Entries Tagged 'Fit Girl' ↓

Hormone Martini Recipe

One part early puberty.
One part early peri-menopause.
Mix in a whopping bit of love.
Stir in some house rules in a card game, jokers wild.
Plop in some compound hormones.
Slather on some mean girls from school.
Drizzle some dark chocolate over a smashing headache.
Add a dash of bloating.
Pour over a marriage on the rocks.
Shake vigorously.

I’ll let you know how it turns out in a few years.

I recently wrote an article in Lydia’s Style Magazine about skin cancer.

The part I found most relevant to The Girl Revolution is that UV (utraviolet) rays, the substance that causes skin damage and skin cancer, are cumulative. Meaning, our body stores them in its cells for the duration of our lifetimes and they add up, never disappearing.

I’m a regular sunscreen-user now, but as a teen I layed out and sun worshipped, to get a tan. According to the dermatologists I interviewed, all those hours of laying out are accumulated UV rays that are in my body’s cells and could become skin cancer. They will still be there in my 60s and 80s too. So, I really want to use sunscreen, to rack up as few UV points as  possible during the remainder of my life, so as not to increase the risk.

People accumulate the majority of their lifetime UV rays as children and teens: recess, playing outside, riding bikes, spending entire summers playing in water, sun worshipping and tanning.

The more UV radiation they acquire as children, the higher the risk of skin cancer as adults. UV radiation can also lead to skin damage, like melasma or pregnancy mask, caused by sun exposure and hormones having a war on your face. I had this, it sucked and it was expensive to treat.

The advice of the dermatologists was to use a 30 SPF sunscreen on our children every hour. Not just in the morning. Not just at the pool. But, every day. All Day.

“Children should be applying sunscreen every hour when playing outdoors, including recess and getting to and from school, not just on a summer day at the pool,” said Mary Blattner, M.D., Lydia’s Style Magazine Oct. 2010.

I wasn’t that mom. I was sunscreen-at-the-pool mom. At the end of summer, they were golden and “protected” from burns, I thought. I was informed that this is also wrong, a good tan gives you an SPF protection of 4 (four). Totally inadequate.

My kids hate the sunscreens on the market currently. I have to chase them and insist they put it on. This isn’t a hugely fun thing for me to do every hour that they spend outside. They hate the chemically smell, they hate the greasy texture and feel, they hate that aerosol cloud. They HATE it!

Which is why The Girl Revolution is releasing a skin care line, TGR Body, with several forms of organic, natural, paraben and phthalate-free, sweet smelling, non-greasy sunscreen and sunblock.

Natural Beauty Sunscreen Powder looks a tiny bit like makeup, but it’s sunscreen. I love this mom fake-out that lets daughters feel more grown-up. It’s a good motivator for them to use it. The applicator has a brush on top, sunscreen in bottom. Just dust the brush around your face, done. It’s small enough to carry to school for recess. It comes in porcelain and beige to match skin tones. I can’t wait to show it to you.

Natural Beauty Sunblock Mist is a light, sweet-smelling, non-aerosol spray.

Natural Beauty Sunscreen Lotion feels like silk and smells very light.

For boys, we’ll carry Skin Armor Spray. It’s the same great sunscreen product, but labeled differently.

These sunscreens are natural, organic and safe for the whole family.

I’ll be talking more about the product-line and how excited I am about releasing TGR Body until the release in the next few weeks. I’m so excited!

We’ve enrolled Ainsley in a variety of sports to see which ones she’d excel at and which ones might light something in her.

When her pediatrician told us her BMI was high and we needed to make some changes, we realized our book-worm of a daughter, who lived in a neighborhood, at the time, where it was not super-safe to let her spend hours in the yard by herself and had no friends in the hood, was simply not getting enough exercise. Enter city Rec. leagues: soccer, softball, basketball, Tae Kwon Do.

She’s playing basketball this season and in January, she and Zack will start taking ice skating lessons. Between the first season of basketball and this one, I can see a real difference in her ability to comprehend the game and use her body to make plays. We also intend to enroll both the kids in spring soccer (Zack is finally old enough to play).

Her real passion and talent is swimming. For which, I will take a tremendous amount of credit. I’ve spent entire summers taking my kids to the lake and pool and teaching them the skills of swimming. Not only is swimming super-fun, and a life-skill (so as not to accidentally drown), it can also be highly competitive.

It’s time now, in her development, for Swim Team. She’s good enough and excited enough about the sport to make it worthwhile.

One of our major money goals is to be able to enroll both our kids in some sort of sport that really lights a fire under them. For the exercise, the sense of achievement and belonging to a team and to instill a competitive spirit in them.

I do think a competitive spirit is helpful in America (I kind of hate when they don’t keep score and give everyone a trophy in kid’s sports). The “right to win” doesn’t come naturally to some kids and it’s a necessary skill in our capitalistic society. The ability to run faster and try harder, instead of give up and surrender, when you think you’re being beat is another skill I hope they learn from sports.

My hope is, and the report on Sexualization of Girls by the APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force makes a categorical case for it, that being invested in a sport, being an athlete will help her maintain a sense of self that is not “sexual object” or “here for male entertainment” as she enters her adolescence. The idea being that her sense of her body will be about something more, something deeper and action-oriented, like “my body is skilled, my brain is wired” to swim, or shoot baskets, to run fast, etc., rather than “my body is pleasing to look at and touch for others.”

In other words, a sense of self that is not entirely about sex and how boys perceive her.

The National Women’s Law Center is running a campaign to make sure girls’ sports are funded equally to boys’ sports, this post participates in that campaign. There’s a ton of resources and tools at Rally for Girls’ Sports: She’ll Win More Than A Game.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner and MomsRising.org are supporting an update of the Toxic Substances Control Act, to address endocrine disrupters that mess with girls’ hormones in an effort to fight early childhood puberty.

According to the Journal of Pediatrics more than one in ten girls are starting to develop breasts by age seven, with even higher rates in some communities, Finkbeiner writes in her post “Puberty in Second Grade?”.

Also from her post:

One of the many contributing factors to the rise in early puberty is that young children are exposed to dozens of potentially toxic chemicals on a daily basis.  In fact, endocrine disruptors, which are chemicals that mimic and interfere with hormones, show up in a wide variety of everyday items including: household cleaners, air fresheners, cosmetics, canned foods, and school supplies. These endocrine disruptors can cause the early onset of puberty. [2]
Updating the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is crucial to the health of our kids because, currently TSCA lacks a requirement that chemicals be tested to assess their ability to disrupt hormones.  This means that many of the chemicals we encounter every day have never been tested for safety.  In fact, since the passage of TSCA in 1976, the EPA has required testing of less than 1 percent of the chemicals in commerce!
The TSCA update would require chemical manufacturers to provide basic health and safety information for all chemicals as a condition for staying in or entering the marketplace. It would also, for the first time, make that information public. [3]

Take Action Now by sending a letter to your Congress person by clicking this link. It’s easy, takes a couple of seconds and will greatly impact the lives of girls.

When Ainsley was younger, I suppose I was more naive and optimistic about my powers as a parent. Now that she’s nearing nine, I have the benefit of getting used to the idea of my own powerlessness.

Of course, I have a great deal of influence in her life and over activities she participates in, media she’s exposed to, that sort of thing.

But, there is a great deal about her self and her life that I am ultimately powerless over. It’s like when your baby is born and you’d always intended to have a blond baby and out she comes sporting bold black or red hair. For some reason, you weren’t expecting it and don’t really know how to respond.

I find in myself, and in conversations with other mothers online and off, that a lot of what we hold to be true as mothers is framed in our own personal experience as girls.

For instance, I got my period when I was 12, had to beg for a bra so I wouldn’t be the only 7th grader in the locker room without one. That was also the year I began shaving my legs, wearing make-up, pierced my ears, curled my hair and was devastated because I wasn’t allowed Liz Claiborne perfume and a Guess watch. Being 12 was HUGE in my own personal coming-of-age experience.

Yet, a generation later, girls mature faster. Lots of things go faster, change faster, develop faster. Cursive may, in fact, be obsolete as my 8-year-old just bought her own pink 7″ mini computer money she’s saved.

Puberty is happening faster in white girls by several years. As a mother, it has taken some getting used to that idea. We don’t know why. Scientists, doctors, researchers don’t know why. I’ve researched and reported on it a lot on The Girl Revolution, mainly in an attempt to understand how to prevent this from happening to MY child. Yet, all the sudden – as I come face to face with the reality, some things don’t seem to be relevant anymore.

What happened when we were girls – personally or collectively – is irrelevant.

As a group, generally girls want to stay inside the norm. If the norm changes, but you keep up with it, you’ll probably make out okay. So, if you’re the ONLY kid in your class who doesn’t develop a few years earlier this generation that is probably the occurrence that will be emotionally and socially damaging. To develop earlier than your mother, but at the same rate as the other kids in your age-range, will be the most comforting pace for most girls. Why should SHE care when YOU got boobs?

I wasn’t allowed to have a phone in my room. There was altogether too much privacy in that idea. Yet, I’m probably going to give Ainsley a cell line within the next several months. It makes sense TODAY.

Frankly, I didn’t expect this yet. But, I have yet to make any headway in stopping it, holding it off or reversing it. Some things, I’ve accepted, are beyond my control. One can eradicate BPAs from the home, eliminate hormones in milk, reduce exposure to media, visit physicians, and pray a lot and still, one must surrender to the fact that parents don’t control their children’s physical development.

It really is irrelevant that I didn’t need a bra till I was 12, that I didn’t start my period until after 6th grade, that I didn’t use deodorant or shave my legs until 7th grade. It really doesn’t make any difference to HER experience. I’m positive my parents made these decisions based on the culture we lived in – a predominantly Mormon one, in which this was also the timing of most of the other kids.

What matters in her experience is what other kids are doing now, what is safe and healthy, what she’s emotionally ready for, what the desires of her heart are and what is currently socially acceptable today.

This is her life. Her development and her experience. My job is not to determine the timing of the experience. My job is to support her through whatever her experience turns out to be. My job is the same as every generation of mothers and only the timing is different – to pass on Feminine Wisdom.