Candy Apples, 12-Inch Subs and Quarter Waters: 3rd Graders Lunches = One Step Closer To Type 2 Diabetes

By NICK CHILES

I was pleased to see that the class trip was a big hit. My daughter Lila’s third-grade class had hit the Salvador Dali exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum in full 8-year-old curiosity mode. They bounced around the cavernous rooms, wide-eyed as they took in Dali’s unique and whimsical view of the world. They had studied him in class; now they were seeing the real thing, close enough to touch (but keep your little hands off!). A painter who could put the Christ child, floating rhinoceros horns, a waterfall and a lovely portrait of his wife all in the same painting was clearly a genius in their eyes. The High Museum made it extra fun by creating an audio-tour that was narrated by Dali’s “mustache.” When the third graders put the headphones on and heard the silly, French-inflected voice that was supposed to be the painter’s mustache, they all broke into giggles. Nothing like seeing giggles coming from 8-year-olds in an art museum.

I was one of two class chaperones, meaning I had to help the teacher and the other chaperone, a grandma, keep 20 8-year-olds moving along the exhibit at a brisk and coordinated pace. Yeah, right. Certainly you’ve heard the expression “herding cats.”

When we reached the end of the exhibit and the kids had to regretfully hand back the audio kits, we announced that it was time for lunch. They were happy. And that brings me to the point of this here diatribe.

We sprawled out in the museum’s courtyard and handed the students the lunches they had brought from home. I was having a great time eating with my little Lila and sharing our impressions of the tour. Then I heard a whole lot of giggling and loud exclamations to my right. I looked over and saw that one little boy was struggling to put away a mammoth 12-inch sub sandwich.

“That’s too big!” one little girl said, pointing at him and laughing. “You can’t finish that!”

I agreed with her, shaking my head and wondering what form of dementia would move a parent to send a child to school with a sandwich that was bigger than my forearm. But it got worse.

A chubby girl (yeah, I know, a little mean, but I’m just keeping it real) sighed and looked down at her lap. What stared back at her was a feast that could have fed half the class, no exaggeration. The girl had about eight sandwich quarters, cut up and stuffed into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. She had a large bag of potato chips. And she had three large containers of those cheap, sugar-water-with-food-coloring bottles of liquid that we used to call “quarter waters” when I was little because they only cost a quarter. She had finished the pink one; now she was looking down at two blue bottles, wondering if she should crack open another. But it got worse.

The girl sitting next to her, who also was a bit chubby, was wrestling with a large red candy apple, covered with nuts. I don’t know about you, but I still have nightmares thinking back to those post-Halloween candy feasts as a child when I had to figure out how to eat a candy apple without losing several molars. The idea of handing one to my child in the morning and telling her to eat it for lunch at a museum…well, I really am unable to understand. I checked in with her a few minutes later and she had shorn off the top layer of hard, sticky, red lacquer—much of it of course winding up on her hands and face—leaving the abused, browning flesh of a sad little apple. But it got even worse.

Sitting next to me was another little boy. He wore glasses and he also was a bit chubby. I will call him Raymond. Raymond was steadily making his way through a giant chocolate Twix bar. When I say “giant,” I mean one of those 8 ½ x 11 candy bar sheets that you see near the check-out counter at the CVS and wonder to yourself under what circumstances any person would ever need to eat a pound of Twix. Well, I found out the answer: apparently when you send your child on a class trip. 

Michelle Obama would have had a coronary.

We hear a lot of grousing in this country about the poor health of our children, and how we are hurtling scarily toward a day when like half of the population will be suffering from Type 2 diabetes. We shake our heads and wonder how we got to this point. Well, on that recent afternoon at the High Museum, I got a little glimpse at the root of the problem. My wife has written here at MyBrownBaby about how unhealthy and plain bad school lunches are, and how Congress needs to get off its behind and get a Jamie Oliver-type Food Revolution going in all of our schools. But we can't just blame Congress and schools for feeding our kids crap. Nope—some of this has to fall squarely on the parents' shoulders.

I feel compelled to add one more fact: all of the children with the ridiculously inappropriate lunches were African American. Of the 20 kids in the class, about 8 are black. The rest are a little model U.N. of white, Latino and Asian. But only the black kids had the bad stuff. And, I might add, the black kids were the chubsters. Come on, people, we gotta pay more attention to what we are feeding our children! So many of us fight so hard to keep off the bulge as we get older. Let’s not put that burden on our kids before they even learn their times tables.

* * * * *

About Our MBB Contributor: Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestselling tome The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms co-written with gospel legend Kirk Franklin. Nick also writes for several publications including Essence, where he frequently pens stories about fatherhood and manhood.  

Salma Hayek, Kim Kardashian and "Creepy" Breastfeeding

I mean seriously: What gets people so worked up about breastfeeding? The baby is hungry, nature put milk in your boob to satisfy that hunger—pop a boob in the baby’s mouth and everybody’s satisfied. It’s free. It’s (relatively) easy. And it comes with some health benefits for the kid and some quick weight loss for you.

Everybody wins.

Why, then, all the vitriol? I swear, when I made the conscious decision to breastfeed both of my daughters for at least a year, everyone from the nurses where I gave birth to some of my closest family members and friends tried to shove Similac into my refrigerator—as I recount in THIS BLOG POST. I always felt like at the base of it, folks were so busy sexualizing my boobs that they couldn’t accept that I wanted to put them to use for purposes other than turning on men.

This was on my mind recently when I read the June issue of In Style, when Salma Hayek expressed shock over a legion of racist hate mail from people who took pen to paper to express outrage after the Mexican starlet breastfed a hungry, crying African child while on a humanitarian trip in the motherland:

This baby was hungry and I was still nursing [my daughter] Valentina, so I fed the child. What was shocking were the hate letters I received. What offended some in particular was that I breastfed a black child. It was not even in my universe, such a thought. For me, it was a baby who was just born and was hungry. He was healthy but malnourished at this hospital – it was really just a clinic in the countryside – and I was able to help.

My girl Erica Kennedy of The Feminista Files had me sending up hallelujahs when she broke down why someone would waste printer ink, paper, a stamp and the spit it took to make it stick to an envelope hollering at a woman whose sole purpose was to feed a baby:

I think this has to do with the messed up, puritanical ideas we have in America about sexuality and our own bodies. A rich Latina woman married to a white French billionaire whose gigantic tatas are always on delicious display on red carpets letting a poor black child s uckle on her golden bosom on camera for ABC News? That could keep a whole army of shrinks writing books for decades.

Indeed.

Which had me thinking that maybe the deputy editor at a top UK-based parenting magazine, should ask HR if her health benefits cover a couple of couch sessions to discuss her hatred of breastfeeding.  Just this past week, after Kim Kardashian tweeted her disgust of a woman who was breastfeeding in public, Kathryn Blundell of Mother and Baby magazine WEIGHED IN WITH AN ESSAY in which she proclaimed her “fun bags” were strictly for lovers, and the idea of putting them in the mouth of a “bawling baby” is “creepy.” She added that she formula fed her child to give her boobs “at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach.”

Now, I get why Kim Kardashian’s ignorant ass would tweet some anti-breastfeeding sentiments. I mean, I find it ironic that a chick whose claim to fame is making uninspired, butt-naked sex tapes with Ray J, is bothered by a mother feeding her baby in public. But nobody ever accused Kardashian of being the brightest porch light on the block anyway, so her dimwittedness makes sense. But the editor of a parenting magazine going hard against breastfeeding? Really?

Of course, after all hell broke loose, Blundell explained herself, but stood surprisingly firm, even in the face of a firestorm of criticism:

My motivation behind writing this feature was to give a voice to those many women who simply do not want to breastfeed, and as a result of this choice have felt guilty, alienated and distressed. 
I also wrote with humour as I wanted to take a more relaxed approach to the topic, in a climate where unfortunately the type of milk a woman feeds her baby seems so open to serious judgment and criticism.

Exactly. Emphasis on judgment and criticism. How, exactly, does one try to stop mothers from judging and criticizing other mothers for their baby feeding choices by judging and criticizing women who breastfeed? I'm confused. 

Here’s an idea Ms. Blundell: How about we accept the fact that God put milk in our breasts to feed our babies, and that all over the world except here in the backwards ass United States and apparently the UK, it’s actually considered a GOOD, HEALTHY way to keep your kid alive.

It’s not creepy.

Or nasty.

Or abnormal.

And I don’t know about anyone else, but I got two-baby boobies—and they sit up right nice, thank you very much.

If you choose to feed your baby with formula—cool, do you.  Your choice. Just like breastfeeding was mine. Let’s leave each other alone about it already.

Real Friends Don't Call Friends "The Maid"

Miss Millie: You kids are so clean. You wanna come work for me? Be my maid?
Sophia: Hell no.

—from The Color Purple

These lines, and Sophia’s subsequent beat down at the hands of a mob of white men who didn’t take too kindly to a black woman expressing, under no uncertain terms, that she had higher ambitions for her children other than for them to scrub floors for the rest of their lives, came to mind yesterday when I read THIS MADNESS over at Momlogic.com. Dr. Wendy Walsh, a white mom of a biracial daughter, questioned whether our “historical trappings” over the use of slurs have “loosened”—whether we’re “so far past the tragedies and injustices of the past” that this new generation can make light of” the “N” word and other insults historically reserved for people of color without assigning any meaning to them. The mom’s query came after her daughter, who presumably looks black (or at least something other than white), revealed that she calls her best friend, who is white, “blonde”—as in “dumb blonde”—and the best friend calls the biracial girl “maid”—as in, “back in the days of slavery, you would have been my maid.”

This whole expanded definition of the "blonde and maid" friendship didn't soothe me a whole lot. But it did get me thinking about how terms of endearment are sometimes slurs that, spoken in the privacy of an intimacy, imply, "This is our special word. Our joke. This separates us from the world and bonds us together."

The mom goes on to suggest that the “affectionate” nickname her daughter’s white friend has assigned to her is not much different from the use of the “N” word by “many African-Americans… within their racial circle,” or the “loving, intimate way” an old boyfriend proudly called her his “N.” “I accepted it with love,” she writes.


DEAD FISH EYES.

I. Can’t.

But I will.

Um, you can do all the convenient self-reflection/analytical thinking/tap-dancing you want to, but the bottom line is this: Where I come from, calling a black child a “maid” would earn you a Ms. Sophia-styled cuss out if you’re lucky, a sound Shaniqua-esque ass whooping if you say it to the wrong one. Best believe, Mari and Lila would surely know better than to let any child, much less a white one, refer to them as servants. For sure, I asked my 10-year-old, Mari, what would be her reaction if a friend called her “maid” for fun, and she said, simply, “I would think it was kinda racist and I’d ask her not to say it again.”

Now, if a 10-year-old gets this, why all the questions from the “maid’s” mother? Venture a guess, but I’m thinking she doesn’t get it because she’s never known—and never will know—what it truly feels like to be called the “N” word and know that it was hurled at you from a person with a hardened heart and a palpable explosion of hate toward people with brown skin. She has no clue how it feels to be followed around the drug store by store workers who think she’s about to steal something—just because her skin is brown. She hasn’t a clue what it feels like to feel virtual steam rise from the top of your head when you get sat next to the bathroom at the restaurant and then get ignored for half an hour because no one wants to serve you—just because your skin is brown. And clearly, she’s never been out with her baby at the park, only to have a fellow white mom press a phone number in her hand with instructions to call her if she’s looking for a new nanny job—the white mom’s assumption that she’s on the playground strictly to watch over and wipe the asses of other peoples’ children and not your own.

But her daughter will know firsthand how hurtful that hate and those assumptions are. Because at some point, someone is going to get a gander of her brown skin and call her out of her name—and it won’t be done “with love and affection.” It’ll be done because the name-caller will think the color of her skin makes her inferior, and he’ll want her to feel inferior, too. And when (not if, but when) that happens, it won’t be all giggles and good times for her or her child.

Instead of simply pontificating on whether it’s okay for her daughter to be called “maid,” my sincere hope is this mother sat her daughter down—and her little friend, too—and explained to both of them the “you should know better” of this situation—that it’s NEVER a good idea to let someone refer to you in a way that can be even remotely construed as derogatory, disrespectful or racist, no matter the name-caller’s intent. For starters, it’s neither cute nor funny. And the moment you LET someone refer to you that way is the moment that you co-sign everyone else getting in on that action.

In other words, they both need to know that wrong is wrong and racism is real—no matter what color the president is, no matter how many kumbaya moments we’re engaging in with other races, no matter how far white folks think we’ve come.

Anything less is akin to this mother letting her daughter and friend play with matches without explaining to them that they’re dangerous and could burn the house down.

A Black Southern New Year's Feast Fit For (someone other than a pregnant) Queen

I almost killed my Lila on the New Year’s Day before she was born.

At least it felt like I did.

Let me explain. See, each and every New Year’s Day, my mother would host a New Year’s Day dinner at her and my dad’s place in Long Island; she’d invite over the folks—my aunties and uncles, cousins and close friends, neighbors and strays—and serve up the quintessentially storied southern black folk meal that was meant to bring good luck and prosperity to our homes: Black-eyed peas and all manner of pig parts, including feet, ears, and tails for good fortune, mustard and collard greens to conjure up dollar bills, and cornbread, because, well, who eats black-eyed peas, pigs feet and collards without cornbread? Top that plate off with some hot sauce and you were starting off the New Year on the good foot, for sure.

At least that’s what I was telling my four-months-pregnant self when I dove into a huge plate of my mom’s New Year’s Day goodness. It was divine. Great food, better company—my childhood home filled with love and light.

And then, the darkness came.

The evening when I got back home, I was so doggone sick I thought for sure every last bit of liquid and innards in my body were going to rush out of each one of my orifices. I was alternately praying to the porcelain god and sitting on it, too—crawling from my bed to the bathroom what seemed like every minute. What was worse was that my little baby, then enough of a bump to warrant maternity pants, wasn’t her usual self. She wasn’t kicking. She wasn’t shifting. She wasn’t poking her little butt out. Nothing.

And I was scared crapless.



It took two ob-gyn visits, several doctor’s phone calls, a five solid days of porcelain god worship, a pinky-swear promise from my mom that, really, nobody else got food poisoning, and normal baby movement for me to get right. Turns out it’s not a good idea, like, ever, to eat black-eyed peas, greens, pig’s feet, cornbread and extra hot sauce when you’re four months pregnant.

Right.

I mean, I didn’t really need to be sick for almost a week to know this; I’d already had one healthy baby and took great pride in keeping my head buried in pregnancy books that extolled the virtues of healthy eating. I took my vitamins regularly, I didn’t eat a whole lot of junk food, and I caved to only a few of my cravings (I said yes to popsicles, and freezing cold ice water, and no—as tempting as it was, to starch, clay, and, get this, Tide detergent. I know, weird right? Turns out those cravings were signs of a ridiculously bad iron deficiency.) But none of those pregnancy books specifically suggested I skip my mom’s New Year’s Day dinner.

So let me just go on ahead and put it on out there: If you’re pregnant, it’s probably best to stick to a sound eating plan, like the one laid out HERE on the super-informative March of Dimes website.


The March of Dimes also has a fine set of guidelines for healthy weight gain for moms-to-be so that your body can perform all the wonderful miracles of motherhood—from giving birth to a healthy baby to producing a nutritious mix of breast milk for your baby to getting your body back in tip top shape after the baby is born.

Um, and tempting as it may be to eat it, stay away from the contraband food this Friday if you’re with child. I’m just saying.


This blog post was donated by MyBrownBaby to the March of Dimes as part of its March of Dimes Moms initiative.

...And Let the Prayer Circles Commence

See here’s the thing: This baby is adorable—I’ll give her that.

And I’m impressed with her ability to pick up on and break down the latest dance craze at such a tender age.

*Even as she still struggles with finding her way to a toilet on her own (as evidenced by the droopy diaper).*

What I don’t get is why this child—a baby!—is on YouTube in knee-socks and the aforementioned droopy diaper, popping her booty and bumpin’ and grindin’ and doing “The Stanky Leg” on top of a table, like the only show she’s allowed to watch in her house is 106th & Park.

She’s not singing the Barney song.

She’s not doing the Elmo “coochie coochie coo” laugh.

Dora? Who’s Dora?

Nooooo… this baby—BABY!—is doing The Stanky Leg.

Now, I’m not going to talk about this child’s mother, because I don’t know who it is who foisted her onto the kitchen table and proceeded to cackle and curse and goad the baby into dropping it like it’s hot for all of the world to see. It could very well be a goofy teenage sibling holding the video recorder. Or a really horrible babysitter.

Whoever it is that made all of this foolywang possible, I wish I could get her in a quiet room for just a couple of minutes—or perhaps take her out to a nice lunch. Maybe explain to her the kind of damage that’s being done to this little girl, who, not even out of diapers, is half-naked and being encouraged to bend over and bounce up and down on a table in front of a camera. When is this ever cute or okay?

The baby knows not what she does; she’s simply mimicking whatever madness she’s been exposed to at such a tender age, when responsible adults—parents—should be off somewhere reading to her and building puzzles with her and pushing her on the swings at the local park.

But when that little girl hits age 10 and gets to jiggling and popping it at the 5th grade dance like she’s Karrine Steffans on the come-up, I hope her mother doesn’t try to get new and act like she’s surprised.

Just go to YouTube and see where all of it began.

Tuesday SmackDown (Update): We CLEANED the Girls' Rooms, and An Hour Later, They're STILL Clean!

I'm exhausted.
And I still haven't showered today.
And I have absolutely NO idea what I'm cooking for dinner.
Hell, there's nothing in the refrigerator TO cook.

But Lila's room is clean. And so is Maggie's.

And Gretchen and I are STILL standing. Your prayers/virtual support/ha' mercy Jesuses and our elbow grease/tenacity/need-to-rid-our-houses-of-the-heebies helped turn these...

Lila's Mess

Maggie's Mess

...into these!

Lila's Miracle

Maggie's Miracle

Gretchen hauled out 10 bags altogether—six for the Goodwill, and four more for the garbage man. She found lost library books. A plastic rat (which she thought was real). And lots of little notes Lila and Maggie were writing to one another in a "secret" stash of little random papers. And she finished it all—the cleaning and the Goodwill drop-off—by 2 p.m., with her adorable son, Charlie, age 3, fast on her heels (show-off!). She stopped by to see my handiwork at about 4:30, looking all cute and whatnot. With make-up and stuff. Seriously? Gretchen is no joke.

And now, Maggie can actually sleep on her bed, find her books, do homework at her beautiful desk, and open her closet sans embarrassment. (Of course, Charlie found a few good uses for some old Maggie toys. His room may actually be Gretchen's final frontier.)

Charlie's Room

I filled a huge 50-gallon bag with junk, and another smaller bag with stuff headed for the Salvation Army, moved out Lila's desk (which she NEVER uses anyway), and replaced it with her dresser, previously in the overcrowded, super junky closet. The closet is now spotless (I had size 2 clothes in that bad boy; Lila is a size 7. Yeah.), you can actually see Lila's bed, her play kitchen is organized, and there's nothing on the floor. I left intact her copious amounts of play "schoolwork" and her really weird collection of internet facts about former presidents (don't ask).

And while I was very happy to (finally!) find my black Kenneth Cole stiletto boots, I'm ticked that it's too late for it; thinking I'd never find it's mate (after an exhaustive search a few months ago), I threw the other one in the garbage.

And I may have to call in the CDC to help me figure out what's making all of this garbage stick to the bottom of this garbage can. Yeah.

Of course, the girls were over the moon when they saw their newly-cleaned digs.

How long do you Maggie and Lila's rooms will stay this way?

I'm thinking, maybe... I don't know... until at least 9 p.m. tonight.

At least.

Tuesday SmackDown: We're Cleaning the 7-Year-Olds' Rooms (Heaven Help Us).

TO SEE THE FINAL TUESDAY SMACKDOWN CLEAN-UP, CLICK HERE.

So my friend Gretchen and I were commiserating the other day about how much alike our daughters Lila and Maggie are—they’re both super smart, super funny, super stubborn and bossy as all get-out—when we both discovered that our little giggle nuts are… hmm, a nice way to say this… SLOBS.

THE CULPRITS

No, seriously. Our girls are just gross on the highest levels. For sure, both Lila and Maggie’s rooms are so junky, Gretchen and I were actually considering stretching that yellow crime scene tape across their bedroom doors—you know, for the protection of children and small animals. Our girls drop toys/books/clothes/shoes/boxes/papers/art supplies/random small items wherever they were playing with them last, and no matter how much yelling/begging/threatening/bribing we do, neither of the girls practices the simple art of cleaning up behind herself. To be fair, both Gretchen and I think too few storage solutions + the fact that the girls are still too little to clean such a massive mess = recipe for this disaster:

EXHIBIT A (Lila's Mess)

EXHIBIT B (Maggie's Mess)

Note the freakish similarities. The horse stables. The guitars strewn about. The desktop mountains of clutter. The bald-headed babies.

It's all just so very wrong.

Wrong, we tell you.

But summer vacation is over and our girls, newly minted second graders, are back in school.

Gretchen and I are going in.

To support one another, Gretchen and I decided to throw ourselves into what we’ve dubbed The Tuesday Smackdown. That’s right: We’re putting on our hazmat suits, getting out our oversized, heavy-duty trash bags, our rubber gloves and our mops and buckets, and we’re going to… gasp!... clean our girls’ rooms. Alas, the 7-year-olds can’t handle the gig. And we moms can’t take it anymore. So clean, we must.

THE BRAVE ONES

Our strategy? We’re going to be downright ruthless. Whatever isn’t an absolute essential/beloved toy/nailed down is going into trash bags—one headed for The Salvation Army, the other headed straight to the curb (made all the more easy by the fact that our daughters will be sitting in a classroom today, completely oblivious to the gangsta cleaning that’s about to take place).

Oh, believe me: It’s. About. To. Go. Down.

Want to see the results? Check back here around 4 p.m. for an update and pictures of their pig pens-turned-sweet little girl rooms.

*Makes sign of the cross.*

Pray for us.