Change Becomes Change

Church's Chicken new ad campaign - you know it's not good

You may not be familiar with Church's Chicken but they're a fast-food outlet, primarily in the south, serving up Fried jalapenos, chicken fried steak and fried chicken, just about any way you want it. Right about now, you might be wondering why I'm writing about fried chicken.

This week, Church's Chicken launched a new advertising campaign called "You know it's good" along with some social media activities, and interactive elements. The campaign is targeted to grow their business with multi-cultural urban youth. Yes, the same group I told you about in an earlier post that struggles with eating balanced, healthy meals while facing diabetes, high-blood pressure, and obesity issues.

Since I've never been to a Church's Chicken before, I checked out their nutritional information.

• All of their entrees contain trans fats
• I'm not sure what they're doing to okra, but there's 22g of fat in this vegetable side and it's one of their many sides with trans fats
• Their Bigger Better Chicken Sandwich with Cheese contains 510 calories and 27g of fat - about the same as a Big Mac or a Starbucks Strawberry & Crème Frappuccino
• The side order of jalapeno's are the healthiest thing on their menu

So, how do you feel about this "You know it's good" advertising directed to young Americans already facing issues around eating right?

In my opinion, Church's Chicken is acting pretty opportunistic, and if they had golden arches on their restaurants they'd have parents and society up in arms.

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National Food Drive Sat May 9: Stamp out hunger

Given today's economy, I'm sure you've seen signs of hunger all around. We've highlighted here a few of the programs that our Oregon Food Bank has to enable local families to help others in our communities, like Plant a Row for the Hungry. And other areas have food relief services that are doing great work too. Well, next month, they're joining forces for one national day of helping our local food programs.

And they're partnering with the National Association of Letter Carriers (you know, the US Postal Service folks) who has made it super simple for us to help. Here's the scoop:

1.  During the 1st week of May, watch your mailbox for two items: a card announcing the food drive and a plastic food-drive bag

2.  Fill the bag with nutritious, nonperishable food such as tuna fish, peanut butter, soups, stews, chili, canned fruits, vegetables, beans, rice and pasta.

3.  Place the filled bag by your mailbox on the morning of Saturday, May 9.

Letter carriers will collect non-perishable food donations left by the mailboxes and take them to the collection stations for distribution. You can probably check with your local folks to see exactly where they're going. In Oregon, all donated food benefits the Oregon Food Bank Network and stays right in our community.

It's super easy to participate. Last year, this one-day food drive raised more than 1.6 million pounds of food in Oregon alone! Fill up a bag (or two) and help feed hungry families in your community! Our kiddos are already talking about going to the store to pick up beans, tuna and soup (yes, we do this a lot, so they're familiar with the list of most-needed items). This is a great one to involve your kids too!

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How we turned off the TV for a week

How did you do with Turn Off (the TV) Week? Did you make it all week? We pretty much did.

Marcelena is used to watching a show while my husband needs to get something done around the house so I'm pretty sure it was toughest on her (or maybe my husband). The first day she asked to watch her recent favorite, Olivia, about 20 times! The requests decreased each day, which was nice. Towards the end of the week, she wasn't even asking.

Patrick realized Tuesday that he and his dad didn't watch Amazing Race like they typically do Monday afternoons. Thankfully, there were no complaints when we explained that we weren't going to watch it this week. He did miss watching the Giants baseball game throughout the week but Justin let him keep up with the scores on his phone. He was happy just to get the game highlights each morning. 

The wonderful thing that happened this week was that no one missed the TV. Marcelena has been sick since Friday, which typically means lots of rest reading, and watching movies. She didn't even ask! So, when we announced that Sunday was family movie night we expected cheers as the TV clicked on. Nope. Patrick wanted to keep playing baseball and Marcelena wanted to make butterflies. They rather quickly changed their minds but we're still pretty proud of them. I expect to see less TV on in our house, and more time with games, books and walks.

Kid-Safe Chemicals Act: why we care

 

A friend who works at the Environmental Working Group introduced me to the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act and asked if I'd be interested in helping to bring some awareness to the topic. After a quick glance at the issue, I immediately signed up: the current toxic chemical regulatory law, the Toxic Substances Control Act passed in 1976, hasn't been amended since, and is widely regarded as the weakest of all major environmental laws. Since this law passed, some 20,000 chemicals have been introduced into products on the market that haven't been proven safe, in addition to the 64,000 chemicals already in use in 1976.

Why is this a concern? Those toxins are found in our bodies and we don't know the extent of their damage. Studies show that babies are born with as many as 300 industrial chemicals at birth. I'm no scientist, but that doesn't sound like the best start to a long, healthy life to me.

I don't think it's coincidence that we're also seeing a significant increase in serious diseases and conditions from childhood cancer, to autism, ADHD, learning deficits, infertility, and birth defects.

Simply put, the existing law simply doesn't work to protect us.

For the same reasons we eat organic foods, use natural cleaning solutions, avoid plastics in the kitchen, and examine the toys our children play with, we support the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act. It's a lot of work to evaluate products, but we do it because our children's health and safety are that important. We shouldn't have to though - food producers and growers, manufacturers, retailers and our government should all be doing their job to make sure that only safe products make their way into homes.

The first, and easiest step, is to visit the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act website and Sign the Declaration to let your public officials know you care. This will take one minute if you watch the short video there.

If you want to make sure you're not inadvertently exposing your family to toxin chemicals in your home, here are few tips (and there's more at the EWG site):

1. Don't wear shoes in the house - keep them, and the pollutants they carry outside

2. Avoid using Teflon pans to cook with

3. To avoid leeching chemicals into food, never microwave plastics

4. Eat organic as much as possible, or at least the Dirty Dozen

Yesterday I was one of the parents filmed for a video produced by EWG to help drive further awareness on the need to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. When the video is ready to share, you can bet we'll post it here and let you know. Thanks for reading and I hope you'll help.

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Share your school lunch memories and show you care

Have you visited your local school at lunch time? Many school-aged kids don't have access to healthy, balanced meals and the lack of funding means that improvement isn't a high priority. Menus in most school lunch programs are too high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and too low in fiber- and nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. Without change, we'll continue to see growing trends of obesity, early-onset diabetes, and hypertension, among other chronic diseases, in children and teens.

We recently wrote about the rising rates of obesity in preschoolers and included a couple easy ideas that parents could do in their communities to help. Well, here's another...and it's fun and simple to do!

Share your fondest, most vivid school lunch memories to strengthen the message that parents care about the food their children are eating at school. Did I mention you also have a chance to win? Yes - there are fabulous prizes to entice and rewards good efforts!

Check out the Fresh Voices for Fresh Choices Contest site - it's super easy. You can write, draw or submit a video to tell your story. Just make sure to get it in by May 1st.

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A sad day for Patrick

Last night my 5 year old, Patrick, experienced true sadness like I don't think he ever has before. He said goodbye to his ride-on Jeep. He's had this Jeep for about 3 years and has always enjoyed his time on it from the very first ride. The problem is that he's over 4 feet tall and doesn't fit in the Jeep any longer. And we live in the hills so there's not many areas where he can really have fun riding it. My husband rigged it for snow rides up our hill with make-shift snow tires and there were many days spent riding in the winter wonderland. But summertime rides were rare - maybe 8 times a year! I guess going 2 mph downhill when you've been on Space Mountain isn't thrilling.

We've tried to explain the fun adventures he'll have on his bike this summer once the training wheels are gone, but the look on this face when this little boy was test driving his car last night was heart-breaking for this mama.

He's feeling better this morning knowing that he's able to share the joy and fun of his Jeep with someone else. I think if he reminds himself of that often, he'll actually start to believe it too. It's his first tough goodbye so it's going to hurt a little, but it's an important lesson to learn. I'm so proud of him for dealing with this like he has.

Parenting GNO: Raising Charitable Children Recap

Tonight's event  - Girls Night Out Parenting Party: Raising Giving, Service-Oriented, Charitable Children - was a great time, lots of fun and totally inspiring. It brought to my attention that there are families, and kids, doing wonderful deeds to help others out. Some are doing really big things like bringing clean water to developing countries. Some are doing smaller, yet equally important things, like cleaning a beach, donating used items, and raising money for charities.

The main purpose of tonight's event was to connect with other moms and share ideas. I'd say it was a success - I know that I was inspired for sure. Here's just a few of the easy ideas I picked up tonight:

• Cleaning up outdoor spaces wherever we go, before we play 
• Visiting the elderly to play card games, read or just sit with them
• Buying a few extra things at the grocery store, maybe sale items or staples like tuna and soup, to bring to the Food Bank
• Collecting donations (or books for shelters) instead of gifts at birthday parties
• Donating "kids-made" items for charity auctions, along with a story about the work that went into the piece
• Practicing random acts of kindness everyday

These are do-able, right? Can you take one of these on this week? Tell us what you're doing and what happened. We'd love to hear! And share your new ideas too.

Raising Charitable Children

Like me, you probably see the headlines all over the parenting mags or e-newsletters about "Raising a Caring Child", "Raising a Happy Child" or "Raising a Smart Child". I've read a few but didn't find them very enlightening - probably because (I think) we've managed to raise what we believe are happy, caring children that are doing great. But, I'm still always interested in new ideas to do things better.

Over the weekend, our local news ran a story about TwitterMoms and their #GNO - for those not on Twitter, that's a Girls Night Out. It's an online get together of like-minded women who might be enjoying a glass of wine or cocktail while visiting with friends online. It was a great piece and featured Megan Calhoun, the founder of Twittermoms (she looked great, by the way!). It seemed like an interesting concept but part of me was thinking that I'd rather get out of the house with my girlfriends if I'm not going to be with the family anyways.

But then I came across a #GNO for tonight, April 21 that seemed to hit home. It's a Girls Night Out  Parenting Party: Raising Giving, Service-Oriented, Charitable Children. While I think we're already doing that, I'm totally curious and intrigued by this #GNO concept and want to check it out. So, it's on my calendar for tonight and I'm looking forward to meeting new friends and gathering a few ideas. Here's a link to the invitation - would love for you to join!

Tonight's event is put on by an incredible group called Mom It Forward who is also working hard towards making change happen. Check them out when you have time and join their efforts.

How are you spending Turn Off week?

We've had requests from followers who want to know: how is everyone else spending their week?

Let's all use this page to journal our experience without TV. We want to know how your kids are doing, what you're doing when you'd normally watch TV, and how you feel about giving it up. Most important…will you keep it up or decrease your viewing once the week is up?

Add to the comments below and ask your friends to add theirs too!

If you need some ideas to get you going, check out the original story - full of fun activities to get you started.

Susan Boyle is making change happen

 If you haven't seen Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent, you need to click over to YouTube right now (well, you might want some tissues first). She is amazing! This lady is making change happen in a BIG way - over 66.3 million people viewed her video online according to the Washington Post.

She's giving hope to every young person who doesn't appear to be what they have the potential to be. Susan sends her message of "don't judge a book by it's cover" with class and humor in a shameless, heart-breaking manner that will give you chills as she demonstrates her surprising performance.

It's a good lesson for all of us. There's something incredible in each of us - it's just not always easy to see. For today, try to find a hidden talent in yourself, your child or a friend. And be amazed.