Category Archives: Home & Family

Homemaking, parenting and special needs

Threatened While Homeschooling

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In some ways, our teenage son with Down syndrome is very similar to his siblings when they were teens. He likes his privacy, talks about wanting a girlfriend and a car, and is very picky about what he wears. He also spends a lot of time primping in the mirror, getting his hair just right.

On the other hand, he can watch “X-Men 3” one day and “Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree” the next, and appear to enjoy them equally. It’s the same with games. He can beat his brother and his sister’s boyfriend (both in their mid-20s) at video games, yet he insists on playing Candyland and Chutes and Ladders with me, which we’ve played since he was little.

So we’re in the middle of working on his lessons this morning, and he gets mad at me because I’m making him pronounce a word correctly (he has major speech issues), and like a typical teen he loses his temper and bellows, “Stop it, Mom, or I’m not going to play Candyland with you today!”

LOL  🙂

(The rest of the story: he didn’t mean it. We had to play twice after he finished his school. Sigh. If I had a nickel for every time we played Candyland over the past 13 or 14 years……)

Kangaroo Care

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After having three healthy babies in a row, I’d gotten used to the idea of bringing a baby home a few days after his birth. So it was quite a shock when my fourth baby had to be transferred to a larger hospital, where he ending up spending almost a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

That was nearly 17 years ago, but I remember how hard it was to sit and stare at him through the plastic Isolette incubator as clearly as if it happened last month. Watching the numbers on the monitors go up and down, hearing alarms going off, freaking out when they were his alarms……it was a very difficult time for our family.

The best times were when we could hold him: gingerly of course, because we didn’t want to disconnect any of the lead wires attached to him. We could never do it for long because he’d get too cold and his heart rate would go down. It was so hard to let the nurse put him back in his little plastic box, which was decorated with photos of the siblings he hadn’t met yet.

How I wish there would have been something like Kangaroo Care back then*. I just read an article about this concept, written by a reporter whose baby was born prematurely. She got to “wear” her baby when she visited him in the NICU, and it made a traumatic experience a little easier on her and a lot healthier for him.

If you or someone you know ends up with a baby in the NICU, knowing that Kangaroo Care exists will be a real blessing to the baby and his parents.

*I also wish I could have known that, 17 years later, he’d be the healthy, feisty guy he is today 🙂

Is College Worth the Cost?

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The worse the economy gets, the more I’m seeing articles like this one asking whether today’s expensive college degrees are worth it. I suppose editors figure articles like this will grab the attention of those with degrees who can’t find work (misery loves company) and those without degrees who can’t find work (they’re thinking “See, a degree wouldn’t have helped!”)

The article is somewhat helpful in that the reporter tries to present both sides of the story. But there’s nothing there that you probably haven’t heard before, and some of the statistics used are a bit questionable. For example:

Studies indicate that college graduates are healthier, donate more blood, vote more often than other Americans and are more open-minded. They smoke less, exercise more and, a 2005 Pew study found, were 25 percent more likely than high school graduates to declare they were happy.

Note that it refers to college graduates. Last I heard, only half of college students actually graduate. So it makes sense that grads will be happier than non-grads, because many of the non-grads have the debt but not the sheepskin! Also, a healthy chunk of those who graduate come from families with above average income, which is where the likelihood of better health, less smoking and more exercise comes from, too. Other studies have shown that being happy is related to good health and having enough money. So duh.

Then there’s this factoid:

In 2007, Sandy Baum, a professor of economics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., studied the value of a degree for the College Board. ….Baum said that college was easily worth the cost. Plus the recession has laid bare another factor to consider:

“Even in this economy, the number of unemployed college graduates is half that of the unemployed who did not go to college,” she said.

That’s supposed to make college “easily worth the cost”? How so? As noted later in the article, less than 1/3 of American adults are college grads. That means more than 2/3 of American adults are not college grads. Since 1/3 is half of 2/3, it makes sense that the number of unemployed college grads would be half of the number of unemployed non-college grads. If college was “easily worth the cost,” a far smaller percentage of college grads would be unemployed. As it stands, the unemployment rate of the two groups is about the same. Hardly a point on the pro-college side.

OK, so I’m picking nits. I guess I’m just getting tired of the pro-college cheerleaders (note that Dr. Baum’s study was for the College Board) whistling in the dark. But bear with me while I share one more reason for going to college, from the article:

Another, even grimmer way to look at it: The poverty rate is 10.8 percent among high school grads. It is one-third less for those with bachelor’s degrees.

I got out my trusty calculator and learned that if this statement is true, then the poverty rate among college grads is 7.1%. I’m sorry, but 7.1% vs. 10.8% doesn’t seem like an earth-shattering difference to me.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that parents believed the hype about college being a necessity and sent their kids there in droves. Now we’ve got way more college grads than we need. The lousy economy makes the situation even worse.

What to do? I found some thought-provoking suggestions in the comments section of the article. Here are a few that made sense to me:

“I’m glad I never went to college until I was sure of what I wanted to do for a living instead of wasting my education by studying some major that was only somewhat interested in……I know so many who never liked the field they studied for.”

“Higher education in this country is a scam, it’s bloated, over-priced, and has sold us a bill of goods for the last 20 years. When a student pays $1,000 for a class at a state institution and has a grad student teach it (while the professor ‘conducts research’) that amounts to robbery. The entire system from 7th grade on up needs to be scrapped and re-designed.”

“There needs to be more emphasis on technical careers. Everyone is not college material and some people just don’t want to go to college. High school guidance counselors need to do a better job of telling kids about technical careers (cosmetology, mechanics, HVAC, etc.). A middle class society needs to have a balance of college educated as well as citizens who have skills in technical fields. I’m probably wishing for too much, though.”

“Simply having a degree doesn’t separate you from the pack anymore like it once did as more and more people are earning their BS. It’s simply supply and demand now. Get a degree in economics along with 200,000 other students, and what job exactly requires an economics degree? How many people with marketing or business degrees do we need?

Focus on a specific career like engineering, something in the medical field, accounting, etc. and you’ll be fine…….And if you want to be a teacher, don’t spend $200k getting the degree because it’ll never pay itself back… go to school somewhere more reasonable.”

What do you think?

King Corn

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The other night we watched an interesting documentary called “King Corn.” At first I didn’t think I was going to like it, because it seemed a little quirky. (Perhaps my judgment was affected by having recently watched the highly polished “Food Inc.”)

Both documentaries are about the American food industry. “Food Inc.” covered several different industries while “King Corn” concentrated on corn (surprise!)

“King Corn” seemed more even-handed in its depiction of a country that, in an effort to make sure everyone has enough food, has encouraged the food industry’s growth to the point that we now grow an amazing amount of food…..but it’s no good for us!

The incredible amount of corn now grown in this country is not represented by the lovely ears of sweet corn you see on farmstands in late summer. It’s a less nutritious type of corn that’s used to fatten livestock to enormous levels, and it’s fattening us, too.

I’m a label-reader, but I was still shocked at how many products now have corn in them. Things you would never imagine.

I guess I was unaware of the extent to which corn products have infiltrated grocery store items because I tend to “shop around the sides” of a grocery store, avoiding premade products when possible and sticking to home-cooking for the most part. But most people don’t have the time for that, so they’re consuming incredible amounts of corn that’s being blamed for the big increase in obesity over the past 30 years.

I was particularly interested in the documentary’s report about an East Coast man who had gotten into the habit of drinking a 2-liter bottle of pop each day (pop is almost always sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar now). He weighed 300 pounds. When he cut pop from his diet, he lost 100 pounds! But he still ended up diabetic.

Our family never got into the habit of having pop on a daily basis, preferring water with meals. I’m sure glad we did that. It might also be the reason why most of us avoid pop entirely now, because our stomachs aren’t used to it.

Corn syrup and other corn products are now found in many, many convenience foods and prepared dinners. I started checking the items in my pantry and found it in pretzels, my son’s very favorite snack food, so I went to Woodman’s and found a different brand of pretzels that doesn’t use corn syrup.

While there, I searched the pop aisle and only found a few products without corn syrup, including Pepsi Throwback, which is made with sugar like Pepsi used to be made. The pop I bought today cost a lot more than pop made with corn products, but that’s not surprising. One of the reasons corn became very popular as an ingredient is that it’s so much cheaper than sugar. I’ve decided that I’d rather pay to avoid the corn now than pay later with health issues. Besides, buying expensive pop means the one person in our household who drinks pop for a treat will have to cut back.

“Food Inc.” deserves its own review, but I’ll save that for another time. You’ll find a lot to think about in both documentaries, but try “King Corn” first. It’s more personal, and we all enjoyed it a lot.