Picket Fence Post

Take two men with their babies in tow. They’ve sent their wives off for the day. So what do they do to entertain themselves? Set up a Red Bull-infused battle between their two wee ones because, well, because they can.

This is the web site Funny or Die’s satire of what they think women think their husbands would do if they thought they could get away with it . . . if said husbands were mentally deranged.

Enjoy . . . but turn down the volume if you’re at work. (Link to video here.)

(An alternative title to this post could be the All-New York Times Edition, as all the stories referenced are from this week’s Times.)

Item #1:  Texting

News flash: It’s not good for teens to text all the time. 

Now you might not think that’s news, but ever since the New York Times ran a story entitled, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” on Tuesday, people have been pretty worked up all across the internet. After citing some brain-numbing statistics depicting teen texting run amok (saying the average teen sent and received 2,272 text messages/month), the Times warned: “The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.” . . . and global warming, the impending GM bankruptcy and the Susan Boyle profanity incident as well.

People need a serious reality check.

What the story about teens abusing texting tells me is that they’ve yet to learn that there’s truth to the adage: Moderation is key. Sure moderation is boring, but if you can no longer move your thumbs because you’ve been texting for 10 hours/day and you can’t sleep because you’re anxious that you might miss Sally’s insipid text about Jon’s new, sick T-shirt, moderation might seem downright novel, even sexy. (Swollen, non-working thumbs and huge bags under your eyes aren’t sexy).

If a kid texts reasonably, there shouldn’t be a problem. (If your thumb starts to hurt, stop. Maybe go old school and call someone on the actual phone, or, even more edgy, see the person face-to-face.) If a kid’s texting spirals out of control, of course other things’ll fall by the wayside, other than the thumbs and the sleep deprivation. When the kid stops paying attention to his or her responsibilities (chiefly schoolwork) and accrues massive cell phone/texting bills, then an adult has to step in and do something.

We don’t need a scientific study to tell us that too much texting isn’t a good thing.

Item #2: More Texting

So while the physicians and psychologists are up late fretting about what texting is doing to today’s youth, the Emily Posts of the world are aghast at what rampant, wild, uncontrolled texting is doing to teens’ table manners because, instead of partaking of riveting, sparkling conversation at the family dinner table, they’re now likely to be surreptitiously, like, texting.

In fact, a Times writer tracked down Emily Post’s great granddaughter, Cindy Post Senning, who told the paper, “People are texting everywhere.” The article, “Play With Your Food, Just Don’t Text,” continued:

“Husbands, wives, children and dinner guests who would never be so rude as to talk on a phone at the family table seem to think it’s perfectly fine to text (or e-mail, or Twitter) while eating.

Dr. Post Senning is here to tell you that it is not perfectly fine. Not at all. So new is the problem that her latest book, Emily Post’s Table Manners for Kids . . . written by Peggy Post, covered it only generally in a blanket ruling: ‘Do NOT use your cell phone or any other electronic devices at the table.’”

To me, that should be the end of the story. Make some House Rules, with a capital “H” and a capital “R,” which also apply to BlackBerry abusers. (. . . not that I have anyone of THOSE who bring the BlackBerry to the table . . .) No texting during meals. (Our meals are done in less than a half-hour so I can’t imagine 30 minutes incommunicado is a supreme sacrifice. Yes, I mean you too Mr. Spouse.) Then when the teens venture forth into the world, parents can only hope that they take the lessons of the House Rules with them when they’re at other people’s tables.

Item #3: Hugging

(This is the low-tech, almost anti-tech entry in today’s Three for Thursday.)

Teens. Hugging. It’s so the new black. This “issue” made page one of the New York Times today, in an article entitled, “For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug.’”

Good grief, is it really PAGE ONE news that today’s teens seem to hug each other more than teens of yesteryear did? Maybe if schools were banning hugging in significant numbers — as a few moronic districts have, and it’s briefly noted in the piece  – THEN I could see justifying the placement of a story about teens hugging on the front page. But the fact that kids hug a lot these days . . . not exactly breaking news.

“Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days,” the paper said. “Teachers joke about ‘one hour’ and ’six hour’ hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for an entire summer.”

When they’re not hugging, apparently, they’re texting.

Image credit: Fred Conrad/New York Times.

Ayelet Waldman’s new collection of essays on modern motherhood are fearless. In Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace, Waldman puts herself out there — the good, the bad, the ugly — in a bracing memoir that seeks to speak truthfully about parenthood. Waldman recently fielded four questions about her new book via e-mail:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: Your book has the air of confessional, almost as if you’re asking for readers’ absolution — or, at the very least, for understanding — for being a “bad mother.” You write, “One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.” Noting that today’s parents feel as though everyone’s watching them and is ready to lash out in judgment about every parental decision, you make this observation: ” . . . [W]e women are the primary authors of our own  subjugation. The Bad Mother cops with the most aggressive arrest records are women.”

Why is that? Why, instead of feeling supported by a community of mothers, it’s so often the complaint that mothers feel judged by online “mom squad assassins” or in-person parenting scolds?

Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace: I think partly because we’re so judgmental of ourselves that we can spare no support for others. We’ve managed to work ourselves in what Judith Warner called the “Perfect Madness” of competitive, neurotic parenting, always striving for an imagined ideal, never reaching it. Our anxiety, our fear that we have failed our children, makes us crazy, and makes us judgmental.

O’Brien: Christie Mellor, the humorist behind The Three Martini Playdate books, has, for years lamented the fact that she believes parents are pressured to cede their whole lives over to their children and make every facet of their existence kid-centric, hence her tongue-in-cheek recommendation that parents teach their kids how to be useful at cocktail parties and make martinis.

You sparked quite the tsunami of maternal judgment by suggesting, in a now-infamous New York Times column, that you loved your husband more than your children, even though you make a point to say how much you adore your four children. In the column, you were delving into the questions as to why so many of your peers weren’t having sex with their husbands and were instead retreating to the arms of their children, putting their children first. You wrote in the book, “The single defining characteristic of iconic Good Motherhood is self-abnegation. Her children’s needs come first; their health and happiness are her primary concern.”

How do parents try to re-set the balance in their homes, to step away from the all-kids’-stuff-all-the-time without incurring the wrath of those who think they’re being selfish? And why is it that today’s mothers are the ones who “self-abnegate” as opposed to fathers?

Waldman: I started writing about maternal ambivalence long before people were knocking back martinis during their playdates! My murder mysteries [Mommy-Track mysteries series] were about a woman so desperately bored with staying at home that she solves crime to keep from losing her mind.

I don’t think you can avoid the wrath. At least I haven’t been able to. But I am convinced that if you want to sustain a decent romantic relationship you need to prioritize that. It’s hardly a new idea — it just seems that we’ve once again forgotten that an untended garden (to use a perfectly cloying metaphor) will not bloom.

The day a father devotes himself wholeheartedly to self-abnegation is the day we can tell Gloria Steinem that she’s achieved the dream of a perfect, feminist universe.

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I loathe the phrase “mommy wars,” a short-cut term designed to represent the so-called “divide” between the moms who decide to continue doing paid work after having children and those who decide to become at-home parents. I see it as an overly simplistic controversy that does an injustice to women but makes for good drama, pitting moms against moms.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve begun to notice a slow uptick in the number of stories about grandmothers which have begun to lay the groundwork for a new media-manufactured controversy: The Nana Wars. When I see articles with headlines like, “When Grandma Can’t Be Bothered” — about grandmothers who don’t want to be unpaid childcare workers in every free moment – and another portraying grandmothers as competing against one another to buy the best, most impressive presents for their grandchildren and thereby winning their affections, I can’t help but shutter. I thought that once my kids were adults, I would no longer have to worry about “wars.” I guess I was sadly mistaken.

My Pop Culture & Politics column this week takes on the notion of so-called “glam-ma wars,” which I hope is a short-lived thing.

Image credit: Mommy Track’d.

This week’s installment of the Friday Funnies features a web site I first learned about via a friend who posted a link to it on Facebook saying that she found it amusing. It’s called Awkward Family Photos: Spreading the Awkwardness.

It’s a site where people willingly submit their off-beat, weird or simply uncomfortable portraits of their families (The photo on the left is one example of said awkwardness.) Looking at these images made me think of the photo I have of my twins when they were 16 months old and all decked out for Christmas. They were sitting on my lap and completely wailing while I, their sleep deprived mother, was laughing as The Spouse took the photo. However I’ve been threatened with being disowned by my kids if I post that photo, so instead, you’ll have to settle with the photos on this genius of a web site.

Be sure to browse several pages into the site in order to see the faux Bon Jovi family with big 80s hair (including the kid), the family where the son thought it’d be funny to “fake choke” the mom, the family whose members were all wearing rabbit ears, the family of four sitting on a limb of a tree and the oddly posed four siblings.

It’ll give you something to think about the next time you, or some relative says, “Everybody get together for a picture!”

Image credit: AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

Item #1: Movie Sets are Boring

I thought the kids might find it fun to visit the location where a movie is being filmed in the MetroWest/Boston area. We might get the chance to see Adam Sandler, who the kids loved in the comedy Bedtime Stories, and maybe even Paul Blart, THE Mall Cop.

So after school one day this week, I drove the three of ‘em to the film shoot. We stood with a large crowd of other spectators across the street from where they were filming. Several of their friends came by intermittently, including a Girl Scout troop run whose members the eldest two kids knew. While they were amazed to see one of their teachers drive by in her mini-van, I told them to be on alert for some real fun as I handed them a Sharpie and a notebook for autographs.

However I think I way oversold it. We waited for over two hours and what did we get for our patience? Mere glimpses of Sandler, who gamefully waved to the crowd from across the street . . . and atop a hill . . .  kind of behind other people, and of other celebs who the kids didn’t know, such as Salma Hayek, Chris Rock and David Spade. Some random guy driving a Lamborghini past us on the street was actually the highlight of their experience, that and seeing the teacher in the mini-van.

The Youngest Boy complained non-stop, threatening to explode with boredom and hunger, even though I’d just given him a big bowl of ice cream before we left the house. When he found out that we were going to be at the set through the kids’ TV hour (5 o’clock), he stomped his feet and ran away from me, but not too far away. The Eldest Boy was so utterly bored that he kept pestering me that he had homework to do (on a project not due until the end of the week) and that I was wasting his time, taking away from his education.

What’s that they say about the road and good intentions?

Item #2: Dinner Knife Mystery

We are suddenly, noticably short on dinner knives, those relatively dull knives that came with our everyday flatware set. No matter how many times I run and then unload the dishwasher, we continue to be short on them. Where are they all going? Is someone throwing them away or swiping them? Should I check beneath The Youngest Boy’s bed, where I’ll likely find a treasure trove of candy wrappers, overdue library books, a mix of dirty and clean clothing and all of my working pens?

We’re also grappling with another mystery in our house: Who ate a big hunk out of The Youngest Boy’s solid, chocolate Easter bunny? (Yes, we still have Easter candy in the house, a little bit lying around.) For some unknown reason, The Youngest Boy decided to hoard his bunny until a future date. That future date was Monday, when he discovered — after a frantic search for the bunny – that someone else had beaten him to the punch and consumed a hefty chunk of it, the head and shoulders. He issued all manner of accusations and suspected everyone but me who, sadly, can’t eat milk chocolate (dairy allergy).

We’ve yet to find the perp and I doubt we will, I told him. Let that be a lesson to ya kid, don’t leave your solid chocolate bunny lying around in a house of candy freaks. But that still doesn’t help me answer my question: Where the heck are all the dinner knives?

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I just shared some of the web site Babble’s “50 Funniest Kid Videos” with my very own kiddos and they insisted that THE most amusing one featured the baby who could give the meanest stink eye look you’ve ever seen at the drop of a hat.

Here it is, per the request of the Picket Fence Post family players:

Friday Funnies . . . because parents need to laugh. At least once a week.

The other day while writing about what a good time I had at the mom-centric comedy show “One Funny Mother,” I suggested that parents raising young kiddos – moms specifically – are in dire need of humor. And after last night’s Grey’s Anatomy manipulative weep-a-thon of a season finale that left me feeling dirty and used by the time 11 o’clock rolled around (this was on top of a trio of Boston sports losses with the Celtics, Bruins & Red Sox), I know that I certainly could use some funny.

That’s when I decided; we need the Friday Funnies. Once a week I’ll post something amusing on this blog, whether it’s parentally-related or not. It can be an anecdote, a video (one found online or made by me or a blog reader), a photo, anything that makes you crack a smile. Because when you’re told, “You’re the best mom” and “You’re the worst, meanest mom in the world” by the same individual within a 10 minute span, you could use a hearty chuckle AT LEAST once a week.

To commence the weekly Friday Funnies installment, I’ve selected two items for your viewing pleasure. They’re brief videos from the snarky parenting web site Babble’s “50 Funniest Kid Videos Ever” list.

Favorite number one is actually an ad for an insurance company, but the kids are adorable and ramble on innocently:

Favorite number two is a toddler Phillies fan “leading” a crowd in a cheer:

If you have any suggestions for an item for the Friday Funnies, please e-mail them to me at: meredithobrien@hotmail.com.

Friday Funnies . . . because parents need to laugh. At least once a week.

Item #1: Old School Tooth Extraction

The tooth is hanging there. I mean JUST hanging there. The kid’s whining, refusing to eat, or is eating with her head cocked to one side so that food and liquids dribble out of that one side of her mouth and all over the kitchen table. And you, the kid’s parent, want the drama to end already. You just want that tooth out.

When one of my kids has a loose tooth, the little enamel beauty’ll be wiggly for weeks upon weeks. And our close relatives will be well aware that their niece/nephew/grandson/granddaughter has a loose tooth because the child will regularly provide them with breaking news updates by phone which usually consist of four words, “My tooth’s still loose.” Inevitably, one of the relatives — likely a wise guy grandfather or uncle – will suggest that the kid tie one end of a piece of string around the tooth, tie the other end to a door knob and slam the door shut. The loose-toothed kid usually responds with a lively, “No way!” as though it had been suggested that the child eat a well rounded meal or clean one’s room without complaint.

But they may change their minds about that technique after seeing my editor Heather Kempskie’s video of her son’s tooth extraction via a string and door knob. Or maybe not.

Item #2: Rude Kids

Are Gen X parents – the ones who are endlessly worried about their kids’ self esteem, who were warned by parenting experts never to criticize their charges and to avoid saying, “No,” who practice attachment parenting and are fiercely protective of their offspring — raising a bunch of ill-mannered miscreants? Yes, in fact, they are, according to MSNBC’s Susan Gregory Thomas’s piece entitled, “Today’s tykes: Secure kids or rudest in history?” An excerpt:

“. . . [B]y many accounts, Generation X may be the most devoted parents in American history . . . Yet their kids are, well, rude. It may be that today’s parents are so fixated on their children’s emotional well-being that they’re teaching them that the well being of others is comparably unimportant, says Dr. Philippa Gordon, a long-time pediatrician in Park Slope, Brooklyn.”

What do you think? ARE kids ruder these days than they used to be? More self-centered? If so, on whom do you pin the blame?

Item #3: Ankle Woes Cont’d

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the saga of my 10-year-old daughter’s ankle woes. Since January 2008 when The Girl suffered a minor ankle sprain during basketball practice, she’s been dogged by ankle problems. She’s only played half-seasons of fall and spring soccer and winter basketball since sustaining the injury. Following periods of pain, she’d rest, sit out of organized sports, get better, start playing during the next season (or join a season already in progress), then experience pain again. (It’d also hurt intermittently during regular activity but not as much as during team sports.)

She has visited an orthopaedist and a physical therapist. She’s had X-rays and an MRI. And she’s still not better. So The Spouse and I pulled her off her spring soccer team before the season began and said we needed to try to get to the bottom of all of this.

This morning we took her to see a youth sports medicine specialist in Boston for his input. He ordered another MRI and has raised the possibility of acupuncture and other therapies to help treat her, depending on what information the new MRI provides. Upon learning that acupuncture involved needles, The Girl’s eyes bulged and she began shaking her head, “No.” I told her that if we actually get to that point and we decide to take her an acupuncturist, she can use it to boost her tough-gal street cred. “Yeah, so I get my skin covered with needles, no biggie, doesn’t hurt at all,” I said, pretending like I was a 10-year-old trying to be cool. Didn’t really convince her though, so I dropped the subject.

To be continued . . .

There’s nothing like sitting in a room full of people – most of whom are roughly in the same place you are in your life – and sharing laughter over the insanity of your common lot.

Like laughing at the fact that you’ve all lost your personal privacy. (Such as being in the bathroom and, while you’re USING the facilities, someone is on the other side of the door, screaming at you and demanding to know the whereabouts of ”the Star Wars guy.” The one with the gray helmet. And the black gun. Because you’re supposed to know. Because apparently you must have a GPS locator on that sucker and everything else in the house.)

Over how you used to feel hot and sexy, but now you drive a mini-van filled with kid crap, empty coffee cups and car seats.

Over the utter ridiculousness of some of the conversations you wind up having these days. (When you’re asked to field questions such as, “Which would you rather do, swim through a lake completely filled with dead poisonous snakes, or swim through a lake with one poisonous snake that’s still alive?” “Which would you rather do, eat snot or vomit?”)

Over your lack of sanity and your dearth of patience.

More than 200 women got to laugh for a solid hour last week in Natick, MA as comedian Dena Blizzard told jokes and bizarre-but-true stories about modern moms’ lives. Organized by the podcasting goddesses, the Manic Mommies (Erin and Kristin), Dena’s “One Funny Mother” show reminded me that the best antidote to feeling as though you suck as a parent (and I had fresh evidence last week which indicated a high level of parental suckitude on my behalf) is bawdy humor.

Before the show, I actually got to socialize (imagine, socializing someplace OTHER than on the sidelines of the youth soccer fields or baseball diamonds) with some cool moms, like the ones in the photo above. The photo has my friend Sharon, Manic Mommy Kristin, P&K  Mag editor Heather, and me, standing awkwardly, half leaning backwards for some unknown reason and trying not to spill my drink.

Afterwards, I decided that moms smack dab in the middle of raising kids are in dire need of enjoying more laughs like the ones Dena gave us that night. Maybe she could do a weekly comedic podcast or perhaps a videocast to which we could look forward.

 Or maybe I — and the community of parents who read this blog (and I know many of you by name) — should start something here on this web site, like a joke of the week, a weird story of the week.  Something. Don’t we need something? Anyone have any ideas on how we can keep the comedy vibe goin’?

In the meantime, be sure to check out the video samples of Dena’s comedy below. Warning: These clips are NOT appropriate for kids or for the workplace. They contain “adult” language. (Link to the first video here. Link to the second video here.)