Sugar Intake

As of this August I have been working twenty hours a week as a bus driver for the College Station School District. It is an awesome job. I love the people that I get to work with and the kids are fabulous. I drive a lot of different routes throughout the week, but I have ‘my’ route that I drive on Tuesday and Thursday. I drive all the kids kindergarten through eighth grade from one neighborhood. They are some great kids and they call me Mr. Andy. I help them with their homework while I drive and get to hear about all the drama from the back of the bus. How their days go at school is very clearly reflected in their behavior on the bus. I can see it in my rearview mirror and in the way they get on and off the bus. This week some of my younger kids went on a field trip during the day. At the end of the field trip the kids were all given a goody bag and full of candy. While I am sure the teachers did their best to regulate the amount of sugar intake for the kids, my kids are very clever and they most likely ate all their candy as soon as the teachers turned their back. And I could tell on the bus. These kids were going crazy. It didn’t matter how much I encouraged them to stay seated and not bounce from seat to seat and in the aisle, they were gonna do it. When I opened the door to let me off they ran so quickly from the bus to their homes that they scared their parents. The sugar flowing in their systems and impacting their actions was an amazing corollary to how the things that we ingest impacts our days and our actions. If you have Mexican food, you just might be able to tell the next day, and so will the people around you. But not just in regards to food. Our intake is displayed through our actions, whether intentional or subconsciously. To take it back to the basics and to preschool, “When I get all steamed up then I shout, tip me over and pour me out.” You can only pour out what has first been poured in, and especially under pressure, like a teapot. When I was growing up and wanted to go see a movie or watch a television show that my parents didn’t approve of I would give them a list of the reasons why I should be able to see it and then tell them that the bad things in the movie weren’t really that bad and the rest of the movie made up for it. My Dad would look at me and say “Dog poop brownies.” My Dad is not crazy and is not a weirdo, he was referring to a story that he once told me. In this story a father gathers his kids in from outside around the kitchen table. On the table is a big tray of warm brownies and the kid’s mouths begin to water. They are really excited about having some freshly baked brownies. Their dad says that they can eat as many as they want, but before they do he wanted to let them know about a secret ingredient that he put in the brownies, three tablespoons of dog poop. The kids didn’t want the brownies. Even though all the rest of the brownies were perfect and fine, they didn’t want the brownies because of the small amounts of bad that the brownies had in them. Small amounts of bad things over time will build up into a large amount of bad things and that is why we have to be careful of what our intake is.