Light and Momentary

Oh, and another thing

We are still washer-less. Elwood P. wants to buy used; I have been looking at new ones. He suggests that we compromise and buy a cheap used one. If it dies, then we'll buy new. This is not my favorite idea, since if it dies we have to deal with the same hassles all over again, but I'm okay with it. Anway: I was browsing at Best Buy (Alex said, "Hey! The last time I asked you if we could go to Best Buy, you said someone would have to pay you a nine-digit sum of money to go back there." This is the trouble with having children whose memories are better than yours.) and found a washer on sale for $2300.

Twenty
three
hundred
dollars.

A washing machine that costs $2300 had better fold your laundry for you. No, wait, it should fold it and then bring it to you with a glass of ice-cold pomegranate juice, freshly extracted via its ultra-high-speed spin cycle. It makes a new front loader look like a positively frugal choice.

Decisions, decisions

Just back from our tour of the parish school. Alex chanted all the way home, "PLEASE don't make me go there. PLEASE don't make me go there." Joe chanted, "PLEASE can I go there? PLEASE can I go there?"

I'm leaning toward Catholic school but still uncertain. They have no gifted program, but the public school gifted program is kind of a joke. (I had that experience myself with gifted programs: too many poorly-thought-out units, dragging on for weeks until something designed to be enriching became something to dread.) There standardized testing is a once-a-year thing, and classroom time is (reportedly) not dedicated to test prep. Standardized tests are given twice yearly in my kids' school, and getting ready for the tests has been the primary focus of their days recently.

There was a mental hurdle for me to overcome in regard to paying tuition for grade school. Why shell out that much money for something you can get for free? But I love the idea of faith integrated with education -- loved seeing the images of the Sacred Heart and the little holy water fonts in every classroom, and the posters with quotes from the Bible next to the posters of the multiplication tables. The classrooms are spacious and full of books. I can see them there.

But Alex does NOT want to go. I could tell that we wouldn't be able to have a productive conversation about it right then, so I just listened. "I shouldn't jump in and argue," I told myself. "I'll just treat the feelings respectfully until the intensity dies down." I said aloud, "So you really feel like public school is the best choice."

In a Faber & Mazlish cartoon, he would have said, "Yeah, that's exactly what I think," or even, "Yes. But I guess we could talk about other possibilities." Instead he said "DUH!"

So much for active listening. I'll keep you posted.

A Tip From Me To You

If you ever wake up on a Saturday morning and are tempted to throw every bra you own into a single load of laundry, my friends, re-think that urge. Especially re-think that urge if your youngest child picked that week to move out of diapers and your load of laundry also contains a bunch of icky toddler underwear. Because when your washing machine gives up the ghost, sucking so much current in its death throes that it blows two fuses while giving off a noxious burning smell, every bra you own will be soaking in a foul broth into which you will not want to stick your hands.

Want to talk about washing machines? I'm in the market for a new one.

Evidid

One of my favorite things about age 2 -- which gets a bad rap -- is the pretending, especially the dizzying identity shifts. In the past five minutes we've been a mama turtle and a baby turtle, switching to a mama seal and a baby seal when it was pointed out that baby turtles don't nurse. After confirming that baby elephants could also nurse, Pete decided we were elephants (rendered "evidids") instead.

"Baby evidids use toiet?" he wanted to know, when I asked if he needed to make a bathroom stop. "They don't pee on their moms," I told him. Baby evidids do, however, use cell phones. Pete fished mine out of my pocket and told me he was calling the daddy evidid. Daddy evidid can be reached at 007. I guess that makes me the turtle-seal-elephant bride of James Bond.

Farrago

I have been a little down in the dumps lately. (Elwood would say that it is a euphemism for "crabby as all get-out.") Do you go through phases in your life where you keep losing things? I am in one. It is driving me up the wall. Remember how I lost that check a few weeks ago? That kind of thing, though nothing else as important. I bought two packages of dpns, feeling a little extravagant for buying the second package (I broke one of my size 2s, leaving me with a functional set of 4 -- did I really need to buy a new set of 5? maybe I should just buy the size 1s...), and when I brought them into the house they vanished into the blue. Gone! Two unopened sets of needles and poof! they are nowhere to be found. Etc. Nothing life-threatening, but quite annoying nonetheless.

I was going to post a picture of my finished Ice Queen (which I love and wear all the time, waiting for someone to say, "My! What a beautiful yummy soft and warm confection that is! Wherever did you buy it?" so I can say modestly, "Oh, I made it myself," whereupon she will say, "You made it? With all those beads? And that lace?" -- hold on, this is getting embarrassing) but our camera is on the fritz. Oh! I just turned it on experimentally and it seems to be working. However, a picture at this moment would be a picture of me with The Hair That Ate Metropolitan Detroit--

(That sentence was interrupted by a philosophical question from Pete, who wants to know if God pees. Talk about questions you never thought you'd answer.)

--and that paragraph is embarrassing enough already. Though surely I am not the only one who indulges in the occasional imaginary conversation. Who's got a recent inner dialogue to share? I'll send a prize for the most entertaining.

Anyway, down in the dumps. I have felt really busy ferrying kids to activities lately. Right now we have two in Scouts, two in piano, two in chess club, one in CCD, three in swim lessons, and three in a library program where they read with a college student. Despite my request for simultaneous sessions at the library, the organizer put us on two different days and I'm always running around in a frenzy at dinnertime. We had to decide about soccer registration for the fall -- do we nudge the child who sometimes needs nudging to participate? If I have three in Scouts and three in soccer next fall, my head might pop off. Elwood and I disagree about pruning activities and I am struggling to keep all the balls in the air at home.

Oh, goodness, Pete says this post is quite long enough. Quickly, then: what I started to tell you is that my advisor proposed a dissertation idea yesterday that made me say YES! For a while I have been thinking I'd work with the data available in her lab -- it comes from slightly older children than I am most interested in but it is already collected and transcribed. My working idea didn't make me want to jump and down with enthusiasm, but I could get behind it. Yesterday, though, my advisor mentioned that she's thinking of trying to organize a study that's pretty different from the work she's been doing, and would I be interested? Oh, yes, most definitely. It's a jump-up-and-down kind of idea -- still preliminary, but very exciting.

Conversation

Boys and I are sitting in the living room. Pete climbs up on the couch next to me. "Me Superman! Have nonny?"

"Raise your hand if you think Superman's mom gave him nonny," I say.

Pete looks around at his brothers (who do not think, apparently, that the Man of Steel nipped home for a quick little pick-me-up between stopping the speeding freight trains and going head-to-head with Lex Luthor) and defiantly thrusts his hand into the air. "Me Superman. Me have nonny with Mama."

The big boys discuss Superman's mother. They wonder, What happened to her anyway? Pete brings them back to the issue at hand. "Superman have nonny with Mama!"

"I know," says Joe. "You can be SuperBOY, Pete."

"Superboy!" Pete agrees. "Superboy have Mama's nonny."

Fee Fi Fo Fat

In one of the weekly literature updates that I subscribe to, I saw an abstract that caught my eye. The authors argue that there's inadequate evidence for the WHO recommendation for six months of exclusive breastfeeding. They say there might be a sensitive window in which babies need exposure to complementary foods, and that exclusive breastfeeding for six months could increase a baby's risk of developing allergies later. They also contend that babies exclusively breastfed for six months may be more vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies.

At this point I detected the unmistakable aroma of a rat in the room. A rat with deep pockets, though whether it was a rat named Nestle or Mead Johnson or Wyeth or Abbott was not clear to me. I pulled up the full text and looked for a declaration of competing interests. There was none.

Five minutes of googling, however, confirmed my suspicions. The first author, Susan L. Prescott, has taken money from Mead Johnson and sits on Nestle's Scientific Advisory Board. (That's a .pdf link, if you've got a slow connection. Google will give it to you in HTML if you prefer.) At the same link, we learn that Ralf Heine has taken money from Nestle and Nutricia. Maria Makrides and Robert Gibson seem to have a Wyeth gig going, though they've also lent Nestle a hand (scroll down to the bottom of that page).

Why aren't these affiliations mentioned in their most recent article?

Some breastfeeding advocates assume that industry-funded research must be untrustworthy. I think that's an extreme position -- Alan Lucas, for instance, has done some work I'm happy to talk about even though I am mindful of his cozy relationship with the infant formula industry. But if you want me to take you seriously, you have to tell me that you're taking money from an entity with an enormous financial stake in the issue at hand. Industry flung back its collective head and howled when the WHO recommended six months of exclusive breastfeeding in 2001, and it sounds like they're still sulking.

Did you know that if you wait until six months to introduce complementary foods, most babies can handle fork-mashed table food without difficulty? What would the shareholders say about widespread recognition that commercially prepared baby food is mostly unnecessary?

If you're interested in truth and scientific accuracy, it seems to me that when you cite an article endorsing six months of exclusive breastfeeding, you should mention its conclusion even if you disagree with it. If you omit the conclusion, saying only that some breastfed babies have lower hemoglobin and failing to address the clinical significance of the difference, I have to wonder about your agenda. And I wonder, too: why wouldn't you touch on the conflicting reports in the literature about iron status after long-term exclusive breastfeeding? I am also going to be deeply skeptical about your article if you don't mention the tendency for allergic babies to reject solids. This creates a chicken-and-egg question: are they slow to accept solid food because of a predisposition to food allergies, or does the late introduction of solids cause food allergies? You are welcome, of course, to favor the latter hypothesis; in my view it is irresponsible to suggest only one possible causal mechanism when a plausible alternative exists.

Anyone who says unequivocally that breastfeeding will protect a baby against atopy isn't telling you the full story. Right now there are conflicting findings in the literature and we don't fully understand what's going on. But anyone who says that exclusive breastfeeding might be responsible for the marked rise in food allergies --well, you'll have to excuse me while I hold my nose.

Marginally Significant

Last week I had enough data for my early research project that I ran a quickie analysis on the results. I got...nothing. Now this is where you sing together "Supergeek, supergeek, she's supergeeky," but I had been looking forward to that for a long time. I had imagined running to high-five my husband, yelling, "p = .01, baby!" Instead I had p = .98.  Eek.

(For anyone unfamiliar with p values, they represent the likelihood that your findings are due to chance alone. If there's no real difference between your study group, you'll still probably see some differences in your outcome variable. If you give an IQ test to blondes and redheads and the redheads have an average score that's two points higher, your p value won't be very impressive. If it's 20 points higher, that's more persuasive. Could still be a weird random thing, but it's much less likely. In the behavioral sciences, you need p < .05 to call your results statistically significant. Smaller is better. p = .98 is comical.)

(It is after midnight and I am feeling foggy. Jump right in if you have a better explanation of p values, because I don't know how that's going to read in the hard cold light of day.)

I have been bracing myself for a null finding all along, but I had so hoped to find something meaningful. I had to be quite stern with myself: PRELIMINARY RESULTS. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't flip out about whether or not to try to publish a null finding when these are PRELIMINARY RESULTS.

On Monday I met with my project director and was able to classify several more of the responses to make them usable. I played around with some different statistical approaches and got less ridiculous results though still nothing approaching true significance. But! I just remembered an idea from earlier in this process, figured out how to run it in R (the powerful but unfriendly free stats program that's all I've got at home), and wound up with (drum roll please) p = .09! Marginally significant! This makes me much happier.

I do not think my husband would greet my news with joy at this exact moment ("Elwood! Wake up! I have marginally significant results!") so I'm telling  you instead. Marginally significant! I'll take it!

(Still hoping for more conclusive results as I get more data, though...)

"Important Skills"

I was digging through the mountain of backpack papers last week when I came across a note from the principal exhorting us to provide opportunities for our children to work on important skills. What important skills? you might ask. High-powered math skills? Sophisticated reading skills? Strong people skills?

Nope. The important skill in question is taking multiple-choice tests. She wants us to tell our kids to spend their free time on a website that lets them practice for the next round of standardized tests.

To which my first response was, Are you HIGH? Are you sitting in your office SMOKING CRACK?

My second response was a little more temperate: I get that she's under pressure here. Our kids' performance on those tests is viewed as a statement about her performance as principal, and who doesn't want to perform well?

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate No Child Left Behind? No? My friends, I hate No Child Left Behind.

Only about 60% of what I want my children to learn before adulthood is something that can be measured on a multiple-choice test. I want them to learn math, yes, but I want them to have fun with numbers -- to be excited about the possibilities and to play with different ways of finding answers. You can do that only if you're not under the gun to finish a certain number of problems in a specified amount of time. Of course I want them to be able to read a passage and parse its meaning, both surface and subtext, but more than that I want them to love reading. I want them to dive undaunted into the Iliad, and be both stirred by the courage they see there and a little put off by the blood-drenched details. The great epics don't lend themselves to multiple-choice testing. ("When Dido realized Aeneas was gone, she was (a) sad (b) relieved (c) indifferent (d) wrathful." Inadequate, much?) In the current climate, that means short shrift for the epics. Kids have to be prepared for the multiple-choice tests, you know, because those are "important skills."

If multiple-choice tests had much to do with the rest of life, my husband and I would rule the world. Or at least be in the Imperial Cabinet -- we're both good at standardized tests. But I am thinking about our recent conversation in the bathroom, where we were grouching about the broken shower valve. I opted to turn my shower into a bath. He said, "If you wait a little while [shivering in the halfhearted trickle] it gets better." Fat lot of good those GRE scores are doing us in the face of a real-world problem.

Complex problem-solving (in whatever domain), nuanced critique of difficult ideas, fearless enthusiasm in the face of new material, lifelong intellectual curiosity -- that's what I hope my kids gain from formal education. NCLB erodes the truly important skills in the name of "tough standards." There isn't time for exploration, because they have to learn to fill in the right Scantron bubbles.

GRE scores notwithstanding, I am not Queen of the World or even her Secretary of Education. I am not optimistic about my ability to make changes in federal law. But I am queen of my castle and here is my ukase: my children will not be visiting the test-prep website.

They have football games to play with the neighbor kids. They have books to read, perhaps curled up on the floor by the heating vent and laughing out loud, or perhaps sprawled on the loveseat, chewing a knuckle in anticipation. They have noodling around on the piano to do, and castles to build and stories to write and Lego Star Wars missions to complete. (BTW, do any kids in this country really need more screen time? I fight that battle often enough -- I don't need the principal telling me to give them more computer time.) The current emphasis on standardized tests has sucked enough real learning and fun from their days. They will not be spending their free time drilling. They have more important things to do. 

Incoherent frustrated grunting

Uuggghhh errrggghh unnnngghhh.

Games

Right now Pete spends a lot of time playing trains and pretending to be a restaurateur.

I suppose almost every boy goes through a train fascination, but Pete's is deeper and more enduring than his brothers'. We have acquired a supply of wooden track and engines over the years, but Pete is the first of my four to play with them every day.

The restaurant game started last fall at a playground. You order; he brings you food. He asks what else you'd like; he brings that too. Sometimes there's a little delay while he grills your burger or flips your pancakes, but it goes on and on. Nobody leaves Pete's Restaurant still hungry. Now that it's winter, Pete's has moved to the living room. He clears everything off the couch (being admirably careful of my knitting if I have left it on the couch) and motions his customers to sit in front. No one can touch the couch cushions, because they are his stove and they get dangerously hot. Unfortunately, people forget. "No touch a food!" calls Pete to anyone foolish enough to sit on the burners.

Here's the funny thing: I am always the preferred customer for the restaurant game. He will only ask me to play trains in a pinch, and then my sole responsibility is to keep scooting my engine with one or two attached cars around the oval track. I mustn't stop, and I mustn't get creative. He doesn't want me to build, or tell stories, or do anything but push my little train around slowly. With Elwood, though, he wants complicated loops of track built. They have conversations that I find a little puzzling. Even as I type, Elwood is trying to sneak a look at the NYT and Pete is saying, "Come! Play trains! Plaaaaayy traaaaaiinnns!"

Elwood might prefer to play the restaurant game, since customers can read or knit at the table as long as they attend to the waiter when required, but no dice. He's the train guy; I'm the restaurant customer. There's a lot to appreciate about two-year-olds, but flexibility doesn't make the list.