Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Dear Summer

To: Summer, c/o Mother Nature

From: Meredith

Dear Summer,

Words cannot express how disappointed I’ve been with you in recent weeks. You’ve been dour and temperamental and unpredictable. You’ve been behaving like an insane toddler. Or Gov. Mark Sanford, whichever analogy works for you.

For weeks on end, you’ve given us gray days where the temps don’t exceed the 60s (sometimes many daylight hours have lingered in the 50s), not to mention the rain and the hail. It’s July in New England for goodness sake, what’s up with that?

I tried to revel in and deeply appreciate the beautiful weekend you bestowed upon New Englanders over the 4th of July holiday. While my husband and children enjoyed your outstanding weather at Fenway Park while they watched our beloved Red Sox win (a team for whom I know Mother Nature now roots, as does God), I celebrated you and your dear mom by finally filling the wooden window boxes on my house with thriving pink and white petunias. They looked fabulous. I even removed weeds from several locations around my front yard, though I’ve still got lots more to tackle in the back yard.

Then you proceeded to unleash two straight days of lightning, pounding rain and vicious hail which rendered those bright petunias in two of the window boxes destroyed. Plus, you ruined the afternoon of swimming my kids were counting on. (I’d been dangling the possibility of allowing them to go to the pool after I finished up some of work in order to get them to give me some peace, but by the time we were ready to leave, we heard the first crack of thunder.) You also flooded basements, back yards, streets and municipal buildings in the greater Boston area, causing loads of problems for people.

Did I mention that it’s July in New England, not March or April? On behalf of the Picket Fence Post family, I respectfully request that you start behaving in ways to which we’ve become accustomed. Either that, or take a Prozac, or Zoloft.

Yours truly,

Meredith

Item #2: Puttin’ Kids to Work

Maria Rodale raised an intriguing notion on the Huffington Post recently, that of putting kids to work. No, we’re not talking about grinding out long days slaving away in factories or logging hours upon hours stitching piecework with nary a bathroom or meal break. We’re talking good, old fashioned responsibilities that make a kid feel pleased that he or she accomplished something. And given that, due to inclement weather and two weeks’ worth of illness, a common refrain evoked by my kids when I told them they couldn’t watch TV or play video games has been, “I’m bored,” I was more than willing to listen to what Rodale had to say:

 ”Just last night I was talking to a farmer from Kentucky, and he was lamenting how his kids just want to watch TV and play video games: ‘In Montana by the age of three, those kids have a rope and a horse and they are put to work.’ Slight exaggeration, but not by much. What his comment reminds me is that whether or not we live on a farm it’s up to us to raise our kids as if we do live on one. Part of our job as parents is to teach our kids how to get things done and appreciate the satisfaction of a job well done. Not only does it take some of the chores off our plates, but it also makes for a more functional family.”

What kind of chore immediately leapt to my mind? Cooking dinner. Every single night, almost without fail, when I leave my office and go to the kitchen to prepare supper, someone walks by, surveys the ingredients, sneers, complains and announces, “I’m having cereal for dinner.” Maybe if THEY start helping — or doing it on their own – I’d get a bit less lip.

Item #3: Those Risky 80s Kids

Jeanne Sager, a blogger for the web site Babble, doesn’t know how people who came of age in the 1980s made it out of childhood in one piece, what with all the rampant dangers surrounding them 24/7. She recently wrote a post entitled, “Five Reasons Eighties Kids Shouldn’t Have Survived Childhood.”

Included among her reasons were the fact that neither the kids nor their parents had cell phones: “. . . [S]omehow we made it home from wherever we were by dinnertime, hair plastered to the back of our neck from the sweat of peddling like mad down that last street or two to get there before Mum pulled the green beans out of the microwave.”

Another reason, cigarette ads. “They were everywhere,” she wrote, “and if you collected your dad’s empty packages of Camels, Joe would send you a free T-shirt. Which you could then wear to school . . . and no one cared.”

Any other reasons why 80s (or 70s) kids shouldn’t have survived childhood?