We have nothing to fear but puppeteers

And fear itself, and giants and fairs, oh my!  But we might be overreacting about dirt.

Been a rough couple weeks with very anxious preschoolers.  One little guy was totally freaked out by a visit to the State Fair of Texas, and could not nap for days. I don't think he was sleeping much at night, either, as he was in tears most of the week and barely able to function.  And no, the little dude did not witness Big Tex going up in flames.

I have my own state fair anxieties. What are normal fears at age three, four, five, fifty+?  Growing Up Brave: Expert Strategies for Helping Your Child Overcome Fear, Stress, and Anxiety, by Dr. Donna Pincus, was a good guide on this topic.  Good reminders for the Halloween season, too!

Normal fears for preschoolers, ages 3-5:

• Costumed characters
• Ghosts
• Clowns
• Monsters
• The dark
• Sleeping alone
• Separation anxiety
• Specific fears such as dogs, bugs, water, blood, or elevators

And for all ages, debilitating anxiety and excessive stress make kids unable to store and retrieve information, to focus, and therefore to learn.

A second student is absolutely terrified of puppets.  She can play with a puppet herself, but seeing a puppet show sends her into a massive panic attack. Just anticipating an upcoming puppet show sets her into terror. Rather than remove her before the puppet show, we are trying to give her the coping skills to ride it out and the cognitive tools to understand the situation.

As for dirt, I'm just beginning An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Disorders, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff.  The hypothesis is that medical elimination of bacteria, viruses, and parasites has brought a new slew of ailments in the developed world.  Ignoring the evolutionary functions of these "bugs" may be contributing or causing the skyrocketing rates of peanut allergies, autism, inflammatory bowel diseases, eczema, rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and asthma.  The costs of these diseases are in the billions of dollars each year. 

The book reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Kirkus have been very intriguing.









© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Rearing caterpillars & frass champions

It's been a poopy hornworm day on both fronts--school and home. Hornworms are those ENORMOUS CAMOUFLAGED DEVOURERS wiping your tomato and pepper plants right off the map.

Caterpillar poop is called "frass", and hornworms are the Texas State Fair champions of frass. They would hold the Olympic World Title of frass if they cared about anything besides eating. They are so good at what they do naturally that it's frightening to consider the possibility of hornworms training with coaches named "Bela" and using performance enhancers.

Tomato hornworms [which are actually hawk moth caterpillars, not worms] are a major garden pest, so I went to the source for pest info, Insects in the City, for a factsheet. Scrolling down through the insect pests I found:

Caterpillars
Asps & Other Stinging Caterpillars
Rearing Caterpillars

This made sense in a confused super-cowgirl mindset. Hornworms do have those nasty pronghorns on their bezoozies. They rear up in a threatening manner then hold very tight when school kids are trying to pluck them off the tomato plants. I bet Slim Pickens could ride a rearing hornworm into a nuclear detonation, and it would still keep eating and creating frass.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Equestrian?

"When you die they make you into a statue." The preschoolers are discussing death and Bibles while chewing PB&J sandwiches with their mouths open. It's scary. What if the statue is formed from masticated Wonder Bread?

At the State Fair someone carves a likeness of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, or the champion bull from a giant blob of butter. When I die, I hope I won't be sculpted in butter. And when I'm dead, dead and gone, there'll by three sons born wondering how their mom was turned into a Gaston Lachaise "Floating Nude" sculpture!

The talented songwriter Laura Nyro died of ovarian cancer in 1997 when she was only forty-nine. She sold her first song to Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1966. It goes like this:

And when I die and when I'm dead, dead and gone,
there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on.

I'm not scared of dying and I don't really care.
If it's peace you find in dying, well, then let the time be near.
If it's peace you find in dying, when dying time is here,
just bundle up my coffin cause it's cold way down there,
I hear that's it's cold way down there, yeah, crazy cold way down there.

And when I die and when I'm gone, there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on.

My troubles are many, they're as deep as a well.
I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell.
Swear there ain't no heaven and pray there ain't no hell,
but I'll never know by living, only my dying will tell,
only my dying will tell, yeah, only my dying will tell.

And when I die and when I'm gone, there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on.

Give me my freedom for as long as I be.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
and all I ask of dying is to go naturally, only want to go naturally.
Don't want to go by the devil,
don't want to go by the demon,
don't want to go by Satan,
don't want to die uneasy,
just let me go naturally.




© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Unplant a Bush

Enjoyed a quick trip to the Texas Discovery Garden at Fair Park this afternoon to just take in the butterfly action. Such variety of species in a small plot of butterfly favorite plants had me feeling I'd stepped into a popcorn popper of butterflies. Most of them did not cooperate with my amateur photo attempts. I do like this photo showing the long proboscis of a cloudless sulphur. I love when the camera can get in close and with far more detail than my eyes can see. Seeing butterflies slurp up nectar at the Garden made me drive ASAP to Sonic for a limeade!

"Save the Earth, Unplant a Bush" was on a bumper sticker in the TDG parking lot.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Fair Day

Cultural differences can lead to confusion. There weren't any classes at my little school yesterday because it was "Fair Day".


When my eldest son started school I was surprised to find "Fair Day" on the school calendar, and a free State Fair admission in his take-home folder. Kids get off school to eat cotton candy??? I didn't get it. In my own school days, classes didn't start until the first Monday after Labor Day, after our state fair ended.


Our international families struggled to understand this strange Texas holiday:

• Was the school having a fair? No.


• Were we taking the children to a fair? No.


• What time should the children arrive on Monday? Not until Tuesday!


• What would teachers be doing? Sleeping late, eating bagels, and getting haircuts.

Many students arrived today with fresh new handsome haircuts. A few were sleeping late after a rough day on the Tilt-a-Whirl.



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Pony Rides

Spent the morning outside corralling twenty-eight preschoolers while they were having their photos taken on a pony. This once-a-year event requires standing in the grass slapping mosquitoes, making sure the kids don't run into the parking lot, making sure they hold onto their name card and don't cut in line, keeping them from touching and pushing everyone around them, all the while hearing them chant:

Inky Binky Bonky
Daddy had a donkey.
The donkey died.
Daddy cried.
Inky Binky Bonky.

That's the favorite recess rhyme this week, but it seemed rather dismal next to the long-suffering photographer's ponies.

I'm sure the photographer and his wife thought it would be a fun business when they started taking Wild West kiddie photos years ago. Imagine how many times in a quarter century you could put a child on the pony, put the bandanna, vest, chaps, and hat on the child, get the child to look photogenic, take off the costume, and transfer the child to another pony for a three minute ride.

A quarter century ago I became a parent. Thank heaven the job of parenting has much more variety and a lot more laughing over the long run. On any given day it can seem a lot like pony ride photography though:

Change the diaper
Put on snowsuit
Buckle in carseat
Sing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" while driving
Get out of carseat
Take off snowsuit
Change the diaper
EIEIO!

I was already having pony ride flashbacks when I opened my morning newspaper to read about the Texas State Fair is opening with a new sixty-five-foot high gondola Texas SkyWay ride. Pony rides and state fair gondola tragedies are forever linked in my mind.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Zat was Venn, Diz is Now

What is a Venn diagram? You know them, even if you don't know you do. They are those intersecting circle illustrations that describe specific populations.



First, you lassoo all women in one corral. Then you swing your lariat around everyone in the United States. Next you snare everybody born 1946-1956 in a noose. Then you enclose all the art teachers in a pink bubble, and all bloggers in a cyber circle. These circles all buy tickets for the bumper cars at the Texas State Fair where they bump into and overlap each other. Don Ho sings "Tiny Bubbles" with Lawrence Welk's champagne music bubble machine and Mr. Moose dropping ping pong balls on Captain Kangaroo.

Hua li'i
I ka waina
Au hau'oli
I ka wa au inu

Tiny bubbles
Make me warm all over
With a feelin' that
I'm gonna love you till the end of time

Who a leakied is so last week. This week it is who a barfied. Put a dozen first graders in a circle. One of them projectile vomits. In their panic and body-functions exhilaration, the eleven run right through the barf on the rug in attempts to flee. This requires a different diagram and a big can of Lysol.

The elementary art students had different ideas about Robert McCloskey's childrens' classic, Blueberries For Sal. One student drew manic overlapping circles for giant blueberries. He was making a "Venn berrygram!"

Fair Day

Many school kids get a day off every year to attend their State Fair. My personal Fair Day is something different, and can't be marked on the calendar in advance. I had a minor version of Fair Day when I read about Eddie the maintenance man at Ruby Pier amusement park in Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven.

This year my major Fair Day was set off by Friday's Dallas Morning News front page headline, "Fair officials see tram on horizon". Yikes. The story's subheadlines read, "Exclusive: Aerial cars called safer than those in '79 crash, key to plan", and "Memories of a fatal gondola accident 26 years ago still haunt one witness".

What stunned me was that fairs still had gondola rides in 1979, over a decade after a fatal tram ride accident at the Nebraska State Fair. The images were back. The vivid memory of looking through a pony ride fence at a parade of wailing emergency vehicles rushing into the fairgrounds in Lincoln, and then speeding back out again.

It was the first time I ever went to the fair. My parents picked a gray Sunday morning when it would not be very crowded. We were not on the midway. We were in the 4H animal barns. I think we were watching farmers chase a large pig that got out of its pen and was running around the aisles when we became aware of the sirens. As we went from barn to barn the sirens continued. Eventually we came to a place where the entrance and all the ambulances were visible. As we watched a pony ride go around and around in the dirt we started to hear people say that something must have happened on the midway. All my parents knew to do was keep we three kids from freaking out, and not go to our car to leave the fairgrounds and get in the way of the ambulances. I don't know how long we watched the ponies and the ambulances. It seemed like hours. I can see my little brother and sister riding the ponies. I may not have gone on the ride.

It was difficult to pinpoint the date of the Nebraska ride collapse. I sensed it was after JFK's assassination when I was in third grade. I bet it was closer to sixth grade when I would have felt peer pressure from the neighbor kids because, not only did I not have any Beatles records, I had never been to the State Fair or Disneyland. I was sure it was before my grandma broke her hip the week of the Pierce, Nebraska summer parade and street carnival in 1967.

Nebraska newspapers have online archives going back maybe a week. I spent too much of this weekend Googling and Dogpiling, hunting for the answer. It was in a place I should know by now to check first, the online archives of the New York Times. The midway ride fell in Lincoln Sunday, September 5, 1965. The day after the accident the Times ran an Associated Press story, "2 Killed, 53 Hurt as Towers of Cable Car Ride Topple". It included an AP wirephoto of firemen using a lift to reach passengers trapped in the gondolas, an effort that took nearly an hour.

Two persons were killed and fifty-three injured when two forty-foot steel towers supporting the ride toppled, according to the AP story. I believe several other persons died of their injuries in the following days.

There are significant differences between the accidents at the Nebraska and Texas fairs. The Nebraska ride traveled thirty-five feet above the ground, compared to eighty-five feet in Texas. I have yet to find documentation, but I believe the Nebraska ride was part of a traveling carnival "mobile venue" temporary installation. The Texas skyride was a permanent installation at a fixed site. I read quite a bit about a lawsuit following the Texas collapse, The State Fair of Texas v. The Consumer Products Safety Commission, in a legal article "The Continuing Showdown Over Who Should Regulate Amusement Attraction Safety", but I'm unqualified to comment on any of it. Carnival rides are regulated by the Texas Department of Insurance, Loss Control Regulation. In Nebraska they are regulated by the Nebraska Workforce Development, Office of Safety and Labor Standards.

I don't wonder that Todd Swanson, the witness interviewed in the Dallas Morning News story says he won't go "anywhere with makeshift rides", and he won't go see the planned new Fair Park tram. When he closes his eyes he might still see the man crushed by the gondola. I just see ambulances through a pony ride fence.

According to an Historic Fair Park website timeline about the Texas fairgrounds in Dallas:
1956 Monorail installed in time for State Fair. $400,000 of bond money allocated for Fair Park expansion Aug.-Sept. 1964 Monorail dismantled and “Swiss Sky Ride” erected in its place.
Dec. 1971 State Fair purchases and takes over operation of Swiss Skyride.
Oct. 21, 1979 Swiss Skyride accident results in 1 death and 17 injured fairgoers. Ride is closed down, never to reopen.
Oct. 1985 “The Texas Star,” a huge Ferris wheel, begins operating on the Midway.