Picket Fence Post

The past two weeks of school — Weeks 12-13 for those keeping track at home — saw The Girl miss three days of school due to illness (AGAIN! We just got over the swine flu here!) was abbreviated by the Thanksgiving holiday and yet, the kids managed to bring home a total of 88 pieces of paper.

The Youngest Boy brought home 34 math papers in one day (math tests of fast facts he’s supposed to master), The Girl’s 12-page moon book and The Eldest Boy’s seven pages of grammar worksheets.

This brings the tally of the pieces of paper sent home with my children since the first day of school to: 751.

(For the backstory on The Paper Project, go here.)

How was your Thanksgiving celebration? Fill in any of the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card squares? Hopefully not. I was happy to have gone a weekend without filling in a square. (I received at least one sarcastic comment about my Dysfunctional Bingo project from a family member who asked, “Which one did I inspire?” I declined to answer.)

All in all, I considered our Thanksgiving holiday week to have been a success because (I’ve been keeping my standards mighty low these days, a technique that has, thus far, worked for me):

– There were no arguments during Thanksgiving dinner, with the exception of a mild disagreement about the rules of the odious Yankee Swap of which I was not a participant.

– No one contracted food poisoning or the swine flu or the plague or mad cow disease (though that seems like such a dated ailment now, doesn’t it?).

– No one got into an accident or ran over anyone’s mailbox with their vehicle or with an errant Tiger Woods-mobile.

– The three Picket Fence Post children have all their limbs and health intact, though they did bicker and fight with one another so much that, at one point, I gave myself a ”Time Out” and fled to my bedroom so I wouldn’t have to listen to them squabble.

– My sisters-in-law, who ventured out at midnight on Black Friday to shop, were not trampled to death.

As for the remainder of the Thanksgiving holiday: The day after Thanksgiving, the Picket Fence Post family and the Picket Fence Post  grandparents decided to brave the rain (a Nor’easter had been predicted but never happened) in order to see a balloon parade which seemed a bit, oh, what’s the word, uh, underwhelming, yeah, underwhelming is the right word for watching semi-inflated balloons being dragged down city streets. You couldn’t even see The Cat in the Hat’s face from where we were standing because it was slumping over as if the feline had had a rough Thanksgiving night at the pub. But at least the kids got to see Santa after the brief parade concluded and tell the big guy what they want for Christmas. (When I heard that The Girl asked Santa for an iPhone, I started banging my head against a wall.)

During the weekend, I celebrated Thanksgiving by partaking of another all-American tradition: I took the iPhone Girl Wanna-Be and a friend of hers to see a movie about a love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf. (For those who’ve been living under a rock, I’m talking about the new installment of the Twilight series, New Moon. I wrote a column about why women my age are so obsessed with the series here.) I also got the chance to do a whole mess of reading.

Now that it’s the Monday after Thanksgiving (and the kids have another day off from school), I’ve already been asked how my Christmas shopping is going . . . an inquiry at which I scoffed. “Christmas shopping? I haven’t even thought about it yet.” That was kind of untrue, as I did ask the children to write Christmas lists so that The Spouse and I can start thinking about gifts, but we haven’t done anything about it yet beyond the contemplation point.

About the headless Pilgrim above: That’s the result of the kids playing in the dining room and knocking over the male Pilgrim that was decorating my table. I’ll play “Taps” for him a little later this afternoon.

Kick your Christmas season off right. Not by slugging it out to the death with another customer in Target over who gets which Wii game or hot Christmas toy. But with sarcasm and humor. Those are the twin saving graces of my December days since becoming a mom some 11+ years ago.

So, in honor of the Yuletide season, I’m offering to you two examples of said sarcasm and humor from the minds of Anne Taintor and Mina Lee, both experts in the perfect housewife/suburban mother satirizing business.

Image credits: Anne Taintor and Mina Lee.

For years I’ve been capitalizing on a  concept originally created by a Brookline psychologist in 2000 as a tool with which to deal with familial tension during holiday gatherings: Dysfunctional Family Bingo.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game except that the squares on the Bingo card are filled with crazy incidents that could plausibly happen during a holiday dinner like Thanksgiving or Christmas. But unlike regular Bingo, believe me, this is not a game you want to win, at least not unless you’ve had your Zoloft prescription filled recently. If you actually are able to fill out five squares in a row to get Bingo, well, I feel for you my friend; you’ve clearly endured an oddball holiday gathering. Perhaps you should write a best selling memoir about it.

But for most of the rest of us, hopefully, reading through the 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card will be a subversive, snarky way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner and that everybody’s family is a tad off-kilter.

So, for your reading pleasure, I introduce my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. (Go to this link to see the card.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s been several weeks since the fall TV season commenced and the new half-hour ABC comedy Modern Family – about a multi-generational, messed up, loving American family — has not only lived up to its pre-season buzz, but it’s exceeded it.

Paired with another family half-hour comedy, The Middle (starring Patricia Heaton), these two have made Wednesday nights the big comedy night of the week. And when you factor in The New Adventures of Old Christine (starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus) on CBS on Wednesdays as well, it’s family dysfunction at its finest. (You can view previous episodes of The Middle and Modern Family on the ABC web site, and Old Christine eps on the CBS web site.)

For your Friday funny viewing, here’s a segment from a recent episode of Modern Family where new adoptive dads, Cameron and Mitchell were taking their baby home from the hospital after accidentally hitting her head against a door jam and discussing whether they are good parents:

Item #1: Time Magazine Takes on Helicopter Parenting

Recently, my twin fifth graders were given an assignment to create hats which represented a vocabulary word they’d been given. As the deadline for them to bring the word hat into school neared, I asked them two things: Did they need me to get them any supplies and how they were progressing. Other parents, I later learned, took a MUCH more involved role in the creation of their kids’ hats, helping the children come up with phenomenal ideas on how to graphically and physically represent a word’s meaning in hat form.

After The Eldest Boy told me about how awesome some of the other kids’ hats were – the ones who got help from a proud parent — I wondered if I was a lazy slacker mom for not suggesting more ideas and for not helping my children create more intricate hats. (I simply let them think it through and execute their ideas on their own.) Or was I, by my insistence that they do the project themselves, engaging in my own, small form of civil disobedience by refusing to hover over my kids?

Time Magazine would say that I was bucking the fear-driven helicopter parenting trend and actively participating in the backlash against it with my inaction.

In her story, “Can These Parents Be Saved,” Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time:

“. . . [T]here is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality.”

God, I hope that’s true. The backlash hasn’t quite reached my own little Boston area suburban hamlet yet; my 11-year-olds’ teachers still want parents to sign off on far too many homework assignments — indicating that mom or dad has seen the assignments or that the kid completed something — a fact about which I loudly complain on a daily basis. But my fingers remain crossed as I wait for this movement to land here. Underparenters unite!

Item #2: NYT Tackles Rudeness at Holiday Dinners

Right in line with my upcoming 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card (see Item #3 below for my plea for you to help me out), today’s New York Times has a story featuring horror stories of rude relatives — of the ilk I’d love to see appear on my Bingo card — from people who’ve survived Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with their extended families and lived to laugh about it, because, seriously, what else can you do but laugh? (Laugh and pass the wine, I suppose. Or write memoirs about it. Or columns, blogs.)

One anecdote from the Times story involved a teacher who was pregnant with  her first child when she spent Thanksgiving at her in-laws’ house:

“For months, the teacher’s mother-in-law had been saying that she wanted to be in the waiting room when the teacher went into labor, and the teacher, who recounted her story on the Mothers-in-Law Anonymous section of Grandparents.com, had been politely rebuffing her.

So at Thanksgiving dinner, with the family gathered around the table, the mother-in-law (referred to on this site as ‘MIL’) took the matter into her own hands.

‘MIL announced to me and the entire family the following,’ the teacher wrote. ‘I WILL be in the waiting room while [daughter-in-law] is in labor, and all of you are welcome to come too. MY SON will come and give me updates every hour on the hour.’”

That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m looking for to include on my Bingo card . . .

Item #3: Send in Your Holiday Anecdotes

Don’t forget, I’m counting on you. I’m collecting your amusing family holiday anecdotes (like the one above) to help me fill the squares on my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. I won’t reveal identities if you don’t want me to, so please feel free to e-mail me (meredithobrien@hotmail.com) a brief explanation of a humorous/insane/annoying instance which occurred at a family holiday event (like Thanksgiving). The people who submit the four best submissions will net signed copies of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

Image credit: Hugh Kretschmer/Time.

For the past few years I’ve addressed the issue of holiday stress – particularly when you gather multiple generations together for a high-pressure holiday dinner — by creating Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards. I take awkward-but-realistic scenarios that might occur during (before or after) your family’s Thanksgiving dinner and place each one into a box on a BINGO card and pray that no one checks off enough boxes to actually win.

In some twisted way, writing up all of these scenarios amuses me and serves as a reminder that EVERYONE experiences a bit of familial dysfunction during holiday dinners so we may as well just find the humor in them. (For the full history of Dysfunctional Family Bingo, go here.)

What kinds of scenarios am I talking about? For the past couple years, I’ve used a few of my own holiday dinner experiences (though there’s no way I’m ‘fessing up which ones are autobiographical) as well as some which my friends have shared with me in order to fill out each box on the Bingo card. Here are a few from my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card:

– Some older children at the gathering taught your impressionable young child how to spit, the glory of purple nurples and new vocabulary words like the “F” word.

– Your mother suggests that you join her in starting a diet in the new year, noting that your pants are getting “a bit snug” and asks you if you’ve ever heard of the term “muffin top.”

– It gets heated when several members of the family cannot agree on the best, fastest route to take from this location to the mall.

– A male relative drags you outside and points out everything that’s wrong with your house, from the roof and gutters, to the window screens and the chimney.

– Maxi pads, whose box you had tucked away in a bathroom cabinet, were taken out by a young nephew who decided to remove the paper strips on the back and stick them all over the bathroom wall in a random pattern.

This year, I’m going to ask you, my smart and witty Picket Fence Post readers, to please contribute YOUR OWN oddball/dysfunctional family holiday dinner scenarios which could happen (or have happened) during the celebration of Thanksgiving. I’ll use reader suggestions along with my own to create my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. Please e-mail me your contribution (everybody’s got at least one amusing scenario) — to meredithobrien@hotmail.com — no later than noon on Monday, November 23.

 The best four contributions (as determined by me) will earn their creators an autographed and personalized copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, where the motto is, “Parenting is best done with a hearty sense of humor.”  Looking forward to reading your e-mails!

Image credit: AP.

The Picket Fence Post Family Christmas/Hanukkah Card Photos: Recent photo session with the three Picket Fence Post children was a disaster. Said session was punctuated by tears, parental threats, puffy eyes (still red from previous bouts of crying which delayed the taking of photos until children’s eyes were less red), forced awkward smiles (called to mind the web site Awkward Family Photos), an energetic (and slightly vicious) pediatric pillow fight and the labeling of yours truly as, and I quote, “the worst person in the world.” (No, the kid who said that does not watch Keith Olbermann’s declarations of who the “Worst Person in the World” is for each particular weekday. However the mere fact that I asked the children to put on nice clothing and brush their hair is clearly grounds for human rights violations. I should start planning for my trial at the Hague.) I’m contemplating actually using some of the odder, weirder shots and chronicling the photographic debacle for a bit of holiday humor, greetings for those with a sense of humor.

Mentos/Diet Coke: This summer I bought a six-pack of 16.9 ounce Diet Coke bottles and a six-pack of Mentos packets with the intent of reenacting the Diet Coke/Mentos explosion — the one you’ve likely seen on the internet – in our backyard. Long story short, I just — FINALLY — got the chance to do it this afternoon after weeks upon weeks of The Youngest Boy whining, “When are doin’ the Diet Coke-Mentos thing?”. What a bust. Maybe we did it wrong because it didn’t look anything like we thought it should. Maybe we should’ve used a two-liter bottle instead of those small ones. Completely anti-climatic.

Soccer’s Over. Hello Basketball: The final soccer games of the season for The Girl and The Eldest Boy were rained out on Saturday. (The Girl’s game was re-scheduled for Sunday, but we were at my niece and nephew’s combined birthday party. The Eldest Boy’s game has yet to be re-scheduled.) And just as I was starting to enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to race around delivering them to various fields for practices and trying to remember who had the game where and whose practice ended when, we’ve started receiving e-mails to alert us to the fact that basketball season starts in two weeks. (The Spouse is The Girl’s head coach and is assisting The Eldest Boy’s team so things’ll be insane around here in short order. Not many family meals together during the week I expect.) Meanwhile, The Youngest Boy just started a once weekly hockey scrimmage thing on Sunday mornings before church. (That doesn’t include his Saturday morning hockey skills sessions.) How is it that I was naively thinking about getting a break?

Going on Month Four of Working at the Kitchen Table: The Picket Fence Post family puppy Max, now 6 months old, is still not completely housebroken yet. Whenever he sets his paws on a carpet, he acts as though it’s the grass outside and he pees. So that means he spends his days in our kitchen on its hard wood floors (on which *knock wood* he hasn’t had an accident in a very long time). But since he’s a puppy who’s still teething, Max needs to be monitored or else he’ll gnaw on the furniture and get into stuff. (That’s when he’s not in his crate whining about the fact that I had the nerve to leave the room.) Guess who’s been doing the monitoring? That’s right. I’ve been working on my laptop at the kitchen table or the kitchen counter for almost four months so that I can allow Max to run around when the Picket Fence Post kids are in school. (Once they get home and heap their stuff atop mine, the kitchen looks like a Superfund site.) We recently had our backyard fenced in and that’s taken some of the pressure off because I can let Max out to romp around (and tire out) like the little maniac he is, but the world starts feeling mighty small when you spend most of your days confined to one room. Kind of feels like I’ve been grounded. Then again, maybe I deserve to be grounded, what with being the worst person in the world and all.

Even though the Picket Fence Post kids didn’t have school last Wednesday — in honor of Veteran’s Day — and The Youngest Boy went on a field trip to Plimoth Plantation all day Thursday (I chaperoned and had to repeatedly prevent third graders from killing the chickens that were running loose on the 17th century inspired village), the kids still brought home from school a grand total of 79 pieces of paper last week.

Among the paper items were: Projects on Mayan life, papers and worksheets about the moon and Plimoth Plantation, as well as fliers about an ice cream social/fund raiser and a bunch of handmade flashcards.

This brings the grand total of the number of pieces of paper brought home by the three Picket Fence Post kids this school year to: 663.

Item #1: Mad Men Concludes Third Season

Sunday nights are going to seem so dull without those Mad Men characters to entertain and intrigue me. The third season of AMC’s super-cool 1960s drama came to an end last Sunday, capped by one of the best season finales I’ve seen, including a series of intense and poignant scenes among the members of the Draper family. (See my review of the finale here.)

When the season began, Don and Betty had just reunited after she’d kicked him out for his philandering. (Betty only let Don return home because she learned she was pregnant with baby number three.) After one of the most harrowing depictions of childbirth I’ve seen on TV, Betty and Don enjoyed a brief period of emotional connection, topped by a sexy jaunt to Rome as Betty accompanied Don on a business trip. However as soon as they got home, their romantic bubble burst. By the end of the season, Betty learned that her husband had been living under a fake identity, had lied to her about his background and she decided she no longer loved him. After having been pursued by a divorced political aide to the governor who hit on her when he saw a pregnant Betty at a social event, Betty decided to divorce Don in order to marry this other guy who she barely knows.

One of the most heart-wrenching moments of the season came in the finale, when Betty and Don sat their grade school aged children down to tell them that Don was moving out of the house. The little boy clung to his father — literally wrapped his limbs around his dad’s body — while the older, wiser daughter asked her mother if Betty was responsible for driving him away like the last time. Divorce, when children are involved, is messy. When the Drapers are involved, I’ll bet things’ll be extra messy. Next season, we’ll likely see the impact of a divorce on young children, up close and personal. The last TV shows which dramatized this in any real way, without sugarcoating it, were the second season of HBO’s In Treatment and the canceled Sela Ward drama Once and Again.

Item #2: Balloon Boy’s Parents Plead Guilty

The parents of the infamous Balloon Boy, the ones who perpetrated the hoax on the country – telling authorities, while the mother wept into the phone to the 9-1-1 operator, that their young son was on board a runaway helium balloon floating helplessly over Colorado skies — have pleaded guilty to various complaints, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Heene pleaded guilty to the felony charge of “knowingly and falsely influencing the sheriff,” AP reported, while Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of filing a false report to emergency services. A judge will sentence them on Dec. 23.

‘Nuf said.

Item #3: Christmas Card Photos

I’ve been trying to tackle the whole Christmas card photo business — because who, in this day and age, DOESN’T include a photo of the kids in their Christmas cards – in bits and pieces, particularly because we’re hoping to use a photo(s) of the kids AND the Picket Fence Post puppy, Max.

Every year it’s almost as if I wipe from my mind the fact that it’s a nightmare to take a good photo for the family Christmas card. Throw an unpredictable puppy into the mix and I realize that I’ve got my work cut out for me. I already had one photo session with Max, trying to get some good shots of him and realize I’m going to need a lot of “holiday cheer” in order to get a halfway decent snapshot.

Item #4: What the ‘Meep?’

From the everyone’s-gone-nuts files, the principal of a Massachusetts high school has forbidden students from using the word, “meep.” No lie. You say, “meep,” and you could get suspended. School officials said that students had been using the word in a disruptive way and wouldn’t cease and desist.

Seriously, is this really the best way to go? What if students then move on to another word, like, oh, I don’t know, “leap” or “pear” or “deet?” Last time I checked, there were quite a number of single-syllable words out there that students could adopt and utilize in an annoying fashion. My kids can make the word, “mom” sound horrifically irritating. Is the principal going to ban all of the one-syllable words? Instead of banning a silly word like “meep,” why not just discipline students for bad behavior?

Image credit: Carin Baer/AMC.