Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (15 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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A mom came up to me recently and said, “I know you don’t like TV in kids’ rooms, but I had to do it.” In order to get their child out of the parents’ bed, they allowed the two-year-old to watch a calming baby video in her own room each night, which resulted in the child being willing to climb into her own bed and made for much more rested and happier parents. Who could argue with that? Whatever works best for your family is the right decision to make, and if chatty neighbors don’t like it, screw ‘em.
This is not to say that those whose children are grown don’t know what they’re talking about. Far from it. Some of the best advice I’ve received over the years has been from grandparents, possibly because they’ve had time to put it all into perspective and not get too worked up about the small stuff.
 
“He’s not sick or wet. He’s just mad. Let him vent.” - My mom.
 
“If you’re going out to a cocktail party that ends at 8 p.m., let the boys stay up until 8:30 so you can put them to bed yourself.” - A prominent socialite who to my knowledge has never been on TV.
 
“Pumping’s hard work. The fact that you got anything while you’re on a business call, on the coldest day of the month so far, is an achievement.” - Simon’s mum, whose words of encouragement helped me relax and pump another four ounces.
 
All advice aside, sometimes what really helps us is laughing. Once at a rather hoity-toity wedding, six-month-old François started to get fussy. As I glanced nervously around to see whether people could hear him, an old dear at our table put down her martini, rummaged in the stroller and triumphantly retrieved his pacifier, stating, “His stopper fell out,” and unceremoniously plugged it back into his mouth. Stopper. Ha! ‘Cause it makes him STOP. Another night when a jet-lagged friend had just returned from Greece and stopped over for a nightcap, teething Johan woke up and set off toddler François and soon they were both screaming. My friend calmly said, “Right. Scotch or tequila?” It took me a second to confirm she wanted to pour it for us, not them.
TOP 10 WAYS WE MAKE OURSELVES FEEL BETTER WHEN IT
S ALL GETTING TO BE TOO MUCH:
 
10. Check to see whether the person offering advice has children. How old are they?
9. Do they have a point? Are they right? It is entirely possible.
8. Will we ever see this person again? If not can we get away with unleashing our fury on them? Note if you’re reading this and decide to try it yourself go big or go home
7. Go online and read stories of parents who lost a child at birth who lost a toddler to a disease… something like that It really puts whining or crying or whatever nonsense we’re dealing with in perspective
6. Sleep Sometimes one of us will just go take a nap on a weekend afternoon
5. Watch escapist TV. Or be part of it. Actually because we
re part of it we hardly have time to watch it. Sometimes a delightfully bad movie hits the spot.
4. Drink heavily. Well
not heavily
just one. Bottle.
3. We share stories with other parents. Every single one of our friends has a worst-parent-in-the-world story. We are not alone.
2. Ask the boys to tell us a joke. Sometimes even if the kids are the ones stressing us out they can snap us out of it too! Johan slays us with his completely nonsensical knock knock jokes delivered with a perfectly straight face
1. Remind ourselves that they grow up so fast there will come a time when we’re dying to have a little baby on our chests with a busy body telling us everything we’re doing wrong
 
 
Chapter 9
 
If I Wouldn’t Eat That, My Kid Won’t Either
 
Dining In and Out
 
Alex
Baby food…mmmmmmm…not. Simon and I vowed when we had children that we would never feed them anything we weren’t prepared to eat ourselves. I’m happy to say that we stuck to that: we never once gave either of them a jar of baby food or any type of unappetizing mush. They were exclusively nursed with (very) occasional formula supplement until six months, and then we started solids. We did not go nuts with introducing one food at a time every other day as some suggest. That seemed too much like hard work. As there were no allergies in our family anywhere, we decided to simply mash up a bit of whatever we were eating and see if the boys wanted to eat it. They both took to food like crazy, and for the most part devoured what we gave them. Some things that our kids loved around the six- to 12-month mark were mashed avocado, mild curries if we had the time or Simon’s famous Dead Cow Sauce (Bolognese).
 
Simon
For many years I’ve been slow-cooking Bolognese sauce. I use ground sirloin, the best peeled Italian plum tomatoes, garlic, onion, preferably fresh basil and oregano, as well as lashings of Hungarian paprika before lastly adding tomato paste. When François came along and was old enough to watch us cook, I christened this Dead Cow Sauce, as I really wanted him to appreciate and understand what it is that we eat.
On many a shopping excursion to our local butcher, Los Paisanos, I’ve seen fellow customers raise their eyebrows as François and Johan would walk down the counter with me as they tried to identify what blob of cells came from which animal. As babies they’d both been read farmyard books and watched a few down on the farm DVDs, but neither of those sources prepared them for the fact that Angus the Bull gets slaughtered for our dining purposes. And while I wasn’t about to explain the process with which they met their deaths, I certainly wanted them to realize that that lump of red meat was a piece of dead cow, or that shank with a little Australian flag on it was actually the humerus of a little lamb. One time as François and I were marching down the long counter identifying the dead cows, dead pigs, dead sheep, dead chickens and dead ducks this woman piped up and exclaimed, “What are you doing, trying to make him a vegetarian?” “No,” I replied, I wanted to make them merely educated eaters, as I believe they should know as much about what they are eating, whether it be the animal it came from or whether their food is laden with high fructose corn syrup. In three of the four countries in which I have lived—Australia, the United Kingdom and now the United States of America—we’ve done our darnedest to make our food as non-threatening in the looks department as possible. I loved the year I spent living in Paris in the late ’80s where I’d walk out onto the local shopping street to buy that night’s dinner and the chicken, duck, pheasant and other game and they looked like birds! They had their feet and head still attached instead of some nicely sliced, skinned, packaged tray in the fridge at the local supermarket.
 
Alex
Simon and I are lucky that both sides of our families are pretty healthy. No one has diabetes, no one has weird allergies, most relatives don’t even get the sniffles very often… “You can’t kill us with an axe,” intoned my Granny Lola, who lived to be 103. Even when we lived in the Midwest with all the fast-food temptations that existed, we always made a huge effort to eat natural foods and even grew our own where possible. I went to a Catholic elementary school run by high-tech hippie philosophers, and although the religion didn’t stick, the idea of living off the land, being self-reliant and growing or making what you need came with me into adulthood. I also took on their fascination with computer technology, but that’s another story. Fast-forwarding to the present day, I guess we’d call ourselves locavores. In our neighborhood in Brooklyn there are many farmer’s markets, produce stands and grocery stores with nearby offerings. The families on our block all go in together to purchase a quarter cow or half a cow, and the meat arrives cut the way we specify. At a local cheese shop, they sell root vegetables from a farm in upstate New York, and if you really wanted to, and you’d have to be pretty bored to do so, you could log on to the farm’s website and watch the harvest via web-cam. The boys’ school organizes fresh egg pickup, and milk pickup is available, too. I have threatened several times to buy a cow to keep in the backyard, but neither Simon nor our block association will let me do it.
I try to make as many things as I can from scratch, such as bread for sandwiches, yogurt, ice cream (to control the added sugar) and even ketchup. Particularly when I went back to work full-time, part of what made me feel better about being out of the house so much was knowing that I contributed as much as possible to their daily meals. We both love to cook—Simon is the master of stovetop stews, such as Coq au Vin or anything involving meat, mushrooms and olives. I’m the queen of baking and roasting, and once we finished our dream kitchen, our days of ordering in were basically over except for nights of bad planning and exhaustion.
When the boys were babies and young toddlers, dinnertime was easy. We pulled them up to the table in high chairs or booster seats and mashed up a small amount of whatever we were having, or if it was something we knew they wouldn’t eat (chicken, for some reason), we’d scramble them an egg or make a peanut butter sandwich. Right, this is not a nut-free house. I recognize that there are homes out there where parents have to be vigilant about what comes in and keep EpiPens handy. I’m so very, very grateful that we don’t have to do that.
At the age of about two, our fearless, eat-anything boys suddenly grew opinions. With that, their little mouths wired themselves shut. All at once, they wanted plain pasta or plain bread. Nothing else would do. Maybe plain fries. Definitely no vegetables, no meat, just plain pasta and a big glass of milk, please. Simon and I had counted many a time on feeding them Dead Cow Sauce, and suddenly even that was out of bounds. I hate to say it, but I remember being a very picky eater when I was a child, too. My seafood-loving family offered me oysters, shrimp and crayfish and I turned up my nose for years. They laughed, served me a piece of steak or a sandwich or whatever I wanted and moved on. At one point I started eating seafood and salads and other things again, and my mother said something to the effect of, “Yes, you’ve been missing out for years, but we knew you wouldn’t starve and that meant more for the rest of us.” And so it shall be with my children, I guess. François finally came through that phase and now happily eats Dead Cow Sauce, Australian meat pies and more. One sneaky thing we did during the pickiest time and still do with Johan, is to boil the plain pasta in chicken or beef stock so that at least a few nutrients soak into the carbohydrate extravaganza; Simon came up with that great idea. We have recently begun to make a little headway even with Johan toward normal eating, in that we can usually get them to try a bite of what’s on our plate with the promise of dessert. We said we’d never bribe our children, but oh my yes, does the threat of no dessert work. Another thing we tried was to pick up a children’s cookbook with lots of photos and have the boys go through and circle photos of the foods they’d like to try. After that exercise they ate salmon, zucchini and tacos. Once.

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