Election Wrap Up

Just a couple of anecdotes about the election.

1. I took my toddler with me to vote (what else would I do with her?) and I must admit I did have a sense of "this is an historic experience and a wonderful memory that I am sharing with you - because I am such a fucking great mom if I take you to vote" This was completely lost on my toddler. She was in fact very, very excited to go with me, actually humming throughout our short walk to the polls. She told me many times on our way there that she would see many "exciting and instresting things" (I can spell, she can not pronounce - I'm practicing capturing dialects). Once I was in the actual booth, she happily played underfoot. I did try to show her that I was inking in the bubble for the first black president. She was unimpressed. I finished my business and we left. Upon our return home, my daughter asked me when we would be getting there (to the polls). When I explained to her we had already been, she became deeply disappointed - "but where are the boats!?" she shrieked.

Apparently she was excited to be going boating, and was not, as I previously believed, excited to be experiencing democracy first hand and going voting.

2. My five year old son has a new knock-knock joke. And this one shows a world of improvement in his sense of humor. Old jokes went something like this:
Knock-Knock
Who's There?
Poop.
Poop Who?
Poop-a-lock-a-chock-a-nonny-moo-moo
(Pardon the pun, but no shit, that's how he told jokes). Anyway, here's his new one:
Knock-Knock
Who's There?
Broccoli
Broccoli Who?.
Broccoli Obama!
And there's something wonderful in that. From this election my boy took nothing but a similarity between name and vegetable. And that in itself is what's fantastic about Obama's election, that my five year old son saw nothing more significant than the material for a better knock-knock joke!

Daylight Savings Time

Most of the United States "fell back" this weekend, early this morning actually. Conventional wisdom says that we should be grateful for this artificial time change because it comes with this amazing bonus gift of extra time - a whole hour to be exact!

But I take issue with conventional wisdom (and the obviously childless legislators that brought this whole scheme to us in the first place).

My gripe is as follows:

Who needs an extra hour at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
I need an extra hour on Tuesday morning at 7:15 - when I am trying to make ghost shaped pancakes for the sixth morning in a row, while looking for one left gym shoe with Velcro closures and special mittens that have glove fingers and a flip top mitten cover (they’re called "glomits"), and making two completely different lunches.

And I need an extra hour again at 2:45 pm, simply to forestall the ending of the school day and the necessary retrieval of two very tired, very hungry, and very needy children, who require snacks, bathrooms, and general attention at the same moment that their toddler sister falls asleep in the car seat, covered in apple juice and chocolate chunks (one would think it would be pretty hard to fall asleep sitting up all hopped up on natural and artificial sweeteners, but apparently it can be done!)

I don’t need an extra hour at 5:45 pm on Sunday evening, after the children have been fed (because children, like senior citizens, must eat at the same time every day no matter what the clock says) and long after they have used up their allotted daily TV time. And I don’t need that hour because the crushing weight of that extra hour and our collective need to fill it can lead to desperate measures like a family game of Chutes and Ladders, which can take much more than an hour to complete - especially when playing with a habitual cheater and a third grader who thinks its utterly hilarious to do one good deed (help an injured dog) and then immediately follow it by eating an entire plate of cookies, throwing up and then reading a comic book during history class.

What’s more, I absolutely do not need an extra hour at 7:45 pm on Sunday night. Especially, when that extra hour perverts what just last night was a glorious fifteen minutes until bedtime and stretches it into an almost unbearable hour and fifteen minutes until bedtime.

I think that if the government is going to impose this extra hour on me, especially if its going to be on the same weekend as Halloween - a night in which all of the carefully planned rules and routines of every household are handily discarded in favor of candy, children running through the neighborhoods in the dark and talking to each and every stranger they encounter - then the architects of "daylight savings time" should offer this package deal to America’s parents: included with the requisite extra hour should be a bottle of wine and a magic pill that makes children happily bathe themselves and quickly tuck themselves into their beds - silently.

My Third Grader on Presidential Politics

My daughter, who is eight and in the third grade, often likes to ask me who I am voting for. As we have heard in the news during the past few weeks, third graders are particularly interested and very astute when it comes to the election. And while it might seem impossible that a third grader can grasp the gravity of the issues of this election, its historical significance, and the way in which it has deeply polarized our country, the third grade view on the election is at the very least incredibly entertaining.

As I said before, my daughter loves to ask, every few days or so, if I will be choosing McCain or Obama. For the past few weeks I have answered with cryptic - "Who do you think I'm voting for?" My daughter's reactions to this vary. Sometimes she says, "Daddy is voting for John McCain" and sometimes she says, "If you vote for Barack Obama he will make you pay higher taxes" and sometimes it's, "Grandmom is voting for Obama." I usually dodge the question by allowing her to refocus on other adults and who their pick for President is.

Yesterday I sucked it up and answered the question, "I said I will be voting for Obama." And instead of telling me all about all the plans of the other registered voters in our family, my daughter said something amazing. She said, "I know, its because of Sarah Palin!" She was exactly right - dead on - but how? Curious and stunned I asked "Why do you think that?" And my incredibly intuitive daughter responded, "Its because you don't like her. Why don't you like her Mommy?" Which is a very difficult thing to answer, when you are talking to an eight year old,who is specifically discouraged from saying not so nice things about people. While I stumbled around with a pretty pathetic answer (its hard to condense forty-five years of feminism, gut instinct, personal views on foreign policy, the economy, our national reputation, and religious and moral beliefs into an age appropriate answer - especially when I have struggled articulating it beyond sighs and expletives in adult conversation). Luckily, my daughter gave me an out. She said, "Its because she locked herself in the grocery store after it was closed, right?" I was so shocked and confused by this statement, I had not heard this bit of puzzling news, that I blurted out "What?!" "Nora, told me that Sarah Palin locked herself in the grocery store after it was closed" said my daughter, "doesn't that seem so dumb?" she followed. Dumb on Palin's behalf, not Nora's - that much was clear. I tried for more details, but my daughter didn't have anything else. All she knew was what a fourth grader had told her, that Sarah Palin, Vice Presidential candidate had spent some extra time in the produce aisle.

Later, I investigated this information. A google search on "Sarah Palin grocery store" produced very little, but I did find a "your momma" style joke, on someone's blog no less, in which Sarah Palin is so dumb that when she was locked in a grocery store she starved. As not-clever as
that joke is, something about it resonated with the elementary school set. As any kid will tell you, being in the grocery store sucks, and spending extra time there is ridiculous.

I explained to my daughter that what she had hear about Sarah Palin was a simply not true. She considered this information for a moment and then said, "Its too bad John McCain couldn't just be by himself - and then we could all vote for him mommy."

And with that, a third-grader captured the sentiments of countless Republicans.

On the Economy

some lady on the news just said - "7 billion dollars?"
the reporter said "no, 700 billion dollars"
the lady then said "I don't think I've ever seen that much money in my life."

What have you accomplished today?

There is a reason mothers never get anything done - to accomplish anything in a single day (and by accomplish I mean focus entirely on a single task so that it is actually completed ) is a total waste of time. It is simply inefficient. For example, the gains from emptying the dishwasher are limited - you get all your dishes returned to their particular cupboard or drawer just in time to remove them for use during the next meal. But the losses stemming from emptying the dishwasher are seemingly endless. While you are putting plates and cups away, your kids are dumping cereal out on the floor, tying dental floss to matchbox cars and the banister and their baby sister, flushing things unknown down the toilet, changing their clothes over and over and over…

You would think that after eight years of parenting I would know this, and consequently know better than to ever try to get anything done (while my children are awake), and for the most part I do remember this and manage to never ever even attempt to accomplish anything beyond feeding, clothing and occasionally bathing my children. But every now and again I get cocky and ambitious and try to get something else besides child rearing (really child maintenance) done. And every time, without fail, the costs of the accomplishment far outnumber the gains…

On Wednesday, I made my toddler noodles (whole wheat wheels) tossed with olive oil and covered in freshly grated pecorino cheese. I then set to work loading and unloading the washer and dryer and the sorting a basket of my husbands dress socks. In celebration of my utter wholesomeness, I decided to take a little break. I sat back and treated myself to a little cultural enlightenment (the new US Weekly had arrived in the mail slot fifteen minutes prior) until I was rudely interrupted by a request for cheese - "Mo ‘nother kind of cheese" to be specific. My daughter, clearly indulging her white trash tastebuds (from her father not me) decided that $12.00 a pound pecorino just wasn’t cutting it - she couldn’t eat her wheels without a healthy sprinkling of Kraft’s Original Parmesan Style Cheese Topping. Not wanting to be interrupted again before I got to the bottom of this whole Madonna-A-Rod situation, I wisely left her with the entire can of cheese product.

And dammit not ten minutes later I was interrupted again and this time it wasn’t a polite request for a condiment, it was a full-on toddler wail. "MOMMEE my another finger stuck!". Sure enough my daughter had somehow lodged her tiny little finger into the middle hole of the cheese shaker top. I did not panic. I simply unscrewed the bottom half of the can of cheese product and set about pulling the finger back through the hole. Only that finger wasn’t going anywhere. In fact it was rapidly swelling to double, no triple its normal size. I tried lathering her hand with soap and tugging. Nothing, only screams. Next I tried olive oil. With the lid still firmly in place, I decided to make a few phone calls. I called a friend who is a pediatrician for her advice. She suggested soap and grease (so much for med school) and then upon confirming that the color of the finger had changed from sweet baby pink to a sickening reddish purple, she told me to gather up my toddler, lid and all and take her down to the ER for professional assistance.

Anyone who has taken a child to the ER knows that it is not something you do lightly, as one friend says, going to the ER with your kid is worse than going to the DMV (or if you live in Cleveland Heights even worse than signing up for anything at the rec center when the mean lady is working). But my friend, the magical pediatrician, did something so incredibly thoughtful that I will never be able to repay her - she called ahead and warned her colleagues that an incompetent mother was en route with a toddler who could not be extricated from the lid of a Kraft Parmesan Style Cheese Topping Container. When we got to the ER, there was a crowd of six or seven medical professionals gathered around to greet us. I’m pretty convinced they were there to see what exactly what kind of mother would feed her kid imitation cheese, unsupervised. What they didn’t know is that it was the same kind of mother who would bring her toddler to the ER barefoot and covered in magic marker on the left side of her body (she’s right handed I guess).

Forty five minutes, four doctors and three nurses later, my daughter’s finger was freed. I won’t tell you exactly how they did it but it did involve a lot of trial and error and some serious MacGyver style problem solving.

So what did I get accomplished? Well I gained, one moldy load of laundry (I didn’t return to transfer the load from washer to dryer for a couple of days), one wrinkled heap of towels, approximately seven pairs of black socks which haven’t quite made it to my husband’s sock drawer, and the invaluable knowledge that Madonna most certainly is leaving Guy Ritchie for a Yankee’s third baseman. And my losses? Well, the lid to my parmesan cheese bottle and the yet to be determined but definitely more than three hundred dollars Emergency Room bill are really only the beginning.

Was it getting something done really worth it? Hardly. Then again, I might be able to recoup some of my losses by filing a complaint against Kraft and their dangerous cheese shakers. But that would require some time to sit down and really focus on getting it done…

F*&!@ its the Fourth!

Ok so it’s been over six weeks since I’ve had any time or any thing to blog (you decide which is more likely). And here we are more than four weeks into the summer with the Fourth of July just around the corner. Which means only one thing - summer is half over. Which in itself means several (all equally depressing things): 1. I have just over six weeks to complete my summer to-do list 2. In less than two months I’ll have to start imposing bath time, and bed time, and no t.v. time and all the things that make the rest of the time I want to be a really bitchy hard-ass mom seem so much less impressive and therefore less effective 3. I have even less time until I have to figure out exactly when things like Little Gym and Kindermusik, and Fall soccer, and oh yeah, school start again 4. And most important, I have only half as much time as I did before to make this the MOST FABULOUS SUMMER EVER! This might sound crazy (if you’re a man, or if you are not in charge of raising children, or if you have no standards pertaining to childhood and nostalgia) but it’s not. I can say with authority that most women in my position would agree that the Fourth of July means much more than fireworks; it means time lost, and missed opportunities, and panic attacks, and the incredible, overwhelming pressure of being the best possible parent (make that mother) you can be by giving your children the one thing every child treasures - SUMMER! Now I know that sounds pretty intense and maybe even a little implausible, but just think for a minute, what are the best memories of your childhood? Take the top ten and for the most part they fall into one of two categories - they are either Christmas memories or Summer memories. And its a lot harder to make good memories when you don’t have a fat man with a shitload of presents to make the magic for you. So I’m not making this up, the pressure to give your children a fantastic summer is undeniable and when you hit the end of June, no matter how well things are going, you can’t help taking a look at what you’ve done with your kids and only seeing what you haven’t done.

Party Planner

2 daughters, born ten days (six years) apart. Birthdays are looming. Luckily I'm on top of things. When I shop for supplies for the eight-year-old's birthday party, I pick up stuff for the two-year-old's celebration. For example while picking up your standard number eight rainbow candle, I found (and purchased)the most perfect pink and purple number one for the little one. Just right for a little girly-girl who loves things like pink and purple...

Except that she's turning two. DAMMIT!

Mother's Day is CANCELLED!

I think daddyfesto should buy mommyfesto a scanner. Then you could see the following note in the actual handwriting, which can only make it more poignant, more hilarious, and yes, even more depressing than it is in the transcripted version below.

Today I found a note on the floor outside my seven year old's bedroom door. Unfortunately I found the note only after I had discussed with her and "resolved" the various transgressions that had led to her banishment to her room (for those who want to know, her crimes included general bitchiness and lying about feeding her lizard).

Here's what the note said:

MOM I am mab AND you know iT. i Am SO MAD VERY MAD MAD MAD. I AM MAD!!! you ARE A MEANY AND MEAN. DONT COME UP to ME DONT. GO AWAY AND i WANT YOU TO KNOW NOT HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO YOU GO AWAY.

EMMA

I'm A Better Mom Than...

I can read. Really. I even have a highly-developed vocabulary and keen literary analysis skills. I used to toss around words and phrases like "irony" and "acute awareness" and "syntax" and, well you get the picture. If you checked my nightstand, or our bathroom, or the kitchen counter, or the passenger’s seat of my car - any of the places a girl-on-the-go keeps her reading material - you would never believe that I can read. You would think that the closest my mind can get to a literary experience is by interpreting the pictures of over-exercised, under-dressed, over-medicated, under-qualified Hollywood celebrities and "newsmakers." And I couldn’t fault you for coming to that conclusion, because the only printed material - outside of pink-eye-in-the-classroom notices, math worksheets, and the occasional Crossword puzzle (I can do up to Thursday, thank you!) is a copy of the latest installment of my Us Weekly subscription. And I couldn’t fault you for assuming that I only "read" Us Weekly, because I am a materialistic celebrity-obsessed former intellectual who thrives on gossip about people she has never nor will ever meet.

But that would be incorrect. I don’t read Us Weekly because I love Hollywood and fashion and reality TV and Britney Spears, I read Us Weekly because it helps my self-esteem. No, really it does. Now I’m not delusional enough to think that looking at pictures of the beautiful people will help me like my body, or my hair, or even my wardrobe more. I am woman in my thirties who has given her body and her hair and her wardrobe over to motherhood and the three children that came with it. I read Us Weekly, because in every issue, without fail, there is at least one item that can obliterate my deepest fear - the sometimes overwhelming conviction that I am the worst mother in the world.

No matter what goes on in my own home, I can open Us Weekly and within moments find absolute proof that there are in fact women in this world that are way worse at parenting than I am. (And the best part is, they all live in LA or New York, so not only are there individual mothers who suck at mothering in ways I can’t even touch, there are entire communities of women who are fucking up there kids!)

So there is always Britney to boost anyone’s confidence in their mothering skills. Her parenting is legendarily bad: a Seven-Eleven style diet, driving with babies on her lap or with the car seat improperly installed, dropping babies or letting them fall out of highchairs. I only let my kids eat crappy food when I am way too busy to give them something healthy or on special occasions like days when we are driving past MacDonalds and I have enough cash in my wallet to buy my way out of cooking dinner. I always make my kids sit in the appropriate booster or car seat - except when I have to squeeze one extra kid in for a carpool or some other emergency - and even then its not like I’m speeding down the road because the paparazzi is chasing me. And I would never drive with a baby in my lap (except for the one time I was at school in the pick-up line breastfeeding and I had to pull forward because they can be really mean about it if you hold up the line and I pulled over as soon as I could.) And I have never, ever dropped a baby! And even if I did, I would catch the baby myself, I wouldn’t need a bodyguard to catch him for me.

But Britney isn’t the only Hollywood mom worth watching. There’s J.Lo and her buddy, Leah Remini, who in last week’s Us Weekly freely admits that she has serious parenting problems - "Leah’s Toddler Trouble." Apparently things are so out of control between Leah and her three-year old Sofia that Leah had to turn to Rachael Ray to sort things out (I guess the Super Nanny was not available). It seems Leah’s parenting transgressions include still giving her daughter a bottle all the time, co-sleeping, and allowing her to eat popsicles for breakfast! Hmm? All those things are clearly way worse than anything I would ever do. Obviously my kids don’t eat popsicles for breakfast, they wait until after they eat their nutrient packed eggo frozen waffles to ask for sweets. As for co-sleeping, I am very strict about that - I always put my kids to bed in their own beds. I can’t help it if that’s not where they end up in the morning.

I often like to check in on Suri Cruise. She’s only a few weeks older than my youngest, so Katie Holmes is a good comparison mom for me. So far I can’t figure out exactly how Katie is fucking Suri up, but I’m not worried about that. I know I am a way better mom than her. After all, I didn’t choose to have a couch-jumping, medicine-rejecting, five foot two, freak father my kids.

And Angelina. So what if she’s beautiful and love kids so much she buys a new one every year? I know I’m a better mother than her, it’s all in the pictures. Every picture of one of the Pitt-Jolie children involves a bag of cheetos, or krispy kremes or KFC. And maybe what you feed your kids doesn’t necessarily make you a bad mom, but when you know for a fact that there is a band of camera’s documenting every morsel those kids ingest, it makes you a pretty dumb one.

On Manicures

My daughter is seven. She has inherited a lot of things from me (blue, eyes, blonde hair, freckles) but she is, more than anything else, her father’s girl and she’s got all the quirks to prove it, including a mean nail biting habit. During a recent manicure session (for her siblings), we had the following discussion:

Daughter: Mommy why do ladies have those long lady nails?
Son: To scratch good with.
Me: Maybe. (and then to son) Please give me your hand.
Daughter: Sometimes girls in my class have nails like that.
Me: That’s inappropriate. (and then to son) Give me your hand - Now! (and to toddler) Give Mommy the nail clippers.
Daughter: When I see nails like that, I sometimes really want to eat them.

Hmm - how bad would it be if I gave son’s hand to daughter and let her chew on it?

Chores

Ok, I just stumbled on this charming little article by Ann Matturro Gault - "Chores and Fun in the Same Breath? You Bet! Here 9 ideas for getting kids to beat you at the cleaning game." While the nine tips below are probably quite helpful (in someone else's house), I've added my own commentary (in bold), if only to round things out a bit. Just to give credit where credit is due, click here for the original article.

1. Hide treats, stickers, or pennies in, on, or under knickknacks, then ask your child to dust. She gets to enjoy the rewards only when everything is dusted. Kudos to Gault for recognizing that these are tough financial times, no longer can we afford the luxuries of the bi-monthly visit from our "ladies" ("my lady" means only two things in middle class housewife speak -cleaning lady or therapist; if one goes to see "her lady," that's her therapist, if "her lady" makes house calls, she's got someone cleaning her bathroom). Now the only money we've got for cleaning services comes from the penny jar and we've got our kids on the job. That's cute and clever except for one thing, if you are going to put in the time to hide the pennies, wouldn't it be smarter just to do the dusting yourself?

2. Post individual lists of chores kids can do (one for each child in your family). Whenever your child accomplishes a task, have her mark it with a sticker. Whoever has the most stickers at the end of the week gets the Helper of the Week award. Is that like a Pulitzer?

3. Play "Go Fish" with a basket of clean socks. Divide the socks among the players, leaving a pile to draw from. Each player, in turn, holds up a sock and asks another player if he has the mate. If not, the asking player must take a sock from the top of the draw pile. When finished, the player with the most pairs wins. This is hilarious. Let's talk about logistics - do you match holes? stains? Can you make a book of socks? Do you get extra for collecting all the socks that came in the original jumbo pack? Who deals (cause if I'm gonna take the time to deal - I'm gonna go ahead and sort those socks myself)? And then there is the other thing, my kids don't like playing Go Fish - if you can come up with sock sorting Uno we might be game.

4. Turn any socks that stay single into child-friendly dust mitts. Insert child's hand into clean but dampened sock and use it to remove dust from houseplants and furniture. I don't get it, if I use all the unpaired socks as dust mits, what the hell are my kids gonna put on their feet in the morning? Plus, you're supposed to dust plants?

5. Have a scavenger hunt. Make a list of everyday items (newspapers, magazine, shoes, etc.). Set a timer for 5 minutes, then have kids collect stray items throughout the house. The winner is the child who picks up the most (and returns them to their rightful spots). Newspapers? Magazines? Shoes? Please! How about: socks and sippy cups, half eaten Go -Gurt tubes, sticks and rocks (yes inside), unused but dried up wipes, melted chapstick, mommy's jewelry, marker tops, legos, broken crayons, snow pants, a jar of dead potato bugs, oh and random pairs of underwear (boys or girls) behind the bathroom sink, or underneath the family room couch?

6. After dinner, do a "10-Minute Tidy." Set a timer and have family members scatter through the house putting away the day's clutter. Let me run through what would happen during the "10-Minute Tidy" at our house: Seven year old, picks up six pencils and then walks past four-year old brother and says - "Bunneri! Electrify!!" to which four year old is forced to respond "Pikachu! - Quick Attack," imaginary Pokemon battle ensues, which means that pencils are dropped, marbles are thrown, pillows are mysteriously, "necessarily" transported from family room to living room. Meanwhile, toddler discovers pile of dirt from freshly swept kitchen floor, plops down next to it and starts snacking on cheerios, soggy pretzels, and month old skittles, dirt pile is summarily decimated, broom is dropped and mommy goes to get a beer. And where's daddy? Upstairs in the master bath, doing requisite post-dinner, 10-Minute intestinal Tidy."

7. Appoint someone to be Inspector D. Clutter. Armed with a laundry basket and plastic police badge from the dress-up box, this person roams the house and puts stray belongings into clutter "jail" (the basket). To set an item free, its owner (Mom and Dad included!) must do a chore. Costumes, jail, handcuffs -this sounds borderline racy to me.

8. Turn a bucket into a personalized cleaning caddy. Use permanent marker to write your child's name on it and have him decorate its with other drawings. Store supplies such as sponge, dust rag and roll of paper towels, etc. Then use supplies such as sponge, dust rag, and roll of paper towels to clean up everything that kid drew on with permanent marker.

9. Show them the money? Some experts believe allowance should be reserved for teenagers. School-aged children will easily get behind the idea that chores are something you do as a member of the family — not for money." They'll be excited just to show off their skill at completing a task. " I'm not so sure about that. I mean when my kids get their weekly allowances, they look pretty excited about getting paid for their skills at completing a task. They take their money and carry it around, they count it and caress, and treat it like, well like money. What my kids "get behind" is that chores are a means to an end, and that end is whole bunch of money. So what if they're planning on using that money to build a super-powerful car that can fly and become invisible and shoot out a trailer of the back end and lasers out of the sides? As long as their rooms are clean, I'm not going to comment.

My Ecofesto

Green is hot! It’s trendy and sexy and political and powerful! I want to be GREEN! I want to love the earth so much that it makes Al Gore look like a Republican. I want to single-handedly stop Global Warming, repair that hole in the O-zone layer and feed the world’s hungry.

Unfortunately, I’m busy raising three kids, so I have to squeeze in my environmentalism when I can.

Here’s how I do it:

1. Skip Baths. For some parents, bathtime is an essential part of the bedtime routine. In this house, the part where I shut the door and walk out is the only essential part. Baths are optional, and the best option for the earth is to limit them to once or twice every week or two.
2. Cook Less. Raw foods preserve nutrients, that’s better for my kids right? Plus limiting cooking means limiting the energy used to actually cook the food and the resources used to clean up afterwards.
3. Limit Cleaning. Cleaning involves harmful chemicals like bleach and other terrible bleach-like substances. Keeping your house looking shiny and new, means dumping countless poisons into our atmosphere. That doesn’t seem right does it?
4. Limit Laundry. You know how going a couple of weeks between washings prolongs the fit (and life) of your jeans? Start taking that approach to all your laundry. One or two or three wearings doesn’t make anything but underwear truly dirty. Just ask my husband, he wears the same clothes over and over again for weeks at a time (he did this even before I became and eco-warrior). Holding off on doing the laundry can save you a ton of water, a ton of gas, some detergent and a whole lot of time. Plus, not doing laundry means not folding laundry, and c’mon isn’t that every housewife’s dream?
5. Car Pool - The advantages of sharing a ride are almost infinite (a la Xavier, anything over five is infinite). Car pooling saves gas, reduces emissions, slows tires from hitting landfills… but car pooling means that someone else can pick up my kid, and then a different someone can drop her off, and if I work it right (like my college roommate did with the divvying up of essay questions on take-home exams) I can spread the driving over enough other parents that I don’t actually have to drive anyone anywhere. And then there’s the whole grown-ups driving other grown-ups thing where refusing to drive on girls night out isn’t selfish, its green!
6. Recycle. Obviously you should recycle. But recycling goes beyond pop cans and beer bottles and cereal boxes. Recycling means reusing all sorts of things over and over again, like using the pretzels your kid left in their lunchbox on Monday as the pretzels in your kids’ lunch box on Tuesday (and Wednesday if necessary). Or using the picture your kid drew you for mother’s day that says "I love you Mom" and changing it to "I love you Grandmom" to cover your own mother’s day obligations.
7. Recycle Some More. Let your kids take on some of the recycling. Especially at snack time, in the car. I happen to know that "Found Objects" are a very hip and happening part of the new Green movement. Helping out Mother Nature feels so good, let your kids discover that special feeling as they scrounge for their very own found snacks - between the seats, under the floor mats, in that hollow part of the car seat base. Whoever made the five second rule did not love the earth as much as I do.

"I Am So Lucky!!"

There are some days you wake up and look at your kids and immediately think "I am so lucky." But most days you wake up and look at your kids and think "What am I gonna feed these kids for breakfast, where the hell are their gym shoes and how soon can I get them to school?" Monday morning I was thinking pretty much that. Until I opened the newspaper and read a little blurb about Nicole Lynn Holmes of Belle Vernon Pennsylvania. The mother of two was recently arrested and charged with child endangerment, after she sent her two children to school with head lice. My immediate response to this news was, "I am so lucky!"

When I consider some of the things that have happened in our house, especially concerning head lice, its a wonder that I haven’t landed in jail like Nicole.

We have had one bout with head lice thus far. It was this past fall. And I can say with some authority that if there is any experience in parenting ( in addition to potty training) that will almost certainly cause you to develop PTSD, it is dealing with head lice.

The first thing you should know about head lice is that the very second you learn your child has been exposed to head lice and potentially adopted a few of their own, your ability to think rationally is immediately suppressed by a terrible itching that begins on your head and quickly spreads throughout your body. Whatever decisions are made, whatever actions are taken, after the mention of lice, are not those of a rational, responsible adult, they are the desperate moves of a mother trying to wage battle on a tiny army of basically invisible parasites (and the asshole who gave them to your child in the first place).

Coping with head lice is a dirty, dirty business. It will force you to throw every rule you have about bribing your kids out the window. You will do anything to get your kids to sit still and smile (ok not smile, just not scream or bite you) during the hours it takes to check your child’s head for a single nit. You will let your kids watch hours of tv, not just PBS or Noggin but Disney Tween Trash like the "That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana" marathon, just so you can comb through their hair in order to confirm your worst fears. You will let your child eat anything they want just so they will agree to allow you to play "beauty shop" for the couple of hours it will take to apply specially formulated poison - the shampoo equivalent of napalm- to your child’s scalp. You will shove candy, any kind of candy, into your child’s mouth just so that you don’t have to listen to them scream "you’re hurting me!" as you yank their individual hair shafts around in hopes of removing any remaining nits.

In short, you will sell your soul to the devil just to get your kids to through the overwhelmingly tedious, unpleasant, downright disgusting task of checking and treating them for lice.

And if you’re too holy to sell your soul to make it through that, you sure as hell will give it all up, just for the hope that one of those critters won’t jump ship and start a colony on your own head.

And all this is assuming you can actually talk your kids into sitting still and letting you even look for lice. If that’s not an option, you will resort to physical intimidation or violence or smothering your child just to make them hold still long enough for you to get a peak at their scalp in good light.

And just to add insult to injury, you will have to force your kids to march to their rooms and round up all the animals, or babies, or blankets that they have come to depend on and hand them over to you so you can lock them up in airtight containers for two weeks. If that’s not the Sophie’s Choice of childhood, I don’t know what is.

After a while, you will be exhausted by your battle with head lice. And because, unless you have eyes with super microscope-like powers that can somehow identify tiny dots for the little crustaceans that they are, at some point you will have to quit your battle against the lice and with a hope and a prayer that they really are gone, send your kids back to school and hope they know enough to not declare - "I stayed home yesterday because I got the lice!" over lunch.

So it’s not that hard for me to see how a mother like Nicole Holmes, could end up doing a simple little thing, like sending her kids back to school with a few live ones running around on their tiny heads. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that she is not the first mother to have done something like that.

Its just unfortunate for Nicole that social services was already on the look out for any missteps with her kids. It turns out that the county had already been to Nicole’s house, when a neighbor who visited Nicole uninvited, complained that she found Nicole "passed out while her unkempt children roamed the house."

And when I read that I found that I can consider myself double lucky- because not only have I never never been singled out by the law for my children's dalliances with head lice, but I’m not friendly enough with any of my neighbors to worry about them dropping by while I’m "napping."

Sometimes, Some Things Come Full Circle

I was at my kids' school today for a meeting. On the way out the door, I noticed a picture of Maria Montessori. The fact that Montessori classrooms and schools have pictures of the method's founder all over the place is usually something I try to ignore (it somehow reminds me of the Kim Jong Il PR machine, except not as ridiculously entertaining). Anyway, Dr. Montessori may have had an uncanny ability to understand the minds of children and she did create an educational method for which we are happy to pay thousands of dollars each year to expose our children to, but from the looks of these pictures, beauty was not one of her top attributes. The funny thing is the picture of Maria Montessori looked eerily similar to another picture I recently saw - the one of the lady with freaky long hair of "what would happen if someones hair was so super long it touched the ground fame" - see below. I'll let you be the judge, but now I'm pretty sure which long-haired hippie it was that inspired my son's original inquiry.

My Own Unanswerable Question

What is the point of going all the way to the upstairs bathroom (next to the bedroom where your baby sister is napping) and yelling "Mommy" at the top of your lungs, only to tell your mother, when she responds to your calls of distress, "NO, DON'T SEE ME MOMMY!"?

Is it so your mother can be the very first one to find out that you didn't flush the toilet yet again?

Coping Mechanisms

It’s no secret that parenting is tough, a lot tougher than any of us expected. On our best days, raising kids can be, for the most part, pretty mundane - routine and with any luck, uneventful. More often, childrearing (and for the sake of this blog, motherhood) is incredibly frustrating. The job is dirty and thankless. Sure, parenting is a unique and fabulous and worthy and incredibly rewarding experience, but the tricky thing is that we tend to only notice that part of it in retrospect.

So what can we do to keep our chins up during the here and now of parenting? Over the years I have cultivated a limited but effective arsenal for coping with the worst parts of parenting. Sure I’ve tried the basic tricks for navigating particularly tough situations. Let’s say baby is screaming inconsolably, every fiber of your being wants to shake baby (but somewhere you heard that that might be a bad idea), you put baby down and count to ten silently, and then baby is magically quiet and happy and fed and wearing a clean diaper…

But somehow conventional coping mechanisms seem to fall just a bit short. Here are the two the things that work for me in particularly tough situations.

First there is vacuuming. Vacuuming really is the perfect foil for mother-homemakers caught in the midst of parenting’s ugliest and loudest situations. Vacuuming is a great choice for any situation that involves any amount of noise. Take the crying baby example from above. Let’s say instead of counting to ten, you grab your vacuum and head for the nearest carpet, not only do you not have to listen to your baby crying, you are getting something done! Feelings of guilt and inadequacy over not being able to console your child are immediately canceled out by feelings of accomplishment (your cleaning!) and peace (the neat hum of the vacuum cleaner drowns out the little one’s wailing). This trick never wears out. The more kids you have, the more opportunities you’ll have to use vacuuming to drown out their crying, their whining, their fights and their tantrums. And the more kids you have, the dirtier your carpets will be. It’s almost the perfect solution.

Second, is a little imagination game I like to play. If it had a name, it would be called "What if a Grown Up Did This?" It’s pretty simple. When I am faced with my children doing particularly annoying, ridiculous things I simply ask myself - "what if a grown up did this?" Almost instantly, the outlandish behavior of my children becomes incredibly entertaining, sheer hilarity.

Even without your kids engaging in any specific behavior, this can be a useful coping mechanism. Just look at what your kids are wearing and try to imagine an adult in the same outfit. For those of you with babies in onesies, this can be especially effective (unless you don’t want to be reminded of early 90’s fashion a-la Brenda Walsh). Here are some of the most common situations I find my kids in, each annoying in their own right, but incredibly funny when you imagine an adult engaging in the same behavior.

My younger daughter loves to eat. Other people’s food. With her hands. If she sees anyone enjoying a meal, she just can’t help herself, she’s got to see for herself if its worth it (nine times out of ten it is for this kid) She’ll climb right into your lap and dig in. Literally, dig in, with her grimy little hands. This habit really gets me. I have no trouble sharing chips or pretzels with her. It’s the things like soup or salad that really get under my skin. To avoid becoming overly frustrated (I don’t want to squelch her enthusiasm for new foods, it could lead her to the all -colorless-starch diet my four year old has been on for the past two years), I allow myself to consider the possibility of an adult woman jumping up on my lap and helping herself to my tossed salad with her hands. And the woman was singing a little song that sounded like a lullaby but with the lyrics of "chicken nugget, chicken nugget, cucumber" the whole time she was digging through the salad.

When my younger daughter isn’t eating my real food, she’s busy making us all pretend to eat her fake food. This involves a lot of time hanging out in her little tykes cottage and simulating chewing and sipping and licking of things. Often, she is very insistent that she has adult company at these little dinner parties. Sitting scrunched up in a house built for toddlers and drinking invisible diet coke can get old pretty quick Especially when just outside the house are piles of laundry that need to be folded and a new US Weekly with breaking news about Reese and Jake. But just when I feel myself starting to lose patience with the situation, I use my little imagination trick. Just the thought of hanging out with an adult woman who drinks imaginary beverages, is fascinated by the doorbell to her own home, and sometimes, without warning, starts licking the walls of her house, is enough to warrant a few good belly laughs. No need for that Us Weekly now, you’re watching the headlines unfold in your own family room!

My son spends a lot of his time lying down, on his stomach, hands tucked under his front. I am not sure what the attraction is to spending so much of the day that way, but my husband assure me it is normal behavior. I like to instill a sense of responsibility in my kids, so I try to ask them to do easier things for themselves. For example, I’ll ask my son to go to his room and find himself a pair of socks. When he hasn’t returned after twenty minutes (and his two sisters are waiting in a running car), I’ll go up to his room to see what the delay is about. Inevitably, he’ll be lying-face down under his train table, barefoot. Now this I a situation which has a lot of potential to piss me off, the kid is making us all wait, and he’s not even accomplishing anything… but to avoid flipping out, I ask myself - "what if a grown up were doing this?" and then things turn pretty funny. What if you walked into a room and a grown man (wearing a pajama shirt two sizes too small and a pair of plaid flannels) was lying barefoot and face-down under a train table? That would be ridiculous! That would be hilarious! In fact, that might have actually happened to Robert Downey Jr. circa 1999.

I think you’ll find this trick helpful, if only to give yourself a little breathing and laughing room, in what can often be a terribly boring and frustrating job. What’s more, when you start to look at your kids antics on an adult scale, you may find what I have, there’s something like a young-hollywood-meets-SNL vibe going on in your own house. With a little lite beer (another of my not so secret weapons) that can make parenting pretty darn entertaining!

Overheard in the Kitchen

If you were a fly on the wall at my house, here's what you would overhear:

Four Year Old Boy: "What is the most important part of your body?"
Me: "Your brain"
Four Year Old Boy: "Oh I thought it was your heart"
Me: "Oh that’s important, maybe it is your heart"
Four Year Old Boy (after thirty seconds of consideration) "Yeah if you didn’t have a brain you would just crash into walls and stuff."

Meaningful conversation has a place in my house. I just don't know where it is.

And I obviously don't know the most important part of the human body either.

Britney Spears' Mommy Manual

One of these days Britney Spears is going to get her kids back. I know it will happen, because I have watched a lot of Lifetime, and the mom always gets her kids back in the end, unless the father is Brian Austin Green (and I am telling you, K-Fed is no Brian Austin Green). And I also know that a lot of people are going to be really upset when Britney gets her kids back. They’ll say that no one who feeds her kids Cheetos and Diet Pepsi all day, and lets them stay up until all hours, and sometimes almost drops them on the ground after fashion shows, should be allowed to have custody of her kids. There will be a whole bunch of other people, Brit’s fans for example, who might argue, that the best place for little Sean Preston and Jayden James is with their mother (in her lap, in the front seat of her Mercedes, in the Taco Bell drive-thru).

If my 22 month old daughter were asked, she would likely agree with this group. In fact, if she were really pressed and she actually knew who Britney Spears is, she would probably call her an inspiration, a true parenting mentor. I mean my daughter and Britney Spears have such similar parenting styles, it sometimes seems as if my daughter might have Brit’s number in her fave five on her Hello Kitty plastic cell phone.

A few examples...

Let’s start with the most obvious thing - transportation. While my daughter can’t drive, Santa did bring her a pretty sweet toy stroller and she definitely doesn’t follow safety protocol when taking her babies around. I would say that the appropriate passenger limit for that stroller is two medium sized babies or maybe two smaller babies and a beanie baby. My daughter routinely crams five to ten of her babies in that stroller, sometimes, shoving larger babies on top of tiny ones and sometimes even throwing in dangerous animals like miniature plastic tigers and reindeer into the mix. Once I even saw her pushing four babies and the Hamburglar around in that thing- something about that just didn’t feel right, almost like she had locked her kids in the car with a sex predator. Except that her babies would never be locked in, because just like Brit, my daughter doesn’t believe in using child restraints when transporting her babies. The stroller came with a beautiful beaded seat belt, but my daughter prefers to disconnect the belt and use it to accessorize her own outfits.

On to food. It has been well documented that Britney has a down home girl’s love of junk food and she shares that with her kids whenever she can. It has been noted, mostly in places like US Weekly and various celeb blogs, that Britney has put pop in her boy’s bottles and let them snack on all sorts of gas station favorites like Cheetos and Doritos and Oreos. My daughter may have more limited access to junk food for her babies (she's stuck with whatever is in the fake pantry of her fake kitchen), but she seems to outdo Britney in this department. She feeds her babies nothing but ketchup all day long. Mostly the babies all have to share the same little red ketchup bottle - the tiniest ones sip from it, while the bigger ones are spoon fed ketchup (two shoved in the high chair at a time).

Just like Britney, my daughter struggles with her own nasty habits and addictions. And these struggles certainly impact her parenting choices. My daughter can be fully absorbed in taking care of her babies - putting them in their beds, singing them lullabies- and suddenly she will be overcome with an insurmountable urge to have her own pacifier in her mouth. Poor babies, she will stop whatever caretaking she is doing and discard them immediately. She will run, crazed, to her secret pacifier stash in her crib. If you try to stop her, or remind her that there is an appropriate time and place (bedtime) for her habit, she will become hysterical, sweeping everything in her path, you, her babies, her brothers legos, up in a fit of rage. If that isn’t an addiction, I don’t know what is.

Now let’s talk about bedfellows and male role models. Everyone knows that father figures are important for babies. I think its pretty safe to say that Britney has struggled with giving her boys a consistent, male role model. I mean K-Fed may have stepped up his game in the last nine months, but it was only AFTER Britney went completely over the edge that he really took on his whole fatherhood gig. Britney is always paired up with a different boy and sometimes she can’t even make it through the weekend with the same date. The most consistent, reliable bedfellow my daughter has ever had is a red monster who’s in show business. That doesn’t sound like a role model to me.

And there’s more… At one point a former nanny asserted that Brit doesn’t even like to actually do anything with her kids. She just dresses them up and looks at them for a while and then has the nanny come and take them away when she is tired of them. My daughter does the same thing, she changes a few diapers, maybe trades around pants from baby to baby and redistributes their blankets. But when my daughter tires of her babies, she doesn’t call the nanny, instead she just drops them, abandons them right there, half-naked and clearly hungry for their ketchup.

I’ve seen the way my daughter's friends treat their babies. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve all taken a page from the Britney Spears' Mommy Manual (not to be confused with the book that Lynne Spears, Brit’s mom, was recently said to be working on). One of my daughter’s friends even left a baby at our house and never noticed. Don’t worry, my daughter gets a lot of advice from Angelina Jolie too, so she adopted it.

I’m not saying Britney Spears is a good mother with a bad rap. I’m just saying that there are probably a lot of other little mommies whose parenting skills are pretty similar. And those mommies aren’t wearing underwear either.

More Unanswerable Questions

Last night, over goldfish, my son posed a couple more of his unanswerable questions. Except it turns out that this time, his questions have actual answers. And they ain’t pretty.

So the first thing he asked me was, "What happens if you eat fire?" I’ve never been to Vegas or the circus, but I know this thing can be done - or at least the illusion of this can be done (if you want to know more about the logistics you should check www.youcaneatfire.com). Before I could really give him a concrete answer, my son decided on his own, that eating fire would be way too hot and therefore probably impossible. But he carried that four year old logic all the way through and determined that if you ate something smaller, and therefore less hot, that definitely would be doable. "No you could not eat fire, so it would be TOO HOT" he told me "but you could probably eat a match stick." Looking past how impressed I am with my son (and my own parenting) that he knows that a match stick is essentially fire encapsulated (I mean he hasn’t even taken Safety Town yet!), I decided to investigate what actually happens if you do eat a match stick. I am assuming by the lack of information on the topic, ingesting one match isn’t going to do anyone much harm. But if you eat matches all the time, then that could lead to a serious situation. In fact there is an entire eating disorder based on the practice! As an alumna of a single-sex high school and a once active delta gamma sorority member, the news that there was an eating disorder I had never heard about was completely shocking. Its called pica and it turns out that people with pica just can’t help themselves around all sorts of "foods" completely void of nutrition - they eat matches, or rocks, or pencil erasers or even poop. And then I started to think about this and became alarmed, because this would indicate that entire groups of children (namely those between 12 and 36 months) are suffering from an eating disorder. Thankfully, a requirement for suffering from pica is that you can’t be a toddler, so poop eating is completely within the realm of normal for those kids. But if you’re not a toddler or dog and you do eat too many matches you can get something called hyperkalemia. I have to admit, that I don’t really know what happens here, but it seems pretty obvious that its must be life threatening and involve something similar to turning into a super-active battery. My son thinks that almost all food that isn’t white or made of shredded cheese is too hot for ingestion so I’m pretty sure he will not fall victim to pica of the match eating variety and die of hyperkalemia.

This morning, as I drove my son away from his Montessori preschool, he asked me "What happens when your hair is so long it touches the ground?" This made me smile immediately as I tried to figure out which hippie (child or adult) he had encountered during dismissal to inspire this question. We immediately discussed the most obvious ramifications of super long hair. It makes it tough to walk, because you might step on it, you would have to put it in a really high pony tail for gym class, you might accidentally poop on it or get it caught in your diaper if you were a baby, it would drag along the ground (by definition) and get stuff caught in it, it would get really muddy. And then we got to the good stuff, highlights of which included, there would be a good possibility that you would flush your own self down the toilet if it got caught in there by accident, and a squirrel would probably climb up it and ride around on your head (I’m not sure if this one makes super long hair an asset or not).

This is one of my favorite parts of parenting. Just listening to your kids explore hypothetical questions outside of the limits of maturity and reality. Its hilarious and endearing and heartbreaking (because you’ll watch them first gain and then lose this skill as they age) all at once. As my friend Lori says, its an awful lot like being stoned, without the sleepiness and the munchies.

By the way, while trying to figure out what would happen if you ate a match, I found out that you can actually make your own rocket out of a match stick. It’s just a guess, but I think that you could definitely hit a matchstick rocket with a bullet and if you did it wouldn’t do much of anything.

Spring Break - Days Five, Six, and Seven

Ok so my husband and I took a break from Spring Break and headed to Chicago for the weekend. It was a lovely little vacation. Not a lot happened that is worth sharing (and none of it is relevant because the kids weren't with us). I would like to share the following: on Saturday, my older daughter turned to my mother and asked her: "Did Mommy go somewhere?" That's gotta make any mother feel good, to know that it took her child more than 24 hours to notice that she was out of town. At least my kids are independent!

Spring Break - Day Four - Unanswerable Questions

Spring Break- Day Four - Answering the Unanswerable

Kids ask a lot of questions. And "a lot" as a quantifier is an understatement. My kids ask me stuff all of the time. From the minute they wake up I am peppered with questions. Usually the first of the day is, "Do we have school this day?" quickly followed by "Why do we have school this day?" These types of questions are simple and therefore simple to answer - "yes" and "because its Tuesday" - you don’t even have to be awake to nail these! But as the day unfolds, the questions usually become more difficult - "Why does my waffle taste like it smells like cinnamon even if the box only says Homestyle because that is gross?" But they are still answerable - "probably because you are making that up to be a pain in the ass" or "in some people’s homes the style is cinnamon - ISN’T THAT CRAZY!"

Sometimes though, the questions get so difficult they are downright unanswerable. And that is a dangerous thing. Because unanswered questions jeopardize your entire credibility as a parent. When your kids come to you for answers it’s because they assume that you are an expert and, knowing this, you can’t pin your whole reputation to false information. So its in your best interest to answer all of their questions to the best of your ability. And if you don’t have that much ability, you’d better get it quick. Because too many "I don’t knows" or "Ask your father’s" will soon have your kids consulting someone else when the really important questions come up. And let’s be honest, you don’t want anybody else (their friends, your neighbors, your husband) explaining things like puberty, or sex, or relationships.

The empty hours of Spring Break at our house have become a breeding ground for these dangerous, unanswerable questions. This afternoon while eating lunch, my two older children posed a series hypothetical situations to which they fully expected legitimate answers. And from the moment the first of these questions was posed, I had a familiar feeling that I was screwed. Here’s how it went down.

Child One: "Mommy, if you shoot off a missile and then it hits a house made of wood - doesn’t it keep going through the wood even though it will explode up the whole house?"
Me: " It will definitely explode up that house - but what do you mean keep going?"
Child One: "KEEP GOING THA-REW!"
Me: "Uhhm."
Child Two: " Well what if the house is made of bricks, so then it will just explode it up and stop right?"
Me: "So are you asking me if missiles can be stopped by bricks but not wood?"
Child One: "What if you shoot off a missile and it hits another missile, which missile will explode first?"
Child Two: "What if you shoot a bullet at a missile, then what about that?"
Child One: "Or what if a missile hits some lava?"
Chile Two: "YEAH!"
Child One: "Mommy how about if you shoot off a rocket and a missile which one is faster?"
Child Two: "What if you hit a missile with a bomb?"

I am seriously unable to answer any of these questions. My knowledge of missiles and rockets is limited to the movie October Sky ( which I have seen approximately 27 times while substitute teaching for high school physics class). I don’t think - "If you get really good at building rockets you won’t have to grow up to be a coal miner" - is the answer my kids are looking for. Usually when I don’t know the answer to something, I do what we all do, I google it and then I wiki it. No luck, the Internet offers no answers to the unique scenario of a bullet hitting a missile. It is pretty easy to locate instructions on how to create both a missile and bullet, but I didn’t really want to spend significant time on those sites (enabling damning cookies just seems too risky in this day and age). Aside from inspirational teen movies, the only other missile knowledge I have is related to the recent government plan to shoot a missile at a rogue satellite thereby blowing up the satellite before it can land somewhere on U.S. soil. This sounds disturbingly similar to the kind of thing my kids were proposing. Which should only serve to scare the pants off of all of us - upper level, national security decisions are being made by a group of people with the problem solving skills of a preschooler and a second grader all hopped up on goldfish and apple juice!

And none of that left me with any real answers for my kids. You see when kids ask questions, they don’t want answers to other similar questions, they want answers to their EXACT questions. So I was stuck doing the thing I hate the most, waiting for my husband to come home and turning over all the questions to him. It turns out that neither of us knows what exactly happens when a missile lands in lava, but we’re pretty sure it’s awfully hot.

Spring Break - Day Three or Why I Hate Candyland

This was one of those days where I can’t possibly tell you what we did today. Mostly people just wandered about our house making messes while I cleaned up messes that had been made previously. Here’s what I do know:
1. Xavier has had the same shirt on since he went to bed Sunday night. I realized this today and while I played with the idea of making him take a bath and change his whole wardrobe, I think it will be far more interesting to wait and see if anyone else notices this. To understand why this is legitimately interesting I have to point out that I am only one of three adults who sees this kid on a daily basis (his father and my mother both have seen him on several occasions since he put the shirt on).
2. I hate Candyland. Growing up I loved Candyland. If you ask any adult without children, they will list Candyland as one of the top games of their childhood. Think about it: it takes place in an enchanted forest decorated with delicious treats, you get to move your little gingerbread self on a candy-coated path through that forest, and it is the only game that really speaks to the fantasy of drifting around in an ice-cream sea. And the only requirement for getting to play in that enchanted forest was, well there was no requirement. Candyland requires no skill whatsoever (by "skill" I mean basic ability). Wikipedia suggests that Candyland requires color recognition but all that really means is that blind people might experience a slight challenge playing Candyland. I mean you don’t have to be able to name the colors to play, all you have to do is match the square on your card to the square on the path. There’s no reading, no counting, no thinking. There’s NOTHING in this game except moving a little gingerbread man along and thinking about candy. Except if you are one of my kids. Then playing Candyland involves a whole bunch of scheming and lying and mistrust. In general, playing Candyland is an opportunity to showcase your worst self. Details of our most recent Candyland game should be sufficient to illustrate this point:
It was Xavier’s idea to play Candyland yesterday and because I couldn’t really come up with any good reasons why we shouldn’t play - I agreed. I insisted that both his sisters play with us and after twenty minutes of arguing over colors (just so you know, I ended up with green which was in fact my LAST choice) and seating arrangements, we got down to it. Right out of the gate there was trouble. Polly knocked over the deck of cards and we had to wait five minutes while a VERY concerned Xavier reassembled the deck. After that, Xavier started things off by drawing an orange card. What luck! This put him squarely on Rainbow Pass and saved him quite a bit of trouble. Had it been someone else’s child, I definitely would have suspected some funny business. Then I started noticing that both kids were experiencing quite a run of double square draws. At that point I had some suspicions but no actual proof that there was some serious cheating going on in Candyland. And besides I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do even if I did have the proof. I mean calling the kids out on cheating would mean that we would all be there much longer than I wanted to be and they were actually getting along quite well (even if it was only because they both were kicking my green ass). So I had decided on turning a blind eye to the situation until Xavier drew the Gramma Nutt card. At the time, he was two thirds of the way to King Kandy’s Kastle and this was a major setback indeed. The kid flipped. And that is when I improvised and came up with one of the best add-on board game rules ever. I told Xavier he could either go back to Gramma Nutt’s cottage (which I pointed out was made of peanut brittle and very possibly deliciously salty) or he could miss four turns. He contemplated his choices for about fifteen seconds and went back to Gramma Nutt’s. Before long, he had another bad draw and that is when the real (and by real I mean downright obvious) cheating began. Pretty soon the kid refused to even acknowledge what card he had actually drawn. When it was his turn to move he would sometimes stop on the color that he drew, but that didn’t mean it was the next square of that color. His sister caught on and begin to get furious. And I was forced into action. See we actually have a family motto and the third part of the motto is "no cheating", so me choosing to ignore the cheating was simply intolerable from a parenting perspective. I called him on it, and reminded him of the rules, and threatened to throw him out of the game and made him miss a turn or two. Eventually the game ended with everyone celebrating with King Kandy, but I didn’t feel any better for having taught him a lesson. I just felt tired and disappointed and maybe just a little bit pissed off that I played it straight and still came in dead last (that’s right, a 21 month old with a "weyow" guy beat me).

Spring Break - Day Two

Mommy goes shopping for a swimsuit. Mommy has a cavity. Mommy is so depressed by 4:30 p.m. that Mommy contemplates death by Michelob Ultra (that I think, is safely impossible).

Spring Break- Day One

I woke up this morning with gleeful anticipation. "I will embrace this opportunity" I told myself. "I will enlighten my children" I promised. "We will make memories and have experiences (that aren’t related to ass wiping and pokemon)." " I am a good mother - goddammit!" I fed my children and asked them five to seven to twelve times (depending on the child and the particular article of clothing) to dress themselves and then at 10:00 a.m. sharp we piled into the car to visit the museums.

Our conversation en route went a little something like this:
Me: "Hooray! I am a great mom - this will be fantastic!" (that was not out loud, although it could have been as no one was paying attention)
Emma: "Where are we going anyway?"
Me: "To the car and airplane museum"
Emma: "What! You never told me that. I never wanted to go there!"
Me: "Oh you will like it so much." Someone told me that if you smile while you say stuff, it will sound nicer like you actually mean to be smiling while you are saying it, so I probably was smiling when I said that.
Polly: "Yuyyaby Elmo" (which means Lullaby Elmo and has no relevance to anything going on whatsoever."
Xavier: "Mom you forgot to buckle me in."
Me: "Oh, Ok sit really still until we get there and then you won’t have to waste up anytime unbuckling yourself."

When we arrived at the first museum, the splendidly boring Crawford Auto Museum, there were two good omens immediately - a Triple-A member’s discount on admission and a model train in the lobby. Not much else happened at that museum. The kids were impressed by the vintage car collection and had fun climbing on the one car they were allowed to touch. They also had a great time cramming themselves into the Tinkerbell replica. A tiny boat in which one man spent seventy days alone at sea. I’m not much for boats and sailing but I can see how that guy had a pretty great idea - he crawled into his little boat and no one could talk to him or touch him for more than three months! Then we spent some time in the other half of the museum, the part without the cars and planes and boat, the part with absolutely nothing interesting in it at all. Here are the highlights: Polly walked into a pole and banged her head pretty good; Xavier revealed his love for pushing empty strollers into my heels; I discovered that Emma loves museums and has to look at everything, even the Carl and Louis Stokes exhibit (which makes her completely unrelated to me); and I found myself in the middle of the lamest toy city playroom ever thinking "My God this might be the most boring thing I have ever done" and then simultaneously feeling incredibly guilty, because a better mom would have been loving every minute with her kids.

We finished that museum in just about two hours, which is incredible considering the lack of actual exhibits in the place, and marched across the street to the Museum of Natural History. When I was a kid I loved this museum and my kids love this museum. So after lunch in the café, which needs no reliving, they trudged happily through the galleries looking at dead animals and rocks and whatever else is natural and historical.

So if you discount the whining and the incident where one child slapped another in the planetarium, the museum was a success. But the whole time we were there I was pestered by this nagging thought - "I am so fucking bored, this is so boring" and its partner thought "I am such a bad mother." I’m pretty sure I am not the only woman I know having these thoughts this week, and I know that they are due to both the overall tediousness of child rearing and the incredible guilt we feel as mothers who find out daily that motherhood is not a nursery rhyme. And thinking these things over on the way home from the museum, I resolved not to become so absorbed in and disappointed by the negativity and dangerously high expectations of this job, and these next two weeks in particular, and instead to focus on the little things that my children do and that I do with them that give me joy and laughter and relief that this really was a good idea after all.

And then I got home, and too tired to make dinner, fed the kids peanut butter sandwiches and drank three beers and ate a bowl of goldfish by myself in the kitchen and waited patiently for one of those little things to happen.

Spring Break

It is Spring Break. When I was growing and in public school, we always had a few days off school in April. Usually, we had Good Friday off and then maybe, but only maybe, the week following Easter Sunday. This meant you had just enough time off from school for your parents to the throw you and your Easter baskets into the car and drive five or ten hours north, west, or east (but never south) to see their parents, so that the whole family could bitch about the cold and the snow and the general greyness of springtime in the Midwest while you played Uno with your siblings and waited for the real cartoons to show up on your grandparents limited reception t.v.

When I switched to private school in the seventh grade, I was introduced to a whole new concept - Spring Break. This was revolutionary. Not only was Spring Break totally unrelated to Easter, it was two weeks long! And the same two weeks every year - the last two weeks in March. In this new Spring Break world, families would jet off (I say "jet" because that’s what they did, they flew on a jet) off to all sorts of exotic points south - Florida, Georgia, islands like Aruba and Jamaica. And return two weeks later, well tanned and grumbling about the unnatural cold of Cleveland weather. While I found out about this kind of Spring Break from my friends, I never actually experienced it (we did get to go Washington D.C. and Colonial Williamsburg one year though). I can tell you as an adult, I’m not experiencing it either.

Our family’s two week long Spring Break experience officially starts tomorrow, and I can already tell you that I wish the schools would go back to the old long weekend routine of my elementary school years. In many ways I am thankful for the break, the kids can sleep in (but they won’t), I don’t have to make any lunches (except the ones we all eat together everyday), no one has to get dressed (this will cut down on laundry), and I don’t have to pick anyone up in the middle of anyone else’s nap. Those are the upsides to the break. Oh yeah, and the ideal of spending two weeks of quality time with my three beloved children. But as thankful as I am for the time away from the school routine, I have this sinking feeling of dread when I think about the next two weeks. Especially when I hear the three of my kids talking at me all at once (and saying nothing) and think about how that sound will not stop until nine p.m. tonight. And I am racking my brain to figure out how we will all make it through, of course I would love to have us make it through, bathed and clothed and enriched with cultural experiences and spilling over with freshly minted childhood memories, but I have a feeling I am going to have to settle for making it through alive, without strep throat or ear infections, and having eaten pizza for dinner less than six times.

Inappropriate, Appropriate Language and Appropriate, Inappropriate Language (or Teaching Your Kids to Swear)

This will be a familiar scene to many moms. You find yourself in the car with your husband. You are showered and wearing your best underwear and your grown-up shoes (which your husband lovingly refers to as your "bitch boots"). This can mean only one thing, you and your husband are ready for a night out, ALONE. The kids are the farthest thing from your mind. And because it is so damn relaxing just to be in the company of another adult, you aren’t even really talking, you are just quietly taking in the scenery. Until something catches your eye, something you are always on the look out for -maybe its a cow, or a train, or an ambulance, or a silly costumed adult selling something- but you are so prone to searching out this thing that you notice it immediately and can’t help but to exclaim in your best mommy voice, "Look honey, there’s a cow! (or a train, or an ambulance, or a firetruck, or whatever commonplace thing it is that your husband doesn’t give a hoot about). And there you have it, no matter how grown up you look, and how far away the kids are, its pretty hard to put away your mommy personality.

This tendency can present itself in other facets of your life and result in varying degrees of embarrassment. You can imagine how uncomfortable it would be to tell your a friend, or a friend’s husband to "say please" when ordering at a restaurant, or to find yourself kneeling down attempting to tie another adult’s shoe, or to accidentally follow a friend into the stall in the bathroom… Most often for me though, I find the mommy version of me appears quite often when I am a little bit stressed or frustrated and a good-old fashioned "cuss word" would be just the thing to express it. Except that for some reason I don’t swear. Instead I find myself declaring things like "Oh Crime!" and "Farmer!" and "Shimey Show!" Phrases that are so ridiculous, I don’t even know how to spell them. The other day I spilled a good bit of dinner on the floor while making it. There were no children within earshot. And my immediate reaction to the spill was to stomp my foot and yell "Shimey Show" (which I think means Shit! but I am not really sure). Now think about what would have happened if I did that when I was out. I mean out with drivers-licensed , college educated and yes, employed people. I would look like a real ass and all my pretensions of interesting adultness would be shattered. And trust me, nothing blows your adult-not-a-mommy cover faster than dropping your family’s own rated-g version of the f-bomb in adult only company.

Don’t let me mislead you though, as my husband (and children) can attest to, the problem with me and my inappropriate language is that I can’t seem to get the censoring at the appropriate moment thing down. So for every time I’ve slipped and said "Oh, farm her!" (which my kids would interpret as oh! farmer!) when discussing something with another adult., there have been at least five or six times where I just let go and used the standard language in front of my children (and whatever other children happened to be in the room at the time).

You can imagine this must be very confusing for my kids. Which is worse Farm or Fuck? What exactly does "Shimey Show" mean and how can it mean "I left my wallet in the car" and "I forgot to pick up your sister?" at the same time. I have a good friend who frankly talks like a pirate in front of her kids. And they are quite familiar and even adept with the correct applications of all of the less savory words. She doesn’t feel guilty about this at all. And I don’t think she should. As she has pointed out, if the worst thing her kids do is say fuck every now and again, than she will have done a damn good job of raising her children. And she’s right.

This had made me wonder however, if I have done my kids some sort of disservice by wavering between my own personal swear words (the use of which will only bring them ridicule in the adult world) and the real deal (which we agree can not really offend their tender ears all that much). Fortunately my four year old son put a stop to all my worrying the other day. He and his sister, who is seven, were eagerly watching the snow fall and discussing the notion of a "snow day". Because Xavier is only in his second year of school, he is just beginning to really grasp the delicious freedom of a snow day which I think is obvious from what I heard him declare to his sister - "If there was no school tomorrow so there was too much snow, that would be fuckin’ weird!" And he was right, snow days aren’t just weird, they are fuckin’ weird. And in that moment I knew that my kids would never, ever innocently utter Farm! or Crime! in frustration. Instead they would say what they really meant (and conjugate it).

Working Mommy Versus Stay-At-Home-Mommy

From the moment you are brave enough (or naïve enough) to share the good news of your pregnancy with your family and friends and let’s face it, the general public because you can’t hide that thing for long, you are faced with millions of complicated questions about your intentions for life after the baby arrives. Are you a breast or bottle girl? Will you vaccinate or just focus on really good handwashing? Disposable or Cloth (which really should be phrased as gross or GROSSER)? Will you have your son circumcised or will you just let nature be (thereby ruling out any possibility of him ever experiencing oral sex)? At their core most of these decisions are more about your baby, than you. Except there is that one burning question that is equally about both of you (and your spouse/partner/lover/whatever) too - will you work or will you stay home? And no matter which you decide to do, you will find that immediately it will set you squarely into one camp of mothers or another: the mothers with careers or the career mothers.

And the mothers from those camps don’t cross over, they may coexist peacefully on the playground, but their relationships are tainted with suspicion and judgment and of course, guilt. Of course moms may get along one on one with other mothers from the opposite camp, but when it comes to group interaction you’ll see a line down the middle more clearly than you would at a sixth grade dance.

I could spend pages exploring, the psychology and the guilt and the motivation behind making and living with this decision, but I am not a social anthropologist and really, I am the mother of three with a shit-load of laundry and a bathroom to clean. So I’ll spare you. I do however, want to let you in on one little secret and I think once I put this out there it might be as eye-opening for you as it was for me. This whole tension between the mothers with careers and the career mothers may be due to a simple misunderstanding. By way of explaining, I’ll share a little anecdote with you. During a visit to the playground, a friend of mine (who happens to be employed - just so you know that I do have one or two of that kind of friend) overheard a conversation between a couple of moms in the career camp. One mother was bemoaning the fact that her nanny had been absent for a week or two and she had taken her place at home with the children. Now you must understand, this mother was not begrudging her nanny the time off. And she wasn’t complaining about all the things she couldn’t do because she was home with her kids. Instead she was simply admitting to her friend that she was miserable at home because she didn’t like who she had become since being at home for a couple of weeks. She warned her friend "Shoot me if I ever tell you I want to stay home, all I do is yell at these kids all day long." While a part of me would love to poo-poo this mommy with a career and claim that she is clearly not cut-out for full-time childrearing, I know that’s simply not the case. What I do know is that someone, preferably a stay-at-home type mom, should take this woman and absolve her of her guilt by telling her our (career mommies’) little secret, that’s all we do all day too! That’s what mothering is, hard and frustrating and relentless. And yes there are little moments of hilarity and tenderness and all that good stuff, but there is a lot of struggle in between. This poor woman has been at her office all these years thinking that all those PTA moms and after-school brownie bakers are greeting their kids with sing-songy voices and simply coping with all the hair-pulling, and spills, and selective listening and general bad behavior that comes up in any given day. She could not be more wrong. Sure, we stay-at-home-moms may have a few more tricks up our sleeves for these situations, like turning on the vacuum cleaner or locking ourselves in the closet with a glass of wine, but we’re not having any better of a time than she would.

So I say this to all the working mothers out there who are struggling with guilt over leaving your children at home: stop second-guessing yourselves, the reason no one is yelling at your kids right now is because you are at work and there is someone with them who you pay to NOT yell at them. And to all the stay-at-home moms who have wondered if they would stop yelling and start appreciating their kids a little more if they weren’t with them all of the time: stop second-guessing yourselves, no matter how much time we spend away from our children we will never altogether stop yelling at them, because they are our kids and we love them. And sometimes they deserve it.

This is not a Mommyfesto

Mommyfesto - "a companion blog to Daddyfesto" in the same way that "mommy" is a companion to "daddy" - less theory, more action; a little bit crazy; and bitching the whole way through.

The first thing you should know is that I don’t have a lot of theories on motherhood or parenting. I know a lot of people who have spent years (ok maybe just nine months and some change) collecting and cultivating their theories on parenting. Determined to find the best way, to have the best kids, they have read everything Amazon has to offer on rearing children. Some of those parents (or parents-to-be) have subscribed wholesale to a single theorist: they are touchpointists, or ferberites, montessorians, or, my personal favorite (really it is), love-and-logicians. Others - the majority- have taken a little of this and a little of that and created their own parenting protocol. I didn’t do either.

Over the past few years, I have occasionally thought maybe I should do a little research into my "profession" and have done my very best to make it through some of the literature. But then something like lice, or a mysteriously wet bed (and a screaming preschooler with damp pants), or flashcards, or poop (not in the toilet) or more likely, a new season of the Real World, would happen and the book would be forgotten long before I finished the preface.

And I didn’t do it ahead of time for a very good reason. There was no "ahead of time." I mean not in the planning, hoping, obsessing, picking out names and schools sort of "ahead of time." You see, I got knocked up, but before it was cool. Happily, the right guy knocked me up and now I have three kids and almost eight years of motherhood under my belt (and above it and on my ass) to blog about. But I still don’t have any theories, or grand plans, or manifestos. Instead I have only anecdotal evidence that may or may not support your theories.

So this is it, my "mommyfesto" little bits of mothering experience, observations, and maybe some advice, but mostly its just me typing in the vain hope that someone out there is listening to me because God knows, nobody is listening at home.