Paper paper everywhere

My kids like to work on paper, loose paper. We are always swimming in the stuff and it seems wasteful, not to mention hard to manage. For example, they were playing this game with some choices written on paper. I would have torn one sheet into pieces and written a choice on each piece. My kids use a whole sheet for each choice. I am horrified at the amount of paper we recycle each week. When I can I always encourage the kids to take a paper out of the recycle pile, and use the back. But I am not always watching. I have tried hiding our plain paper, tried a rationing system but it hasn't worked. For one, I am just tired of having to police the paper!

As kids we always did all our work in notebooks. I like that idea and I have tried to get my kids a ruled pad for writing and blank paper sketchpad for drawling. I have explained to them many times that how it is easier to save and preserve their work if it is a bound notebook, but it doesn't seem to sink in. Even with a notebook, they tear out a page if they want to work on it! Sometimes they use multiple papers to carry out an idea, then tear those pages out and staple them back together. It is completely insane!

On this trip back to India, kids in my family were on their summer vacation so I had ample opportunity to observer kids at play and amazingly all kids have a 2-3 that they write or draw in! So why is it that my kids only want to work on loose paper whereas the kids in India stick to notebooks?

I think the difference is in how the schools in each country operate. In India, all schoolwork is done in notebooks. That is how it was when I was young and that is how it is now. Kids have a notebook for each subject - mathematics, language, science etc. Sometimes there are separate ones for homework and schoolwork, but all the work for the school year is contained in a handful of notebooks. In the US, kids do most of their school work on loose sheets of paper. For example my daughter has to practice 10 spelling words each week. She has to do multiple exercises with the words every day of the week, and hand in the work every Friday. Here she gets her words on a sheet of paper on Monday, does each exercise on a blank sheet paper through the week, uses both sides only if I catch her and insist on it, staples the week's work and hands it in. I bet if the same exercise was being done in a school in India, there would be "spelling notebook" created early in the year, and the students would do all their exercises in that notebook and hand in the notebook every Friday. Hmm...maybe I should suggest this to the teacher.

Close to nature

I am in India these days and I am fascinated by how close to nature and cycles of nature life is here, even in heavily populated cities. "Being close to nature" doesn't imply taking a walk in the woods and hearing birds - that is much more easily and pleasantly accomplished in the US. What I mean is that here relatively small natural phenomenon affect daily life much more than in the US, where only something big like a hurricane affects daily life. Here is an example.

It is almost mango season here and when I got here trees were loaded with green mangoes, on the verge of ripening - tart and sweet. Then we had a week of flash storms - strong wind and rain lasting only for couple of hours or so every other day. Lots and lots of green mangoes fell from trees. The very next day after the storms the vegetable markets were full of many varieties of green mangoes being sold at throwaway prices and within a few days my mother, my aunts and our neighbors were busily preserving green mangoes in a variety of forms for rest of the year. Tarter varieties were sliced and dried in the sun to be used in dishes that need tartness. The chunkier tart mangoes were pickled in oils and spices. The sweeter varieties were made into chutneys and sweet pickles. I had no idea so many things could be made with green mangoes!

Another example is how well people know when the season of a fruit or vegetable is, almost down to the week of the month. It is very common to hear "Oh you want to eat Dussehri mango. You are leaving on the 5th? It is close. They usually start coming to the market around 10th." or "If you had come two weeks ago you could have had wonderful radishes. Now they are bitter and no good."

I cannot imagine this happening in the US. Yes, we hear of a crop being spoiled but it never ever changes the selection in the grocery store. Store selection is not much affected by the season either except for maybe berries. After having lived in the states for 15 years, I still don't know when certain fruits and vegetables are at their prime. Of course there is the berry-picking season and apple-picking season, but when is the cauliflower-picking season? I should start visiting farmer's markets more often.

Milestones

When our kids are little we track all the little milestones - the first solid food, the first word, the first step. As they got older I stopped paying attention to milestones and hence I thought I'd record the milestones my older kids have reached this year as they turned 6 and 8.

1. My older one started talking to her friends on the phone. Doesn't do a lot but seems comfortable with calling up people she wants to talk to
2. My younger one learned to tie her shoelaces. I bought her shoes with laces, quite accidentally, and she became a pro at it in two weeks. I have never bought my older one tie-up shoes and so she still can't do laces.
3. My older one has gotten more conscious about dressing/undressing in front of others. She also becoming more aware of her body.
   
4. Older one has started doing a little cooking. She makes very nice chocolate muffins from a recipe she got on a Barbie website, I think, and needs almost no help during the process. She can also make herself a scrambled egg with some help.
5. The girls walked to school on their own. OK so they did it once and didn't want to again. They come home from school by themselves too. I go to pick them up and then stand around chatting to other moms. They take the keys and leave, and reach home 5-10 minutes before I do. It is still something that would not have happened last year.

What about your kids? Have they reached any such noticeable milestones?

Hannah Montana

Hannah Montanna's appeal is evident by the fact that in spite of having never seen the show on TV my 8 year old has a poster of the fictional pop star in her room and had a Hannah Montana cake for her birthday. After the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy, Miley Cyrus got elevated to some kind of a perfect-wholesome-teenagers status with articles about her faith in God and her excellent upbringing under strict rules etc. in every magazine. Hence, it was inevitable that some horrible photo or article would emerge to pop that balloon. It happened this weekend.

Some provocative images of Miley Cyrus with her boyfriend circulated the net. I was however, more worried by the spread she posed for in Vanity Fair magazine. Apparently her parents were at the shoot, and it was the famed photographer Annie Leibovitz handling the camera. Everybody was quite aware the photo would make Miley appear nude, covered by a satin sheet. Miley was apparently clothed under the sheet, but does that really matter? From what I read everyone was on board with what the picture was going to look like, and everyone involved with the photo shoot, including Miley and Ms Liebovitz themselves, agreed that the photo would appear "artistic".

I am not stranger to art and yes nudes can be very artistic! What shocks me is the state of current culture that nobody batted an eyelid about a 15 year old kid appearing to be nude in a magazine spread - art or no art! Yes, it is "simple" and "beautiful" picture, but it is a girl in the picture not a grown woman. She is insanely famous, but Miley is still a kid, and although she did not do a Britney Spears style sexy-school-girl photo, in my mind that kind of pose is inappropriate for a young girl. Why would the photographer suggest it and why would her parents agree? Could it be that we have gotten so desensitized by the sexualization of everything that it never occurred to anybody that maybe it is not a very good idea to photograph a 15 year old, naked in bed with a sheet held up to her chest?

Food shortage

You know there has been talk for some time that we are on the brink of some very bad times - global warming, food shortages, chemicals in everything etc etc. It has finally hit home when Sam's club decides to limit rice purchases. Things must be really bad if we are going to have food rationing in the USA!

Once things start getting expensive perhaps the overboard consumerism will stop. To my kids, living in this land of plenty, nothing is precious anymore. You buy them cupcakes and they complain about the color of the frosting! That has always felt wrong to me but I don't know what the solution is. To my kids food is this ubiquitous thing, available in any shape, size and taste you want, at any time you want and there is nothing special about it. They have no respect for food or its preciousness and I don't know how to teach them this important lesson. Do I make them lead a life of deprivation just to teach them life lessons? I truly believe that hardship in life is important to grow resilient, strong and grounded human beings but can I force hardship on my own kids. Probably not but then I fail in my duty as a mother, and therein lies my dilemma. I think I will make my kids change schools every two years -that ought to force some hardship!

Independence

A recent article and subsequent discussion on a mailing list I am on, made me think about something much simpler. The article is about a parent letting their 9yo take the public transportation.

For me the much simpler topic was letting the kids drink out of a regular cup instead of a sippy-cup. I know that doesn't compare to letting a kid ride a subway alone but hear me out. As a parent there are a lot of things I do not let me children do because I think they are not ready for it. One such thing is letting them drink out of a regular cup unless they are at the table. My kids, aged 6 and 8, drink a cup of milk before going to bed. We always do this in their carpeted bedroom, sitting on their bed or the floor while reading books. They drink their milk from sippy-cups without the valves, because I am afraid they will spill the milk. On further thought I realized that I was approaching this all backwards. They aren't going to cross some magical age and suddenly have the skills to handle a regular cup. It is a skill they will learn only when they practice it, and if I don't let them, they'll never learn. Starting last week I am letting them both use a regular cup for their milk. Yes, they tend to tip it because they are engrossed in their book, but I am their to help and warn and we haven't had any spills yet. Even if we do, what is one little spill on the road to learning a new skill, eh?

Economics behind safety

In some ways US is one of the most safety-conscious nations. I am now getting used to it but when I was new in this country and on a holiday people said to me "Have a safe holiday" as opposed to a "happy holiday" or a "fun holiday", I used to find it very strange. I have always felt that the safety thing is often overdone, and it has purely been driven by companies not wanting to get sued.

Thus it was with much interest and sense of "A-Ha" that I recently read a chapter of the book Freakonomics. The author states that most of the safety issues become a lot more prominent, and you find all kinds of seemingly non-commercial promotion of those issues, as soon as there is a product to sell that keeps us or our kids "safer." For example, only a nominal number of lives are saved by car seats. Kids are definitely more safer in the backseat, as opposed to riding in the front seat on somebody's lap but beyond that car seats don't save that many lives. On the other hand, a lot more kids die by drowning in home swimming pools. Now there is no safety product to save kids from drowning - what you need is a watchful adult. So you see states rushing to pass laws to require car seats and booster seats, but the issue of water safety hasn't gained any traction over the years. Just wait until a company has some kind of device to sell that can prevent kids from drowning, and all of a sudden it will become a big issue and legislators will be passing laws to require its use.

I am one of the parents who insists my kids use a booster seat in the car, now that they have outgrown their car seats. The usage of car seat has been so instilled in our heads by the "experts" and studies, of them, I am sure, financed by the car seat companies, that going without a car seat seems very very wrong. My 7 year old has been resisting her booster of late because she sees her classmates riding without them, in the front seat no less, and here she is being required to sit in a booster. After this article I have been thinking that maybe I can let her go without a booster. I don't think she is getting to ride in the front seat anytime soon, though, because as it happens having kids in the backseat does keep them safer.