Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Passover/Easter Prep

Whenever Easter and Passover coincide on the calendar, there’s a flurry of activity around the Picket Fence Post house. We buy matzo, horseradish, brisket and make haroset (apples, nuts, honey) for a seder dinner. We also dye Easter egg and get Easter candy, plastic green grass and the unnaturally colored things known as Peeps.

This weekend, we’ll have a belated seder dinner at our house, do an abbreviated reading of the Haggadah (the story of Passover), hide the afikomen (a piece(s) of tooth-breaking matzo . . . eating lots of Easter candy makes the tooth-breaking easier) and award the kid afikomen-finders a buck a piece. Later that night, The Spouse will likely clamor to watch the Ten Commandments while the kids whine that they’d like to watch something else.

The next day, following what’s likely to be a chilly Easter egg hunt in our backyard (at least snow’s not in the forecast), it’s off to celebrate Easter with my parents while somewhere our dentist will rub her hands together in anticipation of the cavities being spawned by the solid chocolate Easter bunnies and sticky jellybeans my kids’ll be gobbling up.

Just your average, interfaith family weekend in April. Plus one kids’ soccer game which we’re not sure how we’re going to deal with just yet.

Item #2: New Mass. School BMI Policy Passes

Back in January, I blogged about what I saw as an intrusive, Massachusetts policy proposal to burden schools with the job of weighing students in the first, fourth, seventh and 10th grades and measuring their body mass index, then dispatching a note to the parents informing them of what they should already know by laying eyes on their child each morning at the breakfast table, and about which they should be discussing with the child’s pediatrician.

The Massachusetts Public Health Council has approved this bad idea, which they plan on asking already overtaxed schools across the Commonwealth to implement in the next 18 months. However I was happy to read that there is a parental opt-out provision. And when I opt-out of this silliness on my kids’ behalf, I’m fully expecting to be viewed as an anti-health, head-in-the-sand nutcase. But that’s okay. I like nuts.

Item #3: Mini-Me’s

My GateHouse Media column this month is about how, despite parents’ hopes and wishes, your offspring’s pop culture, decorating and clothing choices are all their own, regardless of how much we might yearn for them to be chips off the old blocks.

“We’ve each got our pet things or causes we want our kids to love too, only some of us make more of a fetish out of using our kids as reflections of what kind of people we are, than others. Some think we should be able to influence our children’s tastes, but it doesn’t always work out the way we envisioned.”

The Gov. Deval Patrick administration apparently thinks so.

That’s why — as part of a larger state campaign to fight obesity — they want to order overburdened schools to weigh our first, fourth, seventh and tenth graders and make a determination about whether the children are overweight. Then a nice, patronizing form will be sent home to the parents telling them how to make healthier eating choices and how to kick the children’s behind outside to play and work off some of those pesky calories.

My kids’ weight is not the school’s business. Their weight is an issue for them, The Spouse and I, and their pediatrician, who can provide detailed information tailor-made for my children, whom they’ve known practically since birth. It’s incumbent upon the pediatrician to have weight discussions, not systematically by the school nurse who’s already got enough on her hands.

I don’t want the schools (which in my town are serving mozzarella sticks for lunch today; I packed the kids lunch instead, included carrot sticks) — simply because they have custody of my children during the daytime 10 months out of the year — getting involved in my children’s weight issues. (For the record, they don’t have any.)

My children are already learning about healthy eating habits in school, which I think is important. They’ve studied the new-fangled, incomprehensible food pyramid. In gym classes (yes, my kids’ schools still have gym), they’ve been given charts about how much exercise they should get each day, as well as strong advice on how to stay healthy. There are after-school activities which afford the kids more opportunities to run around like maniacs. (I do think the lunch offerings aren’t great though, and I think there should be MORE gym classes, not fewer, particularly in high school.)

I don’t think the schools should assert the right to make my kids step onto a scale and weigh them, and then send me a note telling me that they shouldn’t eat Doritos while sitting in front of the TV for eight hours a day, because I, apparently, am too dumb to realize that eating junk food and sitting around will make people fat. The schools already have plenty to do, like the extremely difficult task of educating the children. We already have a personal physician whose job it is to give us personalized advice on our health. (That being said, however, I heartily approve of educating the students generally about how to eat better, and how and why they should exercise.)

I know there will be health advocates who’ll support this program, saying that too many parents who are in denial about their children’s weight and health, and don’t understand the long-term health implications for the child and for society (diabetes, heart ailments, etc.) associated with obesity. But I’m not a big fan of the state overreaching and morphing a cliched “nanny state” posture, particularly when it can barely pay its own bills and is cutting local aid which results in the slashing of essential services (like in the schools!) because there’s a dramatic short-fall in tax revenue.

Why not instead focus on getting schools to sell healthy lunches and mandate more gym classes during the day?

All right, now I’ll sit back and prepare to get blasted as an ignorant tool.

Image credit: This web site.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has the opportunity to inject some sanity into Massachusetts school systems when it comes to the classroom placement of twins, triplets or what’s called ”higher order multiples” (meaning quads, quintuplets, etc.). A bill to allow parents to choose whether they want their twin or triplet children in the same or different classrooms has made it through the state House and Senate and has landed in Patrick’s hands.

As a mother of twins, I heartily cheer on this empowering move for parents who know the children better than anyone else. In August 2002, I wrote a piece for Parents and Kids Magazine about classroom placement for twin kindergartners and found that a vast number of education specialists believe that the decision should be left up to the parents. However in Massachusetts, many school principals continued to cling to policies mandating separating multiples, treating their unique status as if it were a virus that needed to be stamped out.

As I researched the piece, I spoke with folks who’d been involved in a local mothers of twins organization,  many of whom opted to separate their children in kindergarten because they felt it would be the best move. When my boy-girl twins were entering kindergarten, The Spouse and I wanted them together (had to buck the “we always separate twins” mantra), but by first grade, we wanted them separated. A one-size-fits-all-just-separate them policy is outdated and doesn’t reflect contemporary research in the field of multiples, nor does it recognize that parents of multiples have a variety of opinions on the subject.

The authors of The Art of Parenting Twins wrote, “It is the single most important event in the expansion of their children’s social environment (after preschool and day care), and signals a major separation from parents and home.” A Boston University professor told the Boston Globe that stripping a twin of his or her lifelong partner at a time of major change was an unnecessary move, if the children weren’t ready for it: “If a 5-year-old child would feel more happy with their twin with them, why would we not do that?”

The National Organization of Mothers of Twins, which has a produced a booklet on the issue, says no studies support the age-old contention that twins are better off separated and advocates a “flexible placement policy through the early elementary school years.”