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

Sad underwing

Thank you, Judith Viorst, for your children's books. Alas, this very minute I can't put my hand on my copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  It may be in Australia.

When I walked in the warm noon woods today I had to tell myself, "My mama says there aren't any zombies, ghosts, vampires, demons, monsters, fiends, gobins, or things.". It was just an itty-bitty bit scary because there were these big camouflaged moths with sad underwings flying out at me from the tree trunks along the trail.

How big? Nine centimeter wingspan, and hey, there were a whole lot of 'em! Five or six on some trees.Catocala maestosa is the Sad Underwing Moth (Hulst, 1884). Sad Underwear is Viorst's book of poems for children. It may also suggest it's time to clean out the top drawer of the dresser.

Invisible and odorless

The spider usually sets off the smoke detector in August, so I was surprised to arrive home and  hear a repeating piercing beep.  Went upstairs and opened the smoke detector carefully, not to spoil Mario's handiwork. Replaced the 9v battery.  The alarming beeps continued.

Back downstairs, I gingerly opened the thermostat, again remembering Mario's electrical rescue, and replaced the AA batteries.  The beeps were giving me goosebumps.

Upstairs again to check the doorbell chime.  Back downstairs I found a forgotten smoke detector that's wired-in. This was turning into an Edvard Munch moment with bonus stair-climber workout.

Rounding the corner into the bathroom I find the beep source, the carbon monoxide detector I saved from my parents' house. Isn't carbon monoxide a winter killer?  Every CO horror story I've ever heard clamors into my anxiety between the shrieking beeps.

I move the detector to different electrical outlets feeling guilt for never pushing those TEST MONTHLY and RESET buttons. Should I be getting myself outside into the hundred-degree fresh air before I become woozy and unconscious?

There was that spell in junior high when I wouldn't ride in the car in the Nebraska dead of winter without the window open because I was so sure we were all a-gonna die from fumes. It's a miracle my family didn't just drop-kick me out into a snow drift and drive away. This anxiety was between my two phases of moth phobia, but smack in the middle of the pancake anxiety year.


Now, I could just unplug the *%! bleaking CO detector and throw it in the dumpster, then toddle off to beddy-bye. That story would have the pride-goeth outcome where I drift into a happy sleep with a tad bit of nausea before death.  Or I could let the CO detector keep shrieking, and have a sleepless night worrying about dying, kind of like a bad night camping. Or I could maybe call the Fire Department and have them check it out.


Feeling too torn to actually call 9-1-1, I looked up the phone number in the Yellow Pages for our Fire Department.  Sure, wasting those precious seconds could be the difference between life and death, between dying in my sleep and going outside into the hundred degree fresh air to live another dang hot day. Apparently when it is not a 9-1-1 emergency, the Fire Department phone is answered by a cleaning woman who might be your mom. She hems and haws with you about whether or not your CO detector might have gone a little funny in the head.  She reassures you that putting your call through to dispatch will not cost you hundreds of dollars and could be good for your peace of mind, which you are rapidly losing what with all the shrieking barks of that Tasmanian devil CO detector.

So that's how I ended up with four hunky Plano firefighters in their turn-out pants and suspenders in my kitchen taking readings on their carbon monoxide gizmos and filling out official forms.  They took readings near my gas water heater and upstairs near the gas furnace.  When I mentioned that my fireplace is gas, they ask if I had used it recently.  It was clear they might would drive me straight to the loony bin if I answered yes.  

I thanked them profusely for retrieving my peace of mind, and told them I would be calling my 89 year-old next-door neighbor right away.  "I don't want him to have a heart attack seeing the firetruck."  


"We don't either," they said sincerely.








Let's review what we learned in this Unit, boys and girls:

• Firefighters are our community helpers.
• Check your smoke detectors regularly.
• Stock up on batteries.
• Test your electrical outlets monthly.
• A carbon monoxide detector is a good thing to have, but they don't last forever.
• It's good to know a Mario who can fix electrical problems.
• It's wise to check on elderly neighbors in this heat.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

The Bunny Strikes Back

Eventually the new kid will get over bunny anxiety.


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Suggestible

If you tell me I'm in a tsunami evacuation zone, my shoes will already seem wet. Mention, just FYI, that there have been no cougar sightings in a year and a half, and I'll spot one slinking at every turn of the trail.

Add to that a buddy who emails when she spots a bobcat on her driveway, and I can find a saber tooth tiger. And no, I don't want to go camping! Appearing large is the least of my problems.  Make noise!  So there I was singing "Frosty the Snowman" loud and off key on the self-guided nature interpretive trail at Willamette Mission State Park just north of Salem, Oregon on a dark and foggy Monday afternoon.














Except for the cougar possibility, this was a nice two and a half mile walk on level, soggy ground.  I saw the largest black cottonwood in the United States.

My National Geographic Book of Mammals says bobcats (aka wildcats) are shy, solitary, strong, and twice the size of a housecat.  Cougar is another name for mountain lion, puma, or catamount.  Those agile felines can weigh up to two hundred pounds.  Stay calm!  What is that creature crouching by the trail and waiting to pounce on me?

Hark!  I hear reindeer!  Or maybe pumas on the roof.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

"That bad man will come and get us"

We have nothing to fear but fax machines and finger fumbles that wipe out lengthy blog drafts.  And miller moths flying up the legs of our bell-bottom pants making us lose control of our 1961 Plymouth Sport Fury.  The evaporated verbose entry began with the bell-bottoms and the proclamation about the "bad man" by a three year old student.  We were out for a little nature walk just listening to birds, feeling the wind on our skin, seeing squirrels in the trees, and noticing the guy in the parking lot talking on his cellphone.  My what big eyes he had.  My what big teeth and a coffee mug.  My what big ears and a cigarette, and that same navy striped knit shirt he wears any day when he's not meeting clients.

Fear.

Three year olds are afraid of many things.  This is a countdown of things that send them into a mass tizzy:

1. thunder
2. ants
3. garbage trucks
4. loud toilets
5. fresh fruit
6. sirens
7. spiders
8. bees
9. fire trucks
10. power failures
11. new vegetables
12. foods touching each other
13. paint on hands
14. strangers
15. shots

Once upon a time I was frightened of big cities, not having ever visited one.  I called my fear "metrophobia".  On my first trip to Washington, D.C. I overcame much of that fear by learning to negotiate the Metro transit system.  Twenty-five years later I still love the DC subway system except for the out-of-service escalators..

We have nothing to fear but faxing itself.  FDR did not say that, but it is still true.  My metrophobia is mostly gone, but I'm holding firm to faxophobia.  There are things in this world that are really scary--hunger, abuse, exploitation, lack of clean water, war, gang violence, long-term unemployment.  I was going to make jokes about credit card debt, termite swarms, old age, and other things that will come and get us.

I don't know whether to read an old Nancy Drew mystery with a black widow spider, or to watch the quicksand scene from Lawrence of Arabia.  It is thundering.  Angels are bowling.  Christian soldiers are marching onward.  Mothers are serving brussels sprouts to innocent preschoolers.  Moths are just waiting for you to flick on the bathroom light in the middle of the night.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Someday my prince will bowl

See the princess with the bow in her hair?  I didn't either.  Small students were working on a collage of things that begin with S.  They were choosing images from a basket well-stocked with pictures of shells, ships, socks, soccer, smiles, sheep, snakes, snowflakes, plus sugar and spice and everything nice.

This is a bad cellphone photo, but you get the idea of their collage collaboration.  They found pictures of a snowman, spaghetti, the space shuttle, and Snow White!  Yes, that brunette with the bow in her hair must be Snow White, or at least Annette Funicello.

On a more serious note, Dad can no longer remember his SSN#, and he is hazy about his date of birth. This is complicating matters as we try to update his mailing address with various financial, insurance, and governmental entities. Banks want to chat with Dad about these security issues. Dad can hardly hold the cellphone to his ear, and he is pulling random numbers out of the air.


My parents did a great job of preparing for cremation, do-not-resuscitate orders, power of attorney, and many financial transitions. They faced their own mortality, stashed away funds for their old age, paid off their mortgage, and tried to arrange their affairs. Still, they couldn't visualize my father outliving his younger wife. They didn't realize their art teacher/power of attorney daughter would be so dense. They avoided the scenario of long-term care in a skilled nursing facility with vastly decreased cognitive abilities. Who can blame them? Who wants to imagine themselves in that picture?

 

Can you say s-s-s-s-SCARY?

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Do not follow produce into that good night

I offer a motto on this 2011 New Years Day: 

Never follow a pick-up truck loaded with large fruits and/or veggies. 

This guiding principle for life's journey came to me a dozen years ago on an I-35 entrance ramp in Austin, TX.  My eldest son, Speech-Debate, had just spent a few days at the University of Texas attending an honors colloquium for high school seniors.  The other two guys and I drove down to collect him.  Heading home we pulled onto the Interstate behind a pick-up filled with cantaloupes.  Melons started bouncing out of the truck bed and onto the highway, all around our Buick.  Boing-guh, boing-guh, boing-guh!

During this week's long road trip bringing Dad to Texas, we were stuck behind a white pick-up truck carrying watermelons.  Nine hours into a twelve-hour drive Dad discovered the Jeep Commander's passenger side sun visor. He could reach it and maneuver it to the side window and back. The low sun blazed into my eyes, and out, leaving trails like Sixties Kodak flashbulbs. The Arbuckles added intermittent deep purple shadows between flashes. The pick-up's cargo added the threat of imminent watermelon attack. One hill I got ahead of the pick-up. The next I was back behind the danger.  Post Traumatic Cantaloupe Syndrome made it very scary.  Repeat.  Repeat.

My sister and I preferred to compare our four-state drive to Thelma and Louise, but Rodney Dangerfield and Chevy Chase popped to mind. In 1986's Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield's character is inspired by Sally Kellerman's reading of a Dylan Thomas poem .  Nobody will mistake this for a cinema classic, but it was my introduction to the poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And against following the watermelon!
 © 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

A scary concept for Halloween

We were having lunch at the picnic tables Wednesday, and comparing notes about our costumes for the upcoming school Halloween party. The preschool kids at my table announced they would be a ladybug, a witch, Supergirl, and a Barbie Diva (registered trademark). They wondered what I would be, so I chose an Art Teacher Diva (trademark pending).  

"OH. MY. GOSH," said Supergirl.

My attire rarely elicits this sort of reaction,
but I must say I looked fabulous, Darling!

The preschool students arrived today dressed as ladybugs, firefighters, police officer, cardiologist, bumblebee, fairy, princess, knight, Dorothy, Spiderman, football player, pink leopard, witch/cat/pumpkin girls, and the Barbie Diva. 



I arrived in my itchy/crunchy white petticoat, white ruched gloves reaching to just below the elbow, my mother's peachy-orange costume necklace with matching clip-on earrings, a vintage black velvet hat with added russet and black plumes, the white feather boa from my son's wedding dance, and a few basic black underlying items of apparel.

"Are you the queen of London?," a seven year-old Rosa Parks asked. 
"No, but I had tea with her last week," I replied with my pinkie out.

The six to nine year-old students dressed up as "real people".  Most were the usual suspects like Rosa Parks and Pocahontas, Marco Polo, Amelia Earhart, some hockey player, "myself", Marie Curie, a squire training to be a knight, Christopher Columbus, an Iranian princess, Martha Washington, Julius Caesar, Davy Crockett, a ballerina, a couple students I never got to ask,

AND THEN THERE WAS

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg back when she was an over-achieving high school cheerleader in Brooklyn! That may be the scariest concept for this Halloween.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

A good week for spiders

Spiders portend good luck according to my dream-guide friend. I've had lots of luck finding and photographing spiders this week. Maybe that's because I read Gerald McDermott's Anansi the Spider to the extended-day children. When Anansi got in a predicament, his six children worked together, each using a special ability, to extricate their father. And, the moon ended up in the sky, which is good!

Spiders' special ability to spin webs probably inspired human inventions of spinning, weaving, knots, and nets. Spiders certainly inspired myths and legends. Every time I spy a dewy web sparkling in the sunlight I feel transported to Aladdin's cave of jewels.

Was Helen Augusta Blanchard, the inventor of the zigzag sewing machine (1873), inspired by spider webs? Alas, there are so many things it would be interesting to learn, and so little time. The zigzag pattern appeared in most of my lucky spider webs this week. The zigzag is called a Stabilimenta, but stabilization is not thought to be its purpose.



Thanks to the macro function on my little Canon camera, the designs on spiders' bodies have been revealed. Each spider seems like a design for a Persian rug or Navajo blanket. The markings are amazingly intricate whether the spider is the size of a pencil lead, or the size of my thumb.




Spider education in my childhood was limited. Nancy Drew's cases with black widow spiders in old attics fueled scary slumber party stories. Camp Fire Girl warnings about brown recluse "fiddle-back" spiders taught me to shake out any shoe that hadn't been worn for awhile and to be very wary of violins. Lazy summer evenings sprawled on the warm concrete driveway with the other neighborhood kids included building obstacles for Daddy-Long-Legs between hopscotch and jacks. We didn't learn anything about the beneficial spiders in nature.

I'm including a photo of the biggest spider I ever saw outside of a "bug zoo". It was among the cattails at the bottom of the Oak Point Preserve pond. Its leg span was the size of my hand. And instead of feeling arachnophobic, I was cheering this Argiope girl's capture of a large grasshopper for her lunch. I've known lots of red-blooded grown-up American males who were mighty scared of spiders. Me, I just get the heebie-jeebies from grasshoppers.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

We have nothing to fear but pink eye itself

Don't even say the words out loud. Don't. Just planting the idea in the mind of the preschool teacher is cruel punishment. I dug out the old thesaurus to catalog the woes alphabetically. Fill in the blanks with your #2 lead pencil to indicate your terror threat level.

[ ] apprehension

[ ] anxiety

[ ] distress

[ ] dread

[ ] fear

[ ] itch

[ ] moan

[ ] panic

[ ] sneeze

[ ] snurfle

[ ] tingle

[ ] whine

[ ] worry

Who put the junct in conjunctivitis? Who put the pink in the pinky dinky pink eye?

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Marmot Day, 1978

Wish I could fit in those jeans, but so glad I'm not that clueless! Considering how uninformed we were on this backpacking trek in the San Juan National Forest above Durango, Colorado, I'm glad to have survived with only the occasional recurring lost marmot nightmare.

It's Greta Groundhog Day, a silly holiday I never forget. In my elementary school class, my friend Greta celebrated her birthday every Groundhog Day.

In Alaska, today is Marmot Day. My personal Marmot Day [pMD] was in the snowy mid-summer. It was the first real vacation with my law-student spouse, and our budget for the two weeks was slightly over $200. My mom slipped me another hundred in case something broke on our puke-yellow Chevy Nova.

In the photo I'm smiling because no bears ate me through the whole night while I tried to sleep on the crunchy vegetation and steep slope. As you may note, I can see my shadow. That meant eighteen more years of marriage!

We were somewhere in the vicinity of Kennebec Pass, and about to encounter an abandoned mine area populated by a couple hundred chirping live fuzzy hand-puppets. They were watching our every clumsy move across the snow, and singing a warning that we were way off the beaten trail. I figured these creatures were a Greek chorus of groundhogs warning of impending tragedy.

Only after I returned to civilization and my library did I identify these creatures as marmots. My students are having some Groundhog Day ID troubles, too. We made groundhog stick puppets today, and learned groundhog poems. We reinforced concepts of months, seasons, cloudy and sunny, hibernation, and shadows. We talked about tunnels and living underground. At the end of the day the kids waiting for their rides in car line said the puppets were prairie dogs and brown dogs. Oh, Greta! We really tried, but it just didn't sink in.

A topo map of preschool will lead to many abandoned marmot mines!

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Hummus phobia overcome

It's only the third of January, but I've already added my new food of the year. Cue the theme song from "Chariots of Fire"! I've overcome my terror of hummus.

Running in cinematic slow motion through the Kroger olive bar to get some roasted red peppers (domestic), then down the canned beans aisle to get the chickpeas, I'm feeling the burn. Thank heaven I already had the cream cheese, olive oil, garlic clove, lime juice, and paprika, so I sprinted toward the tape.

The Woolly Mammoth tried to convert me to hummus in '08. "Until I know what's in the stuff, I'm not going there," I said. It took an interview with Nigella Lawson on NPR to convince me hummus might actually be edible if I made it myself.

And, oh, it is so good I say on Triscuits and boats and planes and trains! That Sam-I-Am is doing high fives and cartwheels at the finish line.

Next up--A friend believes kale is edible. Yeah, right.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Scary Sci-Fi Movie

Although my young students are incredibly brilliant, they aren't always the very first persons to say the most fabulous thing. And so, I regret to say, other people used the word "tyranntula" before today. Still, the little girl gave her pronunciation a certain Soviet era flourish.

"Tyranntula" is such a flashback to the scary black and white sci-fi tv shows of my Cold War childhood. We watched those shows sitting on the cork tile flooring in the basement of the house next door. We sat so close to the tv, and with the lights off, it's a wonder we didn't all go blind. That's because the father of that house (who never knew best, or ever, ever got to be the head of household) was snoring loudly in his recliner.

You bet "Tyranntula" is one of those movies with poor safety procedures in the laboratory, a clueless young assistant who's taken the boss' daughter out in his roadster on that road between the wheatfields, and some seriously grainy photography. You know to the bottom of your Skips tennis shoes that far scarier things lurk behind the plastic beaded "bamboo" curtain to the laundry room off to your right as you sit crosslegged. You are terrified of what will certainly happen to you should you spill your Nestle's Quik, toy with the crust of your tuna fish sandwich, or--GASP--take too teensy bites of your red delicious. You would rather be chased down, shredded, and slurpied by a giant reptilian spider than get crosswise with the true head of that house. You know far well what happened to the little kid who didn't eat all his hot dog, spilled Kool-Aid, and then wet his pants in terror. It was far worse than any Twilight Zone episode. He was just a shell, an automaton, after that unfortunate episode. I bet he's still in therapy fifty years later.

In the post-Soviet era, we still have some scary possibilities. We could have to pronounce the new Russian president's name on the air. Yes, Dmitri Medvedev, "med-VYED-eff", could be the foreign correspondent's equivalent of spilled Nestle's Quik.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Arachnophobia and Other Fears

Spiders are cool. They pose for the camera in their designer outfits. They are so much more cooperative than flying insects in that regard. They are artists, too, or at least skilled craftsmen.

Sure, there are a few kinds of dangerous spiders. Texas has nine-hundred types of spiders (all of them working full time to fill my condo with cobwebs for that Miss Haversham wedding cake decor). Two or three of the types are dangerous to humans. It's always a good idea to shake out shoes and boots that have been sitting in the back of the closet or behind the garden door for months at a time.

The macro function on my hand-me-down camera has brought me up close with spiders, and I'm anxious to learn more about them. The more I learn, the more curious I'll become, and the more in awe.

Our teaching intern is arachnophobic, but she is getting bolder being exposed to our infectious enthusiasm for spiders. When she finally got to see a spider catch and wrap its prey in silk she was cheering like a sports fan. This is her spider in action:



Phobias are irrational and persistent fears that interfere with normal life, coupled with excessive avoidance behaviors. At times in my life I've been pretty irrational and afraid of making telephone calls, and of big cities. I somewhat jokingly called these fears phonophobia and metrophobia.

I still avoid making phone calls, but I can mostly function in regular society nowadays. There are many of us out there who would rather write than call. We have the ability to edit and also to control the speed of communication when we write. Some people are just afraid their fingers are too fat for the buttons on the cell phone, or more painfully, too fat for the rotary dial. I looked at the Reverse Index of Phobias, but didn't find "fat finger phobias".

"Metrophobia" seems to mean fear of poetry, which I don't have! Thank heaven there's hope for poetry-phobic folks if they use their fat fingers to dial the 1-800 number right now.

Maybe I had metropolitanophobia, BigApplophobia, or urbanophobia. Could have been a case of SMSAophobia (fear of U.S. Census Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas). Anyway, I'm mostly over it.



Back at Eastridge Elementary I suffered from Neapolitanophobia. The possibility that three-flavored ice cream slices would be served at a birthday party filled me with dread. I knew I could eat the chocolate and vanilla, but was afraid I wouldn't like the strawberry. I was paralyzed by fear that the mom next door would yell at me for not eating the strawberry ice cream. I was creeped out knowing the whole thing would melt into one very ugly color of goo while I was worrying. I'm a grown-up now, and I can just eat the chocolate and vanilla if I want.

For most of my Wonder Years, I was truly, persistently, and irrationally afraid of moths. That is Mottephobia according to the Phobia Index. [You just thought Mottephobia was the fear of apple juice boxes!] Fortunately, the more I learned about moths, the less fearful I became.

I took these photos at the Elm Fork Nature Preserve in Carrollton today. I'm embarrassed to admit that when I saw them on my computer screen, my brain started playing an ancient recording of Glen Campbell singing "Wichita Lineman".





(Written by Jimmy Webb)

I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road
Searchin' in the sun for another overload
I hear you singin' in the wire, I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

I know I need a small vacation but it don't look like rain
And if it snows that stretch down south won't ever stand the strain
And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

By the time I get to Phoenix I'll be over my Glen Campbellophobia!


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder