Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Primetime Adoption Stories

If you’ve been watching House, 30 Rock and/or Brothers & Sisters lately, you might’ve noticed that they have at least one thing in common: Storylines involving career-oriented women who are seeking to adopt children. Sadly, thus far in the season, none of the fictional women has had any good news to report, and, in at least one case, a woman’s busy work schedule was held against her. I wrote about these primetime adoption stories in a column over on Mommy Track’d.

Item #2: Proposed Ban on Fast Food Ads

Question for the universe: Who buys fast food for young children? The kids, who have no means of getting to McDonald’s and likely don’t have the spare cash for a Big Mac? No, it’s not the 3-year-old toddling down to the local fast food joint on his own. It’s the adults in that 3-year-old’s life who buy him the fatty food. Adults, my friends, can just say, “No,” no matter how many tempting McDonald’s ads the kids see on TV.

In fact the adults can use these ads as teachable moments to explain to their little charges how the folks who created the ads don’t care about children, that they’re just trying to persuade kids to spend their parents’ money and eat things that are bad for them. At the same time, the adults can explain the concept of moderation, that having a burger and fries every once and a while, is fine. If you don’t teach kids about moderation as well as how to say, “No” to tempting advertisements, you’re doing your offspring a disservice as we live in a world that’s saturated with ads and bad food. 

That being said, I, a big First Amendment cheerleader, think it’s unnecessary to enact a ban on fast food advertisements during kids’ programming, no matter what the National Institutes of Health and the National Bureau of Economic Research say in a new study, claiming that if there were a ban on such advertisements, childhood obesity could be cut by 18 percent. (If networks want to voluntarily suspend that type of advertising, that’s their decision.)

“The study measured the number of fast food ads kids watched and found a fast food TV ad ban for children’s programming would reduce the number of overweight children aged 3 to 11 by 18 percent, and for adolescents (12- to 18-year-olds) by 14 percent,” according to Ad Age.

There’s a button on TV remote controls that says “mute” which you can tell your children to push when an ad comes on TV. There are DVDs you could have them watch which are commercial-free. And there’s also another handy button you could also use. It says, “off.”

Item #3: Q&A with Blogging Sisters/Mad Men Fans

I’m so missing Mad Men these days. Sunday nights just aren’t the same. In a moment of missing Don Draper & Co., I decided to e-mail two sisters in the NYC area who blog about Mad Men on their witty site, Basket of Kisses (a reference to Peggy Olson’s genius quip from season one). They fielded several of my questions for my Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum blog Q&A including this one about Betty Draper:

Meredith: Betty Draper: Victim, emblematic of young mothers of her era, or narcissistic and spoiled?

Roberta Lipp, Basket of Kisses: Well, both. She is well educated, and now she is full-time devoted to making her house look sparkling and meals on the table. And I think that Don having a secret identity expands the metaphor of a young woman involved with a closed off man who feels like a stranger. But yes, she is spoiled and narcissistic. She has been taught that looks are a woman’s only value, and she looks like she looks. She has some character traits that I’m not a fan of. But I very much feel Betty’s pain. 

Read the entire Q&A here.

Image credit: Greg Gayne/Fox via TV Guide.

Jan Eliot is scaring the crap out of me.

Just as I’m in the process of giving my twin 10-year-olds a little bit of responsibility – letting them stay home for small intervals of time while I go pick up their brother in town some place nearby, as long as they keep the phone next to them, don’t cook anything and don’t answer the door – I read this week’s Stone Soup. The storyline this week has focused on the teenaged girl who’s at home watching TV when her grade school-aged sister starts to choke on some food.

That settles it. The minute my 10-year-olds come home from school today, I’m going to teach them about the Heimlich maneuver, and pray they don’t use it for recreational purposes. Plus I’ll tell them they can’t eat anything when there’s no grown-up at home.

Image credit: Stone Soup via GoComics.

While walking through Stop & Shop I spotted a 75 percent discount bin filled with Halloween stuff. At the top of the heap of candy were many bags of High School Musical candy. High School Musical strawberry pop rocks to be exact. I was surprised to see them because I didn’t know they existed, and believe me, my house has plenty of HSM paraphernalia.

Then, while walking through the frozen food aisle, I spotted Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay again, looking out at me from the other side of the freezer door. This time, they were pictured on a box of waffles. Photos on the box showed a waffle with ”EHS” (for East High School) on one side. Another waffle, right next to Troy, had a crest for “High School Musical” on it . . . because when you think of High School Musical, of course, you think of waffles. And strawberry pop rocks.

Sometimes I wonder what these marketing folks are thinking. Do  they think parents will just capitulate and buy their kids anything with HSM on it?

Shortly after Shrek 3 came out, there was a boom in Shrek merchandise, particularly on all manner of food products all over the grocery store. One day when my kids spotted Shrek on a cereal box, they asked if I’d buy it.

“What does Shrek know about cereal?” I asked, speedily pushing the cart past the neatly arranged boxes as they looked longingly over their shoulders at the green ogre. Shrek knows as much about cereal as Troy Bolton does about waffles.

Years after readers of the world excitedly gobbled up the thousands of pages in the seven-book Harry Potter series, I have finally reached that milestone myself.

My twin fourth graders have been obsessed with Harry Potter since 2006, when they plowed through the books during the summer. To date, they’ve read each of the books an untold number of times and their enthusiasm for the subject matter has not waned. Their birthdays were both Harry Potter-themed this year. (I was rather proud of the Sorting Hat I made from paper bags.) The Girl was a character from the series for two Halloweens in a row. (She was Hermione Granger last year, Ginny Weasley this year.) The Eldest Boy was an unnerving Potter doppelganger last year.

Knowing that their mother is an avid reader, they hounded me for quite some time, trying to persuaded me to read the series. This past spring I acquiesced, put aside all my other reading for pleasure and commenced my Potter odyssey. Last week, I finished the gloomy melancholy that is book seven. (Now I get why, at first, The Girl had to put down Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows multiple times in order to “take a break.”) I was shocked by how dark books 5-7 were and was moved to tears more than once. Whenever Harry saw his deceased parents, for example, I teared up.

And, as promised, I’m now making plans to take The Eldest Boy and The Girl out to a nice lunch where we’ll have a Harry Potter book club meeting and discuss all seven volumes. (I decided not to discuss each individual book with them because they, knowing what eventually happens, couldn’t stop themselves from revealing spoilers.) However I’m going to have to go back and refresh my memory about each book as it seems as though a lifetime has passed since I read those first few innocent books.

For those Harry Potter fans out there: What was your favorite book in the series? (Mine is book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.) Were you surprised by how dark the series became in its later years?

Image credit: Scholastic.

Item #1: New find — The Pajama Diaries

Amidst the glut of post-election analyses, number crunching and U.S. maps colored red and blue, this week I discovered a new comic strip in the Boston Globe. (If it was there before, I hadn’t noticed it until now. My bad.)

The Pajama Diaries, by Terri Libenson, features a character named Jill who is a freelance graphic designer who works out of her house, is married, and has two young girls. (That could be me, only with three kids, only one of whom is a girl.) Jill lives across the street from a family whose home she snarkily dubbed “Perfectville” and uses the DVD player as a babysitter so she can quickly get some work done without interruption from the little people.

After reading through some of her previous comic strips, they hit home, both about the challenges of working from home and about the struggle against the perfect, and they made me laugh. It’s gonna be a new staple in the Picket Fence Post home.

Item #2: Boston Globe Features ‘Mommy Dating’

Ever bring your kids to a local playground and hoped that a mom would talk to you or that a group of moms would welcome you into their fold? That’s called “mommy dating,” according to the Boston Globe  which likens playgrounds to meat markets:

“To the casual observer, the playground may appear a pleasant tableau of mothers and babysitters and, oh, children. But to the initiated, it can be as socially charged as a singles’ bar. The blonde mom over here, the organics-only mom over there, the insecure moms hovering near the swings, pretending to be occupied by the kids. Meanwhile, style is assessed, labels identified, judgments made.”

Now that my kids have gotten older and we don’t hang out at playgrounds like we used to, I’ve become the mom standing on the sidelines at one of my kids’ bazillion games, chugging a caffeinated beverage, and hoping someone won’t point a finger at me and say, “There’s the mom who hates on kids’ sports and the PTO online and in columns. Don’t talk to her.”

Item #3: First Family Gets Ready

On page one of today’s New York Times there’s a feature story entitled, ”A Family Expected to Balance State Dinners with Sleepovers.” The reporter spoke with Michelle Obama’s Chicago friends and how the First Family plans to create its own support system for the girls on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Interesting read.

Image credit: The Pajama Diaries.

“There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation,” so said NBC’s Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on election night after projecting the state of California for Senator Barack Obama, thereby earning him enough electoral votes to capture the presidency.

My children are the same ages as Malia and Sasha Obama, 10 and 7. Michelle Obama has struggled with the same working mom issues as I have (although I don’t have a mega-watt, power job like hers). Michelle and Barack Obama were married two weeks before The Spouse and I were wed. With all those similarities, it will be fascinating for me to watch the Obamas navigate parenthood and their work while the whole world is watching.

For my kids, it’s also going to be interesting to see their experiences mirrored by children in the White House, especially for The Girl, who feels a kinship with Malia because they’re both Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers fans.

Image credits: The Huffington Post.

UPDATE: I just had a column about First Kids in the White House published on the Mommy Track’d web site.

* Cross-posted from Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. *

Phew! Anyone else feel as though you’ve been through a marathon? Two years of watching every debate in both parties, of reading online and in newspapers and magazines about the campaign, of watching YouTube videos, of following every detail of the race can take a lot out of a person. And I wasn’t even a candidate, the spouse of a candidate, working for the campaign or covering it as an embedded reporter. Those folks must feel as though they’ve been run over by a truck right about now.

At 11 p.m. last night, after the networks officially called the entire presidential election for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, I ran upstairs and woke up my kids to tell them the news. They weren’t completely awake, though, and didn’t remember that I’d woken them up when I spoke with them this morning. However, after learning of the results, along with the fact that 10-year-old Malia Obama and 7-year-old Sasha Obama were promised a puppy by their dad, I saw that puppy-gleam in their eyes too. (Sorry kids, you’re not getting a puppy. Your parents didn’t just complete a presidential campaign.)

Kudos are due to Arizona Senator John McCain, who was eloquent and gracious in making his concession speech. I felt badly for him while watching him, a former POW, tearing up as he acknowledged the historic nature of Obama’s win. He’s an honorable man who was saddled with a bad campaign that made bad choices. Had he won and a woman ascended to the vice presidency for the first time in our nation’s history, I would like to think that people would’ve been moved to see a woman succeed.

And Obama’s acceptance speech, in my humble opinion, will be one children will later read about in history books:

* Cross-posted at Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. *

Voting: I took the kids with me to vote in our small town in the western suburbs of Boston this morning at around 10. (There’s no school today.)

We saw no lines as we entered the school gym and were greeted by a sweet Girl Scout. We waited patiently as she explained in a whisper-soft voice, where we needed to go first — to check in by our street address. With my ballot in hand, the kids jockeyed for a good position in which to get a look at it as we crammed ourselves into the polling booth. They couldn’t believe how many people were running for president. They thought it was just John McCain and Barack Obama.

“The Green-Rainbow Party?” my daughter asked incredulously.

“Yep,” I said, as I read aloud all the different presidential/vice presidential candidates and their corresponding parties and the children shook their heads.

They were a bit dismayed when I wouldn’t let them fill in the bubbles with the black pen provided — there was no chance I was going to risk them filling in the wrong circle and ruin my opportunity to vote in this election — but I did let them help me feed the paper ballot into the machine when we were done. The dullness of putting a ballot into a machine made me miss the time when I voted in my first election in my hometown where they have actual levers to pull and a curtain that would dramatically open and record my choices when I was done. It’s anti-climatic to fill in a bubble with a pen.

MSNBC All Day: I’ve had MSNBC on TV all day. I’m a sucker for their “Election Center” in Rockefeller Center and am a big crazy fan of the crew from Morning Joe.

Random Observations:

I thought Barack and Michelle Obama took a really long time filling out their ballots in Chicago. They must have had a huge number of Illinois ballot questions or many contested races. (Massachusetts had three ballot questions.) Their 10-year-old daughter Malia, in her hoodie, looked thoroughly bored and yawned several times.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw Sarah and Todd Palin leave the polls in Wasilla? Shamefully, it was that, as I looked at the vice presidential candidate, I wondered if she’d already given all the expensive campaign-funded duds away to charity.

Calling the Winner Early: I was disturbed by a piece I saw in today’s New York Times about when the broadcast and cable news networks will project a winner tonight. I’m a big believer — even in the age of the Internet, Twitter and Facebook — of officially holding back on projecting a winner in the presidential race when people are still in the process of voting.

If a candidate concedes, then that person is affecting the voter turnout in places where the votes haven’t yet been cast and it’s not the media’s doing.

But if a candidate hasn’t yet conceded, the decent, patriotic thing to do is to wait until polls have closed before calling a state’s results. If the networks call the entire election before the folks on the west coast have finished voting, that move would essentially tell people who haven’t yet voted that their votes are irrelevant.

The viewers can wait. A little while anyway.

The Eldest Boy wanted me to buy him a $45 LaDainian Tomlinson jersey so he could dress up as the San Diego Chargers star for Halloween over his football gear.

Initially, I said, “No.” (Actually, in my head I thought of a more colorful response.)

Then I gave the request more thought. The Eldest Boy hadn’t been thrilled with the birthday present he received from The Spouse and I back in August. (In fact, it’s still sitting in the box in our garage. We haven’t returned it because The Spouse and I can’t agree on whether it should be returned . . . long story.) So I suggested that I return his birthday gift and instead buy him the jersey for his birthday present, enabling him to dress up as Tomlinson for Halloween.

Only he didn’t like this idea. “But I don’t want to wear it after Halloween,” he said.

“You mean you only want to wear it for the two hours you’re trick-or-treating?” I asked.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t wear it after that.”

“No. (*pause, breathe*) Absolutely not. No way. I’m not spending $45 for you to wear something for two hours.”

While his birthday gift remains in the garage, I was finally successful in convincing him to dress up as another football player: Tom Brady. He could wear the jersey he already owns, over his own pads, and — best part – carry a crutch.

The Eldest Boy remains lukewarm to this costume. I think it’s funny, plus it didn’t cost us a dime, my favorite kind of get-up.

Now if I can just figure out how to put my own hair up into an early 1960s beehive for a Mad Men-style costume party for tomorrow night, it’ll all be good. (I’ve already bought nuclear bomb-proof hair spray.) I’m going for the look of one of the gals in the Sterling Cooper secretarial pool. The Spouse is aiming for Paul Kinsey, as The Spouse sports a goatee, a goatee which prevented him from dressing as the hunky Don Draper.

Image credit: Sport Station.

High School Musical 3 opened this weekend and raked in $42 million, the highest opening weekend for a musical . . . in case you’ve been living under a rock and weren’t aware of this fact.

Being the parent of a 10-year-old girl, there’s no way I could’ve been out of the HSM 3 info loop even if I wanted to be. So we had a plan of attack as to how to make sure we could get to see the film on opening weekend without waiting in huge lines or getting shut out. On Friday, the day the movie opened, I drove to the theater and bought tickets for the 3:30 showing on Saturday. The theater attendant suggested that we arrive a half-hour early on Saturday to assure that we’d all get seats together because, “I’m sure it’ll sell out.”

I thought we were in good shape. But by the time The Girl went to her 10:30 soccer game on Saturday morning, almost half her team had already seen the flick, and one gal couldn’t contain herself and leaked numerous spoilers on the sidelines, irritating The Girl who was starting to feel as though she was behind the curve for not seeing HSM 3 on opening night. Sadly, HSM 3 was also a topic of conversation among the parents on the soccer sidelines.

How was the movie? It was Disney wholesome, very peppy, like Grease, only without the teen pregnancy and drag racing. The Girl loved it. The two boys pretended not to be thrilled by it – they have cool reps to protect ya know – though I know that they found one of the scenes involving Troy Bolton (Zac Efron) and Chad Danforth (Corbin Bleu) break dancing and play fighting with swords atop rusty old cars in a junk yard “sick” (as in cool).

That scene actually made me sad. The song was about the friendship Troy and Chad had nurtured since they were little boys. As they faced decisions about college, they realized they might not be able to spend as much time together as they had in high school. At one point, the actors disappeared behind a junk car and two little boys, meant to be a little Troy and little Chad, busted out some cute moves. Looking over at my two boys, I didn’t want to let myself imagine them as teenaged boys deciding where to go to college.