Picket Fence Post

The Obama family has officially been living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a little over a week now and already folks are posting images of Michelle Obama online where they scrawl all over her mid-section suggesting that the First Lady is carrying the First Fetus.

I’ve stated many times before how much I loathe this fetish that web sites and so-called “journalists” have made of dissecting photos of female celebs, suggesting that if women have any contour at all to their bellies that they MUST be pregnant. I find the whole practice invasive and tacky.

When people openly hypothesize online, in print and on TV about whether someone might be pregnant — and that person won’t comment about the subject — did those folks ever think that perhaps there’s a good reason for the silence and that perhaps it would be in good taste to back off? If the woman is pregnant, maybe she’s had difficulties in the past (such as miscarriages) and wants to wait until she’s further along in her pregnancy to announce the news. If the woman isn’t pregnant, maybe it’s a case where she was photographed wearing a baggy outfit, or maybe she missed a month’s worth of Pilates classes. Either way, what’s the harm in waiting to report on these things until you know for sure? It’s not like a pregnancy will be a secret for long.

That being said, I’m ALREADY sick of the speculation that Michelle Obama might be pregnant. I seriously don’t want to endure four years of bloggers and entertainment “journalists” writing all over Michelle photos.

Image credit: AP/Telegraph.

. . . hence the disappearance of the last two blog posts about my trip to Disney World (and how I need a vacation after my vacation), and the list of links to three news articles about dirt being good for babies (helps develop their immune systems), how football can cause permanent brain injuries to youth players and the story behind the story of why my hair has been very dark for the past few weeks.

Here’s to hoping the missing posts return . . .

While her brothers were having a blast taking photos of me that made me look like an insane person, The Girl was busily coloring.

After my photo session concluded, she politely asked me to sit still so she could sketch me. However I wasn’t the most patient of subjects and only gave her about a minute or so before I left the room.

Since I posted the photos her brothers took of me — including one that exposes my giant, silver-colored fillings from the Stone Ages – I thought it only fair to post the picture she drew of me on lined notebook paper . . . which explains why my face has faint lines across it. I wasn’t looking into the house from the other side of a window screen.

One of the web sites for which I write has just renovated its site and the editor wanted me to submit new head-shots.

So, instead of feeling all self conscious in front of The Spouse and have him take photos of me, I gave the camera to the kids to see what I’d get.

The 7-year-old boy kept making me laugh and failed to warn me when he was going to take photos, hence the second two glamour shots above, one where I’m telling him instructions through gritted teeth, the second where he said, “Laugh as loud as you can.” And I foolishly did.

When the 10-year-olds got the camera, the results were slightly more sane looking. After all was said and done, I wound up with some okay shots, including the first one, taken by The Eldest Boy.

And yes, you may notice that my hair looks significantly darker than in any other photograph ever taken of me. That’s not a PhotoShop illusion. It was a real life home hair coloring disaster. You can read about it in my February Parents & Kids Magazine column where I wrote about being nicknamed “Goth Mommy” by The Eldest Boy.

I know, it’s a tad early for April Fools, but this is no joke . . .

A pair of savvy intellectuals, otherwise known as two fourth graders, decided to test the scene from A Christmas Story, the one where Flick puts his tongue on a metal pole on a snowy, December Indiana afternoon.

One child dared the other to try it.
And, wouldn’t ya know it, when the 10-year-old licked the pole, his tongue got stuck. However, unlike in the film, in this case, the boy removed the tongue from the pole by himself “and walked, tongue bleeding, with his friend into Shortstops Bar & Grill where workers gave him a clean towel to help staunch the bleeding . . . A cook comforted the child until paramedics and the boy’s parents arrived,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

The Tribune reporter contacted 40-year-old actor Scott Schwartz, who played Flick in the movie, who said, “Didn’t he see the movie? Did he not see the pain involved?”

The United Press International quoted a police officer who was on the scene as saying, “Remember what happened to Flick.” 

Image credit: Babble (where I first saw this story).

Item #1: First Granny

Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, is moving into the White House along with the Obama family in order to help 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha adjust to their new situation while their parents settle into their new jobs.

Apparently the Obamas aren’t alone in forming a multi-generational household. The New York Times profiled several families with young children and two working parents who also have Grandma living with them, and cited statistics saying that this trend is heating up.

“A recent study by AARP shows that multi-generational households are on the rise, up from 5 million in 2000 to 6.2 million last year, an increase from 4.8 percent of all households to 5.3 percent,” the Times reported. An AARP official added: “Our cultural norms [about having grandparents moving in with their adult children] are shifting. There is a great renaissance of what we think about when we think about family.”

I wrote a column a few weeks ago about how I was coveting Marian Robinson and musing about how much easier my life would be if I had a grandmother like her, who was retired, ready, willing and able to cart the kids around to their activities, help out with the homework and dinner prep.

Item #2: Pediatrician Channels Miss Manners

A pediatrician fumed in a column in the New York Times this week that a particular patient of hers — who she nicknamed “The Rude Boy” — hadn’t been taught any manners. She fretted that if his situation was left unchecked, the child could grow up to become become a bully at worst, or an adult with grossly undeveloped social skills that could hinder him in the future.

“As a pediatrician, I worry about the trajectories of children’s growth and development: measuring a baby’s head size, weighing a toddler, asking about the language skills of a preschooler,” wrote Dr. Perri Klass. “Manners are another side of the journey every child makes from helplessness to autonomy. And a child who learns to manage a little courtesy, even under the pressure of a visit to the doctor, is a child who is operating well in the world, a child with a positive prognosis.”

Rude little heathens running around like maniacs in public make me crazy too.

As far as I know, my own three heathens aren’t rude in public; they save their savageness for me. However, if you hear or see differently, please contact me immediately.

Item #3: TV/Video Games for Recess

Guess I’d better re-work my kids’ TV/video game schedules. Typically, my three children (10, 10 and 7) are allotted one hour a day (give or take five minutes) for TV and/or video games, though that rule doesn’t apply to weekends when we have things like family movie night, or watch news or sports programming (a la NBC’s Nightly News or MSNBC’s Morning Joe, or a Red Sox or Patriots game).

Then I heard from The Girl yesterday that during indoor recess for her fourth grade class, they’ll be watching TV. Her twin brother told me he and some buddies have been playing video games on the internet during recess.

So when I told them that maybe I shouldn’t allow them to have their one hour of screen time on days when they’ve already had recreational screen time in school, that went over about as well as the matzo ball soup I served last week for dinner, which only one out of my three children would eat. (The two who found my homemade soup “gross” at cereal.)

Whatever happened to playing board games, games involving the class, doing something with arts and crafts or, horror of all horrors, reading during indoor recess at SCHOOL? I must just be horribly out of touch and old fashioned.

Image credit: New York Times/Gary Hovland.

1. “O’Briens and Obamas Ready for a New Family Pet” — Patriot Ledger/GateHouse News Service.

No. I didn’t write that headline. And no, I haven’t likened myself to Michelle Obama.

But I do have several things in common with the Obama family: I’m a working mom. I have kids ages 10 and 7. And, it’s very probable that we’ll both get dogs this year. (The Spouse is cringing upon reading that.)

This is my post-dead cat column where I discuss my three kids’ response to the passing of our feline, family pets of my past and whether we’ll get a dog.

2. “Marley and Motherhood” — Mommy Track’d.

Speaking of family pets . . . I went to see Marley & Me last week as an assignment for Mommy Track’d. And while I won’t spoil the movie for you, if you go, be sure to bring a box o’ tissues. You’ll thank me later.

That being said, my Mommy Track’d column is about the storyline for Jennifer Aniston’s character in the movie — she was a newspaper reporter who gave up her beloved journalism job after having kids — that doesn’t get as much play as the antics of the one-dog wrecking machine.

3. “Get Your Lipstick Tube Ready” — Mommy Track’d.

NBC’s Lipstick Jungle – which I first dismissed as a pink confection but later came to like during its second season – is hanging by a thread. Depending on how its ratings fared for its last original show (which aired on Friday), NBC execs will soon decide whether Brooke Shields & the Lipstick gals will live to see another day. This column is my argument for why it should continue.

4. “Live Blogging the Golden Globe Awards” — Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

The Girl and I watched the insipid Golden Globe arrival shows (flipped back-and-forth between stations) and then the awards show, though The Girl went to bed well before 9. I live-blogged the madness (Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais and Tracy Morgan get kudos) on my Suburban Mom blog.

As for what my tween-aged gal thought? She squealed upon seeing her favs – Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens – and was irate that Cyrus didn’t win the award for best song in a film.

Image credit: SF Chronicle/20th Century Fox/Barry Wetcher.

I recognize that it is ironic to post this cartoon on the heels of the lively discussion earlier about childhood obesity and a Massachusetts proposal to weigh students in school, but it was too priceless to resist . . .

Jan Eliot hit it right on the money with today’s cartoon about the bizarre lunches that are occasionally packed by parents in a hurry . . . and I’d hazard to add that weird lunches concocted by parents can come from working and at-home parents alike, particularly if it’s close to grocery shopping day.

When we’re low on food, I send the kids to school with a plastic container of dry cereal and money to buy milk to put into it. Inevitably, the lunch box comes home wreaking of sour milk.

Image credit: Stone Soup/Go Comics.

The Gov. Deval Patrick administration apparently thinks so.

That’s why — as part of a larger state campaign to fight obesity — they want to order overburdened schools to weigh our first, fourth, seventh and tenth graders and make a determination about whether the children are overweight. Then a nice, patronizing form will be sent home to the parents telling them how to make healthier eating choices and how to kick the children’s behind outside to play and work off some of those pesky calories.

My kids’ weight is not the school’s business. Their weight is an issue for them, The Spouse and I, and their pediatrician, who can provide detailed information tailor-made for my children, whom they’ve known practically since birth. It’s incumbent upon the pediatrician to have weight discussions, not systematically by the school nurse who’s already got enough on her hands.

I don’t want the schools (which in my town are serving mozzarella sticks for lunch today; I packed the kids lunch instead, included carrot sticks) — simply because they have custody of my children during the daytime 10 months out of the year — getting involved in my children’s weight issues. (For the record, they don’t have any.)

My children are already learning about healthy eating habits in school, which I think is important. They’ve studied the new-fangled, incomprehensible food pyramid. In gym classes (yes, my kids’ schools still have gym), they’ve been given charts about how much exercise they should get each day, as well as strong advice on how to stay healthy. There are after-school activities which afford the kids more opportunities to run around like maniacs. (I do think the lunch offerings aren’t great though, and I think there should be MORE gym classes, not fewer, particularly in high school.)

I don’t think the schools should assert the right to make my kids step onto a scale and weigh them, and then send me a note telling me that they shouldn’t eat Doritos while sitting in front of the TV for eight hours a day, because I, apparently, am too dumb to realize that eating junk food and sitting around will make people fat. The schools already have plenty to do, like the extremely difficult task of educating the children. We already have a personal physician whose job it is to give us personalized advice on our health. (That being said, however, I heartily approve of educating the students generally about how to eat better, and how and why they should exercise.)

I know there will be health advocates who’ll support this program, saying that too many parents who are in denial about their children’s weight and health, and don’t understand the long-term health implications for the child and for society (diabetes, heart ailments, etc.) associated with obesity. But I’m not a big fan of the state overreaching and morphing a cliched “nanny state” posture, particularly when it can barely pay its own bills and is cutting local aid which results in the slashing of essential services (like in the schools!) because there’s a dramatic short-fall in tax revenue.

Why not instead focus on getting schools to sell healthy lunches and mandate more gym classes during the day?

All right, now I’ll sit back and prepare to get blasted as an ignorant tool.

Image credit: This web site.

At 6 a.m. we got the news via an automated call from the school superintendent.

No school today.

Dangerous snow and ice.

Hazardous conditions.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

While the kiddos — who’ve only been back in school for two days since a lengthy winter vacation, preceded by a snow cancellation, a delayed school start and an early release day, plus two days when The Girl was home from school — rejoiced, I groaned. Trying to get work done today, when I can’t shove them all outside to play in the sleet, is seeming increasingly futile. Plus we’re out of coffee and I’m in a caffeine-deprived snit.

I tried to patiently explain to the three children that I’ll play with them later this afternoon, but first I had to tackle some work. That didn’t stave off the flood of indignant requests to drive them around to Target, to Walgreen’s, to a friend’s house. When I told them I wasn’t driving them anywhere, I was told I’m mean and selfish.

As I write this, all three of them are sulking in their rooms, cooling off because I could no longer stand their angry shrieks and whines coupled with their vicious fighting. I told them they’ll stay in their rooms until lunch time, but the problem is, I don’t have anything to make them for lunch as I wasn’t expecting them to be home. So whatever I wind up throwing together will likely be rejected by one third of the children partaking of the meal. Fabulous.

Snow days, in theory, are magical days which are supposed to provide an unexpected time to bunk in and leisurely enjoy one another’s company while sipping mugs of steaming hot cocoa dotted with gently bobbing mini-marshmallows.

In reality, they’re a big pain in the butt, particularly when the kids are already sick of one another and keep fighting, they can’t go outside without being pummeled by sleet, there’s little ready-to-eat food in the house and I’m trying to work, without the benefit of my daily java fix.

Maybe I should just plan to work late into the night this evening after they go to bed — after The Spouse brings me home some coffee — and throw in the towel on work this afternoon, play some games, evoke some giggles. It’s gotta be better than the screaming to which I’ve been treated all morning.