Picket Fence Post

Item #1: School Celebration Overload

To celebrate Halloween with his classmates at school, my second grade son had “friendship salad,” where each member of the class was asked to contribute a piece of fruit. Members of my fourth grade daughter’s class were asked to bring in a pumpkin so students could carve them in class. My fourth grade son was asked to bring in an apple for a class project, and had a small party.

To celebrate Thanksgiving, both of my fourth graders’ classes are going to be making “friendship soup,” where each member of the class has been asked to contribute an ingredient, while parent were asked to additionally send in Crock Pots, utensils, bowls, etc. (The Girl has been asked to bring in two 48 ounce cans of chicken broth, while The Boy has been asked to bring in a can of corn niblets. That’s for a soup neither of them have said they’ll eat once it’s made.)

To celebrate “Winter” (not Christmas, not Hanukkah, not Ramadan), my fourth grade son brought home a form the other day asking each class member to bring in a new, wrapped book (no more than $5) for a book swap during the class “Winter” party. Scholastic book orders were attached to the note with the suggestion that we could easily order through them so we’d get the books in time for the party. (The note also said that requests for food and supplies for the “Winter” party will be forthcoming.) I’m certain that I’ll soon receive a similar note from The Girl.

When I received that note about the book swap – in a tough economic climate where people are worried about their jobs — I must say, I became irritated, even though my neighbor, who has a child in fifth grade, said the children have always loved the book swap event. Why couldn’t the kids pick a book they already own and wrap it up with handmade paper bag wrapping paper that they decorate themselves? It would promote recycling and still promote the joy of reading, as the note for the swap indicated was the point of the event. Maybe the kid donating the book could even write a note about why the book was entertaining.

I think what bothers me about this is that it’s coming in the middle of a crazy time of year. Taken alone, out of context, $5 for a book (plus wrapping paper) doesn’t seem like a big deal. But then I have to double the cost because I have two kids in the fourth grade. Then I factor in that the room parents for my three children’s classes will soon be asking for donations (usually $15-20) for gifts for the teachers. (We just went through this with the coaches of my kids’ sports teams where parents contributed a similar amount.) When you also consider the cost of the ingredients for friendship soups and salads, paper goods and store-bought food for a bunch of parties (due to allergies, most of the food has to be purchased so that ingredient are listed), the cost of the game we were asked to buy to contribute to a “game basket” for my second grader’s class as part of a school fundraiser, as well as the other requests that have come home from school in recent weeks and it adds up quickly.

My wish is that all of these in-school celebrations and the “gift-giving” could be made simpler, and occur less frequently. Oh, go ahead. Call me Scrooge.

Priceless Semi-Related Tangent: My preschool-aged nephew, who dressed as a skeleton for Halloween, didn’t have a Halloween party at his school. They had an ”I’m Not Scared” party instead. I kid you not.

UPDATE: My proposal to substitute used books for new books and use paperbag wrapping paper for the fourth grade book swap was shot down because, I was told, there are “reasonably priced” books in the Scholastic book order from which parents could choose. And there are “reasonably priced” books in that book order, but this is more of a principle thing at this point, trying to get away from more consumption. Parents are not ATMs.

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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.

When the story about the pregnant Gloucester High School girls (all 16 and under) was being wildly hyped up across the media universe recently, I kept mum about it here at the Picket Fence Post. I had no initial desire to leap into the fray on that particular issue.

Then the July 4th weekend parade in a Boston suburb came along. It crudely lampooned the girls – the minors – the kids who’d gotten pregnant and had no real idea of how drastically their lives were about to change. And some folks in the media and elsewhere said it was important to ridicule these girls so as to dissuade future teens from getting (or desiring to get) pregnant, because, as we all know, it was reported that some of the Gloucester girls wanted to get pregnant.

That’s when I felt compelled to chime in, seeing as though the girls were being called every sexual slur in the book, while the boys/men who got them pregnant (they haven’t been identified other than one 24-year-old homeless man whose name hasn’t been released) somehow escaped all manner of excoriating commentary. The vulnerable girls, with their swollen pregnant bellies, make for much better targets it seems. So I wrote this piece on Mommy Track’d about the media’s and public’s treatment of the girls and of other single women who get pregnant.

And, although I didn’t mention it in the column, pundits repeatedly suggested that a “Juno effect” was at work here, referencing the popular film about a 16-year-old girl from a stable, two-parent household who accidentally got pregnant during her sole sexual interlude then gave the baby up for adoption. So I watched Juno again with The Spouse to see if it could be considered an inducement to teen girls to get pregnant. We agreed that it in no way made the teenaged character seem cool because she was pregnant and didn’t make teen pregnancy seem easy (she was ostracized, she missed her school’s big dance, she was scorned by most adults), though The Spouse did add that he thought she “bounced back” from the pregnancy well, better than most girls, he suggested. I think this moving, quirky film got a bad rap in the post-Gloucester news cycles.

Image credit: Fox Searchlight via Media Bistro.

When I was ready to push and give birth to my third child, I was still in my bathroom, miles away from the hospital. I asked The Spouse to call 911 for an ambulance, but he insisted, Speed Racer he, that he could get me to the hospital faster than an ambulance could make it to our house. (Had I not been howling like an animal and doubled over at this point, I would’ve argued with him.)

While writhing around the passenger seat, I could feel the in-tact amniotic sac starting to protrude from my body. The wild-eyed Spouse urged me to hold the baby in and not push. (I would’ve laughed at that if I didn’t feel as though I was being impaled internally.) The ER staff eventually dragged me out of the car, cut off my maternity shorts in the parking lot and wheeled me into the ER where I frightened everyone in the waiting room with my shrieking. If anything, I thought afterwards, I had a fairly dramatic birth story on my hands.

But Francine Alfontent has me beat by a country mile.

Alfontent and her husband were on a New York City subway train Monday heading for the hospital when her daughter decided she wasn’t going to wait for any stinkin’ hospital to make her entrance into the world. So Alfontent, with the help of strangers, gave birth right there on the subway platform while trains were coming and going, and a crowd had gathered.

A guy who witnessed the birth told MSNBC: “Guys were coming up and they were saying, ‘Congratulations, Mom. You’re a very strong woman,’ and guys were giving the father high fives. It’s not every day that a woman has a baby on the subway.”

How about you, Picket Fence Post readers, any of you have an interesting childbirth story? It doesn’t have to be of the subway platform caliber. Feel free to share.

Image credit: MSNBC/Wendy Brown.

Item #1: HS ‘Pregnancy Pact’

I must admit, a question mark lingers over my head in a cartoonish balloon when it comes to this story. I’m sure you’ve heard about it if you listen to talk radio or watch cable chattering head shows (which I’ll be watching tonight while The Girl commandeers the “good” TV to watch Camp Rock on the Disney Channel). A large group of teens, all ages 16 and under, from Gloucester, Mass. made a pact to all get pregnant at around the same time so they’d all become moms at the same time. And 17 are pregnant. The story was featured in Time Magazine and makes my heart sick on so many different levels. Why would girls be focused on procreating instead of going to college or pursuing a career? (Don’t blame Juno as they made the pact before the charming, independent film about the teen who got pregnant by accident and gave her baby up for adoption, was released.)

The magazine reports:

“The girls who made the pregnancy pact — some of whom, according to [Gloucester High School Principal Joseph] Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers — declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. ‘They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,’ Ireland says. ‘I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.’”

Item #2: Michelle Obama, Target Customer

US Weekly, which usually trafficks in sensational celeb-related garbage reporting, features Barack and Michelle Obama on its cover this week bearing the headline, “Why Barack Loves Her.” The story is largely a pro-Obama puff piece but has a number of interesting mom-related tidbits of info. “. . . [W]hen not on the road, the mom [Michelle Obama] can be seen in her Chicago neighborhood driving to Target for toilet paper and buying clothing for her girls at The Gap and Limited Too.”

The Obamas had difficulty getting pregnant, according to Us, and now are hands-on parents, when they’re home with the 6- and 10-year-old girls, a challenge these days for their presidential nominee father who’s on the road most of the time. Us said: “With the help of a housekeeper but no nanny, Michelle certainly has found her smart-mom shortcuts: She relies on headbands for bad-hair days, claims dessert at school potlucks so she can buy a pie and, until recently, packed Oscar Mayer Lunchables and juice boxes into her kids’ lunches. (She has now cut out processed food, after her pediatrician worried her oldest daughter ‘was tipping the scale,’ as she puts it.)”

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The Bay State is teeming — teeming I tell you — with twins, according to a page one story in the Boston Globe:

“The combination of an unusually large number of pregnancies in older women, who are more likely to have multiples, and a heavy reliance on readily available infertility treatments, which also increases the odds, has propelled Massachusetts to the top: The state has a twin birth rate of 4.5 for every 100 live births, compared with a national rate of 3.2, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

What does this mean? Well, sometimes, bad, bad things, according to the article which included quotes from physicians about the dangers of pre-term births (most twins are born early) and the drain multiple births are putting on Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). Typical stuff. No article on multiples is quite complete without the not-so-subtle bashing of parents of multiples for selfishly pursuing infertility treatments (usually uttered by people with no fertility challenges) and blaming them for hogging hospital resources when they forge ahead with a multiple pregnancy in which babies which could be born early.

As a mother of nearly 10-year-old twins, I have a special loathing for these kinds of articles which start out fine and then go downhill quickly. I’m the first one to acknowledge that twin pregnancies are difficult (though I had a harder time with my singleton pregnancy), that babies born early do sometimes require time in the NICU (as mine did), that twins born very early can suffer from health problems (mine, thankfully, did not). Attempts have been made by physicians administering infertility treatments, as noted in the article, to reduce the number of multiples. All of that is fair game . . . to a point.

But then I read quotes like this one from the chief of newborn medicine at a Boston hospital: “The usual condition is one baby per uterus. That’s the way the system is designed. Mother nature does not take kindly to anything being unusual — even if she created it.”

I’m glad I didn’t give birth to my twins in his hospital where I could benefit from his warm understanding and compassion.