Let Them Eat Cake

Yesterday, the Coalition government announced, with much triumph, that they would be offering free school meals for all P1-3 children in England. The Coalition are falling over each other to claim credit for this policy, with the Conservatives claiming it is all made possible by Michael Gove, and the Lib Dems claiming they got this policy through, "to ensure every child gets the chance in life they deserve" in the words of Nick Clegg.

 That's all very well, but who is really going to benefit, and why are the politicians all so impressed with themselves?

 The policy will cost £600m, and puts parents in the bizarre situation of being told they are too rich for Child Benefit, which many would have used for school dinners, but now are entitled to free school meals. It's a lot of money to spend on a theory, that school dinners are almost always more nutritious than packed lunches, which has been reported in an independent government review. Independent of the government, but of not of be food industry - two restaurant founders wrote it. It's not even as though this policy will be targeted at those with the greatest need - they already are entitled to free school meals.

 Wouldn't it be better if the government instead focused more on these children? They talk about narrowing the attainment gap between rich and poor, while at the same time making life easier for richer parents, and no less hard for poor parents. £600m could have funded a lot of other things.

It could have funded breakfast and homework clubs, where children from poorer backgrounds increase engagement with school and get a nutritious hot meal in the morning and the evening. Instead, it's going straight into the pockets of the food industry (because most local authorities contract out school dinner provision) and providing a state subsidy to more private business, who deliver sub-standard food to a captive audience. The lack of choice is appalling. In theory, the dinners might be more nutritious, but this depends on children picking the nutritious options and actually eating them. I've written about this before, and I'm not hopeful at all.

I don't underestimate how helpful this would be to an average family. It would have saved so much money if we had had free school meals in P1-3, or at least meant I could spend child benefit on something else. However, when housing benefit has been cut so children aren't even allowed their own room, I just don't see how they can justify introducing another universal benefit.

What do you think? Do you really need free school meals? Will you use them?

Sister Points

A couple of days ago, I spontaneously awarded Josie 5 Big Sister Points.

At the time it was just an off-hand remark, in response to her considerate comforting of her sister when Lori had fallen off her scooter for the millionth time that day, and I was too occupied with getting us all along the road in time for holiday club and school to give Lori the sympathy she felt she deserved.

Josie did give her that sympathy, and it was helpful for me, and kind to her sister. So I awarded some points. I've never done this before, it's not like sister points are a thing in our house. But despite that unfamiliarity, Josie's affinity with them was immediate:

"Oooh. Sister points! And five of them."

Later on in the walk, Lori helped Josie in return. She got some too. They both jumped up and down, cheering:

"Hurray, we've both got five now!"

The concept of reward for helpfulness isn't foreign to them. We do have a pocket money system, which is based on the doing of household chores, helpful tasks, perfect play-throughs of piano tunes, and things like that. Pocket money can also be lost, through extreme naughtiness (not that much of a problem) or laziness (more of a problem, thay are little Laws after all).

Sister points are not like pocket money, I've decided. They can't be pre-awarded for specific tasks ("Share that toy, and you'll get a sister point), they can't be docked ("You weren't nice to your sister, 5 points off"), they're just a spontaneous and fun way of saying, "Well done!", which my two have really taken to. The important thing is that they are unexpected and not-looked-for. I don't want two girls who are only kind to each other for a reward, and we certainly don't have that at the moment.

So, it begs the questions...should I allow conversion of sister points into something tangible? Should I keep a formal tally of sister points? If I did, it would be a shared pool. Sister points are not a competition.

Or does that miss the point of Sister Points? Should I keep them just as a fun, light-hearted, and a bit of a silly way to gameify life?

Don't Pack In Our Children's Packed Lunches

Today a report has been published which calls for the government to consider banning packed lunches.

Apparently, parents are providing sub-standard meals, which aren’t as nutritious as the school meals being offered at school. Media reports are claiming that the report (written by owners of a restaurant chain) calls for packed lunches to be banned, and for school meals to be compulsory, and free for everyone.

On the one hand I applaud them for trying to improve the nutritional intake of our children, and doing it while also trying to reduce the cost of raising them. It is sorely needed. When I was on a zoo trip with Lori’s class one child had Nutella on white bread for their sandwich, with crisps, followed by a chocolate bar for afters. I’m mortified if I send my two in with only fruit and no veg, let alone junk food that’s so inappropriate for a child’s packed lunch that it would be funny if it wasn't so sad. On the other hand, for the majority of parents.

I think that a simple comparison between a packed lunch and a school dinner is misleading, and the proposed solutions address the symptom of a disease (parents provide bad lunches) rather than a disease itself (parents don’t know/don’t care what should be in a healthy lunch).

 I’ll confess, I have an inherent bias TOWARDS to school dinners, while growing up, I always had them, and I sent my children to school assuming that I would always buy them school dinners too. It was convenient, relatively cheap (only £1.75 a day), and they’d be assured of a balanced meal.

I was wrong. It was convenient and cheap, but over time I began to suspect that they were not getting a healthy, nutritious, and filling meal made to the standards I would expect.

To illustrate, let’s compare a normal Lindsay-prepared lunchbox with the reports I would get from the children on what they would eat in their school dinners:

Lunchbox: 1 wholemeal sandwich or roll, with a reduced sugar jam, ham, or cheese. Usually eaten
Ham label checked to ensure welfare standards met for piggies. Usually eaten.
Batons of fresh cucumber. Usually eaten.
Red Pepper strips: Usually eaten.
Banana: Almost always eaten
Yoghurt tube/fruit winder/biscuitty bar: Always eaten
Babybel cheese: Always eaten
Orange or apple juice, squash, or water: Always drunk

Anything that isn’t eaten at lunchtime is consumed at after-school club or on the way home under Daddy orders. There’s normally no wastage, and we know exactly what they have or haven’t eaten. This has been absolutely critical with 2 children who tend towards anxiety over eating food in rushed scenarios (and the school lunch hall is loud, and rushed, and stressful), but who are not cunning or naughty enough to hide food and pretend they ate it.

And when they go to school lunches?

Well, the comments below are real ones that I have had back over the course of my lunch investigations:

Josie: I had a quorn burger.

Wow. Processed soya on a white bun. Great.

Josie: I had a baked potato with cheese, but the cheese tasted funny and so I didn’t eat it. Mr Devine [the head teacher] had it too and he agreed with me.

So, she ate the potato bit then had a sponge pudding with custard for after.

Lori: I had a baked potato with cheese, but I got up to go to the toilet and when I came back it had been cleared away and I didn’t know who to ask for more so I just went out to play.

She had no lunch.

Josie: I had strawberry milk to drink.

Filled with sugar. There’s a history of diabetes in the family. I try to minimise these types of hidden sugars in foods that people think are “healthy”.

Lori: Sausages! I didn’t eat my beans.

Oh great. More processed pork.

Josie: There was hardly anything left by the time I got down to eat, so I just had mashed potatoes and sausages.

See above.

There wasn’t a single day where one of them came home and described a meal that had more than a tiny portion of fresh fruit and vegetables in it, or meat that I could be assured was good quality.

My own golden rule when I maked the packed lunches, that I never break, is that I always must put at least three portions of fresh fruit and veg in the packed lunch (and it’s usually 4 or 5), and my bread product must always be wholemeal. The same can’t be said for the school dinner provision: - they might offer fruit and veg, but no one is making sure the children are either:

a) Selecting the healthy option
b) Actually eating the healthy option

And parents don’t know, because anything uneaten is just tipped into a bin. Furthermore, my house has more rules: all eggs free-range, all milk organic, meat from suppliers who are committed to animal welfare.

With school dinners, I have no control over those choices I can make at home. And at £1.75 per child, I highly doubt their using free-range eggs in their muffins.

To me, to ban packed lunches is completely missing the point about what the issue is: teaching parents on budgets how to feed their children healthily, and cheaply.

If some parents aren’t providing their children with healthy and nutritional packed lunches, then educate the parents and treat the underlying issue in the family!

 Don’t penalise the parents like us, who are trying our best to give our children fresh fruit and vegetables, and a healthy attitude to food. We aren’t being helped at all by a privatised school meal system which is failing to provide a decent standard of food, and our children would get much worse food if you forced us to take school dinners.

Further, if you don’t fix the underlying problem, what happens when the children go home? Sure, they might get one vaguely nutritious meal a day at school (and I am not convinced they would anyway), but if the family keeps on eating nuggets and chips for dinner every single day then it’s not really helping much.

Ultimately, plans to ban packed lunches smacks of big business dressing up their interests as a welfare concern. I’m sure all those school meal providers would be rubbing their hands with glee at the idea of millions more captive consumers, paid for by the state, all of whom have no opportunity to opt out or object if the standards are poor.

The Taste of Victory

When you’re trying hard to balance a proper, grown-up career with the challenge of being a good Mum to two children, sometimes things become a bit overwhelming. It’s easy to feel a bit down-hearted when something goes wrong, and even though I know there are things I could do to make it easier, I just really don’t like making packed lunches before I go to bed.

Which is silly, because every parent knows that time passes much more quickly in the morning that it does at night. 07:25 becomes 08:25 in far less than an hour, I’m sure of it. My children don’t exactly help. As my own mother would have put it when I was growing up:

 “These children have two speeds. Dead slow and stop.”

Andrew will attest that this is absolutely true. While other children might actively source their own clothes, my two just seem to sit there, and wait. And wait. And wait. I’d do an experiment to see how long I could leave it before they actually got their own clothes and got ready, but I know it would be futile. We’d be late. Every day.

I’ve tried lots of things: no TV until breakfast is finished and clothes are on, no reading until the same, but they don’t really work. The only thing that does is constant chivvying, and that’s quite wearing on me and them:

“Eat up. Drink up. Get your clothes. Where’s your school bag? Have you remembered your homework folder?”

It just goes on and on and on.

So, this morning, because it was holiday club, not school, we adopted a slightly more leisurely approach to getting ready. Didn’t work. Lori ended up in floods of tears because I wouldn’t let her wear her ripped, dirty cat outfit to Carnival Day, and Josie selected a pair of trousers that, at my primary school, would have led to taunts of “Half-masts!”.

Undaunted, I cheered Lori up with proper half-masts, and a bandana that makes her look like a pirate, and then we tumbled on to a very rare thing for us in the morning: a bus.

I felt quite smug. 6 different fruits and veg in the packed lunch (count ‘em: cucumber, tomato, red pepper, raspberries, banana, and a plum), and as a treat, a reduced-sugar jam roll. A bus that meant I wouldn’t be late for work. And two adorable children pretending (Lori) and actually (Josie) reading about Andy Murray’s victory in the tennis and then telling a lovely old pensioner how Mummy had paid for Andy Murray to win Wimbledon (not true, but my employer has been one of his sponsors right from the start of his career, and they had noticed the RBS badge on his shirt and this was Lori’s interpretation of that fact).

Bus over, and smugness lasted for about 5 seconds. Which is how long it took me to realise that something was a bit different about Lori.

“Where’s your rucksack?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Aaaaaaaah!” she replied, “It’s on the bus!”

I delivered her to after-school club, and they said they would source a lunch from the shop down the road. But I wasn’t satisfied. I had made that packed lunch, and it had 6 different kinds of fruit and veg in it!

I couldn’t wait for it to be picked up from the depot. So, I set about finding the bag bus with the aid of the Lothian bus timetable, and the Bustracker app. The 09:23 36 at Broughton Primary School gets to Holyrood at 09:52. The next 36 after that to leave Holyrood is 10:02. The bus driver would be the same, because I know they change outside the Primary School on the way back, and they aren’t on a route that goes passed the depot. On its way back, the 36 goes right past my work. All I needed to do was work out which bus it would be, and wait for it out there. I figured it would be the 10:29, just off Dundas Street, so I ducked out of my 10 o’ clock meeting a little early and went over to wait.

And what do you know? There it was. A black Hello Kitty bag with white stars, and a very surprised bus driver.

No-one had ever tracked down their own lost property on his bus before. But 6 fruit and veg!

I called After-School Club, in some jubilance, to arrange a drop-off, but they hadn’t believed that I would get it back. They’d already bought her a ham roll and some more fruit. No need for me to drop it off.

Never mind. I know what I’m having for lunch today, and the taste of victory is sweet (well, reduced-sugar jam sweet).

Collaging

Have you heard of a site called Polyvore? It’s along similar lines to Pinterest, except instead of just pinning one image at a time, you put images together to make collages, and it's much more about clothes and style.

They provide templates, and the you slot your own images into them. Here’s my first attempt at filling a template with my own images.

Or you can create your own from the backgrounds and graphics available on the site, or that you’ve uploaded yourself. Here’s my first attempt at creating my own collage.

I was looking at it a while ago, because I wanted to send a picture of an Anne Fontaine waistcoat to Lauren, from Filing Jointly...Finally to help her to protest at Rule no.10: No jaunty vests in public (she’s from the US, so I’m pretty certain a vest is waistcoat. If it’s not, then I cannot even begin to imagine what a jaunty vest would look like.)

Anyway, I digress...back to Polyvore. Lori and Josie were hovering like little piranhas, and they pounced as soon as they saw the site:

“Oooh, what’s that?

“Can I  have one of those pretty dresses?”

“Can I make a collage too?”

They seemed to like the idea of computer collages. The site, which appears to be aimed at an audience who reads Glamour magazine, struck a chord with an eight year old girl. Hmmmmm. Says a lot about the way young women's magazines seem to want to keep these young women in a state of perpetual childishness.

Anyway, I’ve found the site a bit finicky, and I don't really love clothes so much that I need to turn them into collages.

I haven’t used it much since I signed up. Although, I do wonder whether there is anything similar (although not quite so gender-biased) out there for children as they seemed to be drawn to it,

In the meantime, Josie had a jotter to decorate, so we made a collage, for real life:

It was about a million times more fun than collecting clothes on Polyvore.

Cooking for a Diabetic

As Andrew has had some bad news about the progress of his diabetes (sad face), it seems to be about the right time to start eating a little more healthily again.

A few weeks ago I was discussing the difficulties of balancing a full-time job with eating as a family in a healthy, nutritious, and (most importantly) time-efficient way.* In the course that conversation my friend mentioned that she had started her family on a reduced-meat set of meals.

I won't go over all the arguments for this again here, but you can read the following article in The Guardian if you are curious:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/18/halve-meat-consumption-scientists

So, I started to do that this week. The result? I just seem to have made dishes with cheese and egg in them. I don't think that's quite the point. Not only is it still an animal product, it's not at all healthy for a diabetic at increased risk of heart disease. I blame Nigella Lawson because the recipes are mostly from her Nigellissima Italianish cookery book. The macaroni cheese had four different kinds of cheese in it! It was the most delicious macaroni cheese ever, but still, four... Which four? Parmesan, mascarpone, mozarella, and mature cheddar, since you ask. It was actually supposed to be Gruyere, but my Tesco didn't have any, so I used mature cheddar instead. Seemed to work.

I also ran out of food to make meals with by Tuesday. Clearly my skills with shopping and cooking with less meat need work.

Back to the drawing board for next week!

*If you're wondering why I chose to use an Oxford serial comma, then I will direct you to Bigglethwaite and Windermere's Guide to Proper and Exquisite English. . The context seems to fit their rules.

Awkward Questions

It's been another busy few weeks in the Law household.

I had the Focused Women (the bank's gender diversity network, of which I am chair in Scotland) annual conference this week, and an Inclusion conference last week (with a networking evening the night before), and then another Education committee up at the Council (most interesting 2 hours of my week, no question), and my last Parent Council meeting as chair of Broughton PC (*sniff*). These all conspire to take me away from my day job, and often away from Andrew and the girls later on into the evening.

I couldn't do half of the things I do without having a husband who is as supportive as he is, so as it's coming up for Father's Day I thought I would give him a  little shout out on the blog.

And that brings me on to the awkward questions - I regularly get asked at events a question along these lines, "I read your bio and you seem to do so much - how do you manage it?".

That's a very awkward question to answer, my self-effacing side wants to say, "Well, I don't do half the things I do as well as I should, and I have a very untidy house" but that's not strictly true. I don't do things if I don't think I can do them well, and some of the house is quite tidy (mostly because of Andrew!).

So, I usually say, "Because I have a very supportive husband who does all the things that I can't do."

This week, I made that reply, and the woman asking me told me that she too had a husband at home, and it didn't really seem to make things that much easier. That was awkward. I wasn't sure how to respond!

I also get asked, with alarming regularity, "Do you ever see your children?", to which I have to resist the urge to snap, "Of course I bloody do. Do you think I would do half the things I do, if I didn't actually have time with them?"

Instead, I explain about the way we chose to live on the way to school so I can drop them off in the morning on my way to work. And how Andrew and I have alternate lie-ins on weekend days, so basically the whole of Saturday is me/Jo/Lori time, and Sunday is relaxing family time.

Funnily enough, I don't often hear the Dads at work being challenged on whether they spend enough time with their children.

Labyrinthitis and a Rest

It doesn’t feel like it, but it’s been over a month since my last blog post. Writing doesn’t just write itself, it turns out.

I’m not sure why I stopped, but perhaps it had something to do with a feeling of general overwhelmedness that I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks. That culminated last week in a bad cold, which turned into sinusitis, which turned into labyrinthitis. Labyrinthitis is not pleasant, but it’s also not completely incapacitating.

You know that feeling you get when you get off a roundabout or from spinning a child round and round in circles, or from doing too many pirouettes without spotting properly? It’s like that, except ALL THE TIME. Except when lying down in a semi-darkened room, or walking really fast, bizarrely.

That was me, all of last week. I think my body just gave up in a huff, and decided that my balance system was probably the best way to gently incapacitate me.

I’m back at work today, and I feel a lot more positive. The overwhelmedness has lifted, a little, although the news that our landlord is planning on selling our temporary accommodation before we are ready to sell Flooded Flat, makes me panic a little every time I think about it.

It seems I will be spending a lot of my time over the next few weeks packing boxes, chasing contractors and insurance companies, and panicking over where we’re going to live in June.