Picket Fence Post

But he forgot to deliver noise canceling headphones for the rest of the family.

And the additional sound proofing insulation for the ceiling above the drum playing area, directly beneath the kitchen floor.

Lucky for all of us who reside in the Picket Fence Post home, The Eldest Boy can keep a beat, albeit a beat that I still feel in my chest long after the drumming has ceased.

Image credit: Squidoo.

1) Are appalled that a child is out in the world unsupervised, flag down a conductor and urge him to do something.

2) Think, “I wonder if I’d let my kid ride the subway alone? How would he do? Is he ready for that?”

3) Think, “Good for him!”

Well, in real life, this very situation presented itself to a conductor on the Long Island Railroad who took an option not on this list. He called the police.

Here’s the story, via the web site Babble:

“. . . [A] 10-year-old boy was riding the Long Island Railroad to see his friend last Friday. His friend’s family was going to pick him up at the station. He’d done the ride dozens of times before. [The Long Island Railroad] has no policy about what age is too young to ride alone, but his mom had talked to them before his first ride, and they said 10 sounded fine.

But not to one hovering conductor, who not only called the police, but wouldn’t talk to the boy’s mother when he called her after being harassed. Mr. Conductor then held up the train at the station the boy was traveling to and wouldn’t let him leave with his friend’s parents until the police came and basically told the guy he was overreacting and should chill.”

Lenore Iskenazy, the mother of the boy – writing on a web site promoting a freer childhood (less parental hovering), called Free Range Kids – said, “. . . [I]f I had been given a summons as a delinquent parent, or hauled into family court, or had my child had been taken away from me, this would not have been merry at all.”

“Free Range Kids seems like a pretty innocuous idea: Give our kids the freedom we had as children,” Iskenazy continued. “But in reality, we are up against not just a bunch of well-meaning folks who fear for them, but against some powerful authorities too.”

What say you? Did the conductor overreact? Do you think 10 is okay to travel solo? Should today’s kids be afforded more freedom than they have now?

This is a draft of the brief ”amusing anecdote” I was working on for our family Christmas/Hanukkah cards . . . the one that The Spouse said could be misinterpreted by some as too mean-spirited and anti-holiday-ish, therefore it got the ax. (For the full saga of the Redacted Christmas cards, go here.)

Her hairstyle — a high ponytail pinned atop her head resembled a Palin-do, before anyone knew what a Palin-do was – had been dubbed too “embarrassing” to wear outside of the house on a family walk.

“What’s up with that?” her husband asked, gesturing toward her brown spikes of hair jutting toward the sky.

“Mom!” shouted her exasperated-sounding 10-year-old son, “you CAN’T go out with your hair like THAT!”

“Yeah,” the 10-year-old girl chimed in.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s embarrassing,” the boy said.

Embarrassing. That’s what she’d become. An embarrassment.

As her family prepared to take a walk down the street to the park, she decided she’d show them embarrassment. Out of the hall closet came a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, the ones with the crazy nose and fluffily exaggerated eyebrows and mustache that the kids wore for last year’s Christmas card photos. The look of horror on the family members’ faces when she appeared in the driveway with her hair down but wearing the glasses was well worth the irritating accumulation of condensation inside the bulbous plastic nose and the annoying synthetic hairs poking into her eyes and mouth.

“Mooom! You’re NOT wearing that, are you?” the girl asked, visually scouring the street hoping there were no witnesses to this spectacle which could potentially destroy her budding social life with tales of the nut-job mom with a mustache.

“Wearing what?” she asked, coyly smirking as she crossed the street and strolled down the sidewalk, wearing the glasses all the way down the street until she’d sufficiently embarrassed those who had mocked her and, much to her relief, before any passersby spotted her.

Two open questions: Was it sacrilegious for my 7-year-old to pick up our menorah, re-name it a “Hanukkah blaster” and aim it at his 10-year-old brother?

Was it similarly bad for the older brother to then, in response, take one of our dreidels and dub it a “Hanukkah hand blaster” and threaten his brother with it?

Later, after the menorah was restored to its proper position — upright and holding lit candles — and the prayers had been uttered, the 7-year-old took all of the chocolate gelt we had (they’re chocolate coins wrapped in tin foil) and stacked them up on the kitchen counter.

“Look, Mom! A tower of gelt!” he said proudly.

“A tower of guilt?” The Spouse asked.

“No! Gelt!” the kid said, shaking his head.

Image credit: This web site.

Here are excerpts of the Q&A’s I did with the three kids when I was planning the family Christmas/Hanukkah card. The idea was to cut-and-paste these excerpts alongside copies of drawings the kiddos made, but, after I created the document on my laptop, The Spouse looked at it and declared it kind of blah. (For the original story on our Redacted Christmas cards, go here.)

The Eldest Boy, 10

Question: What’s the most annoying thing a sibling did this year?

Answer: That’s a good one. Hmm. I want to think of a good one. My brother and sister using my video game chair without my permission all the time, even when they’re not playing video games, I tell them, “Get your own chair if you like mine so much.”

Q: Who’s your favorite Red Sox player?

A: Mike Lowell, ever since he got the MVP award, I always started liking him.

Q: What ’s the single best movie or TV show you saw this year?

A: Harry Potter IV, The Goblet of Fire because you wouldn’t let us watch it for two years.

(more…)

Although I’m not a person who would typically be described as being ”crafty” (as in crafts, not sneaky), I used to love making our annual Christmas and Hanukkah cards. Ever since our twins were toddlers, The Spouse and I have been making different Christmas cards (in the shapes of ornaments, sometimes with decorative fabric ribbons, or vellum overlays) and including a short, funny story to serve as an antidote to the traditional family holiday letter where folks recount the previous 12 months’ events. Our Christmas card stories usually got laughs at our, or our kids’, expense.

But over the past two years, this Christmas card business has become a source of contention in my house. Why? Because I’m no longer allowed to write about anything that’s truly comedic because the kids say it embarrasses them. It’s one thing to write about our lives in this space where I don’t mention the kids’ names or post their photos. But it’s quite another thing, they maintain, to write a funny anecdote about them, attach their photos, and send them out to all of our family members, friends and neighbors, including kids with whom they attend school.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to come up with a topic that would: a) Be funny and b) Be acceptable to the Picket Fence Post family.

The story about The Spouse trying to prove he’s not middle-aged when he hopped up on the kids’ Rip Stick . . . and then fell flat on his back in the driveway, prompting the kids to fetch me so I could help him up? To make it funny, we were worried that it might come across as too mean. People who don’t get my sense of humor might pick up the phone and inquire about why I was being cruel to my husband and suggest it was un-Christmasy, maybe offer up a phone number for a couples therapist.

The story about The Youngest Boy plunging into mourning after we sold our tan mini-van (called “The Funny Van” since we got it seven years ago), complete with sobbing and angrily lashing out against our new family vehicle? The Youngest Boy got very upset at the prospect of me writing something like that. Then he told us, AGAIN, how much he missed the mini-van and was still angry we got rid of it.

The series of Q&A’s I did with the three kids where I asked them a variety of questions about their current likes and dislikes, with plans to excerpt the best parts on a card insert? The Spouse said it wasn’t funny enough. Nor was it cutesy enough. It was just kind of blah, he said.

The anecdote about The Spouse and the children telling me I couldn’t take a walk down the street to the park with them unless I fixed my hair (because it was “embarrassing” piled up on top of my head and “sticking out”) which prompted me to don Groucho Marx glasses as I strolled down the street? The Spouse thought it was too cutting toward me in the same way the Rip-Stick story was too cutting about him.

With the deadline for the Christmas and Hanukkah cards bearing down, I suggested that I create something I dubbed, “The Redacted Christmas card.” I’d write some sentences and use a thick Sharpie marker to draw lines through the nonsense, filler text as if I were a government censor. It would go something like this:

“It was at THAT moment, when The Youngest Boy was banned from eating chicken. The rest of the nonsense text would go on for a few lines and be unreadable as it would be covered by a thick, black line. But then, The Eldest Boy, chimed in, establishing why he’s been nicknamed, The Instigator. The quick brown fox jumped . . . now how does the rest of that cliched sentence go, the one my father used to type when he would try out new typewriters? But you had to hand it to The Girl, who, in November, decided to ditch her feminine name and replace it with ‘Nick.’”

I thought a censored Christmas card would be kind of funny (thought it was really just my passive aggressive response to being censored), but The Spouse disagreed, saying, “Maybe five of your friends would think it was funny. Everyone else would be confused.” He said he could envision relatives calling us and asking for an unmarked copy of the story.

Seeing as I found it creatively impossible to concoct an amusing card under such conditions, I opted for no story at all.

But I’m not planning on letting my efforts go to waste. I’m going to post the kids’ Q&A’s here, as well as some of the rejected holiday cards stories, ones that were deemed inappropriate for the family Christmas card. There shall be no redacting here.

Thinking himself very clever, The Youngest Boy wanted to hide his Bakugan (a small plastic ball thing that unfolds into a character) in a place where his two siblings wouldn’t find it.

The metal Santa, whose hollow belly comes apart into two pieces, seemed like the best place to the 7-year-old. This was the same Santa whose head The Eldest Boy, 10, is fond of removing and hiding inside said Santa belly. (I’ve been continually disturbed to find a headless Santa sitting in his designated spot on the narrow, white cabinet in the corner of the bathroom.)

Now, Santa, his head and the Bakugan have all gone missing.

Maybe he’s gone off someplace, like, perhaps, to the land of the misfit toys where he’s conspiring with the CDs, the scoffed pens and pencils and the two dozen pairs of kids’ scissors that have likewise disappeared. It’s doubtful that any interrogation with The Eldest Son will yield any actionable intelligence.

UPDATE: The metal Santa, including his head, has been found, however there was no Bakugan inside his belly. The hunt continues.

Image credit: Amazon.com.

Who among us hasn’t hosted or attended a holiday dinner/event from hell? I’ve had a number of them myself.

There was the year my grandfather died on Christmas morning . . . and no, he wasn’t run over by a reindeer walking home from my house Christmas Eve. And we didn’t debate what to do with his gifts, thank you very much.

There was the Christmas when my mother, sidelined by a neck injury, still managed to engage in a sweet potato tossing incident with my father and hurled the F-bomb at him, all while my then-fiance cowered in an adjacent room having overheard the whole exchange but was unable to flee because the only exit was through the kitchen.

We can’t forget Christmas Eve from two years ago where The Spouse and I hosted my family’s traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner for the first time. All was going swimmingly well until the moment I put down my fork at the end of the meal and I succumbed to a nasty case of what I believe was food poisoning that felled my father within hours. I spent Christmas lying in bed feeling like stuff you scrape off of the bottom of your shoe.

Then there was the year when my mother was recovering from a serious illness and my father, The Spouse and I had to call a plumber the night before Thanksgiving in order to fix the gas stove which I’d accidentally busted while trying to make a potato dish.

When my twins were 2, they literally ate decorations off of our Christmas tree, leaving it looking as though it had been ravaged by rampaging wild beasts.

There’ve been family gatherings punctuated by lovely arguments between relatives about the best, fastest route from point A to point B.

The list could go on and on.

But for you, my faithful Picket Fence Post readers, your holiday anecdote could pay off. Parents & Kids Magazine is having a special contest. The magazine is looking for funny, snarky or really interesting family holiday stories. Four winners will be selected and will each receive an autographed copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, which is a testament to my life filled with snark, messy family gatherings and all manner of imperfection. E-mail your tale to: parentsandkids@cnc.com. The deadline is December 22.

Shameless self-promoting addendum: Copies of Suburban Mom would be fantastic — and inexpensive – Christmas or Hanukkah gifts (available via Amazon.com.) They would add some laughter to the life of a suburban mom you know and love, as well as provide relief that her parenting’s not as nutty as mine, as she’s free to laugh at my many foibles mentioned throughout the book. I’ve been told by moms who’ve read Suburban Mom that, because it’s a collection of brief columns, it’s easy to dip into when they’re out and about picking up kids from activities or while waiting in the car pool line.

In its October review of the book, a Literary Mama writer:

“In this collection, O’Brien adroitly handles the balance between relating what could have been tedious anecdotes about the specific frustrations and joys that come with three young children and offered a universal message. With essay titles like ‘The Scrapbooking Cult’ and ‘To Yell, Perchance to Scream,’ it’s easy to picture O’Brien as one of your funniest friends, the one who can make you laugh through your tears and shore you up with the all-important validation that you’re not alone.”

And by sharing YOUR holiday anecdotes, you’ll be doing the same thing . . . letting other moms know that they are not alone with their less-than-perfect family celebrations. I’ll post the winning ones — once Parents & Kids editor Heather Kempskie shares them with me – here on the blog.

Remember, by December 22 people!

Image credit: Wikipedia.

After we layered blankets across our laps and fluffed the sofa pillows, the kids and I snuggled together in the family room to watched two Christmas specials last night. Actually, The Eldest Boy didn’t snuggle on the couch with his two siblings and me. Instead, he sat on the floor, in his special video game chair (the one he hated when we first gave it to him for his birthday but now loves . . . good thing I didn’t return it).

First, we watched the Charlie Brown Christmas show I’d DVRed. We were then treated to a steady stream of snarky comments from The Eldest Boy. The reason for the snarkiness? Lots of things in the cartoon were “unreal,” the 10-year-old said. (In the spirit of Christmas, I didn’t respond by saying that The Clone Wars cartoons he regularly watches as well as the tween sitcoms he loves on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel are likewise “unreal.” But I held my tongue.)

Chief among his complaints: He didn’t like how characters would be hit or startled in such a manner that their bodies would rise up into the air and execute several 360 degree turns. He thought it preposterous that Lucy would’ve set up a psychologist table in the snow “in the middle of nowhere.” He also hated with the passion of a thousand suns the fact that the tiny tree Charlie Brown selected at the Christmas tree lot had a varying numbers of branches depending on which scene we were watching, something I’d never noticed.

“See, there! It grew branches. It has five now. The first time we saw it, it had three,” he said, snorting when the Peanuts gang later waved their arms and whipped Charlie’s tree into something special with the sheer force of Yuletide good will.

His remarks reminded me of that Saturday Night Live TV Funhouse cartoon which parodied the Charlie Brown special “magic” trick involving the waving of arms. I tracked down the satirical and distinctly politically incorrect video. It was first aired in 2002, so some of the topical references are dated (Tom Brokaw is still shown as the anchor of NBC’s Nightly News), but it’s still amusing and definitely NOT FOR KIDS! Repeat, the video is NOT FOR KIDS. (Link to the video is here.)

After Charlie Brown, we watched The Year Without a Santa Claus. Per usual, I teared up at the scene where Santa sits in the kid with the overbite’s kitchen and sings about believing in Santa Claus. We also decided that the two boys remind us of the Miser brothers, with The Eldest Boy being the Snow Miser and The Youngest Boy being the Heat Miser.

During commercial breaks — we went old school and were watching it live on ABC Family – we saw promos for a new Miser brothers special that airs on Saturday. Judging by the commercials, I don’t have high hopes, but maybe the kids will like it. (Link to the promo here.)

Item #1: Work from Home Glitch

What’s the work from home glitch? That would be called noise, more precisely, kid-related noise. When I read the Stone Soup comics this week about a mom of an infant trying to work from home as the baby cries during a conference call, I could sooo relate.

When my three kids were very young (and the youngest was a toddler), I had scheduled a telephone interview with a local district attorney to discuss an anti-bullying legislative proposal. Planning ahead, I fed the children a snack, then, after their bellies were full, I set them up in front of their favorite PBS show and headed down the hall to my bedroom, where I shut the door behind me.

Mid-conversation, the toddler started pounding loudly on my bedroom door. When I didn’t open the door immediately, he started shouting, “MAAAMAAA!” I responded by sticking my head underneath my bed trying in vain to continue the conversation. (By the toddler’s tone, I discerned that he was fine.) Fearing that the DA would hink something was drastically awry in my house, I admitted to him that I was working from home and that my youngest child was making noise. Luckily, he was very understanding. (For those of you who were wondering, the crisis that compelled my toddler to pound on the door was the desire for more food.)

Even now – with kids ages 10, 10 and 7 – they STILL make a racket when I’m on the phone. Yesterday I was on the phone for a very long time with the insurance company and the 10-year-olds decided that, of all the places in the house, the floor in front of the open door to my office was the perfect location in which to stage a loud wrestling match.

Item #2: Balance-Schmalance

Just in time for the chaos of the holidays, my witty Mommy Track’d colleague – author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor – recently mused about how insanely difficult it is to try to do have a well balanced life while simultaneously raising young children. Noting that she and her husband haven’t had sex in three weeks, Wilder-Taylor, mother of three including infant twins, said the horizontal mambo is simply one of those things they just couldn’t fit into their hectic schedules, regardless of the false hopes offered by “experts” in parenting/women’s magazines who claim that parents can make space and time in their lives for everything if they plan well:

“I’m not quite sure what makes someone an expert in the field to how to manage a family of five, a full-time writing job and an eating challenged baby without needing prescription medication — they will suggest to make an appointment for sex . . . My husband and I both have jobs, responsibilities, friends we barely see, e-mails we can’t return, broken things in the house that never seem to get fixed . . . [N]one of us really ‘have it all.’”

(more…)