the hazzard of living
A friend came over my house this week and was completely aghast that I was letting Harvey play with some soy crayon rocks: non-toxic drawing tools about the size of a cherry and twice as long. So fearful for the life of my child was she that she contacted the manufacture and forwarded me the email, prefacing it with:
I felt I really needed to check out those rock crayons. Even if they are non-poisonous, to my eye they looked like a choking hazard. I emailed the manufacturer and asked. They say these crayons are for ages 3 and up.
That's funny, because I've met some 3 year olds and they don't need easy-to-hold won't-break-apart-in-your-mouth crayon substitutes. They just play with crayons.
Lenore Skenazy says it better in her book, but here's my quick take on the hazards of childhood.
Every year the number of children who chokes to death is in the hundreds. For the year 2000 it was 160 children ages 14 years or younger. I'm too lazy to find a more recent stat the doesn't float to the top of Google, but you get the idea.
The number of children in the US that year was 7.24 million. That puts the risk of your child dying "from an obstruction of the respiratory tract due to inhaled or ingested foreign bodies" at... wait, let me open up microsoft excel... at about one in 45 thousand. On the other hand, Harvey's lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is about 1 in 84.
But what can I do??? I have to get him to baby gymnastics!!!
There is a chance the Harvey could die from many things at many moments. Heck, the same is true for me or Dan or any of us - this life is a terminal condition after all, and none of us gets out alive.
Look, we keep the poisonous cleaners locked under our sink, we use car seats, and there's a gate at the top of the stairs. But we let Harvey play with dogs, sticks, Duplo legos (for ages 1.5 and up) and yes, crayon rocks. Because he's a little boy and what else is he going to friggin play with??? No really, because statistically, we're not likely to alter Harvey's risk profile very much by the sort of constant worrying that shuns inch-long crayons.
And there's another risk of fretting over crayons and hand sanitizer and strangers. We could very likely raise a child who views the world as a dangerous place, who fears people, fears change, fears new experiences. A child not very able to cope with life.
And life's too short for that. I'd rather let my one-year-old draw.
bad eggs
So there has apparently been some sort of egg recall in recent days, thanks to an "outbreak of salmonella". My first response, of course, was: "what? Isn't salmonella always in eggs, and that's why we can't eat cookie dough anymore?!" When it had become clear to me that the current situation is even above and beyond what has become acceptable for the contamination of eggs in our factory farming situation, I began to wonder if there was some way that the big-agriculture lobby would turn this situation to their advantage. Why, naturally!
Various parties are now advocating for tighter food safety laws: on eggs specifically, and across the board. There is even a push make farmers vaccinate their chickens against salmonella. Now, I'm not against either of those ideas in principal, if they're applied reasonably based on scientific evidence; but I also see a pattern in legislation that is introduced in response to food-safety scares making business more difficult for small farms—while containing loopholes that let giant operations continue business as usual. After all, it's not like the farms whose eggs were recalled were even complying with existing law.
In general, we in the United States want things to be safe and regular. That means that there is a prejudice in favor of big farms: we imagine that, once effective legislation is in place, we'll be better served by a handful of humongous egg-factories—no doubt gleaming white and staffed by professionals in scrubs and hair-nets—which are watched over carefully by government overseers. Far better that then to let any roadside farm sell its own eggs, from hens kept in a yard with dirt on the ground! Never fear, because Florida food safety officials want to assure you that "basic protections must apply to everyone regardless of size." As spokeswoman Lisa Lochridge tells us, a salmonella bacterium "not going to choose a 150-acre farm over a 5-acre farm." Even "fourth generation farmer" John W. Boyd Jr., blogging at Huffington Post in favor of small and mid-sized farms, agrees: "If there is one advantage of consolidation, it is that it makes the job of inspectors easier. Since there are only a few hundred facilities producing the bulk of our eggs, making regular visits to each of them should not be too difficult."
How about, instead of making the government keep dishonest factory farmers from poisoning us, we only buy produce from farmers we trust?! It doesn't seem that complicated to me, and it doesn't require millions of dollars to be spent in regulation by the government and in compliance by farmers. Paul and Neil wouldn't want my family to get sick, (a fact that has been recognized by Boston's news media!) and if we should happen to have trouble with the salmonella... we know where they live!
The argument about the bacterium not caring about the size of the farm also misses another important point. Just a small handful of farms have been so far affected by this recall (note as well that it will not be related in each case: they all messed up individually) and yet millions of eggs nationwide have needed to be recalled. If something goes wrong at Chip-In, you're only going to sicken a little bit of eastern Middlesex County.
It seems to me that there ought to be a saying about allowing just a handful of producers to supply all the nation's eggs... something about putting all of your eggs in one... naw, too obvious.
before summer ends...
Before Dan gets home from work today and declares it officially fall, I want to post the video montage of our Bar Harbor vacation. Not the most gripping documentary ever created, but it does show some great hiking, some stellar hanging out, and Harvey acting like the cute little summer bug that he is.
We've been busy
A few weeks ago we embarked on project sleep through the night. I don't think the title is too enigmatic. As we've mentioned before, Harvey is crap at sleeping. If he had his druthers he'd wake up every 3 hours for a milkshake. I say milkshake because I'm so generally sleep deprived that my body goes into convulsions at 3 in the morning if I'm woken up by screaming in the middle of my REM. Yeah, it's been bad.
We tried rocking him back to sleep, petting him, cuddling him, and all manners of non-milk soothing for a few nights. It was and wasn't working. He was going back to sleep but he slept fitfully, rolling and crying and back to full-on screaming two hours later. The problem is that the little butter ball is hungry. He can't sleep because he need the calories from milk. But he's not eating enough at dinner time because he expected all the nursings. So project sleep through the night quickly became project ween our clild and then sleep through the night. Like I said, we've been busy.
We cut out all nursings during the day first. That wasn't so hard on him, since he was only getting one bottle when I was at work, but when I get him up from his nap sometimes he remembers how much he used to like to nurse after napping and throws a little tantrum until something else sweet gets into his mouth.
He used to get two feedings in the evening, one when I got home from work and one before bed, and these were really messing up his ability to eat dinner. So we cut out the 5pm nursing and kept the 7:30, which seems to work although sometimes he starts to breakdown and claw at me around 6:30 and I'll give in if he's already eaten dinner.
All this has upped his appetite for solid foods, but it hasn't translated into sleeping success yet. He was doing well skipping his first wake-up for a while and going until 3am, but a few nights of family sickness set us back to a 11pm, 3am, 6am schedule. Dan was sick this weekend and while Harvey and I were sleeping on the mattress downstairs I admit to nursing him twice before the morning. No way was I walking through the cold house to go upstairs to the rocking chair.
So that's where we are now, with a morning and evening nursing and a toddler who'd like to get in two more feedings on the back end. I never had a clear plan for weaning, only that I would nurse him as long as we both wanted to. Well, I think the moment is rapidly approaching. I no longer want to. Not at 3am, anyways.
outing update
Water Country is expensive! We just spent like a hundred bucks to feel and be young!
Dan is sick now from too many waterslides or maybe a fever. To let him sleep, Harvey and I are bunking downstairs.
When it's one sickness after another in your house, you know it's back-to-school time. Happy fall!