kids – Page 6 – SIMCHA FISHER

What’s for supper? Vol. 2, now with link up!

What’s for supper? So glad you asked!

While I’m no cooking jainyus, I do manage to feed twelve people, seven days a week, without spending a million dollars and without anyone getting rickets.

I’ll list our dinners and include any recipes that might be interesting, and I hope readers will share their menus and recipes, too, so we can all get some good ideas from each other. If there’s enough interest, I may start a weekly blog link-up.

There was interest! And tons of variety — and, best of all, absolutely zero meal shaming. So this week, I’ve added an Inlinkz feature, so you can link up to your own blog. If you don’t have a blog, just join in by leaving a comment.

If you link to your blog, don’t forget to link back to this post, please! Feel free to download and use the “What’s for supper?” image, above, in your post. (It’s pretty chimpy, but it will do for now.)

And now . . . what’s for supper?

SATURDAY: BBQ at my sister-in-law’s house. I ate too much. It was good. I didn’t have a camera on me, so here is a picture of bacon that I took yesterday:

Too bad today is Friday, innit?

SUNDAY: Enchiladas, beans and rice.

I like Pioneer Woman’s Chicken enchildadas (I made one tray with green enchilada sauce and one with red). I don’t bother browning the tortillas, though. These are excellent as leftovers. Ex. Cel. Lent.

I usually use the standing mixer to shred meat, but I couldn’t find the attachment; so I tried my lovely mezzaluna knife, and it worked great.

Love that tool. It’s about as close to being a ninja as I will ever get.

Beans and rice: I was really rushing, so I just cooked up a bunch of rice, chunked in a few cans of chili beans and a few cans of diced tomatoes, and mixed it up with chili powder. I also made some plain white rice for boring people. (This is one of the compromises I am okay with making: If it’s almost no extra work, I will make a mild version and a spicy version of the same dish.)

MONDAY: Eat My Poo French Toast Casserole, oven roasted potatoes, watermelon.

Normally, everyone loves French Toast Casserole, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to use up stale bread. After Monday’s meal, all I can say is that this dish comes out better when you don’t spend most of the day ankle-deep in stinky basement water, ripping the skin off your hands on rusty old hose connections, wondering how long it would take the kids to notice you’re dead if you get electrocuted while you sort out the power cords for your collection of three sump pumps that work well enough to be scary, but not well enough to, I don’t know, get water out of the basement.

I also recommend not breaking lightbulbs all over the kitchen floor while you’re writing about dying babies; not having forgotten to buy sausages, and not having promised the kids you’d go to the beach when there’s mega thunderstorms predicted all day. I recommend that your laptop not choose this particular day to break, and that your blog platform not choose this particular day to refuse to upload images.

For a final touch, I recommend having something on hand other than rye bread, moldy wheat bread, and rancid eggs, or at least I recommend discovering before evening that this is what you have on hand. And — hold onto your butt, because this is top chef level stuff — I recommend that you not only turn the oven on, but also put the food into the oven at some point.

Garnish this dish with a heartfelt scream, such as, “THIS DAY CAN EAT MY POO!”

And that’s my recipe.

For oven-roasted potatoes, you scrub the potatoes (no need to peel them), cut them into wedges, drizzle with oil, and season with salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and red pepper flakes, or whatever else sounds good. You can bake these in a medium oven, but they turn out best if you roast them under the broiler. Takes about half an hour if the pan is actually in the oven; considerably longer if not. You can also add chopped onions, yum.

Oh, and you can use the apple corer to cut the potatoes faster, as long as you don’t mind coming up with the occasional inapwo-pwo spud:

TUESDAY: Chicken burgers and chips, possibly salad. Sure, let’s say we had salad.

WEDNESDAY: Picnic! All summer, I’ve been promising the kids we’d have a picnic at the beach. They started school on Thursday, so Wednesday was the day. We had turkey and salami sandwiches, pepper jack cheese, dill pickles, chips, root beer, and so much candy they couldn’t eat it all.

THURSDAY: Bacon and spinach pasta, garlic knots, salad.
The six- and 11-year-olds were in charge of cooking bacon, and the 8-year-old was in charge of pressing garlic.

The three-year-old was in charge of cutting up an eraser. This picture looks fairly lovely, but within five minutes, they were trying to kill each other for hogging the garlic press.

The store was out of spinach (perils of Aldi shopping), so I got kale, instead. I cooked it up and it smelled like a dead squirrel, so I threw it out and served the pasta without it.

Garlic knots: Cut a ball (18 oz.) of store-bought pizza dough into 12 pieces. Roll each piece into a snake, tie it in a knot, and pinch the ends together. Put on a greased, floured pan. Top each knot with a dab of butter or brush with olive oil, then sprinkle with garlic powder, parmesan cheese, and a little salt. Bake at 350 until they’re toasty. (I made 24 knots, which wasn’t really enough for 12 people.)

FRIDAY: Pizza! Two black olive, two plain. Salad. I use frozen dough, because I can make pizza dough in the standing mixer or in the bread machine, but making enough for 12 just isn’t worth it to me.

***

To link up, click the blue “add your link” button below. Don’t forget to link back to this post! Happy eating!

What’s for supper at your house? Share your weekly menu, favorite recipes, cooking tips, or cooking disasters. We spend so much time thinking about food, why not talk about it here?

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Dear Teacher

How I spent my summer vacation

Alas. We spent our summer swimming, watching X Files, sucking down gallons and gallons of ramen, eviscerating countless watermelons, making a meticulous survey of the entire lifework of the master cinematographer Chow Yun Fat, and creating various kinds of heartache for your long-suffering soul sister, the public librarian.

Read the rest at the Register.

***

How to organize lots of shoes and water bottles, plus a love letter

The main reason we home schooled for six years was because home schoolers don’t have to know where their shoes are. Ditto for water bottles. Need to go outside? Lie down with a manga until the feeling passes. Thirsty? Just drink directly out of the faucet like my son — or, like my son when he’s being fancy, drink out of a plate.

I have failed.

Anyway, now we have to be shod and watered every morning. Behold, I have some solutions for you, especially if you have a lot of kids and not much space.

For shoes, you want to buy a bunch of stacking bins, like these:

They’re meant for office supplies, but they work fine for shoes, especially for kids. One bin for each kid, and you can configure them however you want, AND you can empty them out and hose them down as required.

For water bottles, an over-the-door shoe organizer like this is poifect.

We had a million water bottles clattering around the counter, and the tops were, of course, nowhere to be found. I want to make sure the bottles air out, so we keep all the lids in 2-3 pockets, and the bottles in the rest.

The thing I like about these systems is that they’re cheap, and you don’t have to actually install anything — so if it’s not working for you, you can just scrap them, no big deal.

And of course, like an organizational system, they only work if you actually use them! My kids are genetically predisposed to be slobs, and most of them will only put their stuff away if I remind them every single time. So these systems don’t automatically make our house tidy and clutter-free; but they do make it possible to clean. There is somewhere to put stuff if the urge strikes you. When someone (me) suddenly can’t take it anymore, someone (me) can go into an angry, white-hot cleaning frenzy fueled by self-loathing and dust allergies, and can turn a ghastly heap back into a living space again without having to think about it too hard. Success!

Now I’m going to share pictures of what our shoes and water bottles look like right now, a week before school starts. I haven’t done any organizing or cleaning yet, and I’m in the middle of a huge painting job, so these areas are both at peak disgustingness, everything is out of place, and I haven’t been making anyone put anything away because it’s just not my top priority at the moment. I’m painting cabinets, too, so everything that was in those cabinets is now cleverly being stored in the middle of the dining room. But they’re still better than what we had before!

The water bottles:

Why, yes, that is a tattered copy of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” hanging up on the door, from the last time I was panicking about my kids not having a good foundation in poetry; and yes, that door is on the For the Love of All That Is Holy, Please Paint Me list. I call this picture “Palimpsest of Things I Was Worrying About.”

The shoe area:

To the casual observer, this would appear to be the shameful evidence of a slovenly and chaotic household; but to me, it’s a picture called “Simcha Loves You and Wants You to Feel Better about Your Own Life.” Extra points if you can spot the kid who doesn’t appreciate air conditioning.

As soon as my new camera gets here, I’ll take some “after” pictures, and you can laugh at me all over again, because it will still suck.

In a couple of months, I’ll show you how I came up with a brilliant system which doesn’t keep our mittens paired up and readily accessible, but it could.

How about you? Do you have any smart systems to share? Or maybe you’d like to pay someone to clean my house?

What’s for supper?

One of two things is happening here today. Either

(a) I’m launching a recurring feature sharing my family’s weekly dinner menu. While I’m no cooking jainyus, I do manage to feed twelve people, seven days a week, without spending a million dollars and without anyone getting rickets.

I’ll list our dinners and include any recipes that might be interesting, and I hope readers will share their menus and recipes, too, so we can all get some good ideas from each other. If there’s enough interest, I may start a weekly blog link-up;

(b) I’m launching a dumb, useless thing that everyone hates, and in a few weeks I’ll sheepishly kick some dead leaves over it and hope everyone forgets it ever happened.

Come onnn, (a)!

***

Our deal:

We’re busy people. I work from home, I have two pre-schoolers and eight other kids in three different schools, my husband works late most nights and has a long commute, the kids all have clubs and activities and jobs, and I spend two hours in the van on a good day. I don’t expect myself to cook like someone who’s home all afternoon, or someone who has leisure in the evening, or someone who cares deeply and intensely about optimal diets. We can’t afford the farmer’s market, and our garden stinks.

I stay within a certain budget, but I no longer have to shop as cheaply as possible. It’s worth it to me to pay a little more for convenience or variety. We now have an Aldi nearby, which means that foods that used to be luxuries are now staples.

I don’t have a crock pot or a microwave, because I’m stubborn and I enjoy suffering.

I started making a weekly menu several years ago, planning and listing and buying only exactly what we needed to eat, because we were super broke and I had to make, say, $30 stretch for seven days. The menu habit stuck after our situation improved, and I’m glad it did. I hate hate hate grinding out the menu on Saturday morning, but I love always knowing what’s for dinner each night, and always having all the ingredients on hand.

General goals:

I try not to make any main dish more than twice a month.
I try not to serve chips more than twice a week.
I try to serve a vegetable with each meal. I am for produce in season, but frozen veggies are still veggies.
I try to serve three things at dinner, but two happens a lot.
I try to provide a balanced diet over the course of the week, rather than over the course of a day.
I try to make sure there’s always yogurt, cheese, pretzels, and fresh fruit in the house, so the kids can get themselves healthy snacks. This is especially important for kids who are picky about dinner, because I refuse to stress out about everybody eating dinner.
I try to serve meals that at least half the family enjoys eating.
I try to get the kids involved with cooking when possible, even if it’s just peeling carrots or measuring out water for rice.
I let them have straight-up dessert, plus candy and maybe soda, on weekends, but loosely limit sugar during the week.
I try to make at least a few actual homemade-from-scratch meals each week, but don’t beat myself up for filling in the rest with semi-homemade or box-and-bag food.
I fail in each of these things repeatedly, but I try again next week, or next next week. It’s a constant slide and correction, slide and correction.
I try to remember that it’s just food.

How I make my weekly menu:

On Saturday morning, I write the days of the week on a piece of paper, and I make note of any upcoming events that will affect what food I buy (a birthday, which means the kid picks dinner; or lots of dentist appointments, which means I’ll be out of the house during the day; or an evening concert, which means we’ll need to eat early and clean up quickly; or a radio spot right at dinner time, so the kids need to be able to just heat and eat; etc.).

I write in easy meals for whichever days seem like they will be trickiest.

Then I look up online supermarket flyers and add a few meals based on what’s on sale.

At this point, kids start swirling around me, and, seeing food on my computer screen, they start shouting out meal names. I yell at them to leave me alone and let me drink my coffee, and then guiltily fill in at least one meal that they shouted for the loudest.

Then, if I can’t think of anything else easily to fill in the rest of the days, I go to Budget Bytes, AllRecipes, the NYT food pages, Epicurious, Good Eats, and Pioneer Womanfor inspiration, if not for actual recipes. (Sometimes I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, chicken! I forgot about chicken.”) Most of my staple recipes are from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, which I recommend highly as a comprehensive, clear, and encouraging resource.

Then I make a list.

Well, you guys know how to make a list.

***

Suddenly I’m nervous that you’re going to think, “Why is she telling about these dumb, boring, obvious, yucky foods?” Well, maybe I’m just trying to make you feel better, you fancy person.

Okay, here goes. This past week we had . . .

Saturday: Corn dogs and frozen french fries. We had an insane-o busy day and it’s a miracle I managed this much. Anyway, I like corn dogs. We had rice krispie treats for dessert because I was afraid someone might mistake us for people of good breeding.

Sunday: Sesame chicken* (quadruple recipe) and white rice (5 cups uncooked rice). I usually make sesame chicken with steamed broccoli, but I forgot to buy broccoli. This recipe is much easier than it looks, but don’t crowd the chicken! Also, put on the air conditioner, or else you will get hot and frazzled and will accidentally just throw the chicken in the garbage when you meant to transfer it onto a tray. P.S. the most expensive part of this recipe is the sesame seeds. I’m going to look into growing my own sesame tree. I’ve made this recipe with inauthentic white vinegar, vegetable oil, and powdered ginger, and it still tastes fine. Dessert: fancy Aldi cookies and orange sherbet, much to my husband’s dismay. (Whoever’s shopping turn it is gets to choose dessert.)

Monday: Hamburgers, fried red onions, potato chips, and raw sweet peppers and baby carrots with hummus. (This is a “kids heat and eat” dish, because I was on the radio.) We use about 3 lbs. of 70/30 ground beef for the 11 of us. I’ve found that the easiest way to make hamburgers is to make the patties really flat, season them, and lay them on a two-piece broiler pan, so the fat runs off. Put the broiler on “high” and flip the burgers once.

Tuesday: slow-cooked pork tenderloin* (about 5 lbs), two loaves of beer bread, and an enormous basin of salad. I don’t have a slow cooker, so I just put the pork in the oven at 250 and covered it with tin foil. I also ran out of baking soda, so I used this baking powder+cream of tartar substitution, and it turned out great. The pork sauce is savory and fantastic, if you like salt, which we do. When it gets colder, I’ll make this dish with mashed potatoes.

Wednesday: Giant Pancake with chocolate chips, and scrambled eggs. The chocolate chips are because it’s still summer vacation, hoop de doo. I had plans to cut up a pineapple, but I got mad and tired, and went to bed with a handful of eggs, instead. The pineapple went bad, too bad. Giant Pancake is just pancake mix, you add water, you throw it in a shallow pan and chuck it in a 350 oven until it puffs up. Everyone gets a giant wedge and they tell Daddy “DUESS WHAT? WE HAD TATE FOR SUPPER.”

Thursday: Nachos!!! Three giant trays of tortilla chips, layered with ground pork and beef cooked with a few envelopes of taco spice, refried beans, corn, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, salsa, sour cream, and guacamole*. (Our guacamole is: avocados, fresh garlic and tomatoes, onion, jalapenos, cilantro, lime juice, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes.)

Friday: Tuna noodle casserole and salad. This is the guilt dish that some kids were begging for, although I will admit, I like tuna noodle. I got a frozen pizza for Damien, who never did become reconciled to this dish. Our tuna noodle is: cooked egg noodles mixed with six cans of drained tuna and a three cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup. Put the mixture in a buttered casserole dish, and top with crushed potato chips and corn flakes. Bake at 350 until the topping is toasted. Serve with dressing made from ketchup, mayo, and vingar. Tell people online that this is what you eat. Take a bow, you prince among chefs.

*I recently discovered that you can crush garlic without peeling the individual cloves. I can’t believe I didn’t know this. You have to pick the peels out in between crushing cloves, but it’s SO much faster than peeling first.

***

Now you know! And I’d love to hear what you’re eating at your house this week. Remember, everyone has different priorities and situations, so don’t feel like you need to be fancy or fascinating. Whatcha got?

25 Back-to-school Items Your Kids Can’t Geek Without

Doing your back to school shopping online, maybe? Do me a big favor and usethis link.

It will take you to Amazon, and you’ll have the exact same shopping experience as you always do — only my code is craftily embedded in the link, and every time you buy something, I get a percentage. Easy for you, super super super helpful for us!

We are still in denial about school shopping, but there are a few items that caught my eye – things that will help ease the pain when we can’t put it off any longer.

25 Back-to-school Items Your Kid Can’t Geek Without

Message in a Bottle flash drive – about $6. An appealing mixture of old and new storage techniques. 6GB of storage corked away inside a little glass bottle. Perfect for kids who tend to drop things in the toilet a lot.

12 large beeswax crayons – about $7 Yarr, $7 for crayons. But what crayons. Silky, velvety, brilliant. Everyone should color with these at some point in their lives (and they come in a nice case).

Slingshot pencil – about $4 – How to make friends with your kids’ teachers.

Nose pencil sharpener – about $3.50 Tee hee.

Totoro messenger bag – about $10 Note that the model is a weensy weesny Asian model. For the typical causcasian American kiddo, this is more the size of a purse than a messenger bag! It’s not exactly sophisticated looking, but for the right kid, it’s the best ten bucks you’ll ever spend.

Little Alchemy – free Just a neat little game that you may actually want to play yourself, or at least it won’t make you feel horrible when your kids play it all the time. All you do is put stuff together to make more stuff, until you have all the stuff. It’s just difficult enough to be fun, and the breakthroughs are very satisfrying. I meant to type “satisfying,” of course, but they are also sometimes satisfrying.

Robot pencil sharpener – $13 Nicely made. You wind him up by sharpening your pencil (or by using the key), and his little head fills up with shavings. He can hold your pencil in his robot hands as he marches along, too. Sturdy construction; nice and small so you won’t feel the need to assert your human primacy.

Dinosaur earring – $6 (Note that this is a single earring, not a pair!) For an extra boost of confidence for the first day of school, know that you have a dinosaur sticking out of your ear. Also available in T-rex .

Totoro lunchbox – $12.99. This lunchbag took a beating all year and held up really well. Cute and sturdy.

Human organs lunchbox – $12.99 Boy stepped on it; lunch box still functions.

TARDIS dress – $35. Picture day!

I had to stop myself from linking to all the Peter Pauper journals. Dozens of gorgeous styles, and very reasonably priced for the quality, according to the reviews. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

Celestial journal – about $7

Cosmology journal – about $12

The cover design of our magnificent journal is adapted from the celebrated Catalan Atlas (1375), attributed to master map-maker Abraham Cresques of Majorca, Spain.

This cosmological diagram places earth in the center, personified by an astronomer holding an astrolabe.
Around the earth, the elements, planets, signs of the zodiac, and moon phases are displayed within concentric circles, and the four seasons are portrayed in the corners.
Cosmology is enhanced with subtle iridescent highlights and embossed for a dimensional effect.
The journal provides 192 lightly-lined opaque pages for personal reflection, sketching, making

Drumstick pencils – about $6 I don’t hate teachers. Honest, I don’t.

Clip-on adipose for backpack or zipper – about $8. A nice little companion. Clips on so it won’t just walk away.

Luffy T-shirt – about $15 For those kids who are – *sighhhhhhhhh* – really, really into One Piece, especially that one time when they were all in a ship, and Luffy was sitting on the figurehead, and he ate the gum gum fruit, and if you eat any kind of devil fruit, the price is that you can’t swim, and everyone was telling him he shouldn’t sit there because he might fall in the water, and he was like, “No, it’s my special seat, you can’t have it!” And then one time Luffy fell off into the water, and there are two other devil fruit users on his crew, and they’re the ones who jumped in to save him! Also there was one part where he was trying to get this guy who was a shipwright to join his crew, and this guy only wears a Speedo and a Hawaiian shirt, and he wanted to join, but he also wanted to stay where he was, so Luffy stole his Speedo and told him he couldn’t have it back unless he joined his crew, and it was the only one he had, and so he was running through the town to get his Speedo back, and . . . it was just great.

Super Mario earrings Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? – about $10 (Note: these are from China and will take forever to get to you unless you pay extra for fast shipping.)

Zelda ocarina and songsheet – about $8 You certainly won’t regret buying this for your kid so that you can hear those Zelda songs all the time even when they’re not playing video games; you certainly won’t. (There are a great number of Zelda ocarinas available on Amazon. This plastic one is the one my kid happens to have, and it’s fine. I started to plow through the reviews of the higher-quality ones, thinking I would find a better product, but I started to feel kind of sad about humanity.)

Terrifying owl backpack – $49 Whoa. If you are worried about your kid being a little bit frail and puny and maybe not ready for the wilds of the hallway, it might help to send ‘em out wearing one of these.

Set of 6 sushi erasers, about $10 Tip: never make back-t0-school lists for your blog when you’re hungry.

Zita the Spacegirl graphic novel series – about $9 each. I’m getting my kids to write a proper review, but in the meantime, I can’t say enough about these books, which are clearly a labor of love, written by a dad who really knows kids. So funny, weird, sweet, and exciting – and fairly back-to-schoolish, if you kid feels like she’s been catapulted out of her familiar world onto a strange planet on the first day of school.

Musician’s transposition ring – about $15 Useful and pretty. Does this count as cheating? I’m not sure.

This ring helps you transpose musical notes into different keys! It is a simple way to pick the number of steps or half steps you’d like to change for any musical sequence. Want to move a score up a major 2nd? Just turn the top band two position over. Works for any transposition you need. You can also use it for more complex variations such as descending 5ths root movements. One example is ii-V-I’s which are the basis for most jazz tunes.

Finally:

Lovingly handmade bags and pouches in awesome fabrics from Door Number 9 on Etsy. A few samples of the pouches, wallets, and mini bags for sale:

Sherlock Holmes

My daughter has this one: the One Ring Tea Wallet. Gorgeous, one-of-a-kind.

Okay, I think that’s it! Happy shopping!

Why it’s important to beat up robots

Was it a senseless tragedy, or was it a slice of richly deserved jungle justice when the hitchBOT, a hitchhiking “robot” (actually just a vaguely humanoid prop with a computer chip in it) got curbstomped by some jackass in an Eagles jersey, ending a sojourn over two continents?

We can probably all agree that an adult who beats up someone else’s robot for no reason is a jerk. Fine. But what about when kids beat up robots? Are they just jerks in training? Or are they onto something?

Tech Insider reports that Japanese researchers are working on programming assistive robots to avoid large groups of young children, because they’ve noticed that little kids have a tendency to push, hit, kick and throw things at robots they find wandering around public spaces:

If there’s one other thing we learned from the study, it’s that young kids may possess frightening moral principles about robots.

… nearly three-quarters of the 28 kids interviewed “perceived the robot as human-like,” yet decided to abuse it anyway. That and 35% of the kids who beat up the robot actually did so “for enjoyment.”

The researchers go on to conclude:

From this finding, we speculate that, although one might consider that human-likeness might help moderating the abuse, humanlikeness is probably not that powerful way to moderate robot abuse. […] [W]e face a question: whether the increase of human-likeness in a robot simply leads to the increase of children’s empathy for it, or favors its abuse from children with a lack of empathy for it

“Frightening moral principles”? “Yet decided to abuse it anyway”? I’m not going to argue that it’s okay for kids to go whacking stuff (although the “abuse” caught on the videos in the Tech Insider post don’t strike me as horrific). I’m just curious about what would motivate kids to want to do it. Is it just because they’re bad kids, and do these findings point to some terrifying truth about man’s inhumanity to manlike robots?

The kids weren’t just indiscriminately violent toward robots; they were more violent toward robots who were designed to be more humanlike, and the story implies that this phenomenon demonstrates some moral failing in the kids. But I think it demonstrates that kids are smarter than adults.

Adults tend to speak as if machines may actually be able to achieve humanity once they’ve been programmed to imitate it well enough. We’ve been prodding this idea since Isaac Asimov was in short pants. When adults are confronted with something that looks and sounds as behaves like a human, but which may or may not be human, we may laugh, or shake our heads, or feel ashamed, or meekly submit, asking ourselves, “Well, what does it mean to be human, after all?”

But when it happens to kids, it makes them mad.

I remember being that kid. I didn’t just dislike ventriloquist’s dummies; I was angryat them. I felt that someone was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, and I resented it. The world was very confusing, and I was expected to swallow unreasonable and nonsensical ideas every single day (the world is round? The sun isn’t really moving? Baking chocolate doesn’t taste good, even though it’s chocolate? What the hell, adults?). The last thing I needed was more flim flammery.

The story continues:

[T]he more human a robot looks — and fails to pass out of the “uncanny valley” of robot creepiness — the more likely it may be to attract the tiny fisticuffs of toddlers. If true, the implications could be profound, both in practical terms (protecting robots) as well as ethical ones (human morality).

Practical implications, sure. If an old lady needs a robot to carry her groceries, they should protect the robot. But ethical implications? Also yes — but not the ones that the researchers seem to think.

For kids, “is this a real person or isn’t it?” isn’t just an unsettling intellectual exercise – it’s a matter of life and death. They don’t know what is real and what is not real, what is human and what is not human, and it’s very important that they figure it out. When they can’t, it makes them angry. A robot is not a person, and when adults expect them to behave as if it is one, they will put the impostor in its place with their small fists and feet. And, God help us, they’re onto something that so many of us are allowing ourselves to ignore.

We stroke our chins over how much autonomy human-shaped robots ought to have … and at the same time, we shrug and speak of “line item” costs when what we have in our hands — literally, in our hands, dripping with real human blood — is demonstrably a human being.

It is a good thing to rebel against bad things, and blurring the line between human and non-human is a very bad thing indeed. Is this human, or is this not? It matters. It matters. If we can decide, by fiat, that a manufactured thing should be treated with the respect that we owe to human beings, then we can decide, by fiat, that a human being can be treated like a sack of parts. This is happening now, today, constantly, horribly. It matters.

And the robot researchers talk about troubling ethical implications. Well, show a fifteen-week fetus to those Japanese children, and ask them if it’s okay to slice it up and sell the pieces. Then we can talk about “ethical implications.” Then we can talk about who has “frightening moral principles.”

Hold the line, kids. It really is a matter of life and death.

***

image is a screenshot grabbed from the video found here.

10 rules while I’m in Wichita

Far from this opera for evermore. Actually just for the weekend, for the Midwest Catholic Family Conference!

My kids have been extra, extra squirrelly the last few days, and I’ve had to make a few new rules, which I can only hope they will abide by while I am gone:

No spreading peanut butter on balloons.
No snapping while saying the rosary.
No sucking on the dog’s tail.
No more calling Donald Trump.
No propping ladders against the house to spy on your brothers while they do . . . whatever it is they do in their room.
No more saying, “Or IS it?!?” every time I say something is something.
No putting the gerbil in the Cheerios box while you’re cleaning out his cage. At least not until everyone’s done with breakfast.
No taunting, harassing, or otherwise impeding the progress of people learning how to use nasal spray.
Seriously, no more calling Donald Trump, you guys.

And the greatest of these is:

No singing Mulan songs in the voice of William Shatner.

These are, of course, rules for my kids, but you might want to consider adopting them for yourself. Also, no opening an email to me with “Attached you will find a copy of Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg (original text in Latin, translated to English)” in lieu of the customary: “Howdy! Attached you will find a copy of Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg (original text in Latin, translated to English).”

Manners, manners!

Hope to see some of you in Wichita! And I would be so grateful for prayers for easy travel, and for an easy time for my husband back home, who will have all ten kids, and their snapping, and their peanut butter balloons.

Expose your kids to art! (Or vice versa)

Portrait of a youth who stopped and looked closely at a work of fine art. This is a win.

The other week, we visited the Worcester Art Museum in MA. I heartily recommend it if you’re in the area (and it’s free all through August!). They had a world class collection with tons of variety, from pre-Columbian art to this guy; it was quite kid friendly (a docent in the armor display helped the kids try on helmets and gauntlets), the docents were genial and well-informed, and they had the exhibits arranged well to really help you see them. We saw everything in about three hours, and had time to go back and look at our favorite rooms. Looks like they have a pleasant cafe and a bunch of programs, classes, and demonstrations, too.

About what happened in the photo above, I take full responsibility. I’ve been reading them Black Ships before Troy: The Story of the Iliad and he got kind of hung up on Helen of the Fair Cheeks.

Of the Fair Cheeks.

I’m just glad he didn’t notice what was going on on the B side of some of those Grecian urns. Whoo-ee!

Anyway, we had such a good time that I want to encourage everyone to bring your kids to an art museum this summer, even if you don’t think of yourself as one of those high culture families. If you’re in New England, don’t forget about Free Fridays (which includes art museums and lots of other fun stuff).

Here’s something I wrote a few years ago, on that topic of why adults sometimes struggle with visiting art museums, and how kids can show us how to do it better. For more reading on this topic, check out “Introducing Children to Art” by an actual artist, John Herreid, who is raising three hilariously arty kids.

***

Remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when the Holy Grail is being snatched again by the bad guys? Indy cries out in righteous indignation: “That belongs in a museum!” I love me some Indiana Jones, but I have regretfully come to the conclusion that this line was not meant ironically. This really is the highest compliment that Americans can pay to an object of beauty and worth: that it belongs in a museum. I heard someone say the exact same thing in real life, when our college group first stepped out into one of the teeming, sun-drenched piazzas in Rome. There was a magnificent fountain in the middle of the square, featuring a sculpture carved by one of the giants of Western art. And people were sitting on it, and smoking, and drinking terrible wine, and flirting with each other, trying to sell socks out of a duffle bag, and generally acting like this timeless piece of art was theirs. Almost tearful with outrage, the fellow cried out, “That should be in a museum!”

He meant that it ought to be protected from the elements, and also from bird droppings and graffiti and vandals. But he also meant that it ought to be tucked away indoors, where the lighting could be controlled, where people would speak in hushed tones as they file past in reverence — where only the select few, acting in a very select way, would see it, and no one would get comfortable with it. And there, he was disastrously wrong.

Art museums are necessary because they are the most convenient way to preserve and share works of art which would otherwise be tucked away in the private homes of the very wealthy. But there is always the danger of museumishness taking over the work of art — making us forget why the artist made the piece in the first place. It’s a relatively new idea that art is here to “challenge” us, to jar us out of whatever cultural sin is currently considered intolerable. Instead, the great artists of every century have all said one thing: “I see something! You come and see it, too! Do you see?”

Well, that’s a pretty big topic. But in this little post, I can say that the problem with putting something in a museum is that it tends to give the impression that the question, “Do you see it, too?” is already answered. We feel like we have to stroke our chins gravely and say, “Yes, yes, of course I see,” whether we do or not, because there it is, in a museum. It must be Real Art. No wonder so many people have an aversion to art. They think they’re expected to respond like highly educated robots when the encounter it.

What’s the cure for a case of Stifling Museumishness? Take your kids to the museum with you . . . and do what they do.

Oh, listen, if your kids are awful, please don’t take them to a museum. If they can’t be controlled, don’t take them. If they can’t tell the difference between indoors and outdoors, and if they don’t obey you, and if otherwise kind people groan audibly when they see your family coming, then by all means, stay home.

But many parents underestimate how responsive their kids will be to good art. Kids in art museums will often behave in a way that is not only tolerable, but which the adult patrons should imitate.

Kids do not talk in whispers, as if they are at the bedside of a dying tyrant. Why do we whisper in front of art? We shouldn’t speak loudly, to distract other patrons; but a normal, conversational tone of voice is completely appropriate. Talking about what you’re seeing isn’t rude! It’s a natural thing to do, and makes the experience so much more rewarding, when you hear other people’s takes on what you’re seeing. I also like to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations — so sue me.

Kids do not pretend to like things they don’t like. It’s one thing to have an open mind; it’s quite another to be a sucker. Many museums have extensive collections in the ever-popular genre of Egregious Crapola, and sometimes it really is only kids who are willing to point this out. Many adults have been duped into giving up on beauty; most kids have not. (But really, each kid is allowed to say, “I could have done that in ten minutes with a gallon of housepaint and a stick!” one time, and then they’re done. This comment may or may not be true, but it gets old fast.)

Kids are also remarkably open to admitting that there is more than meets the eye. They may shrug or grimace in front of a wonderful piece, but they are usually ready to listen if you point out, “No, look at how the light shines through that leaf!” or “See how realistic her hand looks — but get closer, and it’s just a bunch of paint” or “But why do you think this guy on the side has that look on his face?” or “Holy mackerel, what is this?!?”

Kids laugh at paintings – not only ones that look ridiculous, but ones which are meant to be funny. There is nothing sillier than a bunch of adults gravely appreciating the finer points of a work of art which is supposed to be hilarious.

Kids do not suffer from appreciation anxiety. Some adults who feel insecure in their grasp of art may spend their entire museum time wondering how obvious their lack of expertise is. Well, that’s no way get to be more of an expert! Kids don’t think about how they appear to others; they just look at the art.

Kids do not waste their time looking at exhibits that don’t interest them, out of a sense of duty or thrift. They will keep circling back to take another look at that one room or one piece they really like, and that is a much more natural response than trying to “do” the whole museum just because it’s there.

Okay, yes, and some kids will go berserk and behave like little demons, while their fond parents look on and do nothing. Or if you have a generally decent child who is temporarily going through a highly unreasonably, ridiculously loud stage, then this is probably not the best time to work on enhancing their cultural education. But really, if your kids are generally the non-demonic, non-berserker types, consider taking them to a small museum next time you have a chance. Wear comfortable clothes, discuss expectations ahead of time, plan a small treat for afterwards, and just relax. You will probably have a lovely time!
**
A version of this post originally ran in the National Catholic Register in March of 2013.

Mother Eye/Father Eye

(Going through my archives as I put my new book together, and I found this post from a few years ago.)

We went for a quick evening dip at the town pond. First I had the camera:

and then, seconds later, my husband had it:

Heh. And they were both true!

“I don’t own my child’s body” is a clever mask for something cruel

“I Don’t Own My Child’s Body” is the weirdly melodramatic title of a parenting piece from CNN Living. (It’s from 2012, but is making the rounds again.) You can see from the URL that the original title was probably something more like, “Give Grandma a Hug” — and that’s really all the piece is about. The author’s kid sometimes doesn’t feel like hugging or kissing somebody, so her mom doesn’t make her:

She doesn’t have to hug or kiss anyone just because I say so, not even me. I will not override my own child’s currently strong instincts to back off from touching someone who she chooses not to touch.

Okay, lady. Big deal. I don’t make my kid take off her favorite outfit, which happens to be a heavily upholstered puppy costume, but it’s because (a) it’s not hurting anyone, and (b) I’m saving my strength for the big battles. And I also don’t make my kids hug or kiss people they don’t want to hug or kiss. Like the author’s child, they are required to be polite, but not in a way that skeeves them out. But then the author goes on to say:

I figure her body is actually hers, not mine.

She then quotes a mental health clinician who says that insisting that your child hug a relative

sends a message that there are certain situations [when] it’s not up to them what they do with their bodies … If they are obligated to be affectionate even if they don’t want to, it makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse later on.

She backs this up with a warning from parenting blogger Jennifer Lehr:

“Certainly no parent would wish for their teenager or adult child to feel pressure to reciprocate unwanted sexual advances, yet many teach their children at a young age that it’s their job to use their bodies to make others happy,” [Lehr] said

The readers of the piece largely agreed with the author, many of them immediately bringing up the phrase “rape culture.” They firmly believe that there is a direct, possibly inevitable line between “Please give Grammy a kiss, because it makes her happy” and “Please put out for the entire varsity football team, because it makes you valuable as a person.”

I suppose it’s possible that some kids could make that connection, but only if there are other severe problems with the family of origin or with the child’s mental or emotional health. Healthy families with standard-issue kids do not need to be on permanent freak-out mode about their kids’ bodies. What you do is you tell your kids, “Look, unless I say it’s okay, like at the doctor’s office, nobody is supposed to touch you under your clothes, and nobody is supposed to get near the parts of your bodies that are covered by underwear. And if somebody does something that makes you feel creepy, you tell Mom or Dad right away.” And then you give them lots and lots of examples of normal affectionate behavior, so they can tell the difference between things you go along with, and things you fight.

This article, with its ludicrous leap of logic, reminded me of a phenomenon I see more and more: the most progressive parents, those who embrace every modern degradation of sex, marriage, and childbearing, are the ones who are the most likely to go completely overboard when trying to keep their children safe. I don’t know a darn thing about the author of this article, but if she’s writing for a major news outlet, chances are she’s not pro-life. Her audience certainly isn’t likely to be. And yet here she is, saying, “I don’t own my child’s body.”

I’m going to try really hard not to talk about abortion here, because I don’t want to have the same old, same old, same old conversation. I know that pro-lifers will say, “If you don’t own your child’s body, then you don’t have the right to murder him in the womb!” and pro-choicers will say, “If a child owns his own body, then so do I, and that includes anything that might be inside my body, like a parasitic fetus!”

So let’s not even talk about that phrase, “I don’t own my child’s body.” Let’s talk about why this kind of article is so common — why, as our culture accepts more and more horrors as commonplace, there is an attendant increase in hysteria over little things, trivial dangers, potential risks.

Why do we fret over the dangers of hugging, but shrug aside — well, death? The death of babies. The crushing of heads, the marketing of organs. How is this possible?

It’s not enough to say, “Hypocrisy! Evil!” I believe the two phenomena, the hyper-tenderness and the cruelty, are actually related: one comes from the other.

We look around, compare our world to that of our grandparents, and the guilt seeps in like blood through a bandage. We know there is something amiss – all of us do. And so we compensate by making sure that we’re assiduous about bodily integrity and safety for our chosen children.

Extremism is a very convenient mask for existential negligence and evil. When we get hysterical over something minor, we feel like we’ve done our duty — we’ve hit all the right notes: I CARE about my child. I THINK about how I am raising her. I have GUIDING PRINCIPLES that sometimes make other people feel uncomfortable. I’m not AFRAID to tackle the hard issues.

And once you’ve hit the right notes, it’s easier to tell yourself that you’re singing a tune that is very beautiful indeed — never mind that that “Ave Maria“ and “Deutschland Uber Alles” have a lot of notes in common, too. It’s no coincidence that modern people are capable of both deep cruelty and overly fastidious care: these are two sides of the same coin.

***

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