Harlem's Hungry Kids, NYC 2009

Part One: New York City's Free Summer Lunch Program

Two to three days a week, the girls and I head over to the 145th street pool which I conveniently located directly across the street from our house. It is a lovely, clean, beautifully-maintained pool with a great sprinkler and fountain park.

It also has free lunch.

NYC has a summer free lunch program and every kid in the city is eligible to have a free bag lunch. If you go to the pool around noon, the staff hands out these white bags and the kids hang out by the pool on their towels and eat them. At first, I resisted free lunches since we are not the intended recipients, but there are lots of lunches at the pool and if they don't get eaten they get thrown out, so my kids hop in line.

Well, honestly, you'd think Wolfgang Puck himself was handing out gourmet lunches. My kids LURVE free lunch.


There is something exciting and amazing to them when someone hands them the waxy white bags, the way they are kept in this dark freezer pack and they take the bag to their towels and curl back the paper to see what's inside. It's like opening a Xmas present. All expectation and excitement.

There is always chocolate milk. Always. And this is exciting enough. But there is also a sandwich, usually peanut butter and jelly on wheat or ham and American in a tortilla. They are thin, paltry sandwiches, often without adornment or condiments. There is an over-whelming amount of white in the lunches. But still, they are sandwiches and sandwiches are, oddly enough, exotic to my kids.

We just don't make a lot of sandwiches around here. When David and I first started dating we would lay around the house after making love and leisurely make thick hot sandwiches of Gruyere and ham and local tomatoes and arugula with some special sauce we concocted together in our post-love making haze, naked in the kitchen. We were sandwich whores. There wasn't a sandwich we didn't make and inhale.

Then, we each gained 10 pounds and we decided those sandwiches were the culprit. We never went back. Sandwiches have all but been psychically banned from our thinking. And I kinda regret it, although my waistline is smaller.

For lunch with the kids, we're either butter-poaching flounder, or making pasta and some kind of home-made but thrown-together sauce or other, or scooping up some homemade soup which I always have stashed in the back of the fridge. But no sandwiches. I think I'm, like, neglecting my kids. They are sandwich-deprived.

Every time we have the bag lunch, I feel a little sad that somehow David and I have pummeled what could be the children's life-long love of good, over-stuffed sandwiches. Or even the sheer joy of a peanut butter and fluff sandwich. Uh. What could be better? The free lunch reminds me that our food choices have altered their preferences. Then, I realize we have shaped their little minds in good ways too and I feel the all-powerful rapture and influence that is parenting. It immediately makes me want to marinate something.


Anyway, back to free lunch...every bag lunch has a side dish, sometimes potato salad, or cold string beans in a weird vinaigrette. These tend to fall flat. I watch all the kids eating. About half eat the potato salad. Weird string beans? Nobody.

Oh, but the carrots? A winner. The lunches often include a small bag of carrots. Nothing special. No dip. Just small carrots in a little individually-sized cellophane bag. Well, you'd think my kids had been given a bag of M&Ms. They tear into the little bag and gobble down the carrots and Edie lifts her face to me and begs, "Buy this, Mommy. Buy this."

Do you think I can get them to eat raw carrots as a snack at home? Rarely. But at the pool? It's like the magical bag lunch from Happy Carrot Land.

Part Two: A Little About The Politics of Bag Lunches

That the kids like this lunch and find it so extraordinary is funny and surprising and also a testament to the fact that they are two and nearly three years old and unaware of the stigma of eating a free or subsidized lunch. They are unaware why there is free lunch and all the politics that come with it. They are not marginalized or made fun of because they are eating free lunch. They realize they are affluent to some degree - and probably feel more affluent than we really are, since there isn't a day that goes by that a new crappy plastic toy isn't clutched in their little fists, but they also are unaware that everyone else is not equally affluent. To them, every kid in the neighborhood can pester his mother for a cheap crappy toy from Duane Reade and get it on command.

To them, every child has what they need. And a new Barbie Princess is as necessary as a lunch. The bag lunch is a novelty to my girls. They know if they don't want what's inside, mama will make them something else when we get home.

The free lunch is not a reminder to me that we are surrounded by hungry kids. I don't need to go to a poor, rural community in Alabama to know that children go hungry. It's happening right here. Right down the street.


Don't believe me? Bring a bag of pistachios, a bunch mandarin oranges and a bucket of chalk to our local playground and watch yourself be surrounded by kids who haven't eaten anything but Cheetos in hours and who are so craving structured play and adult attention that they will hang with you - uncool adult - and you'll find that you are supervising an art project with 20 kids. Add one girl who should be in a photography class because she likes taking pictures so much, has your camera and a party on the playground is born. This doesn't happen on the stuffy, eyes-on-the-sidewalk, keep-your-hands-in-the-car, are-you-trying-to-abduct-my-kid?, Upper West Side.

I know kids that I see everyday at the playground and the pool, know them by names, know details about how their mother's last boyfriend used to hit them hard, and have never, not once, seen the parent. Right down the street.


There is much craving, both for food and positive attention, going on this city. The free bag lunch has made me think a lot about Tom Lee and Ezra Klein's discussion of school lunches ever since they came out in response to Alice Waters Op-ed in the Times a few months back. There has been much talk of meals cooked instead of processed and warmed up, gardens grown in public schools, students learning to harvest, cook and enjoy locally-produced, well-cooked food and meals, food as art, not just craft. I love food and cooking, so I'm all for the dream. Alice Waters' ideas are admirable and amazing and completely miss the immediate needs of this community.


We've got bigger issues to tackle here in Harlem. This is bigger than learning about sustainable foods and how to cook on a hot plate in a classroom.

Let's just make sure the kids aren't hungry first. As Tom Lee has said so practically, let's just feed the kids and make sure they are getting the adequate nutrition their bodies need. Let that be our foundation. That, along with all the uphill forces working on them from society, peer pressure and in their homes - will be enough of a challenge. Or an impossible Sisyphean feat. But then, we can build from there. And that's when we give Alice Waters a call and ask her to bring seeds and organic soil.

As for me, I might decide in the Fall that Lucy's bento box lunches at Central Park East II will not suffice and I might channel Alice waters and try to re-invent their whole food sourcing and cooking issues at the school. I might become the Norma Rae of school lunch. Maybe I'll start growing organic corn on the roof of the school. It's possible. I could go that way...

On the other hand, what I might just do is continue to try to influence my little parcel of the universe. I might just focus on making sure my kids eat well, know good food, know where it comes from, learn the value of experimentation and adventurous eating and see the value of cooking instead of pressing the button on a vending machine.

Just doing that is going to be hard work, with lots of successes and failures. And ultimately, I think that's how you change the world anyway, one kid at a time.

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The Post My Husband Doesn't Want You To Read

Let me set the stage for you...

July 4th weekend. A camp site. The morning. Everyone slept like babies in the tent. David plays with the kids so I have time to write. I sit at my computer at the picnic table with the cord plugged into an outlet in a log that also gave us a steady stream of water...okay, the camping wasn't all that rustic. So, sue me. There is bright sun, blue sky, dew on the grass, parachutes tumbling in the breeze over our heads, the smell of pine and river and grass.

I'm working on the book. David is piling the kids into the car. He is taking them to the mountain store where there is food and supplies and an array of toys in the side yard that they love to play with. This is my time to write. I am excited. Grateful. We are all excited about what we are going to do.


Edie is so excited to go on another adventure with Daddy that she forgets to have boob and I am thrilled because we are trying to totally wean her off by the time she turns three, which is, like, in a couple of weeks. And I tell David to reward her with M&Ms at the mountain store because my tactic has been to give her "three M&M's" (because she is almost three and three is the magic number) every time she chooses to forgo breastfeeding.

Basically, I have been hiding a huge bag of M&M's in the freezer and dolling out little secret rations to her every time she gives up breastfeeding. Yes, I am bribing my child with chocolate as a way to wean her. Someone call La Leche. Or Al-anon. I can give classes on this kind of enabling.

But it's been working, so if you scold me in comments, I'll just swear at you or something. I don't mess with what works. Anyhoo, I tell David to pick up the M&M's and the kids pile in the car and I write for, like, what seems like hours in the big blue day. And it's paradise.

And then, David comes back and the kids are uncharacteristically FREAKING OUT. There are tears in the pool. Screams in in the tent. Agony everywhere. Children are like falling to the ground in uncontrollable spasms and making shrill demands as if we were their servants. They are like small, mangy, growling animals. I barely recognize them. I am ready to trade them for a camel and a good milking cow.

This is when my husband looks at me and says in the most matter-of-fact, tone imaginable, "Look, Kim...we can't do this anymore. They can't have M&M's for breakfast."

Okay, so skip to the conversation where I ask, "Um, they only had M&M's for breakfast?" and he says, "Um yeah, you told me to buy them M&M's" and I say, "Um yeah, but I didn't say they could have M&M's for a breakfast and um, like, I give Edie three, not...30 for a reward." And he says, "Well, you didn't say THAT, you said buy them M&M's and you know, you never said, 'Feed them breakfast and give Edie three M&M's as a treat...You should've said that."

And now I realize it. And I start laughing so hard I can barely talk - I get like that, where something strikes me the right way and I am hysterical with laughter and David has absolutely no idea why - and through the tears I manage to say, "Oh my God, this is going to be THE. BEST. BLOG POST. EVER. You fed the kids M&M's for breakfast. BWAAA-HA-HA..."

And I'm on the ground now. Unable to speak and I'm kind of holding up one finger, telling him to wait, I'll recover momentarily. But I'm gasping for air and clutching my side. And that's when he threatens to withhold sex in protest. And, of course, this is the last thing I want. 'Cause I like the sex with my husband. A lot. But I'm still laughing so hard there is spit coming out the side of my mouth. And I'm already writing the blog post in my head.

xo YM

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Going Camping. God Help Me.

July 4th weekend. Think of of us.

No, think of me.

Think of me in a tent. Sleeping on the hard ground. Cooking over open fire while attempting not to accidentally dip my sleeve into the flame and set myself ablaze. Think of me in a bathing suit. In broad daylight. (No really, this sucks.) Watching my children play with bugs and dirt. And more bugs. And making mud pies out of camp dirt. And bringing it all into the tent to show me and dropping it into my sleeping bag. And more bugs.

And speaking of bugs, think of me defenseless against those big buzzing things that bang up against the tent every time someone so much as turns on a flashlight so they can pee. And speaking of peeing, guess where I'll be doing that? Not in a bathroom. Oh, and I think I'm going to get my period. On yet another camping trip.

And yet I am happy to be dirty with my family, who I know will enjoy this little outdoor adventure. While I'm changing my tampons in the bushes. And even for this, I am grateful.

I wish you the very best Fourth of July. Love to you all.

xo YM


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The Vulcan Mind Melt on Arthur Avenue

I am no longer a crap mother. Thank you for your kind words and declarations to the contrary. You gave me a much-needed boost.

I am, however, a crap blogger because when I was spending all that quality time with my kids, I wasn't blogging or even thinking about blogging. I didn't even do the twitter, which is like my new secret obsession. Obviously, I must love the little rugrats.

I know this because I was in a Vulcan mind melt with my children, where we shared a single brain and frolicked with abandon in meadows inhabited by butterflies and bunnies, and I was completely focused on their every need. If they wanted juice, I knew it three seconds before they could open their mouths to scream it at me. I confounded them with my attentiveness.


And this was all good until this morning when Lucy begged me to go back to the Internet and my writing and leave her the hell alone. Apparently, they missed barking out orders until I looked up bleary-eyed from my laptop and paid attention to them.

The period of rainbows and unicorns is officially over.



But we had a blast - one of the places we went this weekend was up to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. If you live in NYC, the surrounding area or are visiting, you'll want to take a little day trip there.

I describe it this way: A gigantic playground with a clean and serviceable restroom, surrounded by Italy with some of the best food, markets and specialty produce I've seen. And it's a 15 minute drive from our house - far enough away to make it feel like a treat, close enough to prevent episodes of high-pitched screaming in the car seat torture device invented by members of the Taliban.

We ate chocolate cannoli on the playground and bought freshy-baked bread.


And Lucy and Edie picked out their seeds to plant vegetables and zinnias this spring.


And we ate pizza at Zero Otto Nove and the kids learned to dip their bread in olive oil and we tried different meats and brought home sopressata, home-made mozarella and proscuitto.


And, much to our dismay, we realized that when left to her own devices, Lucy dresses like a sister wife in a polygamist cult.


David suggested we remove any clothes in her closet that she could use to look like a Mennonite.

And we played on the playground until Mr. Softee came around with his seductive music calling us to the truck like the Pied Piper's children and got ice cream cones and ate them on the drive home.

It was all pretty great.

xxoo YM
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Flamenco Beach. Culebra, Puerto Rico

I'm back, people!

I hope you had a great holiday. I wish you the best year this year - the one where you do all the things you have been meaning to and didn't get around to doing in 2008. Or 2007 for that matter. That's the year I want you to have. A healthy, revitalizing, satisfying one.

As for us, we are washing the sand out of the ten loads of laundry that need to get done and throwing away the berries that Lucy picked on the island and stashed in the side compartments of our luggage before they become smashed and smelly and flaked with mold. And we are shedding bathing suits, flip flops and sarongs for winter jackets, fur-lined boots and ugly hats that squash our hair and make us look silly when we take them off. We are slowly getting back into our routines.



A few of you have been asking about our trip and so, I thought I would share with you some of what transpired on our little adventure. It was ridiculous good fun. Just paradise. So, here is the play by play:


First, I get my period the day we get to the island, which is great because as you know, having your period in a tent is AWESOME.

I lose my hand bag on the air train going to JFK and I lose all my ID, the girls passports, keys to the house, credit and bank cards. Gone. I imagine thieves are selling our children's cute little faces and social security numbers to sex traders. I panic, but I do so quietly.

Jet Blue mercifully lets us on the plane without ID, although they give me a very thorough pat down. Frankly, I think they kinda enjoy it. I consider the possibility they might not let me back in the country. David tells me we won't let this ruin the vacation. We don't. He is prepared to raise the girls without me in the event that I must stay behind in Puerto Rico. I am prepared to live out my days on the beach.

We pretend the whole missing purse thing never happened, except for the three or four panic attacks I have in the middle of the night each night, but I tell no one about them and suffer in silence.


David lets Edie play with his credit card on the plane and she loses it. That first night in Puerto Rico we are calling banks and canceling cards. I imagine we will have to live on coconuts and plantains. I leave all our jackets on the plane and have to go back and get people to find our stuff. I feel lucky that our plane didn't crash.

On the ferry from the mainland to the island, while we are in the middle of about 500 people crowding onto a boat, Lucy gets a bloody nose and by this I mean, all of sudden her nose spurts copious amounts of blood everywhere. She has them occasionally, but the suddenness of this one panicks her. Blood covers her face and clothes. We have 5 huge, heavy bags full of camping supplies and equipment, backpacks and we are stuck in a crush of people. We are all doused in blood. Lucy is wailing.

Also, we have to get on this boat, since it is the last one off the mainland. So, we keep moving at a snails pace through the crowd. David holds Lucy. She screams a lot. She keeps bleeding. Nice people hand us tissues, give up there seats and carry our bags. We are all covered in blood. Especially me. I am wearing a light blue silk skirt, the only "nice" outfit I brought. It is covered in red.

On the boat, the bleeding stops. I am joking with Lucy about her bleeding and she is laughing now. We are grateful for all the help and kindness from strangers. I am sure at this point we are going to a nice place, with nice people.


Once on the island, we pretty much never leave the beach.

The water is perfectly clear. Blue like topaz. The girls have no fear of the water because it is transparent. This amazing clear, Caribbean water. They see everything down to their toes. They start with bathing suits but clothes come off as they grow comfortable. They are naked on the beach by day three. Tourists in the village come up to us and tell us that watching Lucy and Edie playing in the surf is the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. We are already famous on an island of 3,000 people. I write in my journal, "Lucy defines doing things with 'abandon'. Watching her play in the water is pure joy."




I am all channeling "Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon". David is my tossle-haired paramour. The children spend all their time in the sand and surf. They barely know we are alive. The waves are my babysitter.




The tent is our home. It is "winter" here. This is what the islanders call it when the temperature drops from 83 to 80 degrees. Very few bugs, which made it not nearly as "rustic" as I thought it would be. Only one flying bug the size of a small bird and it went after some bikini-clad college girl, not me.

I did not scream or cry hysterically even once. A camping record. Usually the coyotes baying at the moon or spiders the size of dinner plates send me into fits of hysterical crying. But not this time. We listened to the waves crash along the beach as we fell asleep every night. It was lovely.


There were chickens everywhere, a little pueblo with small windy streets and a bustling market and there was music, singing and dancing everywhere. The people of Puerto Rico can break out into song anywhere, on line at la tienda, in the water, waiting for the ferry to the mainland. Lucy got to dance daily in the most everyday of places. She couldn't have been happier.










Everything on Culebra is on "Island Time".

For the first couple of days, the neurotic New Yorker in me is distressed. Confused even. Shops say they'll open at 1pm but they really open when someone slowly meanders in around 2:30p. A waitress decides to leisurely eat her own lunch at the bar before she takes our order. Another restaurant doesn't actually use their menu but they are cooking two dishes in the kitchen that day and we can choose from those.

At first, I'm about ready to go all Joe Pesci on someone and lecture them about how to conduct a proper business, until David reminds me that I am a freak - he actually calls me a freak - and says I need to "get with" island time. He's irritating when he's right.

This is when I realize not everyone in the world is neurotic and driven and on the clock. I make a transition and I see that island time has it's perks. Sure, it may take us two hours to get our lunch and no one is interested in "turning over tables" but no one cares that the kids are running around the tables with everyone else's kids, playing with the chickens and the stray dogs in the sun and they keep plying us with Medallas (PR beer)and we are all drunk and warm and calling friends in New York to see if it's below freezing. And so who cares anyway?

I LOVE ISLAND TIME.


By the end of the week, we almost never know what time it is. The sun is our guide. I don't look at a clock, a cell phone or even a mirror. None of that is currency that is required for surviving. We just exist and bake in the hot sun. Not only did I grow used to everything being late, I was a little late sometimes myself. And no one cared. It was liberating. I was nearly un-recognizeable to myself.


And then after 5 days of getting up at sunrise and eating cereal in plastic bowls on the beach and then, running into the waves as the sky spilled orange and yellow and red onto our faces and then, staying there for like 6 hours, while other people joined us and the kids played with other kids and we made friends with strangers in our bathing suits and then, going into town for our main meal, riding with more strangers-turned-friends in the dusty, bouncy publicos that transported people around the island and then, going back to the beach and staying there until sunset and watching gold and then, blue and then, black take hold over the sky, eating a snack of acapurria and rice and beans in the tent and then all of us tired and spent and brown and warm, falling asleep in a big snoozy pile in the tent, only to get up the next morning and do it all over again, and after all this, we packed up our little tent home and dirty and sandy and sun-drenched, we went to Viejo San Juan.


By this time, I am ready for the hotel. This is Mommy's part of the vacation.


And here is where you will see I have the best husband on the planet - he checks us into the best hotel in Old San Juan - El Convento.

The hotel was once a convent - Our lady Carmen of San Jose - built in 1646 and right next to the Iglesia de San Juan Baptiste, a gorgeous church that Lucy loved because it had a very elaborate nativity scene inside. Like a doll house on steroids. The nativity is BIG in Puerto Rico. The girls were digging on all the statuary.

Legend has it that there is a ghost that walks the halls of El Convento, but I bet it's a good ghost since it's probably a nun. I am too desperate to take a long, hot shower to care about the ghost. If I see her I decide I will invite her to join me in the jacuzzi.

Um, oh yeah, this is me in the roof top jacuzzi.


This is what I see while I am in the jacuzzi.


I inform David that if I disappear unexpectedly, the first place they should look is the jacuzzi.

I am dead serious. I LOVE the jacuzzi.


To be honest, I am a hotel girl. I am a poor excuse for a camper. David is the real pro. He loves the outdoors and he wants the girls to have a relationship with the outdoors, not just go from one "box with walls" to another "box with walls". I get the philosophy. I am behind it. I admire it every time he says it. This is so much better for the girls. I know it. But give me a jacuzzi, plush towels and a complimentary cheese plate and I'd sell our tent to the highest bidder and never look back.

Being out doors makes the hotel - a box with four walls - feel more like it's own little adventure. By the time we get to the hotel, I am desperate for it.

But Edie is throwing up now. The ferry to the mainland that made Lucy's nose bleed has now made Edie vomit every 15 minutes or so like clock work. By the time we get into our room, which is late because they weren't ready for us, she and I are covered in vomit. We smell like vomit. We smell like salt and sand and dirt and dried blood and sweat and vomit. Well, the rest of the family smells okay, this is just me.

I appreciate this hotel like no other hotel I have ever been in. I marvel at the hot water, the flushing toilets, the luxurious terry robes, the staff who dote on us like we are celebrities. When we get there, they are serving complimentary wine and cheese on the upstairs terrace.

Like I had been in the wild for years, I make a big heaping plate of cheese and pour myself a goblet of wine. The staff person eyes me with curiosity. I have dirt under my nails and vomit dried to my shirt. I feel like a wolf girl who has just been introduced to civilization. I barely wait to get back to the room before I am wolfing down cheese and gulping wine.

I wash the Flamenco beach sand out of my hair. Lay on the real mattress. My period stops just as I reach a place with plumbing and toilets. They sell underwear in Old San Juan, which makes me feel all fresh and renewed.

Really, clean underpants are all it takes to renew my spirit.

The kids get reacquainted with cartoons in Spanish. Lucy and Edie now speak to every one in clusters of English words mixed with Spanish. We all sort of lay around like lumps in the big bed and regain ourselves before we go out into San Juan.


We are catatonic harpooned whales laying all over the bed.

Then, we recover and enjoy a city so gorgeous that for the rest of the trip I point out beautiful old buildings with "For Sale" signs and beg David to buy a house here. I do this in almost every city we ever visit, mind you. I did it on Culebra, as well - I tried to convince him to buy beach front property as "an investment". He is used to this. I want to live wherever I am. He ignores me.

We eat at this restaurant called "Ostra Cosa" just down from the hotel. The food makes us remember we are human again.


Octopus salad, chorizo with a beautiful garlicky aioli, ceviche of sole, prawns with rice and beans...Heaven for people just coming out of a tent.


We walk.


We show "Baby" (Edie's doll) the sites.


We feed the birds.


We pretend our shoes are cats. And we cuddle them.


David buys a hat.


And instantly becomes an islander.




Lucy is taken with a bride having her picture taken in front of The Iglesia San Juan Batiste and she joins the photographers taking her picture. Here are two she shot.




And the bride is so taken with her, she scoops her up in her arms. A crowd watches and everyone says, "aaah!".


Lucy is so moved she falls into my arms and buries her face in my shoulder. She has looked at this picture non-stop since we got back. She wants to frame it and put it in her room. We never find out the bride's name.

And we meet new friends...lovely, wonderful friends we originally met on the beach in Culebra and then, begged them to come swim in the roof top pool with us in San Juan because we couldn't get enough of them and who, then in return invited us to hang at their beautiful home on the beach. Such good people.


I suspect Lili, Eric and their daughters Valeria and Camila will be friends of ours for a lifetime. Valeria and Lucy are already BFF's.


I get a call on the last day of our trip from a woman at JFK who has my bag. And all it's contents. I am reminded that we live in a good world.

And then we almost miss our plane because David's phone resets itself to the new time zone and we think the plane leaves at 9, but it leaves at 8. And David figures this out at 7, so we're like chucking through the airport trailing our camping gear behind us and two children, one breastfeeding, the other wanting to meander along and pick up fun looking trash she sees on the floor and it's all good until we get to the gate and the guy thinks he can't let me out of Puerto Rico without ID and we stand there and tell him our sad story of the forgotten purse on the air train at JFK and he looks suspicious, but we look completely sincere and maybe too befuddled to be criminals and so, he breaks the law for us and all the tenents of homeland security and let's me get on the plane without ID.

And then, we pass out.





And now we're here. And happy to be home. And happy to have gone. I need a vacation from my vacation.

xxoo YM

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