Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Adam@Home

I’ve been loving the latest Brian Basset cartoons, Adam@Home, where a work-from-home dad named Adam (has three kids and a wife who works elsewhere) is fielding online questions about what it’s like to work at home with kids bustling about and fighting. This week’s cartoons have cut a wee bit too close to my life’s experience as a work-from-home parent. I have several of the comic strips up on the fridge and in my home office that regularly make me laugh, though, sadly, the humor is lost on the children.

Item #2: thirtysomething Online

Shh! I’ve got a secret. If, like me, you’ve been waiting patiently (or in my case impatiently) for the 1980s thoughtful yuppie drama thirtysomething to be released on DVD (or VHS) and cannot, for the life of you, understand why it hasn’t come out yet, I have a solution for you. Try YouTube. Type in “thirtysomething.” Scroll down the page and you won’t be disappointed.

After watching many of the episodes which are 20+ years old, I find that — fashion aside — they hold up well, particularly when it comes to the angst one of the lead characters, Hope Steadman (Mel Harris) felt about working parenthood. (During the series, she wound up working outside the home after being an at-home mom for a while.) The clip below is from the first episode of the second season after Hope had decided to go back to work at an environmental magazine when her daughter was 20 months old. She and her husband Michael were also debating whether to have another child.

 Item #3: Halloween ALREADY!

It’s the first full week of August. My family just got back from our summer vacation, and what am I finding, other than beach sand still littering the mini-van? Halloween stuff for sale in stores and e-mails in my inbox from Halloween costumer purveyors. This initial Halloween appearance seems earlier than last year when I first spotted Halloween products while shopping for my twins’ late summer birthday party supplies. I say to you premature Halloween pushers: No mas! It’s scary enough to think about back-to-school shopping (school idiotically starts BEFORE Labor Day around these parts), I don’t need the added pressure of Halloween costume shopping.

Apparently American pets are so enamoured of their human “dads” that they’re now buying Father’s Day cards for them. (Just to be clear: I’m talking about pets giving cards TO the humans, NOT about cards that simply have cute pets on the cover.)

How the pets — mostly cats and dogs — are accomplishing this feat is beyond me. I’ve yet to see a pet go to a card store, pick out the perfect Father’s Day card, slap down the cash and then deliver it to its human dad. I simply must not have been paying close attention. They must be choosing cards for their human dads, or why else would major greeting card makers create Father’s Day cards from a cat or from a dog to its human father? (I’m making a huge leap in assuming that the cards are meant for the human fathers, otherwise, how would the animal fathers actually read and laugh at the witty one-liners inside said cards?)

When shopping for Father’s Day cards today, I also saw cards intended to be from a baby to his or her dad. But, like with the cats and dogs, I’ve never before witnessed an infant pick out a card for his or her dad. Frankly, I think it’s dumb to pick out a card “from the baby,” because you’re not fooling anyone. The kid didn’t pick it out. Drooled on it, well that’s a distinct possibility. Picked it out? Maybe if you guided the child’s arm in the general direction of the cards you could argue that the kid picked it out, but that would be stretching the truth. (Better to get one of those, “On your first Father’s Day cards” instead.)

When my kids pick out greeting cards — though I prefer that they make them — there’s no doubt that they made the selections (you should SEE what SpongeBob-ish choices they make). It’s believable to say that anyone from a toddler age on up could conceivably select a card for his or her father. It strains credulity, however, to suggest that a baby picked out a card. Or that Fido just had to get Daddy a card too.

But I could be wrong. Certainly the nice folks at the greeting card stores would never create a line of cards for nonsensical reasons. Pets MUST be doing a lot of card buying these days or they wouldn’t have these cards out on the racks, right?

So if any of you, intrepid blog readers, actually see a dog or a cat selecting a Father’s Day card for its human father, please drop me a line. I’d love to get a detailed report.

Saw this YouTube video on The MotherHood web site.

I cannot and will not say that it reminds me of any of the Mother’s Days I celebrated on behalf of my own mom when I was a kid (right, Mom?). And it certainly could never remind my own family of me (I’m just a peach on Mother’s Day, just ask The Spouse, he’ll tell you what a passive aggressive peach I am).

But I’m sure, in some families, this video will hit close to home. Happy Mother’s Day!

I’m on a hamster wheel. And I can’t seem to get off of it.

I usually block out — probably for self-preservational purposes — how absolutely loony the springtime can get when you have three kids who play sports. I was deluded into thinking that I actually had a handle on things, at least between January and early March, when the only real holidays are Valentine’s Day and the start of the spring training. You don’t have to send cards to anyone, make special meals or buy gifts to celebrate the fact that baseball’s back.

Then spring officially arrived. And all hell broke loose.

On Sunday, the Spouse and I had to sit down with spreadsheets, calendars, four bottles of Advil and a bottle of Merlot in order to figure out the next few weeks, schedule-wise. (We’re still scraping the ceiling following my head explosion.) Take this week’s nuttiness:

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