Picket Fence Post

I spend a lot of time complaining on this blog. In earnest.

Thus, as I prepare to attempt the Herculean task that is packing the family’s stuff up for a Cape Cod vacation, I’ve decided to be optimistic in the hopes that my hyper, over-caffeinated mania — which has descended upon me like a storm cloud this past week as I tried to attend to all of my work commitments – would fade and a peaceful, Zen-like calm would sweep over me. So, in the name of naive optimism, here’s a list of my favorite things about summer (leaving my gripes about vicious mosquitoes, youth sports practices encroaching on summer and high gas prices off the list):

1. Lighter Laundry Load. The laundry is easier to wash in the summer – beach towels notwithstanding – because the kids are wearing T-shirts and shorts, meaning more of them can be cleaned in fewer loads.

2. The Smell of Sunscreen. Makes me think of the beach. And I love the beach.

3. Fresh Fruit. The abundance of sweet blueberries, strawberries, nectarines, plums and peaches puts the bitter winter fruit to shame. Plus fresh fruit makes for an easy snack for the kids to get for themselves while I’m toiling away at the computer.

4. Swimming. No matter how maddening the day — balancing deadlines and refereeing sibling spats before they spiral downward into bloodbaths – the moment I hop into the pool, the frustration literally washes away. (It quickly returns by the time we get back to the house, but we’re trying to be positive here!)

5. No School Projects. No scrambling, no last-minute errand running, no nagging worry that you’ve forgotten to remind your kid to study her spelling words and get all of your kids going on their science projects.

6. Powdered Lemonade Mixes. They’re cheap (yeah, they contain sugar, but it’s summertime, so get over yourself). They come in ginormous cans. Plus the kids can mix it up themselves, if you overlook the granules of lemonade mix all over the kitchen.

7. Eating Outside. If you eat out of doors before the evil mosquitoes descend and carry away your youngest child, the inevitable spills and dropped food that accompany any meal with young children won’t tick you off.

8. VACATION! Speaking of vacation . . . I’m going to be bold and take a Picket Fence Post blogging break for a whole week. I’ll be back in the first full week of August to regale you all with all manner fanciful tales of the modern family’s summer vacation, so don’t forget to check in here. In the meantime, watch (or set your DVR for) Mad Men on AMC, second season premieres on Sundays at 10 p.m. Trust me, you won’t be sorry.

Item #1: Kid-Sick Parents

Read any of the slew of news stories recently about “kid-sick” parents who, when sending their children off to sleep-away camp, insist on constant communication with their kids and, in some cases, flouted the camp “no cell phone” rules by smuggling a phone into their offspring’s stuff? Well I have, and so has syndicated columnist Betsy Hart, the host of the “It Takes a Parent” radio show. She had me on as a guest to discuss what she calls the “Over-Tethered Generation.” You can listen to the show and sparkling conversation (at one point I use the pithy phrase “going all 007″) here.

Item #2: Tiger Beat

I had no idea that Tiger Beat magazine was still being published. To me, Tiger Beat means Shawn Cassidy, Rick Springfield and Mark Hamill. It resurrects a variety of memories involving flavored Bonnie Bell lip gloss, rainbow shoelaces for my hard Nike sneakers, a large comb sticking out of the right back pocket of my Jordache jeans and chewing multiple pieces of Bubble Yum.

To my daughter, however, who literally squealed when she spotted a Tiger Beat in the local drugstore this week and begged me to buy it – with all my nostalgia, how could I not? — Tiger Beat means the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato & the Camp Rock crew, some teen named Selena, the ubiquitous Miley Cyrus and, of course, the cast of High School Musical I, II and XXIV: The Social Security Years.

At the time of this post, posters of the aforementioned folks have been tacked all over her bedroom walls, alongside an inspirational, framed gymnastics poster I put up and the framed HSM poster I tastefully placed in just the right location in her room. It now looks like a Tiger Beat explosion in there, distinctly un-Pottery Barn Kid. Her ‘tweens have officially arrived.

Item #3: Obama Girls’ Crazy Sked

Any regular reader of the Picket Fence Post is familiar with my vociferous objections to over-stuffed kids’ schedules and the havoc those schedules wreak on family life. (As the beginning of the boys’ first football season creeps nearer — with four practices/week starting in August — I’m already getting the dry heaves about having to get them to everything on time while trucking my daughter to her travel soccer stuff. Oh, and have my own personal and work life.)

So when I read an AP story about the extra-curricular schedule for Michelle and Barack Obama’s girls — ages 10 and 7 — I was astonished. While Michelle Obama does have her mother at home to help her with the girls when Michelle is campaigning for her husband’s presidential bid, and Barack is busy on a global odyssey, imagine trying to keep up this kid schedule with everything else that’s going on with the Obama family: Piano and tennis lessons for both girls; soccer, dance and drama for the 10-year-old and gymnastics and tap for the 7-year-old.

Just reading that list — and knowing that Dad is never home and Mom has massive campaign obligations — I can’t help but wonder how in the world they accomplish all of this with just the help of one grandma.

Item #4: Girls & Math

Forget that stupid talking Barbie doll which years ago uttered, “Math class is tough.” A new study commissioned by the National Science Foundation says that, when it comes to boys and girls there is parity in their achievements. “The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems,” wrote Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. “They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.”

A study co-author told the Times: “Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance . . . But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

So let’s take up the cause and send our girls the message that they’re just as good as boys in the numbers and E=MC squared arena. You go (calculate) girls.

Image credit: Associated Press.

If you saw my Q&A with Pamela Paul, author of Parenting Inc., you read all about how almost every aspect of modern parenting has been commoditized. You need to potty train your kid, you can buy special potty training books, clothes, diapers/pull-ups, videos, all manner of potty seats, stickers and, last, but not least, even obtain the services of a “professional” potty training coach. (I kid you not.)

My recent GateHouse Media column tackles the outsourcing of parenthood and focuses on how, when my kids were babies, I used to joke about hiring someone to take care of the madness otherwise known as potty training. Now, the joke’s apparently on me.

A few weeks ago, my two boys — ages almost-7 and almost-10 — had been referring to their nether-regions by the nickname ”Wii” . . . as in the Wii video game system that we currently do not own (Santa brought The Eldest Boy Play Station 2 two Christmases ago).

Now, the nickname du jour has evolved into ”game system.”

I discovered that “Wii” was no longer in vogue when, last week, I saw The Youngest Boy, clutching his private parts after he’d been wrestling with his brother. He was grumbling, “Ow! You hit my game system!”

Sometimes, I do not understand the male species.

Item #1: No ‘Bliss’ for Real Moms

Galt Niederhoffer wants all of you mommies to knock it off with your mommy propaganda, saying stuff like “motherhood is bliss” because, as she says on The Huffington Post, it’s not. In her post entitled, “The Bliss Myth: Cut the Crap Mommies,” Niederhoffer wrote:

“Why not acknowledge that frustration, boredom, guilt and ambivalence are universal, unavoidable facets of motherhood? Sharing will make us better and happier mothers, affording women the comfort of community and the benefit of shared information — the very tools we need to transcend motherhood’s challenges.”

Well, if Niederhoffer had been reading the Picket Fence Post, she would’ve never gotten the misguided notion that parenthood is bliss. Maybe I should e-mail her a few links to places where she can get a reality check on what real, non-blissed-out parenting is like here on Planet Earth.

Item #2: Family Meals Good for Parents Too

Speaking of real parenting . . . Slate’s Emily Bazelton tells us that while we’ve all heard about how absolutely fantastic and grounding it is for children to sit down with their parents for family meals each night — family-meal-eating kids are less likely to get into trouble, are more likely to feel closer to their family, get higher grades, become rocket scientists, etc. – it’s also good for parents too. Bazelton wrote:

“The research by lead author Jenet Jacob of Brigham Young University found that among 1,580 parents who worked at IBM, those who said their jobs interfered less with being home for dinner tended to feel greater personal success, and success in relationships with their spouses and their children. The working parents — both mothers and fathers — had all of these buoyant feelings if they made it home for dinner more regularly, even if they still worked long hours. They also felt more kindly toward their workplace.”

I know I’d certainly feel better if The Spouse were home more often for family meals, then I wouldn’t be the only one to develop a migraine when the kids say they utterly loathe what I’ve made for dinner (there’s always at least one protester per meal), then watch them sulk and, in at least the case of one child, literally throw up all over the kitchen table in order to avoid eating the baked chicken. Good times.

(more…)

When the story about the pregnant Gloucester High School girls (all 16 and under) was being wildly hyped up across the media universe recently, I kept mum about it here at the Picket Fence Post. I had no initial desire to leap into the fray on that particular issue.

Then the July 4th weekend parade in a Boston suburb came along. It crudely lampooned the girls – the minors – the kids who’d gotten pregnant and had no real idea of how drastically their lives were about to change. And some folks in the media and elsewhere said it was important to ridicule these girls so as to dissuade future teens from getting (or desiring to get) pregnant, because, as we all know, it was reported that some of the Gloucester girls wanted to get pregnant.

That’s when I felt compelled to chime in, seeing as though the girls were being called every sexual slur in the book, while the boys/men who got them pregnant (they haven’t been identified other than one 24-year-old homeless man whose name hasn’t been released) somehow escaped all manner of excoriating commentary. The vulnerable girls, with their swollen pregnant bellies, make for much better targets it seems. So I wrote this piece on Mommy Track’d about the media’s and public’s treatment of the girls and of other single women who get pregnant.

And, although I didn’t mention it in the column, pundits repeatedly suggested that a “Juno effect” was at work here, referencing the popular film about a 16-year-old girl from a stable, two-parent household who accidentally got pregnant during her sole sexual interlude then gave the baby up for adoption. So I watched Juno again with The Spouse to see if it could be considered an inducement to teen girls to get pregnant. We agreed that it in no way made the teenaged character seem cool because she was pregnant and didn’t make teen pregnancy seem easy (she was ostracized, she missed her school’s big dance, she was scorned by most adults), though The Spouse did add that he thought she “bounced back” from the pregnancy well, better than most girls, he suggested. I think this moving, quirky film got a bad rap in the post-Gloucester news cycles.

Image credit: Fox Searchlight via Media Bistro.

The Eldest Boy stayed up late last night – with The Spouse’s permission – to watch Major League Baseball’s Home Run derby, while The Girl and The Youngest Boy two watched a recording of it this morning on our DVR.

All three kiddos are psyched about tonight’s All-Star game, although the American League players will be without the services of our beloved Big Papi who’s still on the mend.

Nonetheless, despite any sleep-deprived tantrums that are likely to erupt today or tomorrow following late night baseball viewing, we are thrilled that the Red Sox have re-taken first place in the American League East.

So, as The Youngest Boy is melting down tomorrow because he’s so very tired, I will try to ease my pain in dealing with his irrational behavior by reminding myself that, at least for now, the Sox are number one.

And I’ll plan on bribing the kid with ice cream, that always seems to work.

Image of me wearing my beloved Red Sox jacket. The dinner plate-sized button bearing the likeness of my baseball hero, Dwight Evans, is obscured from view.

So a neighbor stopped by my house yesterday to tell me that earlier this week at around 6:30 p.m. she saw two coyotes in my front yard chasing down some rabbits (the rabbit population has boomed this year in our neighborhood).

My choices: Prevent my three kids from playing outside at dusk or tell them to be aware of their surroundings and come inside immediately if they see anything larger than a cat. (I suppose there’s a third option; I could sit on the front steps with a rifle and shoot down dem critters to protect ma kin, but that’s not really my style.)

In the era of too much TV, too many video games, a fixation on computers/texting and general childhood sloth, I sat the kids down, told them about the coyotes and advised them to come inside if they see an animal larger than a cat, other than our other neighbor’s border collie. True, at dusk, I’ll tell urge them to stay away from the wooded area or near the area of the yard where the neighbor saw the coyotes, but I don’t want them to grow up afraid to go outside and live their lives.

Hopefully, I made the right choice.

Item #1: An American Girl + Great Depression=Kit Kittredge

Took The Girl to see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl with my neighbors and their daughters, and several plastic, overpriced dolls. Was pleasantly surprised to see that the film, which is set during the Great Depression, didn’t completely sugar-coat the struggles families endured, such as having the bank repossess family houses (and businesses), having to take in boarders to earn money, seeing fathers leave their families in search of employment and having to keep chickens in order to sell their eggs. The story was told through the eyes of grade schooler Kit Kittredge (Abigail Breslin) who, much to my giddy delight, aspired to be a reporter and toiled away in the attic on her typewriter.

“I don’t ever want to live in a Depression,” The Girl told me afterward, saying that it must’ve been “very hard and awful.” Days later, she used one of the ancient, manual typewriters I have in my office and typed out her very own summary of the film. A sample of The Girl’s summary: “Kit and Ruthy and their school class had to help in the soup kitchen. The soup kitchen was a place where people who needed food could eat. When they got there Kit saw her father. Then she knew he had lost his job. She was right.”

Item #2: TCM’s ‘Essentials Jr.’

Speaking of Abigail Breslin . . . she and her Kittredge co-star Chris O’Donnell have been co-hosting a Sunday night series on the Turner Classic Movies channel called, TCM Essentials Jr., where, each week, a classic, family friendly film is aired at 8 p.m. This week’s feature is Meet Me in St. Louis, a film, which I am embarrassed to say, I’ve never seen but one that Breslin says is a favorite of hers. Other upcoming films to be aired: Roman Holiday on August 3 and Yours, Mine and Ours on August 24.

(more…)