Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Diary of a Wimpy Kid Movie Premieres

 My kids have been counting down the days until the live action version of one of their favorite book series — The Diary of a Wimpy Kid — comes to the big screen.

And the wait is over: The Diary of a Wimpy Kid hits theaters tomorrow. Much to my relief, Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+ and called it, “a jaunty and forthright production with a lively look reflecting the book’s illustrated pages, [the movie] does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.”

FYI: I did a Q&A with the Massachusetts author of the Wimpy Kid series, Jeff Kinney, here.

Item #2: Pole-Dancing Miley vs Morning Joe’s Mika

Remember last August when teen pop star Miley Cyrus – who has legions of fans in the tween set — caught flak for appearing at the Teen Choice Awards and doing a pole dance atop an ice cream cart (?!) while singing Party in the USA? At the time, I wrote on this blog that the whole performance made me “deeply sad.” And because my 11-year-old daughter is a Cyrus fan, the messages sent by the provocative act concerned me.

MSNBC Morning Joe co-anchor Mika Brzezinski, also the mother of an 11-year-old daughter, had a similar reaction and deemed it inappropriate for a teenaged girl. Well now Cyrus is fighting back through the pages of Parade Magazine which features an interview with Cyrus in this weekend’s edition. According to MSNBC, when Cyrus was asked to respond to Brzezinski’s criticism on MSNBC, Cyrus told Parade:

“My impulse is to say, ‘Get off my case, Mika, get over it.’ . . . My job first is to entertain and do what I love, and if you don’t like it, then change the channel. I’m not forcing you to watch me. I would do that pole dance a thousand times again because it was right for the song and that performance. But, dude, if you think dancing on top of an ice cream cart with a pole is bad, then go check out what 90 percent of the high schoolers are really up to.”

Brzezinski and her colleagues at MSNBC reacted to the Parade interview in the video below:

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 I concur with what Brzezinski and co-anchor Joe Scarborough said in the video: My daughter isn’t watching 90 percent of high schoolers, she’s watching Cyrus, who became rich and famous because of my daughter — and millions like her — did watch her and her parents (meaning me) gave her money to buy Cyrus music and other Cyrus/Hannah Montana paraphernalia.

Instead of being flippant about the fact that parents think her performance was inappropriate for a 17-year-old and telling them to just change the channel, I’d be worried about the same parents not only changing the family TV’s channel, but also slamming their wallets shut, particularly given the fact that Cyrus has a new movie coming out soon to which their daughters will want to see.

Item #3: Baby & Family Expo This Weekend

Just a friendly reminder that The Girl and I will be appearing at the Baby & Family Expo in the Parents & Kids Magazine booth at the Bayside Expo Center in Boston on Saturday morning. I’ll be giving away signed copies of my book of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum as well as reading excerpts.

If you have children of different ages and you’d like to do multi-aged activities with them, be sure to check out my P&K editor Heather Kempskie and her sister Lisa Hanson, authors of the Siblings Busy Book, who’ll be talking activities on Saturday at 1 p.m.

If you’re going to be attending the Expo on Sunday, look for the Manic Mommies at the P&K booth recording their podcast at 1 p.m.

Item #1: Forgetful Mamas

It’s not even the insanely busy spring yet — the time when we’re overloaded with school projects, school events, national holidays, Little League & spring soccer games/practices — and I’ve still been forgetting stuff like sending my kid to school with lunch money, birthday parties, etc. So, when I was trying to get the Picket Fence Post family’s schedule into some semblance of order last week, I felt a bit better about my slacker-ness when I witnessed moms on TV shows being overwhelmed and forgetful too.

I dedicated my Mommy Tracked column this week to this topic, saying that:, “. . . [T]he depiction of two fictional moms on TV this past week screwing up in big ways when it came to their family’s schedules made me realize that, if moms feeling overwhelmed by the weird administrative complexity of contemporary child-rearing is now a punch line on TV shows, I can’t be the only one who’s feeling burned out.”

At least I haven’t forgotten my kids’ birthdays. Yet.

Do you find yourself forgetting stuff, repeatedly, despite your best efforts to get organized?

Item #2: Dysfunctional TV Families

I’ve been going on and on about how much I adore the ABC comedy Modern Family and how much hope I have for NBC’s brand, spankin’ new dramedy Parenthood. Well, the Boston Globe’s Don Aucoin mentioned those two shows when he wrote about a trend in family-centric TV shows as of late: A lack of parental authority.

In his piece, “Dysfunction Junction: Who’s the boss? TV parents these days are often as adolescent as their children,” he asserted that today’s TV parents aren’t as stable and authoritative as TV parents of years past, like on The Cosby Show. He quoted a woman who writes about media and parenting issues as saying: “Bill Cosby was hysterically funny, and yet when push came to shove on The Cosby Show, there was no question that he and his wife were the authority figures, no question that ‘We’re the parents here, we’re here to take care of you, we’re not your friends.’ We lost something there and it’s time to get it back. A better sense of parents not so much as dominant authorities but as parents.”

While I agree that we’ve lost an overall sense of authority over today’s kids, I think the TV shows are simply reflecting today’s reality.  (Ever try to lightly reprimand/correct the behavior of  a kid who’s not yours? Be prepared for pediatric snark and smirks.) If you’re going to complain that TV parents are acting too much like kids, we need to start with the actual parents they’re depicting.

Item #3: Boston Baby & Family Expo

Mark your calendars New Englanders: Next Saturday — that’s March 20 — I’ll be appearing at the Baby & Family Expo at the Bayside Expo Center to tell parents that, while they’ll see lots of products and get lots of parenting advice at the Expo, the most important thing they need to keep in mind is this: If you don’t keep your sense of humor about this child-rearing adventure, you’ll go nuts.

At 10:30 a.m., I’m slated to give a talk/book reading called, “How to Keep Your Sense of Humor (Believe us, you’ll need it!)” where I’ll give expectant and current parents a humorous pep talk and read some of the more embarrassing columns from my parenting/humor book Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. People who attend the talk will not only get a signed copy of the book, but they’ll get the added bonus of meeting “The Girl,” (otherwise known as my daughter) who’ll be helping me out at the Expo.

In addition, my Parents & Kids Magazine editor Heather Kempskie and her twin sister Lisa Hanson, authors of The Siblings Busy Book, will be giving pointers at 1:30 p.m. about activities you can do when you have children of different ages.

If you’re heading to the Expo on Sunday, March 21, you’ll get a chance to meet my buddies, the podcasting divas that are the Manic Mommies,  Erin and Kristin who’ll be taping their show at 1 p.m.

Here’s the link for more info. Hope to see you there.

Image credit: Baby & Family Expo.

In between enjoying fun and inspiring Olympic moments with the Picket Fence Post family during the past two weeks, I’ve felt emotionally beseiged (or manipulated I should say) by the commercials. What was there an armada of Don Drapers working overtime on ads for the Olympics?

You know the ads of which I speak. Those three-hankie ones. The ones that made you tear up in the first frame because you knew what was coming next.

Procter & Gamble is largely responsible for all of this, with its line of “Thank You Mom” ads made just for the Olympics. Nearly every one of them got to me, mostly the one below, because it uses footage from real mothers whose adult children competed in the 2010 winter Olympics. Loved the last mom mouthing the words, “That’s my baby!”

Then there was this ad, where women watched their children compete in the Olympics, only the athletes aren’t adults, they’re little children:

The only P&G-mom ad that I saw which leavened the tears with humor was this “Never Walk Alone” ad where moms were depicted in various points of motherhood: Holding a newborn in the delivery room, vacuuming the living room with a baby on a hip, changing a flat tire with the kids on the side of the road, dragging a kid’s hockey stuff out of the house in the dead of winter, picking a kid up from the principal’s office. However whenever I think about the Canadian figure skater whose biggest fan, her mother, died a few days before she was set to take the ice and then watched this ad . . .

Finally, here’s the last of the insidiously moving TV advertisements that I saw during the Olympics, the retooled ad for Coke with that haunting Sia song playing in the background:

Did you find yourself riveted to these ads too?

Item #1: Penn. School-Issued Laptops Used to Spy?

The family of a 15-year-old high school student in a suburb of Philadelphia is suing his school district, accusing officials of using school-issued laptops, equipped with web cameras, to spy on students in their homes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

An excerpt from the the news story about the lawsuit said:

“In a lawsuit filed [last week] in federal court, the family said the school’s assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had ‘engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district.’

The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students’ webcams and illegally invade their privacy.

. . . Families in the 6,900-student district reacted with shock. Parent Candace Chacona said she was ‘flabbergasted’ by the allegations. ‘My first thought was that my daughter has her computer open almost around the clock in her bedroom. Had she been spied on?’”

While school officials claimed that the remotely activated webcam feature was used as a security measure if the laptops were reported stolen — an application they say was used 42 times this school year – they aren’t saying much more about the controversy, particularly because a federal judge has told them that they need to get legal permission to do so first, citing the pending civil case.  The Inquirer reported that federal prosecutors have also issued a subpoena for all school records related to this program and a criminal probe is ongoing. It’s not publicly known how many images were taken by the remote cameras.

When I read about this case my jaw dropped. How in the world, if what the plaintiffs say is true, would anyone, could anyone, think it’s okay for a governmental institution to surveil someone in his or her home without his or her permission and without a court order? It boggles my mind. Beware of school districts offering “free” laptops.

(more…)

While The Youngest Boy was eating breakfast this morning and I was enjoying my second cup of java, we heard a news report that the disgruntled silver medaling Russian men’s figure skater has decided that since he didn’t win a gold medal in Vancouver (U.S. men’s skater, Evan Lysacek, did), he’s awarded himself a platinum medal for his Olympic work in Canada over the past week.

Platinum.

On his web site, Evgeni Plushenko lists the three Olympic medals he’s won to date. The first is a silver medal from the Salt Lake City Olympics. The second is a gold from Torino. The third is a “platinum” from Vancouver. However, to be quite honest, he won silver medal in Vancouver. They don’t *cough* give out platinum medals, Mr. Plushenko.

It was crystal clear, even to my 8-year-old that Plushenko — who’s been loudly and bitterly complaining that he was robbed of the gold and that because he can do a quad jump he should be named king (his prime minister backs him up on all but the king part) — is behaving badly and like a poor sport in the extreme.

Here’s what The Youngest Boy said after we saw the news report:

“What’s he gonna do, go in his front yard and have a podium thing there and say, ‘And the platinum medal goes to. . .’ then he throws it up in the air and catches it and says, ‘me!’?”

Precisely.

Image credit: HuffingtonPost.

Item #1: Obama’s Sweet Parental Leave Policy

While most parents I know who try to simultaneously work and raise kids — or juggle the needs of multiple kids at the same time — struggle to make an appearance at every kid-centric event their children have, I found myself feeling envious of President Obama’s ability to put everything aside, including budget talks and national security, in order to attend one of his kids’ events.

In a recent New York Times piece entitled, “He Breaks for Band Recitals,” a senior advisor to the president told the paper: “There are certain things that are sacrosanct on his schedule — the kids’ recitals, soccer games, basketball games, school meetings. These are circled in red on his calendar, and regardless of what’s going on he’s going to make those. I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”

I think I need a presidential advisor handling my schedule.

Item#2: Seinfeld on the Poison ‘P’s’

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the father of three kids (ages 4, 6 and 9) told Parade Magazine recently that he’s figured out what’s wrong with today’s kids, something he calls, “The Poison P’s.”

Praise: “We tell our kids, ‘Great job!’ too much.”

Problem-solving: “We refuse to let our children have problems. Problem-solving is the most important skill to develop for success in life, and we for some reason can’t stand it if our kids have a situation that they need to ‘fix.’ Let them struggle. It’s a gift.”

Pleasure: As in, “giving your child too much pleasure.” Seinfeld said that because parents believe that today’s children aren’t as innocent as we used to be when we were young, “We feel so guilty for destroying that innocence — which is what we did — so we’re now trying to repair that by creating perfect childhoods for our children.”

Betcha his kids would reply with a nice, “Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

Item #3: Bullies in the Bull’s-Eye

Remember that horrific story a few weeks ago about the bullies in the Massachusetts town of South Hadley, who, according to news reports, drove a 15-year-old girl to commit suicide? Well the school superintendent has announced that the students involved in harassing the girl have faced disciplinary action and may also face criminal charges, according to Fox and the Boston Herald.  

In the meantime, the issue of students harassing other students in school to the point where the victims are fearful and can’t focus on their lessons, has become a hot button issue. Even Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick who, while relating his own personal experience with being the victim of harassment from fellow students when he was a child, said that harassers should be held accountable.

“Whatever we can do to create a safe environment for kids, that’s what we should do,” Patrick said, according to the Boston Herald. “If we can give teachers and administrators some extra tools, we should do that, and do it swiftly . . . Parents have to take responsibility, especially ones who are themselves parents of bullies. There is nothing in the [pending anti-bullying legislation] that absolves adults from their responsibility to teach kids how to behave respectfully.”

He said he was contacted by a 9-year-old boy from a Massachusetts school who needed help in dealing with kids harassing him and when Patrick met with the boy, the child appeared frightened. The governor said he went on the school’s intercom and told the students that there was to be no bullying at the school and that if there was, he’d have to return and deal with it personally.

Item #4: Trending Toward More Chores? I’m Skeptical.

On Valentine’s Day, the Boston Globe ran a story which claimed that a “modern trend” has been evolving where today’s parents are making their kids do more chores, like we all used to do back in the day, otherwise known as the Stone Age. Citing research from a Wellesley College sociology professor, the article said that parents have been “reasserting” the importance of chores in the past 15 years.

I don’t buy it. Not that we here in the Picket Fence Post household don’t make our children do chores — we do — it’s just that I find it hard to believe that many other parents are doing the same thing. I’d be shocked if even half of today’s kids have to do regular chores.

What do you think? How prevalent do you think chores are today?

Image credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via the NYT.

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.

Okay, so I get dragged to see dreck like The Squeakquel and other such fare on occasion with the Picket Fence Post children. But when the movies aimed at my kids seem like they’ll be decent, well, I’m simply thrilled.

I recently came across the preview for the third installment of the Toy Story series, which has been forever in the works. My eldest two kids fell in love with Toy Story years ago. The Eldest Boy (now 11) and The Youngest Boy dressed as Buzz Lightyear for several Halloweens, while The Girl went as Jessie the Cowgirl one year. We owned a couple of Buzz Lightyears, two Woodys, two Jessies and one Bullseye the horse.

And while my 11 year olds may protest that they’re too old to see Toy Story 3, there’s a chance that my 8-year-old will want to see this with me. (And I’d actually like to see it too.) In the preview, we learn that Andy is *sniff* going to college and has to figure out what to do with all his toys. It looks like most of the crew is being donated to some sort of pre-school.

Then there’s the live action movie that’s based on the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. The preview for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the movie made my kids laugh and I have feeling that, after this movie comes out, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about “The Cheese Touch.”

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?

Okay, so I write about ABC’s Modern Family so much that people might wonder if I’m getting some kind of payment for mentioning it this often. And I do, with laughs.

The promo for next week’s Valentine’s Day themed episode features Claire and Phil, married parents of three,  doing a little risque role playing to spice things up . . . with unexpected consequences. Enjoy.