GIVEAWAY UPDATE
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They don’t tell you this before your kid gets braces, but when
the braces go on, there are many products. The metal in his mouth is just the
beginning.
Michael has a special box I gave him
which holds all the special products related to his teeth. (Just typing that
felt ridiculous.) There is a teeny tiny brush that Barbie could use on her
hair. Michael rams it between the brace and his tooth, to get out nasty food
particles which resist his vigorous brushing. There is special dental floss, a
dental rinse, and special wax, to cover pointy edges on the braces that might
rub his mouth. If they had just thrown in a large bottle of Motrin the
package would’ve
been complete.
Last night, Michael was channeling Granny.
It was freaky. He showed me the package on the free sample of mouth rinse and
said “Guess
what’s in here?”
“I dunno,
but I bet the first ingredient is water,” I replied, feeling smug.
“Nope. Just
one thing!” he
chortled. “Look.”
So I looked. There was only ONE ingredient – hydrogen peroxide. Wow. What
marketing genius figured out you can put hydrogen peroxide in a pretty package
and sell it to unsuspecting parents as a dental mouth rinse, for 3 times the
cost?? I want to hang out with that person. Is their name Barnum??! hmm.....
I was very glad we just had a free
sample of the mouth rinse. We also keep a big bottle of hydrogen peroxide in
the bathroom. I told Michael to take a swig of it, swish it around for a
minute, and spit. We can take the sample on vacation – easier to transport. He rinsed.
I was standing outside the bathroom after he
spit. He came running out, his face contorted like he’d just smelled an overflowing
sewer on a hot day. “Aaaargh!!
It tastes like gym socks that haven’t been washed in a week!” he screamed dramatically.
I was pleased that he had come up with that
metaphor.
I asked him how he recognized the taste of
gym socks. He glared at me.
One day I’ll teach him the Sewer Metaphor. It’s more dramatic.
I love special bonding moments like that. Drama Mama and Drama Tweenboy.
Mother is teaching the kids to read labels
on food. It’s a
very smart thing to do. (It’s better than my personal philosophy, which can be
summed up in 5 words - I don’t want to know.)
I let the kids take a few junky food items
to school for lunch, and you know what? They actually eat. When he bought his lunch he didn't eat. Alesia didn't always have time to stand in line and buy food. My mother used to
pack “healthy” foods for me and I never ate
them. I’d
rather my kid eat a small bag of Fritos than throw carrot sticks in the trash.
Now, I might sing a different tune if my
kids didn’t
like vegetables, but they do. Michael specifically asked me to re-heat some
leftover green beans last night, even though we were also having Stouffer’s spinach soufflé. He ate both. Alesia
likes to wait until dinner is over, and take peas or beans left in the
saucepan, and sit on the sofa and eat them with a big spoon. She will eat a raw
tomato like an apple. Mike loves him some Stouffer's Spinach Souffle, which means
we buy it every week. Fresh spinach is better, of course, but he’s not crazy about it.
If you have a child who refuses spinach in
any form, I urge you to try a Stouffer’s spinach soufflé. Fix it right by the directions, in the oven. If they don’t like it too well plain, try
adding some grated parmesan cheese and onion powder.
Don’t try to put spinach in brownies or something freaky.
I don’t
approve of that – it’s dishonest. Fix good, fresh vegetables
well, season them well, and you can get kids to eat them. (Bribery works, too...)
If they don’t go for the Stouffers, try fried spinach. This is my
recipe. I like to take something really healthy like spinach and FRY it. (If
broccoli didn’t
look like freakish little trees I might fry that too.)
FRIED SPINACH
Get a bag of fresh spinach, and remove the
stems, so it looks less like leaves, which are icky. Chop up an onion, fine. Throw the onion in
a sizzling hot saucepan with lots of olive oil. When the onions are getting
crispy, pull them out and set aside. Line up beside the pan: parmesan or asagio
cheese, garlic salt or powder, onion powder, salt, fresh black pepper. While the oil
is still really hot, throw in your spinach, and stir. When it’s well-coated with oil, let it
cook just a minute until it crisps, meanwhile throwing in generous sprinkles of
all the seasonings. When it’s crispy, turn off the heat, and toss it in cheese.
This is a fun recipe but it might take you a time or two to get the spinach
leaves crispy. You have to just stand there and really watch the hot pan. They should come out like homemade potato chips. If not, if they're a sodden mess, at least they are flavorful and healthy!
CULTURE GAP
Last night as I tucked Michael into bed, he
told me with real fear in his eyes, about an in-class assignment he had in
school. The worksheet listed a number of expressions and asked the kids to fill
in the blanks, like “Easy
as ____.”
Well, Mike had no idea that should be “pie,” or any of the other expressions. His teacher forgot,
he has only been here two years. I emailed her this morning and just asked her
not to grade the paper, as it wasn’t fair to him. He was worried about it, though. The
teacher answered me, agreeing not to grade it – she’s a sweetie. She just wasn’t
thinking about his situation.
A few months ago he had to read a story that
centered on a child playing baseball. He had never played baseball or seen a
baseball game. He sweated bullets over that, too.
I had to have a serious talk with him one
night about the fact that wrestling, the American way, is not real. He
has lately become enamored of the WWF Smackdown. I found some videos on YouTube
showing how wrestlers fake all the punching and body slamming. It’s theatre of the absurd. He
looked at everything and didn’t get upset. Then he found his own weird logic – “In my Nintendo, it’s real!”
OK, yes, in Nintendo world, it’s real. Whatever that means.
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