Saturday, April 18, 2009

What are we feeding this kid?

Last week, if memory serves me correctly, my son Ari was shorter than me. And sometime over the past week of eating matzah three meals a day, he grew about two or three inches and now he is indisputably taller than me. How did that happen? Who grows three inches on a diet of matzah and almost no sleep? And more important, why has that never happened to me? I am the queen of sleep-avoidance and I have a lousy diet. That should be good for a few vertical inches here and there.

Boys in puberty are not my area of expertise. And after a quick check of a website addressing this matter , I realize that I will never be privy to most of the changes that may have already occurred or will soon occur. In fact, I am not sure really want to know any more about them than is absolutely necessary. However, as to the matter of height, the website says:

"This is the most obvious physical change and is typically about two years after the onset of the very first signs of puberty. The 'growth spurt' lasts about two to three years. A boy achieves about 25% of his final adult height during the growth spurt, and he will gain an average of 3.5 inches a year during this time. This compares to 2.3 inches per year in the prepubertal male."


All I have to say is "ewwww". What happened to my baby? He was such a cute little guy. He was so funny that his nursery school teacher told me she often couldn't finish reading an entire story to the class because his innocent comments were so hysterically funny that she couldn't stop laughing long enough to continue reading. He is also the kid who went ballistic and cried for more than an hour when I couldn't figure out what he wanted when he asked for a "chillazon" -- which turns out to be the hebrew word for "snail". He was also the guy who almost went into cardiac arrest at age almost two when he met his hero Barney face-to-face on a snowy street corner in Toronto.

And now he is in puberty??????

I know in my heart that it is all down hill from here. His voice will change; he will get smellier and harrier. He will eat everything that I made for dinner for the entire family. And then one day he will meet a nice girl (who I am sure I will not like; yes, I can tell already) and that will be that. No matter how hard I look I can't find a light at the end of this tunnel.

When we realized that he had had this little growth spurt, it was quite a topic of conversation in our house for a few hours. Then the reality of the situation dawned on me. He is becoming a man. And then reality number two: Overall, I am not that fond of men. I mean "men" in the broad sense of the word. You know, the ones who start wars, enslave women, and get into deadly pissing matches over who has the biggest or fastest or most powerful whatever.

I know that's a lot to read into one growth spurt, but John Glenn said it first: "one small step for man, one big step for mankind."

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