Tag Archive for children

An ode to the shorties: why children can sometimes make us feel better than anyone else

April 2, 2013 admin No comments

This week is spring break for many elementary, middle, and high schools around the country.

That means many things for me… I don’t have boot camp (translation: I feel more sluggish and moody than normal—ask my husband if you don’t believe me), I get to have one of my local friend’s teenage daughters visit my college class (woot!), and—most notably—one of my oldest friends is visiting with her whole family including her husband and two young daughters. (You can see all of us in the picture above.)

Since we don’t have kids ourselves, one of the great joys of our lives is spending time with other people’s children.

I imagine that if we did have our own kids, we wouldn’t appreciate our nieces and nephews and friends’ kids as much as we do. We’d probably want to get away from all of the shorties and have more adult time. But when you’re childless, being around kids is that much more special.

Probably one of the things I love most about hanging with the little people is that they have no guile about them. Even the teenagers—those strange in-between creatures who are enigmatic and overly frustrating to their parents—are still fairly open and honest with other adults.

Sure, kids can be too honest sometimes—and tell you that you’ve worn that shirt too many times or shake their heads disapprovingly when you try to get one more day out of that ’90s pantsuit.

But they are also just as forthcoming about what they love about the way we look—playing with our curly hair as if it is gold, trying on our strappy sandals from Macy’s like they are Jimmy Choos, and gently touching our costume jewelry as if it came from Harry Winston.

And it’s not just the superficial stuff they love either.

They love us for who we are—they love our womanly curves, every last pound of them—and stare at us with so much genuine appreciation sometimes that it almost makes me want to cry. Because, in their eyes, we aren’t the people who used to be twenty or thirty pounds thinner or the person who didn’t always have smile lines and crow’s feet. We are the people who talk to them for hours about their turtle, the people who swim in the hotel pool with them after bedtime, the people who play tic-tac-toe with them even if we can never beat them at their own game.

We are the people they love just the way we are.

kids, self confidence, self esteem

Stay glad: advice from Woody Guthrie and a recap

January 10, 2012 admin No comments

Good news!

I managed to keep exercising while on vacation—apparently Key West is a city made for walkers, so we managed to walk more each day we were there than we do at home, which is really saying something since we normally average an hour a day.

We also had an amazing time and were able to really unwind away from the stresses of work and the internet. I don’t say it in the healthy living section of this blog, but I really should—relaxation is as important a part of being healthy as anything else.

The only bad news (and this isn’t really bad news) is that I’ve fallen a little bit behind on telling you about some stories related to having a healthy mind and body. So rather than discuss any one of them at length, I’m just going to give you a quick rundown . . .

1) After all of the I Will Not Diet contributors posted their non-resolutions here on New Year’s Day, someone sent me a copy of Woody Guthrie’s list of New Year’s resolutions for 1942, which I’ve included above. Some of my favorites include: “Don’t get lonesome,” “Stay glad,” “Have company but don’t waste time,” “Dance better,” and “Love everybody.” I’m sure we’d all do well to take the same advice.

2) I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while about The Real Girl Belly Project, and my friend Alison reminded me about it today. This is a section of online magazine XO Jane (run by Sassy and Jane founder, Jane Pratt) devoted to publishing pictures of real—not Photoshopped—bellies. You’ve honestly got to see these to believe them. They are all flawed and human and wonderful!

3) My cousin Jennifer told me about an article called “The Death of Pretty,” in which the author argues that young girls today no longer want to be “pretty” but rather just “hot.” The article is far from perfect, especially when it veers into the women-should-be-innocent-creatures-men-want-to-protect territory, but it also makes a good point about our commodity-driven culture and the fact that young girls often grown up way too fast in our society because, like the celebrities they see on their screens, they want to be as sexy as possible. I wrote about this problem in my 2010 Halloween post, and, sadly, it’s not something I expect to be resolved any time soon.

4) And last but not least, another friend, Holly, reminded me that Children’s Health Care of Atlanta is currently running a series of anti-obesity ads that are drawing fire. You’ve really got to see the ads, which you can do here, to get the full impact of them, but suffice it to say they’re incredibly dark (like similar anti-meth and anti-smoking ads), and some people think they are hurting more than they’re helping, causing embarrassed kids to avoid exercise rather than embrace it. I have mixed feelings about the ads. I’m certainly glad anti-obesity ads are being disseminated in our society, but I don’t like that the ads seem to lay all the blame at the feet of the parents. At this point, we know that obesity is about the chemicals in our environment as much as it is about diet and exercise. So why not target lawmakers as well as parents? In several of the ads, kids ask their parents questions like “Why am I fat?” and I’d love an ad in which one of the kids said, “Dear Congress–why do you let corporations put so many chemicals in my food?”

Childhood, childhood obesity, growing up, obesity, obesity epidemic, stomach, Uncategorized, young women , , , , ,