Back to Blogging with a Vengeance

Looks like I’ve completely run out of excuses. The garden is done, the yard work is done, veggie and fruit preserves done… I even have a brand new laptop that talks to both printers from the kitchen through some kind of invisible aura, but, despite all this, the blogging is not getting done.

In the knitting basket, there are socks getting done, and slippers getting done, but still the blogging is not getting done. There is Christmas shopping getting done, but no blogging getting done.

Hub is a bit dejected. Thinks I don’t appreciate the new laptop cause he can easily see the blogging is not getting done. And he knows that since 2003, blogging has been so important to me, and now of a sudden, the blogging is not getting done.

I think the real root of the problem is I am quite distressed by what is happening in this old world. The news I heard the other day has investigators, once again, looking for a missing child. This time a 7-month-old babe weighing, according to HNN’s newscasts, 10 pounds. According to the parents, the child went missing from their bedroom while they were sleeping.

Now as sad and distressing as these situations are, I find it comforting to know that the people discussing the situation on newscasts have more intelligence than I. I am comforted when they think of things that I would never think of to solve a case. But now I am quite distraught when, with this particular case, I realize they know so little.

In all their panels of expert detectives, lawyers, medics, newscasters, none zeroed in on the most significant up-front fact in this story. To me, the most outstanding detail in this mystery of the missing baby, described by her family as a little girl with a very big head, is that if a child seven month’s old weighs only 10 pounds, of course she will have a very big head.

And if she weighs only 10 pounds, it is obvious what happened to her. She physically faded away, before her body was hidden, taken, whatever the case may be. I would think any common-sense individual would know that unless a child has a serious hormonal imbalance that affects their growth, what child, at seven months, would weigh only ten pounds?

And so, then what distresses me even more is the realization that we seem to have become a culture that lives with a greater cloud of dread and fear of obesity, than our will and effort to promote good health. We have come to fear obesity to such an extent, that our children are bloody hungry. I see, in shops and on the streets so many babies that are so thin, so tiny, so delicate like porcelain dolls. I ask how old they are and am so shocked at how much older they are than what they look.

Doctors are not helping. Both of my daughters were told by their doctors not to feed their children any solid food until they were 5 or 6 months old. I am so grateful they ignored this advice. Their children got food at two months old and despite Nancy Grace reiterating again and again in the last few days that “babies do not sleep in”, this is not true. Babies can and do sleep in.

When they have had sufficient Pablum to hush hunger demands for eight hours, they will sleep ‘like babies‘ through the night at three months old.

I am just so offended that we do all those seatbelt safety checks, all that monitoring of childhood safety with toys, and bouncers, cribs and highchairs and rockers, and while all this is going on, children are not being adequately fed.

I know what hunger feels like. It is the most anxious, unsettling, empty feeling that one can have. A anxiety that is hard to label and understand. Especially when the child becomes a young toddler and parents are barking, “What’s the matter with you? Stop the whining. You had your supper!”

Meanwhile the clock says half-past midnight, and that very small stomach was last filled at 5:30 p.m. and of course by now is quite empty.
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Yes, I am disheartened, sad, and crabby. Anxious and unsettled with a great empty feeling inside. But it is not hunger that makes me feel this way. It is sadness for children who are so helpless, so wholly dependent on our care and good will. I don’t think that legally one adult can force another to diet without ‘permission’, but kids and babies, that’s a whole different story. You must keep them safe, and keeping them safe, is to make sure you never, never, never, feed them as much as they would like.