Picture is part of the cyclotron my son and his crew are installing in Oklahoma. It will painlessly and successfully treat inoperable and otherwise un-treatable cancers especially in children. By the grace of God, none of our children will ever face this machine.

At the Garden School:

It’s been such a busy few weeks around the Garden School, it’s hard to get to work now without a dozen things pressing. The kids are browning nicely in the hide and seek sun. We are hoping for some sun on Friday for our trip to Audubon Park. It should be a nice day at about 70 degrees.

At home we are re-learning lines. It’s amazing how tough it is to learn to stand in a line. It’s one of the things the K-1s really need to know to go off to first grade successfully because they will spend a lot of time in line next year. Standing quietly in a line without drifting, talking, punching, getting out of line to attend to a number of details like checking out a car that’s been left out, or coming to the kitchen to ask what’s for lunch, or going to see who is still in the bathroom is probably the hardest thing kids have tackled in a long time. It goes something like this:

“Line up!!!”

Fifty percent of kids run the other way.

“Line up!!!”

Ten race for the fence knocking three of the kids down who immediately burst into tears. “He hurt me; he cutted; she won’t let me be first,” struggle, struggle, struggle, hit, waaaaaah; “Miss Judy, Miss Judy!”

“Line up on a red spot!” The red spots number about 25 and are on the walkway between the green door and the playground.

“The red spots?”

“The red spots you’ve been lining up on for a year. Find a red spot.”

Half the kids turn to find a red spot on the playground. Those who find a red spot want the first one and begin to struggle, struggle, struggle, hit, waaaaaah; Miss Judy, Miss Judy.”

“Stand quietly; face the green door; hands at sides; no talking; no drifting; no sitting; no taking shoes off; just stand in a nice perfect column.” We don’t use row, because in math a row goes across not up and down.

Five minutes later the first five children are standing quietly, and they can go in to wash their hands. “Take your jackets off; go to the bathroom; wash your hands to the elbows; and go to circle time.”

All the children come forward to be on the front spots. Another three or four minutes pass and the first five children get quiet and can go in. It takes about 15 minutes to get them all in line, wash and seated in circle time.

Why not just send them in as a group? Because chaos is never the solution to anything. Making a line at the swimming pool in order to get a count will be tough if they don’t know how to line up.

In a crowded place this summer, an immediate line will mean a lot. The inability to make a line could mean the difference between taking kids one place and another. A child who cannot understand getting himself into a line will not be able to go on a field trip. Can you imagine what it would be like to try to corral 40 children at the swimming pool if no one knew what it meant to “Line up?”

“Lines are quiet places,” you hear teachers call out. That’s because when a child talks, he is not paying attention to what he is doing. He will aggravate the child in front or behind him and there will be a fight, so lines work better when there is silence.

Think of all the places we naturally make lines: grocery store, movie tickets, clothing store, cues at the mall for food, getting on a plane, traffic – the roads are lines.

And learning to make those lines are not very human friendly, but so necessary and start at three with “Line up!”

People are always asking about food at the Garden School. We make a lot of things kids really love. Yesterday I made a chocolate cake for the kids for snack, and Amy said they fought over the last crumb. My chocolate cakes are healthy and have fewer grams of sugar than that terrible syrupy yogurt that passes for food.

If you’ve ever made yogurt, you know it’s not sweet – it’s barely palatable plain. So 15-25 grams of sugar have to be added to half a cup of yogurt before kids will eat it. 15- 25 grams of sugar are 4-6 teaspoons. That’s 1/3 of the daily sugar recommendation in a good diet. If kids eat this for breakfast, they get a sugar high to start the day. Might as well give them milk chocolate. Throw apple juice on the pile at 22 grams or 4 more teaspoons of sugar per cup and a big bowl of sweet cereal and milk and the child is going to ooze. No wonder parents are struggling with behavior problems starting early every morning.

Cutting out this kind of breakfast is not hard. Try hard boiled eggs or plain unsweetened bread as toast with cream cheese. Look at the sugar content in bread. Some breads have as much as 6 grams of sugar per slice – that’s a teaspoon and a half of sugar!

If children must have sugar on their breads in the morning, try Benedictine fudge. It’s peanut butter and honey mixed. At least the honey has some medicinal body building elements.

Later in the day, children really need the calories to keep it going, but calories don’t have to be boring nor do they have to be wasted.

In a recipe for chocolate cake – my chocolate cake – there is a cup of sugar or 48 teaspoons in a whole cake. If you cut the cake into 24 pieces that’s 2 teaspoons of sugar per piece or half to 1/3 the sugar in the yogurt.

So what else is in the cake?

2.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup bran
1/3 cup fresh ground flax
1 cup sugar
2/3 cups cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1.5 cups hot water
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Mix and bake at 350 for about 35 minutes.

Cooking for kids means understanding kids. They LOVE sweets and by giving them too many, we upset their body balance. We are trying to cut back on sweets at the GS and engineer our food to be rich, healthy and delicious as we can. Try the cake; it’s a good!

I got this from my cousin Carroll. Just thought it was wonderful and wanted to share:

While visiting my son’s family this past weekend, I was able to speak with some of the wives whose husbands work in Proton Therapy at IBA. Ion Beams and Associates is a Belgian company and part of the work of the company is to build Proton Therapy units all over the world. The work moves people from place to place. In a very short time, my son and his wife Agnes have been in Massachusetts, China, and Florida and are soon to move to Oklahoma. Another wife, Gwen, is from Belgium and is carving out a life in Florida.

Pulling up stakes and moving is not a new thing. My own parents moved 17 times in 17 years with companies, and because they were bored. The moves were not especially hard on us as kids, but as an adult I look back and have no roots. I have no home town, no place that I’m from, and no family life to remember as binding. As a very young adult, I wanted something different; I wanted stability. I wanted a home my children could come home to year after year and bring their children. I wanted these kind of memories.

That’s not always possible to have today, and maybe it’s not the most exciting or the most valuable considering all there is out there in the world. It’s what I wanted because of all my moves, but when I think of the opportunities my son and lovely daughter in law have, I herald their moves and am probably more curious about where they will go next than they are.

Making it work is the hard part. And I think Brendan and Agnes are making it work splendidly. They always make a stake in the community, join what they can join, meet people and form excellent memories. Their children are right in the mix with dozens of friends and lots of activities every place they go. They live about 2 miles from the beach and are there all the time – now trade that for Oklahoma! But Agnes has already made some excellent pre-transition moves and plans to let the children ride horses and have a real western life for the year they will be there, and that’s exciting and very new for them.

Moving things is also a big snag. Making the new place as comfortable and warm as the last place has got to be a huge ordeal. I haven’t moved kids in 33 years, so what do I know? The details of any move across the country or across the world are certainly not black sacking it across town. Making sure that things arrive safely and then put away in a new house has got to be daunting. Yet each time we have visited, Agnes manages to have a lovely and warm setting very quickly, and that’s impressive.

The psychology of moving is not easy. Preparing children for a good and positive change depends on the relationship of a child to his or her parents. When families do this together, are positive about the move, it’s always easier on the children. Children are looking to parents for reassurance and steadiness. They are wanting time, affection, and the kind of in home stability busy parents find difficult. But those few reading moments, that calmness, that “go with mommy or daddy to do what must be done” is the kind of bonding kids need to make transition fun.

Getting involved is another positive piece of the moving puzzle. Getting to know the geography is important, and I am always interested in how fast Brendan and Agnes do this. This ability to go and do gives children the sense of belonging they really need to develop new relationships. Feeling as if they belong right away is the most positive part of all the transition.

I admire the wives at IBA. It’s not easy to pull up stakes and move, and doing it right is even more difficult. But as I watch the moves come and go, I realize how graceful my son and daughter in law are making it and I couldn’t have more pride.

Experts: Men needed in young kids’ lives

Ryan Holland
The Enquirer

Comment: This is for Mr. Tom who we treasure.

Early childhood education is a woman’s world, but it would be nothing without a man to care.

This was the message Tuesday at Kellogg Community College’s Men Matter to Kids event, which drew about 250 students and professionals to the school to learn how to get more men involved in children’s early years.

Speakers diagnosed the lack of male involvement and provided tips on how to get involved, while attendees participated in sessions concentrating on things like brain research and community resources.

“We’re trying to get the word out there that male involvement, and parent involvement in general, is so vital to kids’ success and for them to be prepared for school,” Dawn Larsen, program manager of the Early Childhood Education program at KCC, said.

That men were not as prevalent in early childhood was even evident at the event itself, where a large majority of those attending were women.

Only about 10 of 300 students in Larsen’s KCC program are men, Larson said.

Low pay, social stigmas and fear of molestation accusations all have contributed to a lack of men in the classroom, especially in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten, said featured speaker Wes Garner, a professor at Tri-State University in Angola, Ind.

“Men teachers want to be caring just like the female teachers in the building, but too often they are looked upon as disciplinarians … or heavy haulers,” Garner said.

Garner recommended providing scholarships and allocating more pay to teacher salaries to spur more interest on the part of men in early childhood education.

But speakers said male involvement starts even before the classroom.

The Fatherhood/Male Involvement Program at the Community Action Agency of South Central Michigan seeks to provide support for low-income families in order to ensure fathers are an active part of their childrens’ lives.

By supplying a strong role model early, Fatherhood Program Coordinator Barry Smith said, the benefits would accrue later in life.

“This is our time to show ourselves, to pattern ourselves: This is the way you hold a door for a woman, real men are polite, real men stand up for themselves when it’s appropriate,” he said, speaking to one of the breakout groups.

For 19-year-old KCC student Emerald Diamante, whose only memory of his father was looking up at him as a toddler, the event was an important display of the strength of a male bond.

“This program itself I think is a pretty big step because not too many men are educated about what kinds of things they can do,” said Diamante, who plans to study physical therapy and work with children. “All your teachers are predominately women, and we’re just as important.”

Good morning for the first time in nearly a week. Miss Judy is back and rested and ready for some play. It was a good trip – fast – but fun, and now that it’s over, I think it was a good thing to do. I’m not one for much rest, and as I get older, I realize how important it is to get away and be refreshed for a while upon one’s return.

Traveling can be exhausting – wrong bed, wrong food, wrong set of circumstances. I thought a lot about simplicity and routine while I was away and how simplicity is really “a good,” as Anne would say. Terry and I are really simple travelers. Very few needs along the way. I once traveled a weekend with a credit card and a change of panties. Everyone else on the trip struggled with huge suitcases, hair appliances and what have you. I had a ziplock.

I did, however, want to pack all our food for the car trip, but my husband said he would rather have the experience of his once a year fast food. We stopped at McDonald’s three times and really enjoyed the fat. I got the fruit thing they tout as being healthy – 25 grams of sugar and the walnuts were adulterated with sugar! And they didn’t have tea – but that’s OK, we enjoyed it anyway. We got to stop at a Chic filet for the first time ever.

After visiting with my grandchildren and watching several mothers interact with kids and Paddies birthday party, the thought came to me that I need to start writing a column on the American Family. It would be a fun exchange with the problems of today and the comments of a previous generation. Applying old ideas to new challenges might be helpful and might be insightful to young people. I know every generation thinks the previous generation “doesn’t have a clue” but that’s what the previous generation thinks about this new class of mommies, so it might be really funny.

Not real sure what’s going on at school this week. Everyone was so nice to take my shifts these last few days, I can’t say how much I appreciate it.

Judy

Andrew’s mother sent this:

Very interesting info for those in California, or those who might encounter an earthquake (which is everyone). My name is Doug Copp. I am the Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of the American Rescue Team International (ARTI), the world’s most experienced rescue team.

The information in this article will save lives in an earthquake. I have crawled inside 875 collapsed buildings, worked with rescue teams from 60 countries, founded rescue teams in several countries, and I am a member of many rescue teams from many countries. I was the United Nations expert in Disaster Mitigation for two years… There would likely have been 100 percent survivability for people using my method of the “triangle of life.”

The first building I ever crawled inside of was a school in Mexico City during the 1985 earthquake. Every child was under their desk. Every child was crushed to the thickness of their bones. They could have survived by lying down next to their desks in the aisles. It was obscene, unnecessary and I wondered why the children were not in the aisles. I didn’t at the time know that the children were told to hide under something.

Simply stated, when buildings collapse, the weight of the ceilings falling upon the objects or furniture inside crushes these objects, leaving a space or void next to them. This space is what I call the “triangle of life” The larger the object, the stronger, the less it will compact. The less the object compacts, the larger the void, the greater the probability that the person who is using this void for safety will not be injured. The next time you watch collapsed buildings, on television, count the triangles” you see formed. They are everywhere. It is the most common shape, you will see, in a collapsed building. They are everywhere.

TEN TIPS FOR EARTHQUAKE SAFETY:

1) Most everyone who simply “ducks and covers” WHEN BUILDINGS COLLAPSE are crushed to death. People who get under objects, like desks or cars, are crushed.

2) Cats, dogs and babies often naturally curl up in the fetal position. You should too in an earthquake. It is a natural safety/survival instinct. You can survive in a smaller void. Get next to an object, next to a sofa, next to a large bulky object that will compress slightly but leave a void next to it.

3) Wooden buildings are the safest type of construction to be in during an earthquake. Wood is flexible and moves with the force of the earthquake. If the wooden building does collapse, large survival voids are created. Also, the wooden building has less concentrated, crushing weight. Brick buildings will break into individual bricks. Bricks will cause many injuries but less squashed bodies than concrete slabs.

4) If you are in bed during the night and an earthquake occurs, simply roll off the bed. A safe void will exist around the bed. Hotels can achieve a much greater survival rate in earthquakes, simply by posting a sign on the back of the door of every room telling occupants to lie down on the floor, next to the bottom of the bed during an earthquake.

5) If an earthquake happens and you cannot easily escape by getting out of the door or window, then lie down and curl up in the fetal position next to a sofa, or large chair.

6) Most everyone who gets under a doorway when buildings collapse is killed.
How? If you stand under a doorway and the doorjamb falls forward or backward you will be crushed by the ceiling above. If the door jam falls sideways you will be cut in half by the doorway. In either case, you will be killed!

7) Never go to the stairs. The stairs have a different “moment of requency”
(they swing separately from the main part of the building). The stairs and remainder of the building continuously bump into each other until structural failure of the stairs takes place. The people who get on stairs before they fail are chopped up by the stair treads- horribly mutilated. Even if the building doesn’t collapse, stay away from the stairs. The stairs are a likely part of the building to be damaged. Even if the stairs are not collapsed by the earthquake, they may collapse later when overloaded by fleeing people. They should always be checked for safety, even when the rest of the building is not damaged.

8) Get Near the Outer Walls Of Buildings Or Outside Of Them If Possible. It is much better to be near the outside of the building rather than the interior.
The farther inside you are from the outside perimeter of the building the greater the probability that your escape route will be blocked.

9) People inside of their vehicles are crushed when the road above falls in an earthquake and crushes their vehicles; which is exactly what happened with the slabs between the decks of the Nimitz Freeway. The victims of the San Francisco earthquake all stayed inside of their vehicles. They were all killed.

They could have easily survived by getting out and sitting or lying next to their vehicles. Everyone killed would have survived if they had been able to get out of their cars and sit or lie next to them. All the crushed cars had voids 3 feet high next to them, except for the cars that had columns fall directly across them.

10) I discovered, while crawling inside of collapsed newspaper offices and other offices with a lot of paper, that paper does not compact. Large voids are found surrounding stacks of paper.

Spread the word and save someone’s life.