While Sasha Obama stole some of her mother Michelle’s thunder at the Democratic convention last week when she took the microphone and bellowed greetings to her dad via satellite TV, Piper Palin was sitting in the audience near her dad Todd last night and was holding her baby brother during her mom’s speech. Then Piper “groomed” her little bro in a moment only a parent of another little kid could love. ( Video clip here.)

When it comes to crazy-long school supply lists, apparently my kids’ public schools aren’t the only ones doling them out. The New York Times ran a page one piece about schools in the New York area and elsewhere which are asking parents to shell out big bucks for supplies, including one mom who had ”10 boxes of baby wipes” on her kindergartener’s list.

“. . . [A]ccording to the New York State School Boards Association, supplies run an average of $100 for high school students and $60 for middle schoolers,” the paper reported. In some school districts, the school supply lists have grown so large that school boards have stepped in and placed caps on how much families should be asked to spend:

“In the suburbs of Rochester, the Gates Chilli Central School District last year capped the amount that parents were expected to spend on supplies at $10 a child, adding $100,000 to the budget to make up the difference. The sprawling Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Ky., set the limit this fall of $120 a child for the year, including field trips.”

Item #2: How Palin Does It

Answer (according to press reports): Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has a husband named Todd. Who’s the father of their five kids. Who works part-time. And takes care of the children (all but the baby and the eldest – who’s deploying to Iraq this month – are in school all day). The Palin family, you see, works together. Just like the Obama family, only no one’s asking Barack Obama how he’s managing to parent his two school-aged daughters while he’s on the campaign trail. So let’s back off the Palin-is-a-bad-mom garbage, why don’t we. It’s an unbecomingly sexist attack. ‘Nuf said.

Item #3: ‘Hockey Mom’ Humor

The line of the night, as Sarah Palin accepted the Republican’s VP nomination: “You know [what] they say [is] the difference between a hockey mom and a pit-bull? [*pause*] Lipstick.”

Palin’s speech — including the lipstick comment, at 8:50 – can be found here.

Savaging a working mother of small children for her choices instead of just trying to understand her decisions and realize that each family and each woman is very, very different.

This time it’s GOP VP nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a mother of five, who’s in the cross-hairs. She had a baby in April. And returned to work days after giving birth. Before the birth, Palin reportedly got on an airplane while her amniotic fluid was leaking after consulting with her doctor. Now, because she went back to work, because she boarded that plane and because she’s got a baby and is running for vice president, people are all over her. Calling her a bad mom and questioning her competency, particularly because her 4-month-old has Down Syndrome. (And I’m not even talkin’ about Palin’s policy positions, qualifications or her teenage daughter’s private situation which even her opponent says should be kept out of the political arena. Let’s leave those items aside and focus on the attacks on her bio.)

Today’s New York Times has a page one story about what they coyly dubbed, “The Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition:”

“. . . [T]his time the battle lines are drawn inside out, with social conservatives, usually staunch advocates for stay-at-home motherhood, mostly defending [Palin], while some others, including plenty of working mothers, worry that she is taking on too much.”

The article continued:

“In interviews, many women, citing their own difficulties with less demanding jobs, said it would be impossible for Ms. Palin to succeed both at motherhood and in the nation’s second-highest elected position at once . . . Many women expressed incredulity — some of it polite, some angry — that Ms. Palin would pursue the vice presidency given her younger son’s age and condition.”

Yet several months ago, another high-profile political woman — this time a Democrat — drew brutal criticism which labeled her an anti-feminist for scaling back her work so she could campaign for her husband and care for their two young daughters. In calling Michelle Obama a bad example for today’s girls, a Salon.com  writer said, “She traded in her solid gold resume, high-octane talent and role as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.”

So Palin’s a bad, evil mother for going back to work after having a baby and for acting as though she can have it all. And Obama’s a bad, evil mother for setting a bad example for “our daughters” by taking a hiatus from her work so she can care for her daughters and help her husband campaign for the presidency, acting as though she can’t have it all.

This reminds me of a circular firing squad. Everyone winds up dead or wounded. If female critics take out all the political working moms with small children – no matter their work/motherhood choices – who’s going to be left to try to break that glass ceiling? The political men with small children who NEVER face such criticism about who’s going to take care of their young children and their babies? Lest we forget, when this presidential election began in earnest last year, five presidential candidates – all males — had children under the age of 10. No one was calling those men bad fathers for running for office.

I’ve got a solution. How ’bout you make your own, personal and career decisions. I’ll make mine. Palin and Obama will make theirs. And we’ll just agree that we don’t all see eye-to-eye on work and parenthood, that we all stand alone in our own shoes. If the mothers who are so quick to attack one another’s choices instead channeled their energies into something other than insulting one another, think of all the time that’d be left to do something more constructive.

You can get directions on how to download/listen to the Manic Mommies podcast here. (It’s a radio show on the internet, for the uninitiated.) Or you can just go to iTunes and download it for free — gotta love the free! – to listen to our sparklingly witty conversation.

Image credit: Manic Mommies.

Additionally, I wrote an essay about the difficulties working women have when they are asked to speak at national political conventions when their spouses are running for president, called, “Michelle As First Lady: General Election Edition.”

Image credit: Associated Press/Kiichiro Sato.

She used to be a TV sports reporter.

She played girls basketball and is into outdoorsy kinds of things, like hunting.

She has five kids, including a 4-month-old with Down Syndrome.

She calls herself a “hockey mom.”

And today, GOP presidential nominee John McCain picked her, Sarah Palin, as his vice presidential running mate.

It will be interesting to see how much her motherhood and her baby play into the media coverage of her selection. Barack Obama has two little girls — ages 7 and 10 — but his wife and his mother-in-law are taking care of them while he’s out on the campaign trail. Will Palin’s husband garner the type of coverage Michelle Obama gets when it comes to issues of balancing work and family? This, my friends, is going to be very, very interesting.

Image credit: Daylife/AP/Al Grillo.

My September Parents and Kids Magazine column is all about our difficulties in trying to find a vehicle that’s right for us. What do you think? What fuel efficient/green choice would you make for an active family of five, with one child in a booster seat, children who have sports equipment and a family who’ll be driving additional children around on occasion?

Image credit: Edmunds.com.

I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soup comics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.

“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”

The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.

Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer

Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.

Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.

Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment

Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.

Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.

Image credit: Amazon.com/Stone Soup.

I always love it when kids drag their politician parents off-message when the media’s watching. In those moments we get to see a glimpse of the pols’ authentic selves, the part that remains unpolished by political consultants. Meanwhile we mere mortal parents are interrupted and pulled off-message on a daily basis — on the phone, during attempts to discuss something at the dinner table – although not while we’re in front of a television audience.

The U.S. Women’s Soccer team triumphantly won gold this week at the Beijing Olympics. Not only did they emerge victorious, the players — whose ranks included moms of young kiddos – inspired a whole new generation of soccer players, as you can see by the beautiful photo to the left. Makes ya want to cheer, “U-S-A!”

Item #2: Parents Followin’ College Kids

The New York Times ran a story that I found disturbing. It was about a mini “trend” among parents who, once their offspring goes away to college, decide to buy a second home in the town where their kid is attending school:

“. . . [S]ome parents are investing in college towns in an unexpected new way: they’re following their kids to college. From South Bend, Ind., to Oxford, Miss., from Hanover, N.H., to Knoxville, Tenn., they are buying second homes for themselves near campuses where their children are enrolled.

Many, like [M.J. and Jim Berrien], want front-row seats to watch their family athletes perform. Some seek a gathering place for football games or family holidays. Others long for a retreat with the amenities of a college town — and why not the one where they have children attending?”

One of the parents said she’d “been seduced” by a college town, while another said the college community would make “an ideal retirement place.” Some said that their kids (and their kids’ friends) are thrilled with having access to the home, free laundry plus home-cooked meals parents cook when they’re in town.

Helen E. Johnson, author of Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money:The Essential Parenting Guide to the College Years, told the paper that she hopes parents are buying the homes for the “right reasons,” and urged them to seriously ponder the answers to these questions: “Would I like to be in this town even if my child wasn’t?” and “Does this have more to do with my need than theirs?” Then she threw in this killer line, “You might be making your child more fragile, not less.”

Another contrarian opinion was voiced by DenYelle Keynon of the University of South Dakota who has studied “the parent-student relationship” once the kid goes to college. She told the Times: “Research has found that the parent-child relationship grows better once the child has left the house. Parents should be careful not interrupt that process.”

Ouch.

Item #3: Missing August

Jan Eliot, the clever cartoonist behind Stone Soup, has been making me sad. This week’s theme in the family-centered comic strip has been, “Ya gotta love August.” Each day’s installment has included those four words, along with images of children star-gazing on a beautiful summer night, lounging in the water on a warm day and sipping coffee while the others with whom you’re camping are still asleep in their tents.

August just hasn’t felt like August in my house this year. Football practices for The Eldest Son and The Youngest Son started the first week of the month and are slated for Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays until Labor Day. There’s also a weigh-in this weekend, followed the next day by a football jamboree.

School in my town starts next week, BEFORE Labor Day.

Plus, over the past 10 days, all three of my kids have been felled (at different times) by a mysterious bug/virus thingie (high fever on day one, hideously swollen throat and pounding headache on days two through three). I’ve been ferrying liquids and meals on a tray to each sick child while the kid whines and vegs out in front of the TV in my bedroom . . . on The Spouse’s side of the bed. Being sick in the summer stinks.

I shouldn’t have taken last August’s much more relaxed schedule for granted. (*sniff*) I miss August.

Item #4: Lifeguard Rules

This is a shout-out to a courageous, young lifeguard who works at the pool my family frequents in the summer months. Per tradition, every hour, for a very brief period of time, a lifeguard blows a whistle and announces that it’s time for “Adult Swim.” All kids must vacate the water immediately. The children slink over to the side of the pool and sullenly stare at the grown-ups who bask in a few moments each hour without their splashing, screaming and errant kicks to adults’ spleens.

One day recently, after the announcement of an Adult Swim, a boy — anywhere from 7-10 years old — looked directly at the lifeguard who’d blown her whistle and shouted, “You suck!”

My heart burst with pride when my three kiddos immediately expressed their dismay at his behavior. The Eldest Son said, ”Ooh, I can’t believe he said that.”

The lifeguard, a young woman in her late teens/early 20s, turned to her fellow lifeguard, a young guy of roughly the same age, and said, “My parents would’ve never let me act that way.” To her credit, she called the kid — who was still swimming in the pool, ignoring her – and told him he was gettin’ the boot, not just during Adult Swim, but for the remainder of the day. On my way out, I told her she did the right thing because, all too often, people don’t.

Image credit: Yahoo/Getty Images/Mike Hewitt.