The Delicious—and Dangerous—Treat That is Figgy Pudding

12/18/2009

"Oh bring us some figgy pudding," the kids have been singing on the walk home from school this week, which got me to thinking—what the heck is figgy pudding anyway?

I looked it up and realized that, as a kid, I used to eat it every Christmas. Because in South Africa, the former British colony where I grew up, figgy pudding is still a strong holiday tradition. More commonly known as Christmas pudding, it was one of the solstice highlights for me.

(Strange, but by solstice, I mean Summer Solstice, given that we're talking Southern Hemisphere here. Yes, we had fake Christmas trees with fake snow, roast turkey and warm figgy pudding, smack in the middle of summer and often at the beach.)

In any case, for me, the excitement of figgy pudding ranked right up there with presents.

Why? Because it was dangerous.

Here's how the Christmas pudding ritual went down: My granny would emerge from the kitchen wielding the pudding like a prize ham. My grandfather would promptly douse it in what must have been 100-proof brandy. Then he'd set that thing on fire.

Spiky purple-blue flames would shoot up as my granny waved the whole shebang thrillingly close to the grandkids' hair. And things kept getting better as we kids dove into our pieces of boozy cake because my granny had buried loads of silver charms and coins in it.

One bite you'd get a horseshoe, the next you'd get a thimble, and the next you'd get a nickel. And each time you found one, you had to shout, wave it in the air, then proudly display it on your plate.

Best of all was when you swallowed one because then everyone could make lots of jokes about what would happen to it.

And here's the other thing that made figgy pudding fabulously dangerous: We didn't actually like it. It was, well, edible if you immersed each bite in custard or ice cream. But really, it was just glorified, steamed fruitcake. And what kid likes fruitcake?

Even among adults, fruitcake fans are numbered. But for those that like it, warm figgy pudding, soaked in brandy and paired with ice cream, is a real treat—if you want to try it, here's a recipe from NPR.

Just don't forget the brandy, fire, charms, and coins. Oh, and the figs.

There’s One Key Way to Keep Holiday Stress at Bay—Here’s How I Figured It Out

11/26/2009

Ah, the holidays are here: Cosy fires. Candles in the window. Roasting turkeys. Towers of presents. Outrageous desserts. Family togetherness.

And tension, discord, and stress.

So how to minimize the misery and maximize the fun? I have an answer of sorts, but before I reveal it, let’s, Scrooge-style, take a tour of several holidays past:

Thanksgiving 1996
I’m not sure why, but it was decided that I and my then-boyfriend would host my sister and her new husband, my mother, his mother, and his brother and her girlfriend in our tiny Arlington, Va., apartment.

My sister and husband showed up with a surprise guest— their rambunctious lab puppy—and it immediately became clear that the dog had no use for floors. It leapt from one piece of furniture to the next, sending lamps, vases, purses, tchotchkes, whatever, flying in every direction. My boyfriend demanded that the dog be taken to my sister’s hotel (where it wasn’t allowed to be, but oh well), leaving my sister grumpy for the rest of the holiday.

My boyfriend’s mother (who I’ll now refer to as MBM) had insisted on bringing a turkey, despite the fact that my boyfriend was a vegetarian who ate seafood—"no land animals, nothing with feet!"

So for dinner, I had prepared a bean dish for me and my boyfried, while the others tucked into MBM’s turkey. She eyed me, smirking, “Well, just look at her salivating over that turkey.”

After dinner, my sister decided it was time to try bonding with MBM,  so she hauled out her wedding album. As my sister thumbed through it, MBM glanced over suspiciously, taking in the lacey dress, the long curled blonde hair.

“Well,” she said, “Weren’t WE the Southern belle!”

That was the last time I ever hosted a holiday.
 

Christmas  1997
My parents had rented a place right on the beach at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras. The evening I arrived with my ex (we were newly married), everything was going swimmingly – tree-decorating, cake-eating, drinks before bed – and then my sister and her husband arrived.

My ex, never a fan of my sister, refused to get out of bed to greet them.

“I’m not dealing with your West Virginia diva sister and her brain-damaged, spasmodic dog. This is ridiculous. I’m staying HERE.”

Things progressed from there: My ex commented that my brother-in-law’s peanut soup vaguely resembled puke and ended up having cake for dinner.

And then, to top everything off, my sister announced that she was knocked up—by way of a positive-pregnancy test placed on the tree. My ex stormed out the room, raging that "This is just a typical drama-queen move on the part of your sister!" Reflecting back, I could have noted that his response was a typical drama-king move. Ah, hindsight.

Thanksgiving 1999
My parents were planning to spend the holiday with my sister’s in-laws four hours away, and my mother was obsessing over what to bring. Then, scanning the paper one day, she saw it: German chocolate sauerkraut cake! Perfect.

Only problem was, she somehow quadrupled the amount of sauerkraut called for in the recipe—putting in something like four cups of it instead of ¾ cups.

When it came time to cut the cake, the knife got stuck. The way my father tells it, they had to put the cake down on the floor and have someone step on it while another person sawed it into pieces.

Christmas 2008
My mother had gathered together my husband and me, our three-year-old  twins, my sister and her husband and their seven- and eleven-year-olds—at the West Virginia homestead for a tranquil Christmas Eve.

She was hell-bent on getting us all to sing carols by the tree before Christmas dinner, but the plan kept going awry.  For example, Punk, not yet potty-trained, peed on the floor. T-Rex slammed his fingers in the sliding door. And my nephew hit his sister on the head during a wrestling match.

Meanwhile four dogs—my mother’s Yorkshire terrier, my sister’s golden retriever, our miniature dachshund and our pound mutt—chased each other around the house, leaving their own deposits throughout. My father it seemed, was always the one to step in these deposits, yelling, “For God’s sake! Not another bloody pile of dog[expletive]!?”

Throughout all this, the adults took generous hits from the punchbowl. And then the doorbell rang.

Assuming it was the kids’ pizza, my mother ran for the door, and shoved a couple of $20s at the man standing there.

“I’m sorry, m’am….I don’t think you think I’m….”

“You’re not the pizza guy?”

“No. Uh. Sorry, but my mother just backed into your car.”

Yep. The neighbor's 90-year-old mother, after one too many eggnogs, had wrecked my sister’s car. That definitely put the kibosh on the Christmas carols.

Later that evening—I guess we hadn’t yet had enough—it was decided we would open some presents. It was the usual mayhem, with the kids shrieking, shredding wrapping paper, grabbing, and throwing presents. And then my sister and I were handed two identical gifts from my mother.

Simultaneously, we unwrapped nondescript brown boxes, stuffed with foam. I pulled out a long metal thing. Then another longer metal thing. And then a rounded black rubber hose thing.

“Good God,” said my father. “What have you given them? They’ve both got husbands you know!”

Turned out that they were self-standing hairdryers—they were attached to a movable stalk so that you could blow-dry your hair without having to hold the dryer.

“I saw it on an infomercial,” explained my mother, somewhat defensively. “I thought it looked, well, useful.”

I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I just laughed and laughed and laughed. I had finally discovered the one and only true key to de-stressing the holidays—realize that it’s all theater of the absurd and laugh ’til it hurts.

Outsourcing Our Brains: So Busy Recording, We Forget to Live

11/06/2009

A good friend of mine called me in a snit earlier this week. She was going to a big-deal event on Capitol Hill for work—some Senate thing—and a colleague had casually asked her to take photos.

She was all whipped up. “I mean the nerve!” she fumed. “I’ve earned this. I had a dress altered. I don’t want to be stuck behind a damn camera. Not gonna do it. I want to snarf heavy hors d'oeuvres and get snockered. I want to schmooze!”

I tried talking her down, but it didn't work because I totally identified. Not on the schmoozing part. (I couldn't schmooze my way out of a wet paper bag.) I sympathized that logging the event would crimp her fun. Because that's exactly what happened to me at my twins' fourth birthday party last weekend.

It wasn't enough for me to be party planner and people herder; I also appointed myself photographer. So while everyone else was dancing with giant parrots, feeding bison, and stroking camels (the party was at a local petting zoo), I was scrambling around the "safari" wagon like I was after the money shot for National Geographic.

I kept it up the entire time.

Click. Click. Click. Distribute bottles and pellets for barnyard-feeding. Click click click. Order pizza. Click. Click. Click. Everyone on the pony rides. Click. Click. Click. All aboard the wagon. Click. Click. Click. Catch ostrich grabbing cup and chugging pellets. Click. Click. Click. Serve pizza. Click. Click. Click. Cake and candles. Click. Click. Drop dead from exhaustion.

Afterward, I realized I hadn't spent one free moment with either birthday boy. When I wasn't playing traffic cop, I was full-on recording.

In a way, I'd totally missed their freakin' birthday!

So now I'm wondering what else I've missed.  As a blogger, I am always writing, tweeting, Facebooking my observations. That means I'm not living in the current moment. I’m capturing the one that just passed.

And I'm not alone. Millions of other moms—and dads—are out there snapping, blogging, and video-logging their kids' milestones and antics. Now, as I blathered in a previous post, there's a positive side to all this. If you don't capture those first steps and words, it all gets buried in the mush of your poor, information-overloaded brain.

When you record it, you not only have a record to return to later, you also help cement your memory of it—as found by memory researchers. But there’s a price: Not only does your reality become more about the recording, but your reality may be altered by the recording.

Imagine if a bride had to videotape her own wedding. Walking down the aisle and cutting the cake would be more than a little awkward. And it would no longer be her day. It would be her guests' day. But I bet it's been done.

Just think of all the people Facebooking and tweeting their babies' births. I was one of thousands who followed Pregnant Jane (@HisBoysCanSwim) as she tweeted the birth of her son, Monkey, from the very first contraction to the big delivery. It was like my favorite show, "Birth Day," except on Twitter.

And our obsession with digital recording is only going to escalate as the technologies get smarter. As noted in a recent CNN article, Microsoft will soon be releasing a wearable digital camera, SenseCam, that auto-snaps your every action, 24/7. Think of the implications! Will we all become walking citizen journalists recording everything that we and others do? Swear, and it's on the record. Burp, and it's on the record. Everything you do and say can and will be used against you on the Web.

On the other hand, if you do want to record something, it'll be even easier. And we're all so addicted to documenting everything that I can't see us foregoing the recording equipment.

Consider my friend. She called me all gushing and aglow after her Capitol Hill event. But she had one complaint: "Nobody brought a camera," she wailed. "Not even one person. So now we've got no record of it at all."

But boy did she enjoy herself.

Quick, When Did Your Kid Start Talking? Forgotten, Haven't You?

10/15/2009

It’s early morning. Zoned, I shuffle into our neighborhood coffee shop in search of caffeine. Next to me, twin toddlers scarf their parents’ pancakes, waggling small fat feet squeezed into Robeez moccasins.

 
“Mmm, mmmm, mmm,” they grunt for more, waving puffy hands at their parents' plates.

I watch the parents struggle to keep one toddler off the table and the other from upending the flower vase. And I immediately feel a sense of kinship. I tell them I also have twin boys, though mine aren’t identical.

“Oh my God!” says the dad, his hair syrupy and spiky. “When did they start talking? Ours are 20 months and nothing! Look at them. They just grunt. We have no idea what they’re asking for!"

He is wild-eyed, manic—with that just-a-few-shrinks-short-of-inpatient-admission look that's characteristic of parents with two toddlers under age two.

 
"Well." I say. Well what? I realize I have no memory of my twins' first words and what they said when.

Nothing whatsoever. Total blank.

But here I am, getting expectant, even pleading, looks from this mom and dad.

"Sooooooo, your twins are 20 months. Great age. They're really coming along." I stall. "Oh, I'm sure it was right around this age that mine started talking. Any day now your guys will be talking so much you won't be able to get them to shut up [snort after lame joke]."

Mom looks doubtful. Dad looks grumpy. "Well I sure hope it's soon. We aren’t mind-readers."

I head out with my coffee, and now this is bothering me. How could I have forgotten when my kids started talking? For crying out loud, I can't even remember their first words. This is pathetic. What kind of parent am I?

OK. Focus. Focus.  Somehow I'm pretty sure the twins were talking before 20 months. But I didn't want to say that to those poor, frazzled parents.

So, before 20 months. Focus, focus. Still getting nothing. Just a blur of respiratory ailments, profuse green snot, potty-training misfires, peed-on sheets, projectile vomit, heated phone calls with day-care providers, traumatic haircuts, and assorted food-throwing incidents.

OK, this is bad. It's like I have complete amnesia about perhaps the most hallowed aspect of kids' development. I thought memory was meant to be kind. Aren't you supposed to forget all the bad stuff and just remember the warm fuzzies, like baby's first words?

 
I've seen studies that show moms with small kids aren’t nearly as gung ho about child-raising as moms with older and grown kids. Maybe the positive-memory amnesia is just temporary and returns with gusto once the kids are older?

Time to get on Google. First I do a search on parents and memory because I need to find out if this amnesia is normal. Perhaps the raising of small children, much like giving birth, brings on a sort of amnesia to ensure propagation of the species. This theory would seem to be backed by certain grandparents who have completely forgotten how to change a diaper (for the record, my mother is a SIGNIFICANT exception to this).

But wait. That argument doesn’t work because it would mean parents only forget the negative stuff. My issue is I only forget the positive stuff.  Either way, my Web search reveals zero support for my parental-amnesia theory.

My next stop is an old blog I used to keep when the kids were six to 22 months olds. Why didn't I think of this earlier?

 
Here I have a record of their happy milestones!

The first thing I notice:  When the twins were 17 months, I was obsessing—and I mean FREAKING OUT—that they didn’t have 15 words yet.  For Pete’s sake, that totally wasn’t worth it.  Because by the time they were 18 months, I was all, “They say ‘bah bah’ for baby, bye-bye, and ball: so cute!” and “OMG, T-Rex said ‘sheeeoooo.’ His first word, shoe!” He has always been obsessed with feet; but that’s another topic entirely.

I mentioned that Punk’s first word also started with “sh” but isn’t FCC-approved, so we were furiously trying to rework it to “shirt.”

Two weeks later I was just tickled that T-Rex was calling his brother “Doo Doo.” (Glad that one didn’t stick.) And then, by the time they were 22 months, they pretty much had 50 words. I actually listed them all. (Did I happen to mention that I’m obsessive?)

Now this would have been good information to pass on to those stressed-out parents in the coffee shop: That I was also freaking out about the language thing when our twins were their twins’ age, and then “poof,” in a matter of weeks they had partial words. Then full words.

But after looking at my old blog, I think the timeline wouldn’t be my focus at all. What I’d want to say to those parents now is, write it down. Write down every articulation. Because if you don’t record when your kids utter those first syllables, those first words, you’re going to forget.

First Recollections: Spinning Stories into Memories

08/06/2009

It's a muggy Friday afternoon, and we're crossing the I-395 bridge in Washington, DC—in hot pursuit of a duck. Not the feathered kind. I'm talking about that giant duck-boat thing with wheels that takes people on tours. My three-year-old boys are bananas about it. I’d sort of been hoping they might miss it because once they see it, they're obsessed. Like right now, Punk is quacking and instructing me to go catch it.

"Oh no. He's getting away. After him!” he squeaks. “Fast-aw mommeee, fast-aw!"

Of course, my pursuit fails miserably because, well, this is DC, and traffic is always at a standstill. Nevertheless, I'm trying to get a GPS on the duck, some coordinates, anything, when I notice the black cloud billowing across the GW Parkway. "Looks like a storm ahead," I comment, absently, then immediately regret it because the boys start panicking.

"Oh, it'll just be a few drops of rain—nothing to worry about," I tell them.

Boy am I wrong.

About a half hour later, on I-270 approaching Frederick, we get hit by a borderline tornado. Womp, womp, womp. Sheets of rain smack the windshield, and our visibility goes poof. The only thing we can see—and hear—are branches pelting us from all sides. Somehow, Punk, having given up on the duck, is sleeping soundly through all this commotion, but not T-Rex. He's terrified, screaming, "I'm scared! I'm scared! What’s happening mommy?"

What’s happening? Mommy is white-knuckling the steering wheel, watching stones spin next to the driver’s-side window and something approximating a log whiz past the windshield.

But, somehow, I practically sing my response: "Oh, now, nothing to worry about honey." {Crack!} "It's just a little storm." {Crash!} "Just relax and enjoy the rain."{Thud!}

Clearly skeptical, T-Rex starts whacking Punk, trying to wake him up—to…share his discomfort, I guess. I quickly put a stop to that. But I do feel bad that T-Rex is so scared. And when we finally drive out of what felt like a bad acid trip, it occurs to me that this could be one of T-Rex's first memories. Maybe even his very first recollection.

I'm pretty sure I was around his age when I started my own mental record. Some of it is hazy, pleasant impressions from the farm we lived on. A cow licking my hand. Picking apples from the orchard. Swimming in the dam. But the clearest memories are of less-than-sunny events.

I don't mean anything seriously traumatic. Just regular-life unpleasantness that, as a kid, you're not expecting: getting a bee-sting on the eyelid that made my face swell up like a blowfish, for example. Sitting on my dad’s shoulders, projectile-vomiting into a trashcan after having tubes put in my ears. Or watching my favorite toy truck get run over by an octogenarian.

To see if others remember similar experiences, I did a highly unscientific, informal survey on Twitter. Tiny sample. Very qualitative.

Most respondents, in line with behavioral science research, recalled their first experiences from age two or three. Also squaring with research and with my first memories, they recalled standout happenings, departures from the daily routine: meeting a new sibling in the hospital, falling down the stairs, hiding in the depths of a closet when company arrived.

Why the amnesia before age two? Scientists explain that, during the first years of life, children learn language and recognition skills that lay the foundation for what we commonly know as memory, and what psychologists call "long-term memory." This is how we describe our personal conscious experiences.

Researchers also find that:

• We form our first significant memories when our sense of self begins to take shape.

• These first autobiographical memories are our own interpretations of what happened and may not reflect the actual events. Really, our long-term memory is part of how we define ourselves and make meaning of life.

• Culture plays a large role in our first memories. Research by University of New Hampshire psychologist Michelle Leichtman finds that in more individualist societies, like ours, recall starts earlier than in more collectivist Asian societies. Her explanation: Because personal stories are so important in our culture, adults feed children’s memory formation, discussing events with them in ways that build and reinforce their autobiographical memories.

 

On one level the adult reinforcement bit makes sense to me. But on another, I think we most vividly remember our pure emotional response, and by age three or four, we have the words to describe that response.

And on yet another level, some of us are the kid who was awake during the near-tornado. And some of us are the kid who slept through it.

But if adults have as much to do with shaping kids’ memories as scientists say we do, I’ll have to stop myself from mentioning that Friday-afternoon monsoon to T-Rex. Instead, I’ll try to bring it back to that dern duck—how next time we’re going to catch it, no matter what.

It's Time to Give Sleep Its Due—For the Health and Sanity of the Whole Family

06/24/2009

I once had a co-worker who considered sleep a total waste of time, and complained bitterly about having to do it.

“There are so many other productive things I could be doing,” she’d grouch. “Why spend eight hours of my day completely unconscious and drooling?”

So she didn't. She stayed up way past midnight watching “Sex and the City” reruns and Magic Bullet infomercials, shopping on eBay, and pursuing other such productive activities. And every day at work, she was, well….cranky.

My three-year-old twins are the same way. They resist naps and bed-time because they’d much rather be lobbing carrots at each other, jumping on the coffee table, or breaking the printer. The older they get, the more they refuse to settle down—and the crabbier they are later, when their sleep debt catches up with them.

Poor sleep. It doesn’t get much respect from folks at all points on the age spectrum. And in a caffeinated world driven by instant messaging, real-time news, and texting—and with collapsing boundaries between work and leisure—sleep is first to get the shaft (with healthy eating and exercising close behind). It doesn't help that our Type A culture tends to associate sleep and naps with laziness.

I am just as guilty of dissing sleep as everybody else. But unlike my twins and former co-worker, it’s not because I consider sleep a waste of time. I am, in fact, a huge fan. My problem is that, as a mom who works full time, I don’t have nearly enough time to spend on it. Consider an average week day:

• 6 a.m.  Shower, extract kids from cribs
• 8 a.m.  Haul kids to daycare, do potty duty
• 9 a.m.  Stagger into work, smelling vaguely of pee
• 5:15 p.m.  Leave work, make mad dash for daycare
• 6:30 p.m.  Feed kids dinner, argue about eating veggies, bribe them with post-dinner cookies
• 7 p.m.  Cajole kids onto potty with promises of Wii (no pun intended)
• 7:30 p.m.  Coax kids in and out of tub, emerge soaked
• 8 p.m.  Administer pre-bed milk to kids
• 8:30 p.m.  After series of empty threats, brush kids’ teeth and put them to bed
• 9 p.m.  Absently prepare parents’ dinner while attempting to watch "House"
• 9:30 p.m.  Eat dinner while watching rest of "House"
• 10 p.m.  Wash peed-on pants, attempt to clear walkway amidst toys in living room
• 11-11:30 p.m. Collapse on bed, stare blankly at book for two minutes…BLACK OUT…zzzzzzzzz

I know.  Sounds like my own personal pity party. And I don’t know how I’d do it without my husband, who shares these duties. But on this schedule, we’re lucky to get six or seven hours a night; forget the recommended eight. I realize it’s a typical schedule for parents of young children. But it’s one that can take a toll because, as noted in Harvard’s Healthy Sleep Guide, too little sleep hurts our health. 

Specifically, lack of sleep:

• Impairs our judgment and ability to learn and retain information.
• Compromises our mood and emotional well-being—hence the crankiness we associate with fatigue.
• Can raise our risk of serious accidents and injury.
• May, if chronic, lead to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even premature death.

On the flip side, plentiful, restful sleep—averaging about eight hours a night—helps boost our learning capacity, mental performance, and memory, not to mention our mood (and, not surprisingly, our relationships with the poor folks who have to deal with us every day). Good sleep can even help us lose weight and bolster athletic performance, according to a recent New York Times blog post.

Great. But the question remains, how do you get the sleep you need when your job and kids are running you like Jillian Michaels on "The Biggest Loser"? Discovery Health's Ten Tips for Better Sleep offers useful guidance, including advice to soak in a warm, relaxing bath and avoid caffeine near bed-time.

But parents of young kids need even more drastic measures to take back their sleep. For me, at least, it's going to require hard-core action. Here's my give-sleep-a-chance to-do list:
 

• Eat dinner when the kids eat dinner. I need to swear off cooking after they've gone to bed. The risk here is that I'll end up eating corndogs and mac 'n cheese along with them—I’ll have to watch that.
• Turn off the TV. Ouch, this one is going to hurt. But I know myself. Once I get sucked into a "House" episode, it's all over. I'll keep watching them as long as they roll them.
• Procrastinate on household clean-up tasks. This one I really like. Why didn't I think of this before?

But my biggest coup would be getting the kids to sleep in later, past 6:30 a.m., or even (dare I say it) 7. That way we'd all get more healthful sleep. Anybody got any suggestions?

Meat: Memory Booster or Mortal Threat?

05/06/2009

Lately it seems like I keep having moments when I space on a word—what brain scientists call tip-of-the-tongue moments. The other day a co-worker asked what treat I wanted, and I just couldn’t come up with “Godiva,” even though I walk past their obnoxiously decadent ads four times a day.

Another co-worker has a picture of the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore in his office, and I’m snapping my fingers going, “Hey, that’s whatshisname….you know, that Weather Channel guy?....Always getting blown about by hurricanes…really knows his weather disasters?”

I’m sure these tip-of-the-tongue moments have nothing to do with the fact that I have three-year-old twin boys, a brain crammed with ever more useless information, a demanding full-time Web job, not to mention a husband. Right?

No way. As usual I’m entertaining the more catastrophic possibilities—early Alzheimer’s, amnesia, most likely a brain tumor. It’s against my nature to look at a simpler fix, like say, get more iron (research shows that lack of iron can inhibit oxygen delivery to the brain, hurting learning and memory).  But just for the sake of argument, let’s investigate this possibility. Forget Godiva. Maybe what I need is steak.

After all, I like a rare fillet mignon as much as the next person. That is, I do until I contemplate cows overgrazing the planet and releasing enough methane gas to blast a gaping hole in the ozone layer.  And then there’s the study that came out a month ago indicating that eating red and processed meats daily raises death risk by 30 percent. Big government study of 500,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans. Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Nothing to be trifled with.

And that brings me to my big dilemma: One of my three-year-old sons has a confirmed iron-deficiency problem. Both he and his brother were born premature and anemic—they were seven weeks early and weighed just under, and just over, four pounds. T-Rex, younger by 30 seconds, looked smaller and paler but got his iron up in a matter of weeks. Punk, the more strapping twin, has continued to be mildly anemic, yet another never-ending source of worry to his hypochondriac mother.

Punk’s iron problem just magnifies my meat quandary: Do I ply him with meat because, as noted on the American Academy of Family Physicians Web site, the body absorbs meat’s iron the best? Or do I instead try to give him other sources of iron with a view to a greener, de-cowed planet, and to reducing Punk’s dependence on meat—thus adding years to his life?

Looks like Punk may be starting to answer that question “all by self,” as he insistently puts it. The kid just isn’t nuts about beef. And there is no way he is eating the number-one iron delivery vehicle recommended by his pediatrician:  beef kidneys. Not gonna happen. He sends back chicken breast, won’t touch roast beef, and recently barfed up a sloppy joe right after eating it. (His father commented that it looked just the same coming up as it did before going down. I know, TMI.)

Still, there are a few—not exactly lean and healthy— meats on Punk’s short list: turkey lunch meat, chicken nuggets, and sausages.  And according to the CDC Web site, Vitamin C enhances iron absorption from both meat and non-meat sources like fortified cereals, fortified breads, and  kidney beans (all of which Punk likes!). So I’m trying to mix in lots of Vitamin C-rich fruit juices, fruits, and the Punk-favored veggies, carrots and green beans. I’m also sneaking iron supplement drops into his cran-apple juice. He hasn’t noticed yet, or believe me, I’d hear about it.

We’ll see how it goes. The proof will be in his next blood-test result. Once his iron levels go up, my longer-term Punk plan is to reduce the meats and increase the produce.

Wait. Wasn’t there someone else with an iron problem? Oh yes, me. As much as I’d like to attribute my tip-of-the-tongue moments solely to “twin head” (my husband’s name for what dual toddlers do to the adult brain), I guess I should probably be upping my iron as well. After all, a recent study by Johns Hopkins’s Laura Murray-Kolb found that iron supplementation markedly helped women improve their memory performance.

Given the red meat thing—the threats to mortality and the planet—I figure I’ll try to get most of my iron from white meat, seafood, and non-meat sources and pills. That is, I will once I get around to it. When you’re a mom, your own health is largely neglected. But that’s the subject of a whole other blog post.