Picket Fence Post

Max the Mini Wheat says, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to y’all, Boston Red Sox style. (Actually, he doesn’t say anything since he’s a dog, can’t speak and had to be bribed with food to pose for this photo.)

Anyway, while I’m on the subject of St. Patrick’s Day, I have an open question to families of Irish descent:

When did it become common practice for a leprechaun named “Lucky” to visit the homes of children who have an Irish background and leave presents (toys!) for them on St. Patrick’s Day Eve so that the little lads and lasses discover them on St. Patrick’s Day morn?

My 8-year-old just came home from school all confused and wanted to know why some of his friends received visits from Lucky but he never has and, in fact, none of the Picket Fence Post children ever have.

After I blurted out, “Toys?! For St. Patrick’s Day?” I regained my composure and promptly informed him that when I was a child, no one left my brother or I any toys on St. Patrick’s Day either and that we were never visited by Lucky.

What this will mean to the boy’s psyche in the long run is anyone’s guess (will he be telling his therapist in 20 years that he’s been unlucky in life and it’s all because he was the only Irish-descended child in his class not visited by the leprechaun?), although he did add, “Maybe Lucky will visit us next year . . .”

Okay, I know, I know, I’ve been woefully negligent when it’s come to updating The Paper Project numbers.

The Paper Project, for those of you who may have forgotten, is my attempt to quantify the amount of paper that my three kiddos (a boy in third grade and boy-girl twin fifth graders) bring home during a school year.

Given that I oftentimes feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of requests, projects and paper that come home from school, sometimes without warning – The Youngest Boy just brought home a plastic jug which we’re supposed to fill with items so he can bring it back to school for his class to estimate the number of items inside — I figured that by putting a number on the paper blizzard I could at least place that overwhelming-ness into a context.

I just poured through the paper that was brought home during the second and fourth weeks of February — minus the winter vacation week and a snow day — plus the first week of March. Among the papers were: Four announcements for a fundraising event at my older kids’ school, a flyer telling us about a day when we’re supposed to be “unscheduled,” 35 math work sheets/word problems, 44 papers worksheets/assignments involving spelling/grammar/reading and a beautiful landscape art project my 8-year-old created. (It’s quite lovely.)

The total number of pieces of paper that came home during that time was: 147.

That brings the grand total of pieces of paper brought home this school year to: 1,407.

Scene: My kitchen where I’m making dinner. The 8-year-old boy suddenly appears, having just left the basement playroom where the kids were hanging out and listening to a top 40/pop radio station which I suspect has some sort of mind control over them as they’re obsessed with it and want to listen to it all the time.

Kid: Mom, what’s a disco stick?

Me: A what?

Kid: A disco stick. We were listening to a song on the radio . . .

Me: By Lady Gaga?

Kid: Yeah. And she says, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

Me: (*head imploding, trying to think up something misleading, quickly*)

Kid: Do you know what it is? A disco stick?

Me: (*thinking that lying is the way to go*) I have no idea. That Lady Gaga’s crazy, isn’t she?

****

We were all watching the Winter Olympics as a family last night and, after witnessing a few brutal wipe-outs during the women’s downhill racing event — in particular, the crash where an athlete’s body, while careening out of control down the mountain, went up a mogul and then, after flying through the air, slammed into the ground — my 11-year-old daughter ran out of the room in tears wondering why on earth anyone would willingly participate in such a sport, especially in light of the luger’s death last week. She had trouble falling asleep because she kept replaying the crash footage in her head over and over. I had to try to take her mind off of the crashes as she fell asleep . . . but not by providing the definition of “disco stick.”

However their experience watching the Olympics hasn’t been all bad. Yesterday afternoon, I’m lucky we didn’t have a wipe-out situation of our own. After-the-fact, the Picket Fence Post children informed me that they had attempted to reenact an Olympic snow boarding event. They’d donned their bike helmets, climbed atop a small snow-covered hill in our yard, then stood on the rickety wooden sled as they slid down. (I got conflicting reports on how fast their descent was.) When I responded loudly with, “You did WHAT?” they tried to distract and impress me with the news that, before they “snowboarded,” they’d taken some tall dry weeds from the woods and pretended they were the Olympic flame and ”lit” a pretend Olympic cauldron. I have no idea what was the stand-in for the cauldron. Thank God that’s as far as they went with the flame reenactment.

****

Other than attempting to impersonate Shaun White, the kids have also used their vacation time to – and I’m not kidding here — reorganize their playroom. No, I didn’t bribe them to do this. It was wholly their idea.

Normally, I’m fond of likening the room in the basement — with the half-peeled jungle/animal border, the crayon scrawled on the walls next to the holes caused by a wooden wagon and various balls being smashed into them — to a bad neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood you realize is kinda sketchy only after you’ve taken a wrong turn in an unfamiliar city.

However, the kids did an admirable job of neatening it up. They set up ”sofas” (pillows from the various sofas in the house, blankets they pilfered from bedrooms), a music listening area (so they can listen to that station that’s teaching them about “disco sticks”) and a makeshift library where they created a bookcase from cardboard boxes and duct tape and filled them with paperback books, a hardcover copy of the 2009 Guinness World Records and an assortment of sports trading cards. They created and posted on the wall a list of nine ”rules” for the room that visitors have to agree to abide by, along with an oath that visitors must sign. Among the rules were:

1) When coming downstairs, never touch the bottom step.

2) Do not ever stand on furniture.

5) Owner of drum set must be watching you if you play the drums.

No word on whether playroom visitors are required to sing along with Lady Gaga tunes, however you DO have to have a high tolerance for KISS 108.

Image credit: Getty via Gawker.

And I laughed. And laughed. And laughed. “My head would explode if I gave up shouting for 40 days,” I told them today as I was driving the Picket Fence Post kids to the grocery store with me.

“You couldn’t do it,” The Youngest Boy said as he too chortled at the notion.

“I think I’d melt by day 20,” I agreed.

Instead, we agreed that I’d try to refrain from using bad words during the duration of the Lenten season, the 40 days leading up to Easter. When I’m in front of the kids I try, really hard, not to swear. But I’m not perfect. The ”s” word slips out of my mouth from time to time when I drop stuff or make a mistake. When I substitute “damn” or “crap,” they raise their eyebrows as well because I’ve told them those are bad words not to be used by kids. (For the record, I apologize when I slip up.) 

I think I’ll do what I did last year to incentivize myself to curtail my invocation of naughty words by putting a quarter in a jar each time I mess up, even outside of my kids’ presence. However it doesn’t always work. On one particularly bad work day last spring when the kids were at school, I put a $5 in the jar.

I’ve asked the kids to think about what they’d give up or what positive things they’d do during Lent. They’ve got until dinner tonight to come up with some good ideas, but having Mom cease with the shouting, ain’t happenin’ my pretties. No. Way.

I felt a bit like the faux-cool dad, Phil Dunphy from Modern Family yesterday when I attempted to invoke the slang term “beast” when talking with my 11-year-old son and describing something as being cool. (”Beast” is — or was – the kids’ hip way of saying, “cool.” That’s why my eldest two kids told me last year anyway.)

“Mooom!” The Eldest Boy said, “It’s not ‘beast’ anymore!”

“When did that happen?” I asked, chagrined. “What do you mean?”

“It’s ‘tank.’”

“‘Tank?’”

“Yeah, that’s the new word,” he said.

It’s so new, this using “tank” as a synonym for “cool,” that when I looked in the Urban Dictionary of slang words, I couldn’t find a definition of “tank” that matched my son’s.

Combine my verbal miscue with the fact that last week when The Girl and I started dancing in the kitchen after dinner and The Youngest Boy (8) told me I danced “like an old lady,” you can understand why I’m not feeling too hip these days.

Hence my earlier statement that I’m worried that my kids are going to start to think I’ve become a Phil Dunphy. Who the heck is Phil Dunphy? He’s a fictional character from an ABC comedy. Watch the video below and you’ll understand my concern:

Do your kids make you feel woefully out of touch?

Things have been a bit chaotic over the past few days, what with some family drama (don’t ask), the never-ending slog of kids’ activities slowly sucking the life out of me, and trying to shoehorn actual work into the mix, never mind attending to volunteer efforts both The Spouse and I for some reason foolishly offered to do. Plus there was this fifth grade bread baking project we were supposed to complete over the weekend. The Girl actually completed the project on her own — with no help from her parents – but The Eldest Boy did not because, honestly, there was too much crap going on.

In the meantime, to make up for the lack of bloggy stuff, here are a few newsy items I’ve missed in the past few days:

– I had the pleasure of co-hosting the Manic Mommies podcast with Erin Kane last week. We talked about mid-season TV (Big Love, Lost, a bit of ranting about the current state of Grey’s Anatomy) and about our crazy kids’ activities (this was before family drama hit the Picket Fence Post household). You can download the podcast for free on iTunes, including where I called Erin by her co-host’s name, Kristin. Smooth move.

– It was with a heavy heart that I read the recent news stories about a teenage girl living in Massachusetts who committed suicide reportedly in the wake of cyberbullying. Adding to that was the fact that a local school district had an anti-bullying forum led by a Vermont father whose own 13-year-old son (two years younger than my twins) killed himself several years ago after he’d been bullied, and I’ve been wondering when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is going to legally define bullying behavior with an anti-bullying law and when schools are going to start taking harassment seriously and not as a form of “conflict.” If sexual harassment in the workplace and acts which create a hostile workplace can be outlawed, certainly bullying/intimidating/humiliating harassment and acts which create a hostile learning environment should be as well.

– In a similar vein, the web site Parent Dish had a provocative post about parents who bully and name-call other parents online. Blogger Amy Hatch asked, “How can we teach our children be kind to one another when we can’t model that behavior in our own lives?”

– Completely changing subjects here . . . If you were among those who were once fond of watching Hope and Michael Steadman, Nancy and Elliot Weston, Ellyn Warren, Gary, Melissa and the crew from thirtysomething, you’ll be pleased to learn that season two of the 1980s/90s drama is now out on DVD. My Pop Culture column this week is about why, even though decades have passed since these episodes first aired, “. . . I can find no current TV dramas which capture the gloriously messy and stressful, day-to-day slog of child-rearing, work and marriage as deftly and incisively as this 21-year-old series did.” (As you can tell, “slog” was my preferred word of the week. . .)

Image credit: Dyna Moe/Nobody’s Sweetheart.

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to take the lead of some New England media folk and chronicle a day in the life of a Massachusetts suburban work-from-home mom of three by snapping photos throughout the day. That mom, of course, was me.

And wouldn’t you know that today happened to be the day when The Youngest Boy stayed home from school complaining of a constellation of vague symptoms. However because The Spouse was working from home, it wasn’t solely my duty to serve at the kid’s beck and call, fetching him beverages, snacks, lunch, blankets, etc.

(more…)

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup comic has a tendency to strangely reflect some aspect of what’s going on in my house at any given moment. It’s really starting to freak me out a little.

Take this week’s subject: The two grade-school aged girls — whose favorite pastime is mocking their mom’s lack of expertise in the domestic arena – have been forced to pick up the slack when it came to the laundry and preparing dinner, since their single (widowed) mom’s busy working and their grandmother, who had helped out around the house, is on an extended trip. The girls are finally going to get a taste of what it’s like to tackle the mundane and unglorified tasks of running a household. (I’ll bet the tuna surprise they’ve been making in the last two comic strips, with marshmallows and chocolate malted milk balls, will certainly surprise them when they dig into it. My hope is that, if they ruin the laundry and the dinner, that they’ll have a bit more respect for what their mom does for them. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

In the Picket Fence Post household, I’ve been trying to get the three kids (8, 11, 11) to be more comfortable with making meals as a way to help out. They prepare their own breakfasts on many school days — The Girl is confident enough to make pancakes and egg dishes — and they’re able to put together school lunches, though The Eldest Boy’s usually too slow moving in the mornings to prepare his lunch. The Spouse has also been trying to get them accustomed to doing the laundry and folding it.

Unfortunately, none of this has prevented The Ungratefuls from routinely kvetching about the dinners I make them. (Actually, that’s not fair. The Eldest Boy doesn’t usually complain and is a very good eater. One out of three ain’t bad I suppose.) However The Youngest Boy will drop to the kitchen floor and roll around in a fury, I’d estimate, roughly, 80 percent of the time when I inform him what I’m making for dinner. The Girl’s technique is to sit at the dinner table and eat nothing, fighting furiously with us if we try to coax her into taking just a bite out of dinner. (Last night, we had words when I tried to convince her to take a bite of the barbecued chicken, long grain rice and the baked butternut squash with pecans and brown sugar I’d prepared. You’d think I was trying to get her to eat beets or chicken livers.)

As of late, I’ve been declining to answer the question, “What’s for dinner?” I leave them on their own to deduce what I’m making, commence with their requisite griping and prepare for a bowl full of cereal for dinner.

Maybe it’ll work out better for the mom in Stone Soup.

Do your kids help out with laundry, making meals or other household chores?

Image credit: Stone Soup via Go Comics.

Hey, have you heard that there’s a U.S. Senate election happening today in Massachusetts? It hasn’t received all that much coverage, has it? Have you caught any of the ads for Republican candidate Scott Brown and Democratic candidate Martha Coakley? Maybe you’ve heard a bit of talk about it on the radio, that’s when you weren’t being incessantly reminded that some 62-year-old would-be rapper recently sang a ditty called “Pants on the Ground” on American Idol.

Seeing that I’m a politics and news junkie (read tons of news, watch political TV shows, listen to talk radio), the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts to select someone to complete the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s term has become major grist for kitchen table conversations at my house. The three Picket Fence Post children joined The Spouse and me and watched some or most of the final Senate debate on TV last week (seems like eons ago) and they kept asking who that “Kennedy guy” was since they hadn’t heard The Spouse or me mention that he was even running. They found it patently unfair that the third party candidate — Joseph L. Kennedy – was asked by the moderator whether he’d vote for Brown or Coakley if he had to choose between them.

As political ads (many negative ones largely from the Coakley campaign) have been rolled out at such a brisk pace that their sheer volume nearly blocked out the sun, the kids asked more questions, like why the negative ads had such grim music and ominous voice-overs making it sound as though the world would end if the other person were elected.

In short order, the members of the Picket Fence Post family started lining up behind candidates, and suffice is to say there wasn’t unanimity, which has caused some friction . . . like when The Youngest Boy pumped his 8-year-old fists into the air and started chanting his candidate’s name in the face of his 11-year-old sister who’s backing a different candidate.

I’ve attempted (key word *attempted*) to tamp down my own enthusiasm for a candidate as I’ve been vigorously lobbying The Spouse (who always waits until the last minute to decide on a candidate) that my choice is the right one. However I didn’t want the rugrats to witness me pestering their dad while I was simultaneously preaching about the importance of being civically engaged and voting, no matter what one’s political views might be.

Today, on Election Day, The Spouse was working from home and the children had no school so we decided, as a family, to go vote together. There was jostling over who got to hold the two ballots and over who got to feed them into the machines (we have fill-in-the-circle ballots at our precinct). The jostling was exacerbated by the deep red/blue division between two of the kids and inevitably devolved into tears because The Youngest Boy didn’t get a chance to put a ballot into the machine.

Seeking political reconciliation, after we got home, The Youngest Boy and I baked some vanilla cupcakes and swirled red food coloring into six and blue into the other six. Once they’ve cooled, we’ll frost them and decorate them all with red, white and blue sprinkles. The plan is to enjoy them together in front of the TV at around 8 p.m. after the polls close, with some hot cocoa in hand. It’s supposed to be a celebration of Election Day and how lucky we are to have choices. I’ve warned both factions within the Picket Fence Post household that poor sportsmanship and gloating will not be allowed. That’s the goal anyway. Political, all-American unity. Under one roof. While enjoying red cupcakes and blue cupcakes decorated by red and blue sprinkles. My fingers are crossed.

Image credit: Metrowest Daily News.

How did the Picket Fence Post family ring in 2010? With a champagne toast for the grown-ups and sparkling cider for the kids? With a robust rendition of Auld Lang Syne? Fine food and good humored company?

Wrong. On all counts.

The new decade began with a trip to the ER, two broken bones and a kid running a high temperature.

We’d survived several days of Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations with friends and family highlighted by: A rather aggressive Yankee Swap, grown-ups developing a keen interest in a Spanish liqueur at a Christmas gathering, the kids receiving Wii(and quickly becoming addicted to it and annoyed by my desire to create weird avatars modeled after TV characters) and the Picket Fence Post puppy Max devouring a brand new Star Wars figure a half-hour after we finished unwrapping our presents on Christmas morning. A few days later, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve day, I was quietly reading The Book Thief  by the fire while the Eldest Boy was sleeping his way through a cold (and a fever), The Girl was playing at the neighbors’ house and The Spouse was ice skating at an outdoor rink in a town park with The Youngest Boy.

Then the call came.

“I’m hurt. You need to come and get me and take me to the hospital.”

I dragged The Eldest Boy out of bed and drove to the rink to find The Youngest Boy shaken and in tears, while The Spouse’s left wrist looked gruesomely swollen and lumpy as his whole face was contorted in one big clenching grimace. Quickly dubbed “the Ice Skating Guy” by the folks at the ER, we were waiting to find out if The Spouse’s broken wrist (broken in two places) would require immediate surgery when The Eldest Boy said he had to go home, NOW, because he felt ill. I touched his forehead. He was burning up.

In full scramble mode, I pulled out the cell phone to find someone to watch The Eldest Boy at our house — his temp wound up being 101.3 — as I arranged for The Youngest Boy to join The Girl at the neighbors’ house. I abandoned the Ice Skating Guy and quickly drove The Eldest Boy home, got him settled in, brought The Youngest Boy to the neighbors’ house and got a lift from one of those ever-so-kind neighbors to pick up The Spouse’s car that had been left behind at the park.

(more…)