Go Get Your Jacket

The proof is in the Poreef

 Way back, during one of my several fairly serious flirtations with vegetarianism, I used to eat 

"slices" with mustard on rye. I called it a "sanswich." These were not good, obviously, but at least they possessed slightly more verisimilitude than did an old ex-roommate's version of the sanswich, NotDogs with UnKetchp and Nayonnaisse, whch were not so much food as they were black matter, or antimatter, a hole in space where food was supposed to be. 

Nowadays I do eat meat, but I don't eat pork, so we do consume a fair amount of sem-substitute meat product in this house, chicken chorizo and the like. The kids eat beef baloney or fancy leash-walked turkey slices at lunch. I can't, and also won't, eat meat of unknown provenance, mystery meat, or this:

Now, though, with the kids going to a preschool that is not only Jewish but physically located inside a synagogue, with its invisible anti-unsourced meat force field at the door, we are forced to go veg at lunch. Which is fine, but I resisted at first. It's hard enought ot get preschoolers to eat without adding outside restrictions, so I thought I'd fool 'em, not with Poreef, of course, but with faux-fu.

I bought some fauxloney and some, I think, SmartDogs, and made a couple of sanswiches and placed them, without comment, in front of the children. The doglike thing, I swear they could not see. They did not so much as glance at it. The sliced thing, my more adventurous eater picked up, brought partway to his mouth, and then looked apalled and lowered it abruptly. "This smells wrong," he observed, accurately.

I ended up palming the packages off on our nanny, who is an adult and eloquent and fully able to express what is wrong them-- the rubbery, too-homogenous snausage of a hot dog replacement;  the slices with their thin veil of spice and smoke flavoring hovering in the air just above the tasteless slab of Soylent Brown protein paste-- but she is a vegetarian and so has to think of them as food. The children aren't, and don't have to, and also, clearly, won't. 

Looking for Mr. Goodbyn

When I tell people what I blog about I usually find myself instantly assuring them, over-eagerly and probably unnecessarily (they don't care!) that GGYJ isn't one of those kid-stuff shopping blogs, you know the ones. It's, um, a different kind. We talk about how we feel about children's products, what needs particular products seem to set out to fulfill, how things used to be and where they are going... you know. It's not just about buying things. And it's often, specifically, about not buying things.

Until my kids started school, apparently.  Kenton and I do like some good gear. We like a tool that works, and one that looks good while it's at it is even better. I know this about us, and I did sort of see it coming, but I'm still a little ashamed to admit just how much gorgeous, unnecessary, and obviously aimed at design-conscious, eco-conscious, gear-conscious Bobos ( like we aren't but could easily be mistaken for)) stuff I want to kit them out with now that there is at least a passable excuse for doing so. There were the expensive (but really nifty and the object of envy at the preschool) labels. There were the backpacks. There were the heretofore unblogged darling oilcloth lunchbags from Mimi The Sardine:

 

And now there is this, the Goodbyn all-in-one lunchbox:

We'd bought a bunch of teensy sub-bento boxes, little Japanese containers meant to hold pickled radish or eggs shaped like rabbits or whatever, and after only one day I was wondering how long I'd be willing (we'll give up on "eager") to wash them all every night and keep track of all the lids and make sure they all went back in the right bin to be found again to refill , and so on. And then an online aquaintance with two school-age kids plus triplets posted the same problem, and I was going to go look for a solution (I was going to start with the bento lady) but another invisible friend beat me to it. Let's look at it again:

I think I want to marry it. 

Thirty bucks. Adorable, sturdy. Customizable. Easier to wash. Purports to keep the sandwich unbesmirched by apple sauce and the crunchy snack crunchy. Sold out everywhere, but on re-order. Talk me down.

What have you done for me lately, Publix?

I never thought I'd plan my grocery store trips around which ones hand out certain treats to tots, but well, didn't we all have grand visions of parenting before we became parents? I envisioned myself teaching my child to recycle and be kind to animals and to enjoy whole-grain bread, but I didn't exactly see myself planning dinner around the kindness of clerks in the bakery at Kroger.

In my area, this is what the grocery stores provide, gratis, to your three-foot-tall pink-cheeked co-shopper:

Harris Teeter: a helium-filled balloon and a sugar cookie

Publix: cookies with sprinkles on them OR chocolate chips, green "publix loves kids' stickers

Kroger: a big long strip of "I've been Krogering" stickers

Trader Joe's: a helium-filled balloon, stickers (if you ask for them) and the chance to push around a special child-sized cart

Wal-Mart: nothing (cheapskates)

I try to avoid the cookie places when I have to drag my son to the store before lunchtime or dinnertime. The cookies that Publix hands out are delicious, but they are big. On the other hand, that means that hey, I don't absolutely have to feed him lunch.... maybe I should rethink that strategy after all.

Oddly, the biggest draw for my child isn't the cookies. it's the kiddy cart at Trader Joe's. He makes a beeline for the cart rack, selects a cart and kicks the wheels before taking it out for a test-drive. Then he heads straight for the sample stand at the back of the store. There, he collects his mini-cup of pomegranate lemonade and a small plate of organic whatever and leaves me to hunch over and push the cart around the store until he's finished his snack.

All I can say is that I'm grateful. I'm grateful for these small things that make it easier to shop with my son. (I'm also grateful to the guys at the liquor store down the road a few miles who hand out Dum-Dums lollipops, but I don't actually go there that often.) I hope the stores never think of cutting back on those small treats to save money. There have to be thousands of other parents who really do take these things into account. Double coupons are nice, but nothing beats the prospect of a small child riding quietly in the cart's seat with his mouth full of cookie.

Winner: terrible idea that ought to be a good idea, edibles division

The frozen vaguely sherbetish "push up"  treat thing seems, at first look, pretty clever. The sleeve/cup contains the mess, and the nominally edible frozen slurry is accessed at the child's own pace. Having seen my kid attempt to  get a reasonable proportion of his ice cream cone into himself on a hot day before it suffered complete structural failure,, dumping a river of chocolate down his front to pool dispiritingly in his lap, I can see both the inspiration and the appeal. In practice, though, they are hilariously bad, their mere existence a triumph of wishful thinking over physics.

My kids like to clamp their open maws over the entire top of the sleeve, more as though they are attempting to inflate it than lick it. This accelerates the meltage, already faster than it ought to be even on a standard-issue San Francisco afternoon (almost certain to be 65ish no matter the season). Then, lulled by the presence of the containment sleeve into a false sense of security-- if the sludge can't drip, it can't escape, right?-- and assured that they've got this thing handled, they slump contentedly in their seats, anticipating a leisurely treat. At the slightest relaxation of finishing-school posture, though, the now melted, preternaturally sticky, surprisingly fast-flowing sugary slick overflows the lip. Down the chin, over the shirt, into the lap it flows, and, as the dismayed child leaps up, both to shriek in outrage at the loss and to escape the sticky, nastily opaque pinky-orange magma, all over the couch or chair it goes. Through socks, into sneakers, and on into the carpet it goes. And last night my poor son attempted a valiant save, containing the mess by clamping his mouth over the fountaining top like a beer drinker with a shaken bottle.  Of course he was then unable to figure out how to disengage from it without further loss, and burst into sticky tears.

They are so gross that the obvious answer is simply not to buy them, but the children clamber for them, and I guess I can bear it if I don't look too closely and never, ever read the ingredients. From now on they have to eat them in the shower, though. 

I want candy

Easter's coming up in a few days, and for those of us who celebrate it, that means we've got some Easter baskets to fill.

When I was a little girl, my mom....er, the Easter Bunny....always put one special toy in my Easter basket. When I was in the first or second grade, it was inevitably a Strawberry Shortcake doll. By third or fourth grade, it was a Barbie doll, one of the fancy ones with special glittery accessories. There was occasionally a hollow chocolate bunny, more for tradition than for any other reason. But the rest of the basket was filled with plastic eggs stuffed with Twizzlers and foil-wrapped eggs and those Reese's peanut butter eggs. All my favorites. Mmmm. Mom...I mean, the Easter Bunny...always knew exactly what I liked.

So my son will be three years old in just a few short weeks. Last year, we put a Thomas the Tank Engine train, a book called Little Bunny Follows His Nose, and some Play-Doh in his Easter basket, and he was delighted. He had no clue that Easter baskets are supposed to hold candy. But I wasn't about to share my mini-Cadbury eggs with him. Not when 1) you can only buy them at Easter, and I'm too selfish to share unless I absolutely have to and 2) why give an already wild toddler extra sugar? (Although, as Andrea pointed out, the whole sugar-->wild toddler phenomenon has been debunked.)

Unfortunately, this year, William knows about Easter candy. He pointed out pictures of pastel-colored M&Ms in the Target flyer this morning. I have no idea where he learned about Peeps (can't stand them myself) but he mentioned them the other day in a hopeful tone of voice. Should I give him and give him a little bit of candy in his Easter basket? Or should I just keep on with the little toys and pretend like I don't know what he really wants?

(And for the record, Marya already raised the possibility of a candy substitute like trail mix with yogurt-covered pretzels or something. Bah. I feel the same way about that as I do about the people who hand out raisins on Halloween.)

Whose fault? Your fault!

Marya read this article and depressed the rest of us with it, and I thought of it again yesterday when we spent (I won't say wasted) at least an hour buying non-HFCS simple syrup and brewing a vat of anti-oxidant-rich white tea flavored with that and some organic blueberry/pomegranate juice, and that was just for me. There are days I care about this stuff and days I think if our childhood diets (does anyone but me remember Hydrox, the Oreo-like cookies actually named for the partially hydrogenated gak that held the wafers together?) haven't managed to kill us yet we could all start relaxing a little. 

There are a billion articles about the ways we are poisoning our children. I think this is the first one I've read, though, that manages to make both positions--"Think of the children!" and "Stop thinking so much!" sound utterly detestable. I hate those parents who are making little Hugo and Araminta so joyless and fearful of food, and I loathe the author for ignoring current theories about eating disorders and blaming them squarely, and familiarly, on guess who. Hate! It's a hate fest! I realize that hate is probably worse for me than high fructose corn syrup, but it does taste awfully good.