We’re creating their “normal.”

Leave a comment May 1, 2017 drworobec

My son had a flag football game on Saturday morning. I snuggled in a blanket on the sidelines with my daughter and we played with colouring books and hand clapping games while we watched him run around. He’s only eight, and his teammates are in the six to eight-year-old range, so it’s a bit of organized chaos unfolding amidst a sea of mouthguards and football cleats. Flags flying, kids running, and footballs dropping everywhere. It’s childhood fun at its best.

The game was scheduled from 11:30am-12:30pm, so we packed snacks to eat at the field to tide us over for a later lunch at home. Both of my kids are snackers, as am I- in fact, our sporting event snack bag looks more like a full grocery bag than a few snacks thrown into the bottom of a purse. I’ve always been that way; I’m the mom with a full cooler at BlueJays games and a packed lunch for an afternoon at the park. Nutrition is important to me, and I find that I have far less control when purchasing food than I do when I pack my own. Food brought from home allows me to better manage the preservatives, the additives, the sodium, and the fat content of typical take-out on-the-run options.

When the game finished, we began to pack up our gear. My children are still young enough that we usually pack like we’re going away overnight when in fact we’re only gone for the afternoon. I gathered our blanket, our games, our snacks, our extra layers, and we began to leave. My husband, who is the assistant coach for my son’s team, mentioned that team snacks were being handed out further down the field. The post-game snack is a big part of the fun in young children’s sports, so my son hurried down to claim his share. He came back with two things:

I cringed on the outside and raged on the inside.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be unreasonably strict with my nutritional standards. Yes, I believe in high-quality food, and yes, I try to minimize my family’s intake of processed junk, but I’m not on the all-organic, all-homemade, no-sugar, no-yellow #5 train either. I like to live in the world of moderation, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables. All that being said, “normal” is based on one’s perception, and my household normal does not include multi-coloured goldfish crackers and KoolAid jammers.

As is always the case in parenting, I weighed my options. I let my son have some of the above, and my daughter had a taste too. We threw the rest out and we had a good, long conversation on the way home about properly fueling our bodies so that they can be at their healthiest and help us to perform and feel at our best. As a lifelong athlete, I have learned first-hand the effects that nutrition can have on athletic performance, and that’s why I find it particularly troubling that these snacks are being given in a situation in which we are promoting fitness and sport. The irony is not lost on me. The same could be said for school cafeteria and vending machine choices- if we expect our children to perform at their best, physically and mentally, why are we choosing these types of snacks?

A pre-cut veggie tray and a block of cheese would be no less convenient. A bag of apples and a box of fig bars would be no less costly. A watermelon and some granola packets would be no less tasty. We can change the food industry with the choices we make with our dollars, and we can change our children’s well-being with the choices we make with their food.

Please, let’s choose wisely. After all, we’re creating their “normal.”

Beauty. Babies. Bathrooms.

2 Comments March 20, 2017 drworobec

Not coincidentally, most of the blog posts that I write that really resonate with readers are the very same posts that really resonate with me. The posts that make me laugh or cry, make me introspective and reflective, make me transparent and emotional. This is one of those posts.

My five-year-old daughter wasn’t feeling well yesterday, so I kept her home from school. She wasn’t really sick, just not quite herself, and a full day of rest for her seemed like a better choice than sticking her into the first-day-after-March-break Kindergarten chaos. Her tired little body needed to stay in pyjamas, to watch movies, and to re-energize. Mondays are an 11:00-7:00 day for me at the clinic, and my husband was unable to take the day off, so my in-laws stepped in and agreed to play nursemaid. But before I took her to their place, we stopped into one of my happy places to sneak in a workout. I saw my 9am crew, completed week four of the five-week Crossfit Open competition, and set her up with an iPad, crackers, and water.

It was after the workout that she threw me for a loop. She was sitting on the vanity in the women’s changeroom as I applied my makeup, getting ready for work. “Why do you need that mommy?” she asked, pointing to my eyeshadow. “What does it do?”

Radio silence.

“Well, it makes my eyes look brighter,” I said. And as she asked about each subsequent piece of makeup, I explained away concealer and powder and eyeliner and mascara as “it makes my skin smoother” or “it makes my eyelashes darker,” stumbling to find words to minimize the aesthetic component of cosmetics. As I spoke, I cringed inside, realizing that this is where it starts. This is where she starts to learn about society’s rules of beauty. This is where she starts to learn about her beauty. Her worth. Her value. Am I being too dramatic? If you think so, then I will boldly tell you that you’re wrong.

Now, I don’t wear much makeup as it is, and you can often find my face completely bare, but nonetheless I swayed her views, however unintentional, to believe that having smooth skin, bright eyes, and dark eyelashes are desirable. I fuelled the machine that believes that young skin, blonde hair, and a thin body defines beauty. I contributed to the belief that natural looks are not good enough and I influenced my own daughter towards an ideal that I don’t even believe in myself, yet have somehow bought into. My history of disordered eating is no secret, and I’ve written about it a few times; I still feel emotionally stripped down and exposed when I read those posts. But with adulthood and hindsight and years of self-reflection under my belt, I’m sure that disordered eating also falls into the realm of beauty and self-worth too. And it starts young.

So what should I have done? What should I have said? The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know that I find parenting my daughter much trickier than parenting my son, because of social issues like this. Beauty. Value. Self-esteem. Uuugh, it’s just all so damn hard.

I’m trying to raise my little girl to value her brain. And her abilities. And her kindness. Even if the world at large values hair extensions and self-tanner more. It starts young and it starts with us. And maybe, just maybe, it starts on a bathroom vanity at the gym.

“If Children Live with Friendliness, they Learn the World is a Nice place in which to Live.”

Leave a comment January 9, 2017 drworobec

I had a group of friends over one morning through the Christmas break. There were five of us, just a casual coffee-and-muffin kinda thing after our workout. It was a chance to catch up and snag some girlfriend time in a world that needs more girlfriends. Meanwhile, my kids were loving the extra action in our living room, and proudly demonstrated their toy saxophone skills, played Spot It with a new audience, and snacked right along with us on the food platters spread out on the coffee table.

I loved it.

I loved it because I love low-key, last-minute get-togethers. I loved it because I love to show my children the value and importance of nurturing friendships. I loved it because they were involved too.

We host friends quite regularly and as much as we can, we try to keep our children involved in those gatherings. Come to think of it, we try to keep our children involved in everything we do. They often visit my workplace, watch sporting events at my husband’s school, and tag along to the gym. We take them to festivals and rodeos, baseball games and the movies, live theatre and hotel overnights. We try to expose them to a life well-lived and well-loved. I take live-in-the-moment advice to heart, and I’ll chose experiences over stuff every time.

But I think these friendship experiences are especially important for them to be a part of, and help to build the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. In those couple of hours on a wintery holiday morning, they learned some important social lessons like not interrupting a person’s story, how good a belly laugh feels, and how fulfilled someone can be just by hosting people in their home. They watched, they listened, they observed, they contributed. They grew.

“What was your highlight today?” I asked them, as I often do, during their baths that night. “Having your friends over,” they said. Me too kids, me too.