Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Inventing Cereal Day



Look, it’s getting silly. It is. It’s too much. There’s now a “National _______ Day” every damn day. And I swear there’s several days dedicated to both donuts and biking to work. (Come to think of it, those two should come in equal proportions.) March 7th is National Cereal Day. It’s one of the few National Days our family observes. The thing is, we've been doing it since the mid-1950s. According to NationalDayCalendar.com no one can “identify the creator of National Cereal Day.”  Well, I would like to remedy that.

This is what love looks like
When I was a kid my mother told me about a glorious day. It was a day to be anticipated and revered in the same light as Christmas or Easter. This was Cereal Day. It was 1982 and I was going to be introduced to a family tradition. You see, my grandmother wasn’t interested in feeding her family the sugary cereals that were coming to prominence during the Mad Men era. My mom and her siblings grew up on Cream of Wheat and Corn Flakes. But grandma wasn’t made of stone. She designated one day each year, March 5th*, as Cereal Day; a day when each member of the family could choose any cereal they wanted. 

My mom was tie-dyed in the wool socks hippie. I was raised in true Berkeley fashion on a diet of sprouts and whole grains. I choked down Mueslix with goat’s milk or granola and soymilk. But my mom was a fool for tradition, so once each year on March 5th, I was allowed to choose any cereal I wanted. I went through phases. I drifted from Cocoa Krispies to Cap’n Crunch with brief forays into Lucky Charms and Froot Loops. As a young adult I continued to celebrate Cereal Day. Even though I was living on my own and could have had any cereal at any time, there was something special about maintaining the discipline and singular joy of waiting for that one time each year.



You need to get the one with the most sugar

As a dad it was a no-brainer that Cereal Day would continue for my kids. Luckily, even though my wife evolved into being an even bigger hippie than my mom, she doesn’t totally hate fun. So Cereal Day lives! My kids look forward to Cereal Day like they look forward to Halloween. They revel in it. They talk about it and plan for it for weeks ahead of time. They have even started their own tradition, mixing all their cereals together into a chocolaty, fruity, marsh mellow morass that makes my teeth hurt as type. None of it would have been possible if not for my grandmother inventing cereal day. Long before the Internet, long before the proliferation of 365-special-interestdays-a-year, a single mother in Berkeley invented a holiday in order to control her children’s diets. I have no idea how the cereal industry got wind of the date, but I can’t entertain it as a coincidence. I'm sure they moved it by two days in order to avoid a controversy, but I'm on to them. My grandmother invented Cereal Day. Your welcome.



Monday, March 5, 2018

(Video) Beyond the Call: Raising Children with Special Needs



I still feel like an imposter here. Not in the imposter syndrome way, but like I really don't belong here. "Here" is the disability community, specifically as someone who has been out here talking about raising kids who have special needs. I didn't set out to be a public voice for raising kids who have disabilities. I started writing about this topic as part of the writing I do about being dad. Then in 2016 I submitted a piece and was chosen to read at the Dad 2.0 conference in Washington D.C. Outside of that, I have had a long association with various disability communities, mostly through my work as an ASL-English interpreter and as an academic specializing in sign language.

With that in mind, I was honored and little surprised when I was invited back to Dad 2.0 as a panelist to discuss raising special needs kids. When I realized I was moderating the panel I was nervous. Who am I to be leading on this issue in any capacity when I know that there are other parents who are far more knowledgable and qualified? I think the best answer is that I'm decent with words and I can keep people on topic and keep conversations moving.


The panel was intimate and became more of a conversation with the audience, than a traditional panel. The panelists and audience brought a range of perspectives and backgrounds from active bloggers and activists, to people working in social services, to dads just now learning about and dealing wit their child's diagnosis.

Some of the conversation revolved around dealing with that initial diagnosis from both an emotional standpoint, and how we spring into action as parents in those early days. We talked about navigating the continuing journey, including some of the things people don't often consider when they think of raising kids with special needs. For example, we don't often talk about how much time parents miss at work and how much instructional time special needs kids miss with pull out time (i.e. speech therapy) and doctor's appointments. These are some of the hidden costs of special needs parenting. Finally, since Dad 2.0 is a bloggers conference, we discussed how much and why we should or shouldn't write about our kids. The consensus is that if you are writing about your special needs experience, it has to be about you and your journey rather than about your child. You need to be telling your story, not theirs.

I hope you'll give the video a listen/watch, and let me know what you think on the Facebook page. Also, please follow our panelists on social media.