NO LANGUAGE TO CALL MY OWN

Language is more than Language...

I should’ve known better. Both of my parents were raised in bi-lingual homes, their Yiddish-speaking Russian grandparents an important presence in their childhood homes, in their upbringing. They both studied Hebrew as well, lessons every afternoon, from an early age. But we were the lost generation, the first generation to lose that second language, raised strictly in English, second-generation Americans raised by parents who wanted to see us totally and completely assimilated. Looking around me as I was growing up, I saw, I heard only English. And took it for granted that that was the norm. One family, one language, fitting in.


Yet the more I have traveled, the more I realize that those of us raised with one language are the minority. When I moved to France, I looked around me and said “Wow! So many people who are perfectly bi-lingual! I feel so out of it!” Then we had two sons and moved to Italy with our now bi-lingual French-English home and that’s when it seemed to me that all of a sudden I was surrounded by tri-lingual families, English-French-Italian. And when we proudly added Italian to our list, I noticed just how many kids had a fourth language, Spanish, Swedish or German, as well. It seems that speaking only one language is not the norm, but rather the exception.

When we started out on this long and exciting journey that was raising multi-lingual, multi-cultural kids, we did our research and followed the simple rule, the rule that seemed to work: One language/one parent (for example: mom always speaks English, while Dad always speaks French) or one language/one place (for example: everyone always speaks English at home while French is spoken at school). Simple and it worked for us. Our sons could understand and eventually speak both languages, easily sliding in and out of one or the other as the situation called for and understanding that different people spoke different languages depending on where they lived. And when they were moved to Italy, they simply sponged up that third language with only a slight learning period and minor trouble. Perfect!


Yet, it couldn’t be quite that simple, could it? Little by little we realized that the boys, 2 years apart, handled the situation differently. Clem, the elder of the two, had already been well entrenched in and pretty well spoke both French and English when we moved to Italy while Simon, only a year old, may have understood but hadn’t begun speaking yet at all. When the boys were 5 and 3 and we decided to put them both in the Italian pre-school, Clem already understood a smattering of Italian and happily jumped into his new circle of friends waving his arms and repeating the same 5 sentences over and over again, just to make contact, until, little by little, he added to his repertoire. He also had almost 3 years of pre-school tucked under his tiny belt so felt completely at ease in his new surroundings. Simon, on the other hand, hadn’t mastered any one language completely yet, had never been to school and knew no Italian, so everything was thrown on his tiny shoulders at once. Needless to say, Simon uttered not one word for his entire first year of pre-school until the day he could speak Italian fluently. And then only to communicate. The strict minimum.

At home, on the other hand, he seemed to have mastered everything. His vocabulary in all 3 languages was wide and impressive, having adult multi-syllable words at his disposal and often correcting or translating for his older brother. While Clem, 2 years older, was a chatterbox and one of those perfectly normal kids who went through a few years of asking non-stop questions, all the Who? What? Why? and Hows? Simon never asked any questions of anyone. But then, why should he have? He seemed to have all the answers, following his older brother around and answering all of his questions, both the sensible and the nonsensical. He grew to love documentaries on tv, history, archeology and even politics, and could discuss these subjects with ease. He loved museums and traveling and discovering.

As time went on and their school years flew by and we eventually moved back to France, we saw a growing problem with Simon: trouble at school, bad marks when he knew his subject, grades all over the place, up and down, but never quite bad enough to have it suggested that he repeat a grade. Even his grades in English and Italian classes were lousy! And misery. Depression, Feeling small and insignificant and just plain miserable yet with a growing anger towards his teachers and a feeling somewhere of injustice. We took him from specialist to specialist, speech therapist to psychiatrist to psychologist to educator and we heard over and over again “Be patient. He’s a smart boy. He’ll find his footing and get over it.” And still things got worse. Inexplicable bad or mediocre grades, teachers’ reports describing a boy morose and silent or disruptive and insolent. A refusal to study, a shrug of the shoulders, a roll of the eyes and “What’s the point? They give me bad grades no matter how much I work and how well I know the subject!” And a boy not happy, hiding his emotions, rarely laughing and enjoying himself. So when things reached disaster point in high school, we hired private tutors, Math and Science, then History and French and Philosophy. And they loved him! They said he was personable, engaging and engaged, interesting and smart, took the initiative and asked lots of questions. Around the house he seemed to come out of himself, was happier, and talked more. His language even evolved from one word grunts to complete sentences! Well, we had always known he was smart, very smart, but why this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine? Why one person at home and another at school?


Until this summer. He finally finished school, succeeded in passing his Baccalaureat exams and, whew, 15 years of misery ended and a weight lifted from his shoulders. And we finally found professionals who understood there was a problem, who finally listened and discussed. And tested. And we were struck by the results and the interpretation of these results.

The psychologist who did the testing sat me down next to Simon and handed me the brown Kraft paper envelope that held, we hoped and prayed, the answer to all of his misery and all of our questions. “Your son,” she explained, “speaks 3 languages, but he has never chosen one over the other. He has no first language, no language he has chosen to call his own.” And she continued to explain: With a language comes a culture and an identity: When one embraces a language, accepts it as one’s primary language, one embraces the culture that goes with it. One accepts an identity through which all else filters. Along with a primary language comes all the baggage, the nuances of expression, tone of voice, responses and reactions. And all other languages are seen, translated and understood through that first language and through that culture. On the practical surface and in a school context, this meant that Simon was constantly swimming between one language and another not only to find the right word, the appropriate expression, but the tone, the meaning as well. We knew that he had trouble processing information and then getting it out, expressing himself, but simply never understood why. Information went in but then got all jumbled up as it passed from language to language, word to image and back to language again, from verbal to written. It became garbled and he just had never developed the tools to transfer information easily and clearly from one part of his brain to another. We now understood why. So he transferred his energy to form rather than content: spelling or sentence construction rather than substance. What information he had came out as if spit onto the page. To his teachers it was obvious that he did indeed know his subjects but he was constantly penalized, punished for not expressing himself “as he ought”. Vicious cycle: bad grades even if I study and I know my subject so why study?

On a higher level, this caused another problem, social, cultural, because here, in France, he never felt comfortable, at home. He had become the proverbial Man Without A Country. Somewhere early on he had rejected the notion of “being French” most likely because the culture, the language, the school system had been forced on him and forced when he wasn’t ready and then he had been punished over and over again for not being “French” enough. So his anger grew, his sense of injustice, his feelings of persecution. And he turned that anger onto school. At the same time, he so badly wanted to identify himself with his American side, America, that land of gold, of sunny vacations, cop shows, the Marx Brothers, peanut butter sandwiches and brownies, but didn’t know how and just wasn’t in the right place to do it. So even that he kept buried alive somewhere deep down inside, feeding his discontent. Which led to a total rejection and disdain for anyone demanding that he “be French”, namely his teachers and the school system he found himself in. Vicious cycle 2: rejection of the culture he was living in leading to his sense of rejection by the system itself (his teachers) which made him even angrier at the system he was in and further rejection.


Hilda wrote a very lovely article in these pages about being a third culture kid, about fitting in, children for whom home is everywhere, home is nowhere. Our children, the children growing up multi-cultural, multi-lingual, the children of expatriates or mixed marriages or those who simply move around the globe, have an uncanny ease sliding from one place, one society to another, an actor’s ability to change languages, change personas as easily as they change clothes, an adult’s understanding of how the world works and that people are different everywhere we go, different but the same, and all it simply takes is a change of vocabulary, way of holding oneself, of dressing, of eating. Yet language is more than language. Children do indeed sponge up language after language after language and it is a joy to behold, but as we have learned so painfully, it goes well beyond that simple “Does he understand? Can he speak the language? How wonderful that your children will grow up multi-lingual!” It is a delicate balance of place, time, age and change. It is giving your child an understanding of just exactly who he or she is, their place in the world. It is finding a school where they will be accepted and their differences made to feel truly an advantage not a disadvantage, a weight, something to punish. Teachers as well as parents need to understand that not all kids are the same, that they need to be able to express themselves as they can and be helped along the way with the rest.

And more than anything, these children need to feel a sense of security and an even stronger sense of home.

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This post was written by JAMIE

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Where are you from? - The, sometimes, unanswerable question...

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I’d like to talk about something a little personal, if I may, because I’m curious about what the rest of you who have experienced this in the past or are experiencing it now feel about it.

I’m sort of a third culture kid, although even that doesn’t really describe what I am. I didn’t go from one culture to another and then form a third culture out of that mix of experiences; I was born in one Iran, raised the first half of my life in France and spent the second half of my childhood in the US in California. I’ve often been described as being like an onion, my core is Iranian, my mid-layers are French, and my outer layers are American, though the skin is Iranian based on my looks, and I've described myself as a cultural mutt when asked "what I was."
I married a Pakistani who was born in Lahore but who, in terms of education, was raised in the United Kingdom, and in terms of vacation time was mostly in Saudi Arabia or sometimes back in Pakistan. He and I have funny arguments about the meaning of various words in American English as opposed to British English. I have two step-children, one who is half Pakistani-one quarter Kuwaiti-one quarter Swedish, and the other who is half Pakistani-half American. My ten month-old daughter, who is ethnically half Iranian-half Pakistani, was born in London, entitling her to a British passport to go with her various other passports and residency permits.

Where am I going with this? Well, I’ve always had an easy and a hard time fitting in. Easy because there were few ways in which to be entrenched, my parents not being big sticklers for tradition, hard because I could always see what the other side of the argument might be, or the way that those “foreign” people might interpret the situation. I think of everywhere as home and nowhere as home if that makes sense. Wherever I am, if I am there for a while and haven’t traveled, I start to feel antsy and homesick for another home. It’s disconcerting sometimes because I can be in a room of people who have very strong opinions about their country or their part of the world and it feels like this brings them a sense of security in something permanent that I have never felt.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t argued for my various countries of origin, as I actually did most of my life though I didn’t begin to realize it until I was in my late teens.
My French childhood friends would sometimes refer to me as “l’Iranienne” (the Iranian); to my American schoolmates I was a French “frog” first but became Middle Eastern when the Middle East would come up in the news which then often translated to my representing terrorism somehow; to my French friends I became “l’Américaine” who could understand the way Americans thought and behaved and probably was betraying French culture and tradition by assimilating somehow; on the round went until eventually there were so many arrows pointing from one place to the other on so many different subjects that I stopped trying to defend one culture to another as a function of where I was geographically. If people didn’t want to understand, that was their own problem, not mine, but the feeling of not belonging was only delineated more sharply by the ever-growing impossibility of taking one side and sticking to it.

So the question is, how do I raise my daughter to feel a sense of home that is, pardon the pun, foreign to me. The saying is that “home is where the heart is,” but that’s a bit trite and nebulous, isn’t it? I can certainly agree with the idea that my home is where my family is, but even though family is immutable, one still goes through life in one’s own head and is, in a way, alone. It’s likely that we will be traveling a fair amount as she grows up, partly because that is our wish and partly because our personal and professional lives require travel. Is the answer simply to make sure she has a thick skin?

You’re probably wondering how my stepchildren have fared so far, and my answer would be quite well, but I don’t know what it was, or perhaps wasn’t, that has resulted in their faring so well while being pulled in so many different directions. I haven’t had a long discussion with either one of them about this because I don’t think I was fully cognizant of the source of my discomfort until I was in college, so I don’t think it fair to bring this open-ended question into their lives, until they start to feel it for themselves, while hoping that perhaps it will never enter their consciousness.

I know that many of you who read the Daily Tiffin are expatriates in your own right, some having children and raising them in completely foreign cultures from your own, but wonder which of you were brought up in a couple or more different places, as I was, and feel like they have no country but, also, every country.
And, if you have children, are you finding that their experience of several cultures is similar to yours or different, or that they are affected in ways you couldn’t have imagined because their experience was not, in the end, what you thought it would be based on your own understanding of the nomadic life? Why don't you step into my office...

This post was written by Hilda

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OLD IS AS OLD DOES and Can we really be cool parents at 50?

Between school and careers, traveling and, quite possibly, selfishness, we are marrying older and having our children later than our parents and grandparents had them. This means that when our children enter their teen years we are pushing fifty or more. As our children are coming to terms with puberty and those turbulent adolescent years which bring the coming of adulthood, we are dealing with our own mid-life crisis, both of us passing over the rocky road of a life-changing period, coming to terms with a process that neither of us are really prepared for. And because of the bad timing, we end up bumping heads a little too often. Our kids are trying to look older, act older, appear older while we, yes, are trying to turn back the clocks. We are trying to wrap our heads around the fact that we have aged even if we don’t feel it at all, they want to grow up all the while clinging onto the safety of childhood. We color our hair and slip on something tight and try to deal with the withering look or, worse maybe, the eyes rolled heavenward in disbelief of our teen; the teen avoids the scrutinizing glare, the judgmental scolding of the parent when he or she appears in the hallway dressed in a similar uniform. The line between teen and parent of teen gets finer every year.


Remember when moms and dads dressed like moms and dads? Remember the good old days of TV families, like The Cleavers or Rob and Laura Petrie? You know, dads wore suits to work then changed into beige cardigan sweaters and slacks before the 6 o’clock news came on and moms wore shirtdresses or skirts and blouses, sweater knotted casually around the shoulders, looking so cool and collected while dashing between clubs and grocery store? Moms and dads fell into recognizable categories and there was comfort in knowing that when we got home from school we would always find the same thing every day. And moms and dads never crossed the line, stepped over into our teen territory either in their wardrobe, their activities or their language. We wore the bell-bottomed jeans, they wore the polo shirts and banlon, we biked with our friends, played board games, surfed and danced, they played bingo and bridge or Mah Jong, had cocktail parties and went on cruises. We listened to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, they played Herb Alpert or Burt Bacharach LPs. Now the line is oh-so fuzzy and our roles are tossed topsy-turvy up in the air like balloons, blown this way and that, changing day to day.


I turned fifty this week. No matter how I saw it coming, it still surprised. The years pass and somehow I feel younger now than I have for a long time. But how to be a good parent when I feel so young, when I loathe playing the part of “a woman of a certain age”, the traditional mom? Changing times call for changing roles, yet I think that the younger generation is actually more uncomfortable with the setup than we are. We twitter and Facebook, we blog and we text. We chat with our girlfriends on Skype, giggling and gossiping like schoolgirls, laughing about hot musicians and hotter rugbymen, we hold hands with and kiss our husbands in public and while watching tv, we dress in the latest fashions, fashions quite possibly meant for younger women. And even while our sons’ friends say “Wow, your parents are so cool!” our sons wail “Why can’t you be normal like other parents?” Our tiny pleasures incite embarrassed glances, their friends only invited over when we are out. They shake their heads in dismay when they see us hunched over the computer, typing furiously, giggling hysterically as we tweet or update our status. And as I slip on my Doc Marten boots over my favorite fishnet stockings, hands are slapped against foreheads, as husband chases me around the house whooping like a crazy man, dog hot on his heels, as we fall in a heap onto the sofa and start making jokes about the latest celebrity gossip, they get up and silently slide out of the room.

Can we be the cool parent at our age or are we simply an embarrassment? Should we get upset each time they say that we just don’t get it, that we grew up in The Dark Ages and therefore there is no way we understand anything that they are going through, that we can’t possibly know how to correctly use any of the internet social sites? Do they resent our advice, our advice lost somewhere between 1960’s straight-laced parental thinking and cool 20th century ideas? Well, yes. But what’s new? I actually think that our teens are just going through the same old teen rebellion, that ages-old parental disdain not unlike what we went through at their age and secretly they are pleased that their friends think we are cool, are pleasantly surprised that we have a popular blog, are proud when their friends gobble down crazy mom’s cakes and cookies and beg for more. They laugh at our jokes (no matter how hard they try to suppress the grin), enjoy going on vacation with us and think it’s funny when their friends flirt with us (yes it has happened!).

So stay cool, keep on truckin’ (no, wait, that’s wrong…), allow yourself the same freedom of expression that they assume for themselves, laugh at yourself (and at them) long and hard and enjoy that youth for as long as you can hold onto it. One day, they, too, will understand and be glad that we taught them how to be content with what we have, who we are, what they are and what they can be. As I wrote in my birthday blog post: Time is fleeting, life is ephemeral, youth is a game. Enjoy it while you can. Everything else will fall into place.

And I’d love to share an incredibly delicious, luscious, lemon treat that we all ate with gusto on this most important of birthdays.


LUSCIOUS LEMON SOUFFLE PUDDINGS

Makes 6 individual soufflé puddings.

1 cup (200 g) sugar, divided
3 Tbs (45 g) unsalted butter softened to room temperature
3 large eggs, separated
1 tsp vanilla
1 Tbs lemon zest
1/3 cup (50 g) flour
¼ tsp salt
1/3 cup (80 ml) freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 cup whole milk (I used half low fat milk + half light cream)
1/8 tsp cream of tartar (if you don’t have cream of tartar replace with a few grains of salt and a drop or 2 of lemon juice)

Preheat the oven to 325°F (170°C). Butter 6 individual ramekins or pyrex bowls.

Remove and set aside 2 Tbs of the sugar. Separate the eggs: place the yolks in a large mixing bowl and the whites place in a separate bowl preferably plastic or metal.

Cream the butter with the rest of the sugar (1 cup less the 2 Tbs) until blended and fluffy. Beat in the yolks, one at a time, beating after each addition until blended. Beat in the vanilla and the lemon zest. Add the flour and the salt and beat just until combined. With the mixer on low, beat in the milk and the lemon juice. It will be very liquid.

In the separate bowl with very clean beaters, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until foamy and then until soft peaks form. Continue beating the whites as you gradually add the 2 tablespoons sugar. Beat until stiff peaks form.

Fold the whites into the yolk/lemon batter just until incorporated and you have no more chunks of whites.

Using a ladle, fill the 6 ramekins with the batter almost to the top. Place the filled ramekins in a large baking pan (placing a piece of newspaper on the bottom of the pan keeps the water of the water bath from boiling) and very carefully (so as not to get any water in the lemon batter) fill the pan with hot water, so that the water is halfway up the ramekins. If you like, place the baking pan in the oven and then pour in the water; this will avoid you having to lift and move the baking pan after it is filled and risk splashing the water into the batter.

Bake for 40 – 45 minutes. The tops will be puffed up, maybe ½ to 1 inch (1 – 2 cm) above the rim of the ramekins, and a deep golden brown.

Remove the baking pan from the oven then carefully remove the ramekins from the water bath onto a kitchen towel. Allow to cool slightly before serving. Like a soufflé, the tops will sink a bit when cooling.


Serve hot or warm – they can be eaten later but are best when fresh from the oven or just slightly cooled – with a sprinkling of powdered sugar or a dollop of whipped cream.


These mini soufflé puddings are a cross between a soufflé, a mousse and a pudding: they will have a top layer of puffed, light as air soufflé and the bottom layer will be creamy, almost like a pudding. They are tart and lemony like the best of lemon pies but warm, light and soothing and oh-so elegant.

The soufflé-like top.

The pudding bottom.

They are also delicious after a day or two in the refrigerator, like a fabulous, rich lemon mousse.

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This post was written by JAMIE

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Can Healthy Meals Be Kid Friendly Too?

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I am Aparna, I write a vegetarian blog at My Diverse Kitchen and am excited to join the team at The Daily Tiffin. When Meeta invited me here, she suggested I could write posts related to "healthy kid-friendly meals".
While I am not an expert in this area, I have a 13 year old daughter who has a very strong opinion on most things, including food. Trying to ensure that she eats food which I deem healthy and she likes is not a very easy thing to do.

I am not an authority on child nutrition even though I did study biochemistry, nutrition and dietetics in university a long time ago. I have, over time, discovered (like many others) that no degree in anything remotely connected with health, diet and nutrition can prepare you for the task of getting your child or children to eat what you think is best for them. It is always about what they want to eat, which mostly is what you would prefer they didn't!

Funnily enough, I never had much problem with getting my daughter to eat when she was younger. She wasn't a very fussy eater though she could take hours to finish a meal. At that point she used to find the rest of the world more interesting than food, and often had to be reminded that she needed to finish what was on her plate!

At the age of 8 or so, whenever we went grocery shopping, Akshaya would check all the product labels to ensure that they were vegetarian, contained no trans-fat, preservatives or colour! Whenever we ate out, she would refuse aerated drinks insisting that she only drank water!!
In fact, I started baking a lot more at home because she didn't like the "funny" taste of store bought cookies/ biscuits and cakes.

Sure, she had her own likes and dislikes where food was concerned and there would be occasions when we would argue over her not eating something. A large part of the time reasoning things with her or giving in to her demands occasionally kept the balance going.

Then around the time she turned 10 something happened. Apparently, teenage sets in these days a lot earlier than it did in our times! And our daughter's food tastes and preferences underwent a dramatic change! She discovered junk food with a vengeance!
Pepsi or Sprite was so much "cooler" than water, traditional food just didn't have the "style" that a McPuff, a McVeggie or a McAloo Tikki from McDonalds did and how could a dosa (Indian savoury crepes) ever stand up to "ze pizza"?

One of my "healthy" vegetable burgers!

That's when the question "Can Kid Friendly Meals Be Healthy?" really became relevant for me. I am happy to have discovered that that the answer is definitely a "Yes!" Well, most of the time anyway.

We found ways to ensure that most of what our daughter eats is on the healthier side. This is not to say that she and I do not argue over what she eats. In fact, one of her pet peeves is her inability to understand why I have to cook and insist on her eating "healthy and boring" food! Actually, she does understand this but I think that she doesn't want to accept it, most of the time.

We have now arrived at a sort of compromise where she now accepts my need to ensure she eats healthy food while we accept her need to occasionally fulfill her "unhealthy" food cravings.



This post was written by Aparna


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Modern Technology for Modern Kids

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What does it and will it mean to be technologically savvy if you're a child of the 21st century?

I've been thinking about this a lot ever since my little girl was born almost 10 months ago now. Last week there was an article in the New York Times about the difference in childrens' experience of technology as a function of the pocket of time in which they were born, with only a few years making the difference between children who think of a computer as something with a keyboard, and toddlers who think that if they touch the computer's screen something will happen as it does with their parents' iPhones and Blackberrys.

This was driven home by the fact that I have two stepchildren, a sixteen year-old and a ten year-old, and now an almost one year-old child as well, each of whose experience will have been vastly different by the time they are adults. In fact, I've been thinking about this for much longer than that because I keep thinking about conversations I used to have with my grandfather about the technological leaps he'd seen in his lifetime, which I'm sure is probably a conversation you've had with your parents and grandparents as well.
My grandfather was born on the shores of the Caspian Sea in 1916. When he was three years old, he was sent off with his nanny in a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of the night to Teheran, the family fleeing in front of the White Army, itself chased by the Red Army. In his lifetime, he saw cars go from a top speed of 40mph to over 250mph, radios were replaced by televisions, movies acquired sound and went from black and white to color, planes became the de facto mean of traveling long distances, the sound barrier was broken, the computer, video games and the internet were invented, the phone became mobile, man went to the moon, nuclear war became a real possibility, etc.... In conversations with me, he would often marvel at the things he'd seen come to pass, and I would try to understand what it was like not to have a television. At the time, it seemed absurd, to witness so much change, but the truth is that we are still witnessing that change, only we witness it at a micro level compared to the two generations before ours (I'm 34).

In my, and probably many of your lifetimes, the computer became personal and then became hand-held with the PDA and now the smartphones, video games went from the Atari (remember that?) to game consoles in 2 and 3D, the internet (and the reason you may be reading this right now) became a publicly used medium (and no, Al Gore did not invent it), films went digital and now with Avatar it looks like there will be many more movies in 3D, television went from the old cathode ray tube boxes to plasmas and HD, and even the phone, remember how the phone used to have rotary dials? Now we carry them around in our jackets and purses, listen to music on them, shoot pictures and video with them, and even give them verbal commands to dial a number. Crazy talk.

The difference between all of my kids when it comes to their understanding of technology and its possibilities will range from the sixteen year-old and nine year-old knowing that one types on a computer's keyboard, while my little one will probably not have to resort to such measures, when she can finally use one, and is most likely receiving the right kind of training by playing with the touch screen on my iPhone. It will mean that while the eldest has very restricted access to Facebook and other social media outlets, the youngest will probably communicate on the internet in ways I haven't begun to fathom yet, while the nine year-old will likely have a grasp of social interaction that is between her older brother's and her little sister's.
The sixteen year-old communicates largely by text messages, while conceivably my nine year-old and my little one are getting more accustomed to video-chatting, which may be a good thing in the sense that they are getting used to actually seeing people in order to communicate with them. Is this where this is leading us? Ultimately, the loop coming back around to being able to see someone's face when you are talking to them, albeit with the difference that physical proximity will no longer be a requirement. And knowing that this is one of the many possibilities coming up, is there a way to monitor and control your childrens' access or exposure to technologies as they become ever more ubiquitous and mobile?

I know that, ultimately, I've already been relegated to the stone age as far as the period in which I grew up, I mean, libraries to do research... who goes to those anymore? So the challenge will be how to keep up with my kids without seeming like the technology has gotten beyond my capability to relate to it and its possibilities. I am curious to know what those of you with children think about this, anyone want to share?



This post was written by Hilda


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Baby Proofing...or how to Protect your House from your Baby

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Conventional wisdom has it that you are protecting your baby from your house when you baby proof it. Well, really you're protecting them from you and your bad habits... you know what I'm talking about: leaving change and small things everywhere when you clean your bags and pockets, the cables that, even when painstakingly separated, manage to get back into an impossibly tangled mess a day later, etc... as soon as you own up to that, the whole process of proofing will become more straightforward.
Once a baby is crawling or walking, making your home safe for baby is almost a daily chore. Here are some important things to watch for:

• As soon as your child can sit up or be on all fours and therefore reach up and touch them or pull them down, remove mobiles or hanging items from his/her crib.

• Keep any items that will fit into the palm of your hand if you close it, such as coins, small toys or pieces of toys, buttons, balloons, etc... off any surface that is at or below your waist level since a child who can sit up and crawl could possibly stand up and pull those items off a low table.
  

• Beware of curtain or blind cords that hang, shorten them or position them on a hook high up on the wall so they are well out of reach of the child. 

• If you use doorstops (for example we have to have them everywhere here as our doors are fire-safety doors), buy the all-plastic all-in-one large doorstops or doorstops that are much bigger (e.g. we have a small bean bag door stop that is a bit larger than the size of our child's head) and absolutely remove plastic ends from non-plastic doorstops as those are a serious hazard and several infants choke on them each year.

• Put away any chemical or hazardous substances preferably in high-reach cabinets with locks or put child-proof locks and other babyguards on any lower cabinets which might contain these items. Remember that substances hazardous to a baby include alcohol or medication of any kind.
  

• Pad the edges of any item of furniture that has square or fine (and therefore sharp) edges. You would also be well-served to put any glass furniture (e.g. glass coffee table) in storage for a few years, or simply get rid of it for a more child-friendly material. We don't have glass furniture because, while I love glass tables, my husband fell on one when he was two, thankfully not injuring himself, but it was a close call and he now harbors a mild fear of glass furniture as a result. Anyway, we have a baby so case closed.

• Cover all electrical outlet with child-proof covers. The more commonly found plastic plugs are easily pried out, particularly if you have an extremely persistent child (guilty as charged). 
  

• If you must have houseplants, place them out of the baby's reach and become very familiar with every one of your plants' names and potential effects if ingested. It's the 21st century people, if you're reading this you can google your plants; it takes a couple of minutes and could save you so much grief.

• If you use a crib bumper, remove it when your baby can get on all fours as he might use it to climb over the side of the crib. Seems unlikely, but you don't want to find out the hard way.

• Secure heavy stand-alone furniture such as shelves and commodes to the walls so your child cannot topple them if he/she tries to climb up on them. By the same token, try to hide or securely cover all appliance cords (IKEA has cord tubing for this specific purpose) so that your child cannot either pull table-top appliances off surfaces or items such as audio/stereo equipment off their perches - try to position those things far back and high away from your child's reach to begin with. If, by some miracle, you still have a VHS player or more likely, a CD player, find a guard to put in front of their "openings"; most of us are old enough to remember at least one baby "feeding" the VCR...

• On gates and guards: If you have any heating units or a fireplace, position gates or guards to prevent the baby from crawling too close to them, for obvious reasons.
• If you have any staircases that are more than two stairs, install a hardware-mounted gate, meaning a gate that fastens directly on the wall and uses a latch to open and shut, rather than a pressure-mounted gate that works through a mechanism of two sliding panels designed to reach the opening dimension and lock by pressure. Pressure-mounted gates are fine between two rooms on the same level but are not recommended at the tops of stairs.
  

Of course, these are not all the things you could possibly think of, but it's a good list to start with. If there are any other obvious things missing, please feel free to add them

With the holidays upon us, take care that your safety checks include such things as menorahs (brass and candles) or christmas trees (pine needles, ornaments - i.e. small breakable objects, tree lights, etc...).

Most importantly, if you feel overwhelmed at the idea of doing all of this, remember that you can do it progressively while your baby is still stationary and that just a bit of prevention can avoid emergency room visits later.

Happy proofing and Happy Holidays!

This post was written by Hilda


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Foods You Thought You Knew

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So I think I’m probably going to be known as the baby-lady around here, but as many of you know, it does take over your life doesn’t it... but in a very good way.
Today we are going to talk about carrots. That’s right, you heard--err, read me correctly, carrots. Why are we going to talk about carrots? Because I use them a lot in my baby’s food and because they’re quite interesting in more ways than you’d think.

I guess there could have been many other vegetables I could have written about for this post but I picked carrots because -WARNING: I’m about to admit something I probably shouldn’t here so get ready- I only just discovered- NO not carrots silly, of course I’ve known carrots forever, who hasn’t- rainbow carrots. I’ve only just discovered rainbow carrots. I didn’t actually know there were other colors of carrots than orange, (did you?) so imagine my surprise when my husband brought home these beautiful carrots in shades of purple and greenish-yellow and told me there even were red carrots out there somewhere.
Upon doing a little bit of research I discovered that carrots, in fact, were not orange to begin with. That seems odd doesn’t it? It seems like no actually they always were orange and then some guy with too much time and a lot of carrot seeds laying around started making hybrids and coming up with cool funkedelic colors, but it just seems that way, that’s not really what happened.
In reality, it’s not exactly clear what the chronology of the modern carrot is other than, from evidence found in archaeological digs, some form of carrot, as in plants from the carrot family, existed back in the Eocene period (55 to 34 million years ago). After that, there is no actual written record of their use either for food or medicinal purposes until the Greeks and Romans, although the domesticated version of carrots (oh yes, I’ll tell you about that in a minute) are believed to date back to approximately 5000 B.C. in Afghanistan.
So, to the issue of wild vs. domesticated carrots. When I first read that there were wild carrots and that the carrots we take for granted as simply being carrots are the hybridized and domesticated descendants of "wild" ones, I imagined a Mr. Potato Head version of a carrot wearing a loincloth and carrying a sharpened stalk of celery for a spear. It turns out that you probably know wild carrots by another name; they are commonly known as Queen Anne's Lace and are mostly considered to be a weed, albeit a pretty one; the root is tough, pale (most often white), bitter and quite small. Presumably, over thousands of years and many combinations, the modern, domesticated carrot evolved partially from the wild carrot, but attempts to create domesticated edible carrots -such as we know them- purely from wild carrots have failed, so the belief that domesticated carrots come entirely from wild ones is inaccurate.
The first domesticated carrots that I mentioned above were purple and sometimes yellow. Through time and cross-cultivation, other colors appeared, first red, then white, then orange which became the most common form of carrot particularly in the West. They were brought to Europe by the Arabs in the 10th century, at which time the orange version did not yet exist, and it is thought that Western Europeans eventually developed the common orange-colored carrot some time around the 16th century.

Now to the nutritive properties of carrots, which is really why you might still be reading this post:
Carrots are phenomenally nutritious. They contain the most beta-carotene (unsurprisingly and that which gives carrots their orange color) of any fruit or vegetable which is converted to vitamin A by the body. They also are a source of vitamins B6 and C, and a pectin fibre known as calcium pectate which may have the ability to lower cholesterol. Carrots are loaded with potassium, thiamin, folic acid, and magnesium and when cooked also contain copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus and sulphur. The lesson here being that an apple a day is all well and good, but maybe you should consider eating some more of those carrots you have laying around. It's as easy as washing and peeling one. If you happen to get a bunch of carrots with their greens, those contain vitamin K which is not present in carrots themselves, so you might want to use those as well. It's all good.

I used to hate cooked carrots when I was little, but realized in retrospect that that was only because my mother didn't cook them and the only cooked ones I had were often boiled to death and lacking any flavor. I've always loved them raw however, and now like them cooked as well. I've been making all of the carrots pictured above for my little noodle and she loves them, no matter the color or the manner in which they are cooked. It is thanks to her that I've discovered all of these things about carrots, and that I continue to discover things every day about foods I eat.
Have you learned anything about foods you thought you knew from your children?



This post was written by Hilda


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Roasted Potatoes and my trip to Aleppo

note: I want to apologize to everyone for being late with this post. I am going out of town in a few days and have been running around like a crazy person trying to get everything in order before my trip.

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A couple weeks ago, I finally bought my plane ticket to go to Aleppo. My grandmother is there now, visiting her sister, and I will get to join them in just a few days. Middle Eastern food, like most of the food from around the Mediterranean, is extremely fresh and healthy. I promise to be back with lots of pictures and recipes that I will share on the Daily Tiffin.

In the mean time, I've been strategically trying to use up all my produce and perishables for the past couple of weeks. Today I chose to write about roasted potatoes because they're a healthy alternative to fried potatoes, but are still popular with the kids. They're great in lunch boxes or afternoon snacks, and easy enough to make in large batches. There are a few steps, however, to ensuring a perfect roast with an extra crispy exterior and ultra creamy inside.



Preparation is simple. It makes a big difference to scout out good potatoes for this dish: small, firm and tight skin. I prefer reds simply because they have a higher sugar content, so they tend to caramelize better than other potatoes in the oven.



Since potatoes grow underground, you'll want to give them a quick rinse before you roast them. Make sure to pat them dry so that the outsides crisp up.



It's also important not to crowd the potatoes in a pan, otherwise they will still steam, regardless of how well you've patted them dry.



Although I usually use Spanish paprika, or pimentón, it's a lot easier to find the Hungarian variety at my local grocery store. My inspiration for using paprika in my roasted potatoes came from patatas bravas -- a classic tapas made from fried tomatoes covered in a spicy pimentón-base sauce. If you can't find Spanish paprika near where you live, Amazon is where I usually buy from.



Once they come out of the oven, they can be eaten hot or at room temperature. Enjoy!

Click here for the recipe.

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This post was written by Antonio Tahhan

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Nursing: A Journey to a Destination

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Any men out there who start to read this, gag and want to skip this article, if there is a woman in your life who might get pregnant and deliver a child she intends to nurse, I'd try to at least get halfway through it. I promise I won't get graphic.

Disclaimer: This post is meant in no way to make a statement about the merits of nursing over formula or vice-versa. I don't see anything wrong with feeding your baby formula, I was a formula-fed baby and I turned out ok (I think anyway).

The last time we saw our pediatrician at the 6-month appointment, he took one look at my baby and said "she looks perfect, she could be an advertisement for breastfeeding." I think it would be hard to describe the sense of relief I felt when he said that. I didn't originally think that I would be writing about breastfeeding/nursing here, but when I told K.'s Godmother what the doctor had said, she immediately insisted I had to write about it for my next DT post, if only to let other soon-to-be mothers know that as hard as it may be in the beginning, it can end up being perfectly fine. You see, it was very difficult for a while. 

In England, midwives are the bulk of the maternity unit staff, rather than nurses, and because they are the main baby birthers in the public system (a doctor is called in to supervise if there is an issue of some sort but otherwise midwives often deliver babies themselves), many also consider themselves to be the authority on everything pregnancy and baby-related; this results in, over a post-birth period of 48hrs, receiving the advice of at least four different midwives on the proper nursing positions, times, frequency, etc... and they all have different ideas about every part of the process, all in contradiction with each other. The day I left the hospital, I had a breakdown on the phone with my sister because my baby seemed a bit jaundiced and had needed hardly any diaper changes that day, so she couldn't possibly be well; surely I was doing something wrong. The midwives weighed her, checked her bilirubin level (for jaundice), reassured me that she was fine, and off we went with a stash of painkillers for me.
The timeline from then on went basically like this:

Day 4 - Morning: Community midwife comes to the house as part of the National Health Service. First helpful with tips to improve latching position and keep baby awake during a feed, but also thinks baby looks very jaundiced and even though the hospital pediatrician has declared her to be fine, I become extremely anxious.
Day 4 - Afternoon: Our pediatrician checks baby over thoroughly and plots out her bilirubin level on a special hospital jaundice chart so we can see that she's fine. He declares her to be in very good health. Says to put her in sunlight for the jaundice.

I'd been told that it would take 6 weeks to establish the nursing completely, but I'd also been told that I seemed to be a natural at it and that I had the latching down properly somehow from the beginning, the main issue was that I had this baby who just couldn't last more than a few minutes into a feed without falling asleep and I was having a great deal of difficulty keeping her awake long enough to eat.

Day 6: Baby has slept entirely way too long at night and I haven't been able to feed her at regular intervals. Am worried about my milk coming in and the supply being sufficient with a baby that doesn't create a demand (it's a demand-supply system). Midwife visits and weighs her, declares she is not putting on enough weight. We should supplement feeds with formula.
Day 8: I've developed an infection and must urgently return to the hospital, nursing baby in tow.
Day 9: I have an operation under general anesthesia which makes me drowsy and sick to my stomach. I am exhausted and have a hard time waking regularly to feed a baby I can't wake to eat and who won't stay awake through a 45mn feed. Am convinced my supply is not going to get established and my fatigue only augurs bad things when I'll get home. Am hysterical on the phone to my sister about the baby not putting on enough weight and my supply dwindling. Am sent home with more painkillers and antibiotics.
Day 11: Midwife visit, I am advised to really supplement more with formula as she is not gaining enough weight, and by then am a complete mess. Tired, in pain, with an adorable baby who seems fine and alert when awake but who is asleep when the midwife visits and isn't gaining weight quickly enough. Try to pump to increase my low supply.  I supplement grudgingly, feeling excessive guilt even though I know very well that it would be fine if I ended up not nursing and giving her formula, after all I was a formula-fed baby. No matter how much coaxing we do or what we try, she takes almost no supplemental formula.

Day 16: Midwife visits, the baby is an ounce shy of her birth weight and a few days away from being declared as"failure to thrive". Am about ready for the loony bin. Make my husband buy a medical scale most often used for weighing babies so I can weigh her every or every other day.
Day 17: The health visitor, a person who basically checks in on the family from a child's birth until he/she is 5, comes by and I see my first glimpse of hope. She says that though she has no empirical evidence to support her thoughts, her experience is that in cases such as mine, as soon as the new mother stops taking the painkillers, the milk supply increases dramatically and the baby gains weight very well. I'd taken my last pill that morning and wait to see what might happen over the next couple of days.
Day 19: Even though I can't measure it, I know my supply has increased and baby is starting to wake up to the world, clearly the painkillers were not helping in this whole debacle.

Over the next few weeks, I had to sort through a number of other hiccups in the process (biting, soreness until I thought I couldn't possibly get through one more feed) until by about 6-8 weeks in, just as predicted, and in spite of everyone saying it would take me less time because I seemed to be doing well the first couple of days in the hospital (even though I wasn't), I'd figured out 95% of the problems and was nursing her fairly comfortably. I'm still nursing her now as she discovers solid foods.
I often thought about just giving up, especially since we'd found a brand of formula that she actually seemed to like when we first had to supplement her, the point being that it was only perseverance and the will to nurse her that got me through. During those first three weeks in particular, and still fairly often until she was about 2 months old, I never thought I'd make it this long or that the pediatrician would ever say that she looked wonderful and could be an advertisement for nursing.
I know this has been a long post, but I wanted to share that, just in case one would-be mom reads it and it makes a difference. Experiences like nursing that are very personal can make one feel very guilty or inadequate when they don't go well and it becomes hard to share, so if this helps even one woman out there, it's worth putting the rest of you to sleep.


This post was written by Hilda



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Immunization - Truth and Rumor

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My families are a bunch of trivia heads, both the one I was born into and the one I am now a parent in. I think asking us trivia questions incessantly and providing interesting trivia continuously was a way for my father to instill deep curiosity about everything in us.

On occasion, my father will ask me the same question, perhaps forgetting that he has asked me it before: What would you name as the three most important discoveries for mankind? My answer has always consisted of the same first two things: 1) Fire and 2) The Printing Press. The third one is not always the same depending on the occasion, and while he agrees with me about the first two, my father is always unerring in the third one: 3) The generalization of the vaccination process by Louis Pasteur.

When I was little, I don't think there was even a shadow of a doubt that I was going to be vaccinated. In fact, I can't recall there being any issues with vaccination during my lifetime except within the last five to ten years. In that time, the rise in instances of autism in young children has led factions of people to believe that vaccines and vaccinations in general are a direct cause of the condition.
So, to vaccinate or not to vaccinate? That is the question.
As the mother of a nearly six month-old baby, I'm going to be honest and begin this discussion by saying that my little girl has had her prescribed shots;  at two months, three months, four months and has just had a BCG shot which is recommended before the age of one in Europe. The vaccines that she has received so far are meant to protect her from Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Polio, and Pneumococcal(lung) and Meningococcal(brain) strains of influenza. The BCG is a vaccine against Tuberculosis. Further shots when she'll be thirteen months old should protect her from Measles, Mumps and Rubella. So it's obvious which side of this equation I fall under, but I'll break it down and see if it makes sense to you too.

Even before the mercury rumor, which persists to this day, the first rumor blaming vaccines was started by a group of researchers who published a study in the late 90s theorizing that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine (MMR) caused autism in a study they did of 26 children (12 with autism and 14 without). Yep, you read that right, 26 children, there's no zero missing at the end of that number.  The researcher who headed the study was very vocal about publicizing the results though the study did not prove anything. However, the said same researcher was later found to have hidden a conflict of interest involving funding from potential plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer. Ten of the thirteen researchers who had published the original study later retracted their findings. Nevertheless, the rumor that vaccines caused autism was cemented into the psyche, and as the MMR debate was being fought, a new target was found in mercury.
The most persistent rumor in the anti-vaccination campaign has been that mercury found in a chemical known as thimerosal, which was used as a preservative in some vaccines, is the cause of higher rates of autism. However, upon doing extensive reviews of such a possibility, it was found that the quantity of mercury in thimerosal, measured in nano grams per milliliter in children after vaccination, is well below the acceptable level as defined by EPA standards. I trusted the reports I read because I was trained as an environmental engineer in college so I know about measurements like nano grams per milliliter (ηg/ml) up the wazoo as I had to study air, water, and soil pollution (did you know that if you work in the United States, the air in your workplace has to be recycled 5.4 times per hour? Yes, I'm so scarred I remember OSHA standards by heart twelve years after the fact). To be specific, the amount of thimerosal measured in children after vaccination was less than half of the acceptable amount.  Unfortunately, in this day and age of electronic communication, coming on the heels of the claims about MMR, the fuse had already been lit and spread in part by the New York Times and Rolling Stone and the thimerosal rumor grew to enormous proportions.

In my mind there are several things that are more likely the cause of autism, than just something as unlikely as a simple vaccine or set of vaccines. I apologize in advance to anyone with an autistic child who may read this but I do not pretend to be an expert, I am simply going forward with what some research, experience, and logic are telling me. Autism does not describe one particular condition, rather, it is a spectrum of disorders. This is why a condition such as asperger would be said to fall within the autism spectrum of disorders. My mother has asperger, some of the symptoms being stronger than others in her particular case. My paternal uncle, who is a mathematician, also falls within the general spectrum; though which one of the exact disorders he would qualify as having I wouldn't know. What I do know, from these two people close to me and many others mostly unrelated to me, is that many of the disorders which fall under the autism spectrum umbrella have only recently been identified and categorized as such, and that the diagnosis of many of these disorders is not always evident unless a person has a severe case of that particular category. In other words, what I've gathered from people of my parent's generation and above is that as recently as my parent's generation (the '40s and '50s) they weren't aware that there was any such disorder, they were simply considered to be relatively slow, quirky or eccentric. The octogenarian mother of a man I know who is in his early 50s didn't know that he suffered from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) until he was diagnosed a few years ago. As she recanted, she had always thought that he was simply over energetic, this being his quirk compared to her three other children. To me, this translates to the steady increase in the reports of autism as actually being a function of our recent heightened awareness of its distinct categories rather than its sudden increase as a consequence of vaccination.
Moreover, autism, in severe cases, is often diagnosed in young children as early as one year old. This is right in the middle of the standard vaccination timeline and I, as a new mother, can attest that I would consider it odd if my perfectly normal-seeming child suddenly started displaying autistic behavior shortly after being vaccinated and might want to think of that as the possible cause for her sudden change in behavior. I completely understand the urge to find a concrete cause for something like this happening to one's child as the more concrete the cause, the more possible a specific treatment and/or cure might be. However, it should be considered that the urge to blame vaccination comes partly from the fact that when children are this young, vaccination is one of the only things that we as their parents can control completely since they cannot fully communicate with us yet and we have little or no control over a number of other factors in their environment such as pollution or allergens and, for that matter, many other things which surround us daily but which we've come to accept as the natural state of the 20th and 21st century life. It's important to remember that while we can control the administration of vaccines to our young children, unless we are doctors or biochemists ourselves, we don't fully understand them either, and understanding something only partially may be worse than not at all in some cases like this.

Finally, if I haven't caused you to nod off on your keyboard by now, the third and last part of this equation is the fact that some of the diseases which our generation, and now our children's generation, are routinely vaccinated against used to kill scores of infants and adults alike. Because the population of people, however small, who are not vaccinating their children is on the rise, diseases such as measles, which was considered to have been eradicated in the United States in 2000, polio and mumps are now on the rise again, with outbreaks over the last few years. I think it's hard for my generation to comprehend diseases like polio because we were vaccinated against them. We didn't have to endure them as people of our parents' generation had to. The risk of my daughter catching one of these diseases and perhaps dying from one or more of them if she were not vaccinated, is higher and more likely than her developing autism from the composition of the vaccine; particularly since the causality between vaccination and autism is not proven. So I think in the end it must be pretty clear why I'm in the vaccination camp.
I have to note the following: All children are, of course, individuals and it is important to take family history with allergies and adverse reactions into account when deciding whether or not to vaccinate a child.

I can't remember now what other answers I've given my father when it comes to the third most important discovery for mankind, but now that I have a child who is being vaccinated, I don't think I'll ever forget that that is probably the best third answer I can come up with. Perhaps that has been the point of his asking me repeatedly over the years, to see if I would come to this realization when I had children of my own. Thanks Dad.



This post was written by Hilda


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Back to School with Healthier Lunch Boxes

Soeren's already back at school since the past few weeks, but in many countries schools are still out for a few weeks. Not sure about how you feel, but vacations always bring back some of the easy going feeling and especially after summer break I seem to be scrambling to keep up with the hectic pace school life and chores bring along.

One thing that needs attention everyday is packing balanced and healthy lunch boxes. They need their daily nutrients to keep them active and give them the power to get through the day. Unfortunately, in our convenient world, lunch boxes are often filled with packaged ‘convenience’ foods. Full-calorie soda, chips, and cookies can add up to a lot of excess fat, sugar, sodium and calories, which may contribute to long-term health problems like high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Furthermore, these extra calories also make kids sluggish or cranky in the afternoons.

After packing lunches for Soeren over the past few years I have learned quite a few things. Next week he's going to be 7 and very much has a head of his own. So, I know that the lunch boxes has to have items which he enjoys and is most likely to eat.

What we've done is made a chart and included included all his favorite healthy foods. The chart divides the foods into different groups and we try to focus on a variety to be able to provide a balanced lunch box. This provides the energy and nutrients needed to grow, play, learn and stay healthy.

The basics are simple - the lunch box needs to include:

• One serving of vegetables or salad and a serving of fruit (preferably fresh, but canned or dried can counts).
• One serving of a low-fat or fat-free dairy item such as a low-fat cheese stick, a yogurt cup, milk or some cottage cheese.
• One source of protein. Things like meat, chicken, fish, eggs, peanut butter or beans.
• A healthy drink such as water or unsweetened 100% juice or as Soeren likes a mix of 100% fruit juice with some sparkling water.

With this in mind the chart is fairly simple to create. Below I've made a copy of Soeren's chart.

Main	Vegetable/Salad	Fruit	Dairy	Protein	Drink
Whole wheat pita with egg salad + quark dressing	Carrots	Strawberries	Natural quark w/honey and peaches	Gouda cheese stick	Apple juice w/Sparkling water
Multigrain bread with tuna salad	Cucumber Sticks	Peaches	Chocolate milk	Unsalted cashew nuts/almonds	Cherry Juice w/ sparkling water
Rye bread with turkey meatballs	Bell Peppers (no green ones)	Homemade apple sauce	Plain yogurt w/ agave nectar and strawberries	Hummus dip	Multivitamin juice
Chicken/Falafel wraps	Tabouleh	Honey Melon	Plain yogurt w/ blueberries

These are just a few of his favorite things. There are plenty more items he likes but we wanted to list just a few so that both of us understand in which direction we are going. What I mean is, by getting Soeren to make this chart with me he is more aware of the healthy things he likes. For me it means something to follow when I am lost for ideas or need some inspiration.

I use the chart to mix and match and as a basis to make new creations. From a very young age Soeren ate a lot of fruit - I am lucky there as I get no fuss in that aspect. In addition I do add a healthy treat or snack, like buckwheat blueberry muffins or homemade cookies, sticky buns etc. I prefer to make these treats at home so I can manage the level of sugar and use healthy organic products with less preservatives.

It’s important to add variety and be innovative. If you’re packing cheese and cucumber, cheese and lettuce, or cheese and tomato day in and day out it most probably will get monotonous.

Here are a few ideas I’ve successfully put past Soeren:

• I use different kinds of breads avoiding white bread as much as I can. I try to make variations of different sandwiches – everything from whole wheat pita, naan bread to wraps and baguettes, focaccia to ciabatta rolls.
  
• Sneaky mums add salad to the sandwiches – arugula, shredded cabbage, lettuce, cress etc. Soeren has learned to love his salad in this way!
  
• I use different spreads like goat cheese, cream cheese, avocado dip or a herb flavored quark. Go easy on the butter and avoid mayo.  
  
• Add raw veggies like cucumbers, carrots and bell peppers to the lunch box as a side to nibble along with the sandwiches. I make this a must. Soeren loves to have a dip with these raw veggies. I often pack a hummus, herby flavored quark,  plain cottage cheese or a yogurt tahini dip for him to dunk his veggies into.
  
• A nice change from sandwiches are leftovers from a quiche, spring rolls or pasta bake.
  
• I pack at least 2 types of fruit in his lunch box. Strawberries, blueberries, yellow kiwis, raspberries, apples, orange wedges, melon slices – the list goes on.
  
• During the colder season when the variety of fruit is not as abundant as in the summer, I often turn to dried fruit and nuts.
  
• Sometimes I skip sandwiches and make a salad with couscous, bulgur, pasta or rice. Adding some shredded chicken, veggies or hard boiled eggs makes it more filling. Fat-free or low-fat dressing is often packed in a separate container.
  
• Drinks – I pay very close attention to this. It’s amazing how many drinks label themselves as “healthy!” but a closer look at the label show that they are loaded with sugar. I usually buy 100% fruit juices like apple, grape or cherry. I fill Soeren’s drink thermos with 1/2 juice and the rest is topped off with sparkling water. Low-fat and unsweetened chocolate milk and unsweetened herb/fruit iced teas are also a few of Soeren’s favorite drinks.
  
• Like every child, Soeren loves snacks and treats. I usually make mini treats like small muffins, cookies and brownies, where instead of sugar, I use agave nectar, honey or maple syrup. Smaller mini versions satisfy the snacker’s appetite and does not have that many calories/sugar as the larger portions. Furthermore, I try to use fruit as much as I can in my baked treats.

If you are looking for great inspiration you’ll find several healthy, fun, innovative and scrumptious lunch box ideas right here on the Daily Tiffin. If you’ve ever wondered what Bento is you’ll find the answer to this and much more in our article The art of Japanese lunchboxes - an introduction to Bento.

Finally there are always times when we are in a rush and the lunch box needs to be packed quickly. The best tip I can give on this is try to prepare as much as one can the evening before.

• Fruit and veggies can be cut the evening before and wrapped in Clingfilm.
  
• Frozen rolls, bread etc. can be taken out the evening before. In the morning they are thawed and ready to be spread.
  
• Spreads and dips can also be made the evening before and packed in containers.

You’ll find more useful quick lunch box packing tips in our article Need for speed: A mommy's lunch manifesto. While packing lunches, hygiene plays an important role and our food safety for packed lunches article will provide you with the best pointers.

Our recipe section might also offer you with a few healthy option for the next lunch box. These sweet Asian meatballs are simple and low in stress, which work not only as a party appetizer but also are perfect in a lunch box too. Or how about quesadillas? In our article Que Sera Sera Quesadillas, we share with you just how versatile these are. They make great alternatives to the regular sandwich. My personal all time favorite are these quick Chickpea Spinach Pockets. We also have several ideas and recipes for breads, which you can easily make at home.

I hope a few of these suggestions will help you to recover from the lunch box burn out.

Do you have more helpful and yummy lunch box ideas?
What do you find challenging when packing lunch boxes?

Share your thoughts with us. 

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This post was written by Meeta