Read Online Hungry by Sheila Himmel - Free Book Online

worried. Yummers Too continues the theme, with the addition of Emily’s favorite relative, Uncle Fatty Pig, and Emily eating her way through the inventory of Healthy Harriet’s food store. She has to tell Harriet, “I lost control.” Another interpretation: The Yummers books are about what happens when you panic about your weight.
     
    lisa: Emily is a pig! Is she binge eating or just being a pig? I think it would be different if the Emily character was a person, but she’s just being a hungry pig. A child wouldn’t read that much into it. I loved this book as a kid.
    And there is a lesson at the end because Emily gets sick, so there are consequences to her actions. Maybe Eugene, her friend, should have stopped her. But whether or not Yummers! carries a positive message, it is charming.
     
    sheila: How do parents find the right books and messages? First, you reconvene the team of advisers from when you were pregnant, and add knowledgeable friends and relatives with slightly older children. As your children grow and their needs shift, you’ll naturally recruit new advisers, but the early ones may point the working parent to the right daycare center, which itself will be a great source of expertise and comfort. After my six-month maternity leaves, I went back to work and the kids went to the Learning Center, a highly recommended program with the corny acronym TLC. Nearly three decades later, TLC is going strong, with a long waiting list and an outstanding professional staff who get health benefits. The center closes at 5:30 p.m., early for working parents but powerful incentive to get home. Whenever Ned or I arrived, bedraggled from the office and the rush-hour freeway, TLC teachers were still fresh.
    The food was fresh, too, and central to the program. It still is, as the center’s website states:
    We do not serve food or snacks with sugar, and we recommend that you feed your child a breakfast low in sugar. Please do not send your child to TLC with any gum, candy, or sweet food. If you wish to send a treat for snack time or your child’s birthday, a holiday, or your child’s last day at TLC, please consult the director for a list of healthy possibilities.
    We became friends with several of the teachers, went to their weddings, and formed a sort of eating club to explore Asian and South American cuisines in restaurants and in our homes. It was a little like the gourmet group my parents had, dabbling mainly in the foods of Europe, except that then the mothers did all the work. I thought their gourmet group was even dumber than bridge, the card game in which the mothers seemed more often to be the “dummy.”
    The TLC teachers had a remarkably natural way of talking to young children without patronizing them. It is a place for children with a “whole-child” philosophy, featuring tenets like this:
    We encourage the children to: show kindness, courtesy, and tolerance, be self-directed, develop their potential as loving human beings, to express their thoughts and feelings.
    While Lisa and Jacob were developing their potential, we looked for an elementary school to keep up the good work. Palo Alto children have great choices in the public school system: excellent neighborhood schools and three alternative schools, at no extra expense.
    We had heard about Ohlone and Hoover, the two alternative schools open when Jacob was ready for kindergarten: one named for the Native Americans of California’s Central Coast, the other for Hoover, as in Herbert. Hoover’s big contribution to education was to proclaim: “Children are our most valuable resource.” More famously, while campaigning for president in 1928, Hoover predicted, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” That was a few months before the stock market crash.
    Hoover Elementary School is about solid academics, fabulous test scores, and “a quiet and orderly environment.” Ohlone is about