Child Poverty And The Myth Of Supporting "Family Values"

"To us, it's just how we live. You don't get to make choices in how you live."

Challenge your members of Congress to live for a week on a poverty line budget.  No cheating, and no help from any food stamps or food pantries since they feel that their budgets need to be cut.  See if they can survive it (and no cheating by snacking on fancy canapes at lobbyist-paid cocktail parties and junkets, either!).  

The switchboard on the Hill is (202) 224-3121. The nice folks on the line can connect you to your Senators and your Representative.  Raise your voice.

Right now in the United States, a child is waking up with an empty stomach and no food in the house to help fill it.  He woke up the same way yesterday, and will probably wake up the same way tomorrow.  He goes to bed hungry, he wakes up hungry, day in, day out.

He is three, and he knows nothing else but that this as his life.

He didn't ask to be born into this family.  He is not getting remotely enough nutrition to feed his growing brain, and because of the nutrient deficits, his brain is not developing its maximum potential...and will not if things do not change.

He starts his life out behind the curve, because poor nutrition for his mother while he was in the womb already put his brain development as well as his systemic development behind the curve.  If he is to make up any ground and catch up with his peers, he needs a healthy diet of fresh fruits and vegetables and good proteins and foods with omega-3 fatty acids.

Imagine being that child.

The food stamp program, or SNAP, helps to cover this gap for millions of children in this country every single day, children who did not ask to be born to a family living in poverty.  If the House GOP gets their way with the current Farm Bill, millions of children will have that safety net ripped out from under them.  I say that giving lip service to "family values" in your stump speeches while pulling the floor out from under the children who most desperately need help is a pretty piss poor way to walk your talk.

The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just completed a broad study of the impact of these proposed cuts and their broader budgetary and social implications.  The consequences are starkly dire for the nearly 5.1 million people, including a whole lot of desperately hungry children out of the 16 million living in poverty right now in the US of A, who would be cut from food assistance at a time when poverty issues for the poorest of the poor are reaching crisis levels in this country (via the NYTimes):

The Spirit of Christmas

Today, The Peanut and I went to the local WalMart to get a new microwave oven.

Ours died an ugly and smelly wiring death earlier in the week, and life just wasn't the same without my ability to make easy movie popcorn in the popper we use to make it fresh in the microwave.  And so, off we went to the belly of the Christmas shopping frenzied beast.

We got there just as the Salvation Army folks were finishing their annual "shopping spree" event with young children who get to come and shop with a parent for a couple of items.  It was crowded, but really, really fun to see how thrilled these little kids were to get a baby doll or a tea set...the sort of thing we take for granted at our house because we can afford it for The Peanut without worrying about how to then pay for a meal or medicine or something else.

We are lucky.

But we had also gone to the store for another purpose:  this year, we wanted to help someone in need to pay off their Christmas layaway.

We were hoping to find a family that needed a little help or some other way to help out.  So I took The Peanut with me to the layaway counter, and the clerk asked us to pick a letter of the alphabet, and they found an account that had a little over $200 remaining on it to be paid before Christmas...and a lot of toys for little kids on it.

So we paid it off right then and there, and got to stand by while they called the mom whose account it was to let her know they could come and pick up all their toys.  It was really wonderful...as it turned out, she didn't know where she was going to scrape together the money to pay the remainder, so I'm really glad we ended up doing that particular family.

Some Thoughts On Finding Your Holiday Joy

I love Christmas.  It is my absolute favorite time of year in so many ways:  the joy my child gets with every little ornament and bobble that gets pulled out of our Christmas closet as we decorate the house, the late night passionate smooches under the mistletoe (woo hoo!), the smell of baking cookies and homemade fudge filling our house.

Love it.

But the crazed lunacy that is shopping and giving and feeling like you have to find the present that is absolute perfection in the quantity guaranteed to please even the pickiest member of your family?   Ugh.  Hate it.

After reading this post on BlogHer, I see that I am far from the only person that feels that way.  Which is comforting in some way -- misery does love company -- but saddening on so many other levels.  Shouldn't we be enjoying the Christmas spirit instead of miserably dragging our rear ends through the mall or getting pepper sprayed while participating in a shopping scrum?

I hate the commercial pressures this time of year.  And I really hate that everyone else's expectations have gotten so crazy and that it has begun to rub off on me, too.

Especially the pressure that it puts on me to out-perform last year's gift giving, to make everyone happy, to pull out all the stops...it just brings out the absolute worst in my people pleasing lunacy every single year.  I hate that about myself, especially because that really ruins the holidays for me.

When you add in the endless running around that your over-scheduled mess of a calendar forces on you this time of year?   Or if you have to balance all the sides of divorce in your family on top of everything else, and then feeling like you are being tugged in twenty directions at once and timed by a stopwatch down to the last comparative second of your visits?  Or your present valuations don't align precisely?

Aiiiiyeeeeeee!  It is enough to make a jolly old elf toss his cookies, isn't it?

Last year, though?  I stumbled onto a formula that works really, really well for me and allows me to ratchet back the crazy while pushing forward the true heartfelt joy of the season.

1)  Work gratitude into your day, every single day, from now until Christmas.  I have been keeping a gratitude journal off and on for years, after having read Simple Abundance a while back.  I find that I am more conscious of the blessings in my life when I am keeping it than when I let it lapse.  Especially during the holidays, when you are overly tired and stressed and running your kids from choir practice to grandma's can't miss afternoon dinner-palooza and back again to play practice and then out to the overcrowded mall and...well, you see what I mean about needing a little moment to exhale and take in only the best for a few precious moments.  Then I re-read some of my journal entries on the days when I am most stressed out or irritated, sitting back with a cup of tea and relaxing while thinking about how good my life really is.  It can really take the edge off, even from a stressful family gathering, when you put gratitude and joy on the front burner of your brain before you go.

Happy Mommy Moment

Yesterday afternoon, The Peanut and I were in the car, singing along to some song in her favorites folder on my iPod...which mostly consists of songs from Kidz Bop and various Disney singing child stars and such, along with just enough "oldies" that mom has mixed in for the sake of motherly sanity.

And when I say "oldies," I mean tunes from as far back as the Dark Ages in the 1970s and 1980s and stuff.

Otherwise known as that time period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and mom was in junior high and magically learned the words to all those songs that she likes to sing at the top of her lungs in the car.  Which mom threatens to continue to do well into teenage-hood just for her own personal kicks, too, may I say.

So anyway, we are happily singing along to something innocuous when it happened.  Suddenly, things got really quiet in the back seat.  Never a good sign, because it usually means something has spilled or is otherwise wrong.

And then a little voice piped up:

Mom?  Can I ask you a serious question?

At this point, I cringe, certain that I'm going to have to field something horrible or painful or difficult, and I honestly was not feeling up to it just at that moment.  It had been a long day of doing make-up and costumes for their play practice dress rehearsal, and I was fighting off a headache, and I was worried that it might be something awful. And if it was, that I would utterly flub my response out of tired and crankiness.

But I steeled myself for the worst -- because, honestly, what else can you do in that moment, right?!? -- and said:

Sure sweetie.  Anything.  What's up?

And then her sweet little voice said:

Can we have a lemonade stand next summer?  To raise money for kids in Haiti or Japan or kids who don't have any food at home here in our town?  I'd really like to do that.

I almost had to pull off the road just to hug her right then and there.  As it was, I had to stop myself from sniffling long enough to tell her "yes."

Pinching Garden Pennies: Plants On A Budget

Tis the season:  I've been bitten by the spring gardening bug, and I'm jonesing to get my hands in the soil and start working on my little Square Foot Garden.

Alas, the weather is freezing cold and planting is still a ways off here because of frost through most of April.  Our little microclimate area is a wee bit unpredictable, and I'd rather not plant early only to lose everything with a hard freeze.

So, what's a girl to do?  Lots of planning and looking at garden articles and magazines and books. 

One thing I've been especially interested in this year is stretching my garden dollars -- in a still tight economy this is really important for most folks.  That's especially true with our family as we are also currently thinking about ways to be more careful with our money so that we can teach our daughter the value of thrift as a means to help others by using the money more wisely and for better purposes.

We want to give more of our disposable income to charity, and in order to do that, we need to save more of our disposable income.  We talked a lot about ways to do that over the weekend and we are nibbling around the edges on a project that I'll share much more about in the days ahead.

Let's just say that thinking about spending more wisely for the greater good is something we've been talking about a lot the last few days.

In any event, I've been re-reading some of my gardening books to pull ideas from them on wiser use of my gardening resources.  I've also been doing a bit of research and reading online.  And I want to share some of that with all of you.

Could Less Be More?

We have been talking about ways to bring home the point for The Peanut that to whom much is given, much ought to also be expected.  And that helping others who are less fortunate is a choice we all ought to be making more often.

Now that she is 8, it seems a really good time to find more ways to bring that point home as her perspective on the world and her community widens, and her understanding and empathy begin to broaden a bit beyond "me" and "everyone else."

But how to best do that?

We already donate unused household items -- especially clothes and toys that she has outgrown -- to charity that we have her help to pick out every year.  We put together gift stockings at Christmas each year so that children who don't have toys can get something nice, and she loves helping with that.

And we donate money to local, national and international groups.  But not nearly enough, we feel, as it turns out, as we are reviewing our finances at the end of the tax year.

One of the things that is worrying for us is that, since we had The Peanut later in life when we were both already established professionals, she's been born into a family where she doesn't really want for anything.  That is both a blessing and a curse, as we are constantly struggling with how to make us and her happy without pushing the line over to rampant, thoughtless, rote consumerism without giving thought to what we are buying and why.

More importantly, we want to ask and we want her to ask where the money might perhaps better be used for a much more needed purpose.

One Of My Favorite Christmas Treats

Every year, our family picks out several needy kids through our local Salvation Army, and we put together stockings filled with toys, warm gloves and assorted other fun things for them. 

It's one of my very favorite things to do for Christmas. 

Today was my annual shopping day for stocking goodies, and I had a blast.

We had four children to shop for this year:  two tiny babies (so fun!), a little girl about The Peanut's age and a boy who was just a few years older.   So it was a very mixed group of shopping, but a fun one nonetheless.

I managed to find some lovely baby toys, including a few teething items that doubled as learning toys, and the most adorable hat and mitten sets -- a pink bunny one for the baby girl and a brown bear one for the baby boy.  Too cute!

Lots Of Surprises

One of the coolest things I've discovered about Yellowstone in my research thus far?  There are native pelicans there.

You don't really think of pelicans as an inland bird, and yet there they are. 

I booked a couple of touring excursions for us while we are there -- they apparently fill up really quickly, too, and I wanted to be sure we got these.  One is a driving/walking tour of the Firehole Basin -- we'll get to see all the geysers, hot terraces, and bubbling mud pits one family could possibly dream of on this, and do so with someone who has a working knowledge of geology which is evenbetter.

The second is one I booked for myself at Mr. ReddHedd's urging:  it's a way-too-early in the morning photography "safari," which they try to keep to small numbers with an instructor who goes along to help you improve. 

Between now and then, the plan is that I'll have gotten myself a decent DSLR camera and worked on taking photos with it.  Am still looking at pros and cons of several models, but am having lots of fun with it at the moment without even having gotten a camera.

If anyone has suggestions, pros or cons, about a camera for a beginner who wants to do some nature photos, perhaps a few landscapes, maybe some decent macros, and just plain have some creative fun along the way?  Please let me know.

But today?  I have to run over to the Steptoe & Johnson old office building and spend several hours inventorying furniture that is being donated to St. Mary's (The Peanut's elementary school). 

Tasty Way To Helps Kids In Need

Tomorrow, on August 5th, for every Blizzard sold at participating Dairy Queen franchises, $1 will be donated to the Children's Miracle Network.

Just got this in my e-mail:

Tomorrow will be a day of hope. Tomorrow will be a day of help. Tomorrow will be a day of happiness. Because tomorrow is Miracle Treat Day at Dairy Queen and with your help miracles will happen for sick and injured children. $1 or more from each Blizzard® treat sale at your local DQ location and every participating DQ location across the country will be contributed to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Just think, if every Blizzard Fan Club member bought a Blizzard treat tomorrow, we would raise over $2 million. Let's join together and make tomorrow the day miracles really do happen for kids in need. RSVP below and spread the word to your family and friends.

One of our local franchises is participating, and we will likely hop over to get one.  (The one in Bridgeport, for locals who are reading.)

Thought folks might like a heads up about this.  The promotion is going on all over the US at participating franchises.

Given how many kids we've seen at Disney World through the years participating in Children's Miracle Network programs, this is a really great idea from someone at DQ.

Day O' Yard Sale Update

We finished the second day of the school fundraising yard sale yesterday.  It was a long, hot, sweaty slog.

We raised close to $6500 dollars.  Boo yah!

The kids and their lemonade stand raised over $330 of that by themselves.

The Peanut turned out to be a serious force at selling lemonade and water -- she did an awesome job, appearing to have inherited both our work ethics (poor kid).  She was absolutely amazing -- so we are taking her out for ice cream this afternoon as a reward.

Things I learned?

First, the same old lesson: that a few of the people end up doing all of the work, even though everyone else gets to benefit from it.  How to change that?  Wish I knew, but it has been that way for a while and I'd love thoughts on how other school parent groups or others have motivated people to get off their butts and help out more.  Thoughts?