Latch Key Kids In Action

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 10, 2018] ©2018

 

I was interested to read in a recent La Jolla Light that the issue of whether to change the start time of Muirlands Middle School and La Jolla High is once again being raised. 

 

My sons are now in their late thirties so it’s a moot point.  But my vote, if I had one, would be a resounding yes.  Please start school one hour later.

 

Some memories never leave you. One of them is dropping off comatose teenage boys at La Jolla High school at 7:10 every morning.  I always prayed that whatever their first period class was would never be a subject they would need later in life.

 

They were usually asleep by 10:30 p.m. at the latest.   But teenagers are not, by definition, morning people.  Ironically, the morning people are the elementary school kids who started school at least an hour later. 

 

At the time, I was told that the start times at the various schools were totally dependent on the school bus schedules.  The buses had to go pick up the older kids first, then go back and get the younger ones.  But it still never made sense to me that the early risers were the once picked up second. 

 

I remember getting a survey when they were in high school addressing the issue of latch key kids and how this problem could be solved.  I returned it writing across it in big letters: START SCHOOL ONE HOUR LATER. 

 

Very few working parents have the flexibility to be home at 2 p.m.  Fortunately, one of my sons had an after school job for his last two years, and the other was usually playing sports. But they both usually came home to an empty house.

 

I was genuinely concerned about this.  I always told the kids that if someone came to the door when they were alone that they should say that their mother was taking a nap and couldn’t come to the door.  Never open the door to someone you don’t know, or admit you are there alone. 

 

Of course, you can’t predict everything that could go wrong. Oh no.

 

One afternoon when I got home from work, 13-year-old Rory greeted me in the driveway.  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” he says.   When someone asks you that you know there’s bad news and worse news.  There is no good news to be had.

 

He had met a new friend, he reported (the good news).  Where is he?  I say.  He’s in the hospital, says Rory.  He fell out of our tree and broke his leg.

 

Is his father a lawyer, I ask?  Rory doesn’t know.  But he does know that his Mom is a teacher whose school lets out at 3:30. And like me, she has left explicit instructions that she is not to be called at work unless it is an “emergency.”  Turns out her definition of emergency is pretty much the same as mine:  someone is not breathing or has lost at least a quart of blood. 

 

Rory and his new friend and another kid who was over that day assess the situation:  is this in fact an emergency?  The poor kid is lying on the ground in tremendous pain.  He had decided to jump out of the tree with our rope swing but let go (way) too soon.  As a single parent living a month-to-month financial existence, I lived in terror of these possibilities.

 

The three 13-year-olds assess the situation.  Kid is breathing.  Hasn’t lost any blood. Does pain count?  They – including and especially the injured kid - conclude that this is not a sufficient emergency to incur the wrath of calling Mom at work. But they are all Boy Scouts and have taken First Aid.  So they prop the broken leg up on the kid’s skateboard and carefully secure it there with Velcro strips.

 

The two non-injured boys keep a supportive vigil and countdown:  “Only 30 more minutes until we can call. Only 15 more minutes etc.…”

 

Precisely at 3:30, they are on the phone to the school.  Mom rushes over, frantic, loads the kid into her car and rushes off to emergency room.  Rory waits for me. I have an instant feeling that this boy’s parents are going to own my house by nightfall.   And it turns out that his father IS a lawyer.

 

The poor kid turned out to have a compound fracture.  I called his mother that night, offering to pay his medical bills. They were insanely nice about it, however, and said their medical insurance will cover it. We both agreed we were perhaps defining “emergency” a little too narrowly.  But I’m also guessing that her kids called her at work waaaayyyyy too much, just as mine did.

 

And both of us Moms wished Muirlands had gotten out at least an hour later. 

 

 

'Tis The Season For Silly Ideas

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 3, 2018] ©2018

I couldn’t help but notice in December that my WTF? file of silly ideas was getting fuller.

The first, of course, was when we received an email from our dental group alerting us that we had not used all of our dental insurance benefits for the year and advising that there was still time to make an appointment. “Wow!” I said to myself, “I think I’ll go get a laser curettage under anesthesia!”  Unused dental benefits are not like CVS Extra Bucks which reward you for being a regular customer by giving you coupons you can spend in the store for stuff that would actually bring you PLEASURE. A minor detail is that our insurance only pays up to 50% of any dental procedure so to take advantage of those benefits would actually cost us money (never mind pain). 

But silly went into even higher gear when I went to buy more twinkly colored LED lights for our Christmas tree.  We’d tried a string of mini LED lights last year and liked them. As it turns out, we are in the minority in wanting lights that twinkle.  How can this be? Who wouldn’t want their Christmas tree lights to twinkle? But Meanley’s pointed out that Sylvania’s mini LED twinkle lights are now called “TwinkleTech” and EACH STRING comes with a little remote.  I submit that if there is one thing that no house in America needs more of, it’s remotes. Never mind little teeny remotes that easily get lost and are a suitable size to be considered a comestible by one’s dog.  I’ve written before about “feature creep” but this is feature creep run amok.  We’re hoping that Sylvania will come to their corporate senses about this, especially after all the nasty letters I plan to write to them under different pseudonyms.

But silly went into overdrive when I was watching a video of Thanksgiving hacks (useful hints) on my favorite YouTube channel. Not surprisingly, most of the hacks were genuinely useful, for example, making your mashed potatoes early and keeping them warm in your crock pot. But then they went off the deep end by suggesting cooking asparagus in a mason jar filled with water and spices in the top rack of your dishwasher.

This just seemed wrong on so many levels. From a practical point of view, my dishwasher takes two hours and nine minutes to run a full cycle. So are the guests sitting around the table starving waiting for the dry cycle in finish?  It definitely gets points for novelty and it’s hardly the craziest hack you’ll see on the internet.  But this wonderful site is known for actually helpful hints, this not being one of them.

But then I thought, maybe I’m the one not thinking outside the appliance carton. What about cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner in the dishwasher?  This is a throw down, YouTube ladies.  I mean, our ancestors cooked over open hearths with far less temperature control than a KitchenAid Power Scrub.  The way I envision it is that you put your turkey in one of those oven bags (maybe three oven bags) with some veggies and seasonings and set it on the bottom rack. Your Idaho potatoes could go on the top rack. Then just keep running the dishwasher for as many cycles as it takes. You may have to start a day early depending on the size of your turkey. Basically you’d get the benefit of slow-cooked steaming from the wash cycles which might produce a really moist bird in combination with crispy skin from the dry cycles.  The unknown variable is how the turkey would fare going through a wet-dry cycle about 15 times. Still, I fully expect Bobby Flay to be making a turkey this way next year.  

Now, I did say dishwasher, but I honestly don’t see any reason why other non-traditional appliances couldn’t be used as well, like your dryer. So I was thinking that you could mash those potatoes you cooked in the cup rack by plopping them into a Ziplock bag with a ton of butter and thwacking the s--t out of them on the blanket cycle.  Lumps would never survive.

Better yet, if you have one of those Fluff features, it would continue to toss them around every 45 seconds until dinner is ready.  No need for that crock pot!

Alternatively, if you have a sweater rack for your dryer, you could probably cook one of those sweet potato casseroles on it. Make sure the dish is covered. You would NOT want those little marshmallows in the lint filter.

So, at this point I still think the dental insurance idea and the twinkly light remotes were pretty idiotic but maybe the YouTube ladies were on to something. Could cooking Thanksgiving dinner in your non-cooking appliances be that crazy?  After all, someone first thought of Turducken.