Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Mad Men Concludes Third Season

Sunday nights are going to seem so dull without those Mad Men characters to entertain and intrigue me. The third season of AMC’s super-cool 1960s drama came to an end last Sunday, capped by one of the best season finales I’ve seen, including a series of intense and poignant scenes among the members of the Draper family. (See my review of the finale here.)

When the season began, Don and Betty had just reunited after she’d kicked him out for his philandering. (Betty only let Don return home because she learned she was pregnant with baby number three.) After one of the most harrowing depictions of childbirth I’ve seen on TV, Betty and Don enjoyed a brief period of emotional connection, topped by a sexy jaunt to Rome as Betty accompanied Don on a business trip. However as soon as they got home, their romantic bubble burst. By the end of the season, Betty learned that her husband had been living under a fake identity, had lied to her about his background and she decided she no longer loved him. After having been pursued by a divorced political aide to the governor who hit on her when he saw a pregnant Betty at a social event, Betty decided to divorce Don in order to marry this other guy who she barely knows.

One of the most heart-wrenching moments of the season came in the finale, when Betty and Don sat their grade school aged children down to tell them that Don was moving out of the house. The little boy clung to his father — literally wrapped his limbs around his dad’s body — while the older, wiser daughter asked her mother if Betty was responsible for driving him away like the last time. Divorce, when children are involved, is messy. When the Drapers are involved, I’ll bet things’ll be extra messy. Next season, we’ll likely see the impact of a divorce on young children, up close and personal. The last TV shows which dramatized this in any real way, without sugarcoating it, were the second season of HBO’s In Treatment and the canceled Sela Ward drama Once and Again.

Item #2: Balloon Boy’s Parents Plead Guilty

The parents of the infamous Balloon Boy, the ones who perpetrated the hoax on the country – telling authorities, while the mother wept into the phone to the 9-1-1 operator, that their young son was on board a runaway helium balloon floating helplessly over Colorado skies — have pleaded guilty to various complaints, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Heene pleaded guilty to the felony charge of “knowingly and falsely influencing the sheriff,” AP reported, while Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of filing a false report to emergency services. A judge will sentence them on Dec. 23.

‘Nuf said.

Item #3: Christmas Card Photos

I’ve been trying to tackle the whole Christmas card photo business — because who, in this day and age, DOESN’T include a photo of the kids in their Christmas cards – in bits and pieces, particularly because we’re hoping to use a photo(s) of the kids AND the Picket Fence Post puppy, Max.

Every year it’s almost as if I wipe from my mind the fact that it’s a nightmare to take a good photo for the family Christmas card. Throw an unpredictable puppy into the mix and I realize that I’ve got my work cut out for me. I already had one photo session with Max, trying to get some good shots of him and realize I’m going to need a lot of “holiday cheer” in order to get a halfway decent snapshot.

Item #4: What the ‘Meep?’

From the everyone’s-gone-nuts files, the principal of a Massachusetts high school has forbidden students from using the word, “meep.” No lie. You say, “meep,” and you could get suspended. School officials said that students had been using the word in a disruptive way and wouldn’t cease and desist.

Seriously, is this really the best way to go? What if students then move on to another word, like, oh, I don’t know, “leap” or “pear” or “deet?” Last time I checked, there were quite a number of single-syllable words out there that students could adopt and utilize in an annoying fashion. My kids can make the word, “mom” sound horrifically irritating. Is the principal going to ban all of the one-syllable words? Instead of banning a silly word like “meep,” why not just discipline students for bad behavior?

Image credit: Carin Baer/AMC.

Item #1: Lessons from the 1960s

Okay, I’ll admit it. I am obsessed with Mad Men. (I think some of my friends secretly cannot WAIT for the short Mad Men season to conclude so I’ll stop dropping Don and Betty Draper’s names into virtually every conversation, blog post and Tweet.)

Annnywaayy . . . this week, over on Mommy Tracked (note the new spelling of the site’s name), I wrote a column about how watching the show, set in the 1960s, has given me a new-found understanding of how women in my family were raised and the expectations which were instilled in them when they were grown women, some expectations which they never jettisoned, even long after the feminist movement went mainstream.

Watching Mad Men’s affluent, Grace Kelly look-alike at-home mom Betty Draper, newly married career gal Joan Holloway (who thinks she wants what Betty has, not realizing that Betty hates her life) and the single, aspiring careerist Peggy Olson interact with the 1960s world has consistently brought to my mind aunts, grandmothers and sometimes my mother and has helped me look at their viewpoints with a whole heck of a lot less judgement than I used to.

Item #2: Family Dinners

Also on Mommy Tracked this week is a piece by Abby Margolis Newman, a mother of five (including two teens and one tween), who challenged the notion advanced in a New York Times article (and elsewhere) that families who are interested in keeping their kids off drugs, unpregnant, engaged in school and not off toting a rifle under a trench coat someplace should strive to have family meals together at least five times a week.

She wrote: “. . . [The] National Center on Addition and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) also shows that ‘teenagers who eat with their families less than three times a week times a week are more likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs than those who dine with their families five times a week.’”

Given her family’s hyper-busy schedule and that her husband doesn’t get home until after 7:30 p.m., Margolis Newman said that even eating together three times a week is a stretch:

“The boys are at three different schools and are involved in sports and theatrical productions. This situation, needless to say, is not conducive to cozy family dinners during the week. Frankly, we’re lucky if we even get one sit-down dinner per week — and I mean at the table . . .

So, if my teenage and pre-teen boys get only one family dinner per week, does this mean they are five times as likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs? Holy crap. And do the chances of this bad behavior go up even higher if I, as the stay-at-home parent, do not actually do any home cooking but rather buy the pre-marinated chicken breasts, the frozen (but organic!) oven fries, and never vary our vegetable choices? Does eating In n’ Out burgers in the car on the way to or from baseball practice — as long as the boys are all together — count as a family meal (is there such a thing as partial credit)?”

Does your family eat dinner together at least five times a week?

Item #3: Reality Check Survey (Please Chime in Below in Comments Section!)

Statements directed at me by my children since school began:

“Everyone else on my soccer team has a cell phone but me.”

“My friend Matt can watch as much TV as he wants . . . No, his mother doesn’t stop him . . . No! Really! She doesn’t!”

“I’m the ONLY one in my class whose mom makes him pick up after the dog.”

I’ve been told all manner of tall tales by the kids — specifically my fifth graders — about what other kids’ parents are or are not allowing their children to do. Not that what other parents do or don’t do is going to change my opinion that my rugrats do not need cell phones at this time. And no matter what other parents report, I’m not putting a TV or a computer in their bedrooms any time soon. (To do so would result in my children watching TV until their eyes bleed.) And if they’re going to use the internet, it’s going to be in a public area (our kitchen, family room, etc.) so I can walk by to glance at what they’re doing. (I’ve already been asked, “If you type in ‘naked butts dot com’ into the internet what will you get?”) 

With all the smack that goes on in their school hallways (talk which prompted one of my kids to ask me to define “pole dancer” because this child heard kids joking about the subject in the hall), I wanted to do my own investigating and find out what other folks really are or aren’t doing with regard to cell phones, TVs, computers and family dog care.

Here’s where you, my smart readers come in. I would love to hear your answers to the following five questions:

1. How old is your kid(s)?

2. Does your kid(s) have a cell phone? If so, at what age did the kid(s) get it?

3. Does your kid(s) have unlimited TV watching time?

4. Unlimited computer and video game time?

5. If you have a family dog, is your kid(s) ever expected to clean up after the dog?

Please feel free to post your answers to my Reality Check Survey in the comments section below, or, if you’d prefer, e-mail me at: meredithobrien@hotmail.com.

Looking forward to reading your answers.

Image credit: AMC.

If you watched the latest episode of Mad Men entitled, “The Fog” (my recap/review can be found here), you saw a dramatization of what it was like to give birth during the 1960s.

And it wasn’t pretty.

As Betty Draper gave birth to her third child, the medical staff — one nurse in particular – patronized her (mocked her for eating pineapple earlier that day), threatened her (when Betty said she was too tired to push the baby any longer the nurse said she’d better push or they’d go in and take the baby out), ignored her pleas for her husband, pinned her down, provided no comfort or encouragement, and drugged her so that she was in what they called “twilight” sleep where she was in and out of lucidity. During the stressful pushing stage, Betty’s mind wandered off to her own kitchen where she envisioned herself speaking with her deceased parents, including her father who died the week before. All in all, it was a miserable experience.

A Mad Men themed blog entitled Basket of Kisses had a great analysis of the way in which Betty was treated at the hospital. Many of the blog’s readers chimed in in the comments section and shared their experiences of giving birth during that period, when the men went to a solarium to drink and smoke, while the pregnant women were infantilized. It was a horrifying portrayal, to say the least.

Image credit: Carin Baer/AMC.

I’m getting a kick out of watching Betty Draper’s pregnancy playing out on this season’s Mad Men. It’s such a study in contrasts. In that day and age — 1963 — pregnant women drank and smoked and no one said a word to them about it. The women didn’t think twice about it. (They also referred to pregnancy as a “condition.”) In the latest Mad Men episode there were two pregnant women drinking and no one blinked an eye.

Compare that to now when if the pregnancy police see a gestating woman eating unpasteurized cheese or holding a Starbucks cup in her hand, the pregnant woman would potentially subject herself to a public scolding, at the very minimum.

I’m dying to find out how much more Mad Men creator Matt Weiner is going to delve into Betty’s pregnancy and eventual delivery. I’m also wondering if they’ll be any discussion about baby formula (vs breastfeeding) and disposable diapers.

Meanwhile, over on Showtime, circa 2009, the off-beat show Weeds had its main character, Nancy Botwin, give birth to a Mexican drug lord/politician’s baby midway through the season and spent the last few episodes tackling issues such as sleeping through the night, circumcision and breastfeeding/formula.

One of the funniest episodes – actually it was painfully funny — occurred two weeks after Nancy gave birth to her baby and she went out to dinner with her former brother-in-law. While there, she became engorged with breastmilk. She brought her hand-held breast pump into the women’s bathroom in order to relieve the pressure, but it broke. She took rather *cough* unorthodox measures to deal with the situation.

Nancy’s unorthodox life choices in the wake of her first husband’s death — turning to pot dealing and then spiraling down in the abyss of the drug trade — along with the impact of those choices on her two sons were the grist for several of the latest episodes. (One of her sons has gone from a wimpy kid getting trounced on a suburban soccer field to a violent maniac, while the other has tried to make a living by peddling medicinal pot in California.)

The video below is a snippet of conversation with her kids about  breastfeeding their baby brother, the son of the drug lord/politician.

Item #1: The Max Factor

I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve time traveled back to 2002, when my youngest child was still a baby and wouldn’t allow The Spouse and I to sleep through the night. For three years this went on, unless we let him sleep in bed with us. Those sleepless years — with the pint-sized bed hog nestled in between us, randomly flailing about – made an impact on The Spouse and I. That was a dark, sleepless period of time.

So when our 3-month-old puppy Max decided that for all but one night since he’s been in the Picket Fence Post home that he’d be bound and determined to howl and bark after we went to bed, it’s as if we’ve zoomed back to those sleep deprived years when The Spouse and I would crankily argue at 3 in the morning over the best plan of action.

With Max, after five nights of The Spouse or I sleeping on the sofa next to his crate, we finally decided to leave him in his crate in our family room (not in our bedroom as I suggested, with the sole goal of getting some shut-eye) and the canine’s been none too happy about it. Two nights ago, The Spouse and Max had a stand off that went on from 2-3 a.m. The Spouse took him outside twice during that time only to have little, fluffy, extremely cute Max bark the minute The Spouse returned to our bedroom.

Juan Valdez is so psyched that our life is currently being run by a nocturnal six-pound loud mouth. It’s good for business.

Item #2: ‘Outside Ye Maniacs’

I don’t understand. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

Why won’t the Picket Fence Post children go outside and play — and do whatever their little minds imagine — without making me threaten them with hours upon hours of brain-deadening housecleaning chores, like scrubbing the kitchen floor? (Kidding. Sort of.)

We’ve had two weeks of fairly good weather and, on the nice days, it’s been a struggle to get the kids to frolic in the out of doors. Much to my chagrin, my oldest children have figured out how to exploit my love of reading to try to get out of going outside by saying, “But I’m reading!” Which, of course, is a good thing, right?

Today I struck a compromise. “Go outside and read under the shade of a tree,” I said.

“Are you gonna MAKE us go outside?” the Youngest Boy asked, after saying he wasn’t interested in reading, inside or outside.

Seeing that he was clutching a Star Wars figure in his hand, I used that to my advantage. “You can get more action figures and bring them OUTSIDE and play with them.”

Item #3: Coveting Your Kid’s Life

Do you covet your kid’s life? A Details Magazine writer, in a piece on Yahoo’s SHINE, thinks that today’s kids have it way easier than their parents did. (Isn’t that what every generation thinks?) An excerpt of the snarky, tongue-in-cheek piece:

“. . . [L]et’s be honest, there’s plenty to begrudge. Not only do your kids have a far sweeter set up than you had growing up — in the days when Atari ruled and easily accessible porn meant your sister’s Judy Blume collection — but they also have it better than you do now . . . Your kids have multi-player online games and time to play them . . . Junior — God bless him — keeps getting smarter and savvier; he’s effortlessly cool and young while you struggle to hang on, wincing from an Achilles tendon strained when playing H-O-R-S-E and fighting the urge to sing along with ‘I Kissed a Girl’ in your Passat wagon.”

Does he have a point or is he just whining (kind of like I am in Item #1)?

Item #4: ‘Mad Men’s’ Award Winning Mommy

Actually, I jest when I use the phrase “award winning mommy,” because there are no mothers of the year on Mad Men.

Betty Draper, surficially the woman who has everything — beautiful home in the suburbs, nice clothing, two kids and a hot husband who makes a good living and buys her jewelry – was last seen at the end of season two, pregnant with her third child. But Betty Draper, my friends, is certainly no role model. She chastises her daughter about the hazards of a girl getting “stout,” urges her husband Don to beat on their youngest son Bobby after he misbehaves, and sometimes gets so loaded that she can’t take care of the kids and leaves it up to the nanny/housekeeper.

The Dyna Moe image above is from the first season when Betty found her daughter Sally playing “spaceman” and wearing the plastic dry cleaning bag over her head. Instead of telling Sally to take it off because she could suffocate, Betty says her dry cleaning better not be found lying all over the floor.

Catch Betty’s latest maternal escapades in the third season Mad Men Sunday nights on AMC.

Image credit: Dyna Moe.

The only way The Spouse is gonna see me wearing a yellow polka dotted dress and heels while in the kitchen, looking like a happy domestic goddess is in this image, circa the 1960s and AMC’s Mad Men web site. (I couldn’t resist having my Mad Men doppelganger toting a newspaper. And coffee. Not unlike today, or most days when I have my morning java and read the newspaper. Except that I don’t dress like that.)

AMC’s Mad Men web site has a new app where you can Mad Men-yourself, select your body type, hair, eyes, nose, clothing, extras and your scene, anything from a bar with Don Draper and the offices of Sterling Cooper, to the Drapers’ kitchen with Betty. For this blog, I chose the latter. And then laughed at the unlikely image.

For those of you counting down at home, the third season featuring Don Draper & Co. premieres on August 16.

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.

Years ago, I wrote a column that somewhat embarrassed The Spouse. It asked one, central question: How do sleep deprived parents of young children enjoy “private time” together? (And those moments at midnight, when you’re both exhausted and about to fall asleep, didn’t count. The key word here is “enjoy.”)

After taking an informal survey of my friends at the time, I learned that many of them had invested in solid bedroom door locks and took advantage of the fact that their kids would be transfixed by the TV, so they kept a variety of videos and DVDs that their kids liked on hand, hoping that the glow of the TV would maintain their children’s interest and keep them away from Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom for a little while, say, 10 minutes. In addition to those suggestions, friends also offered horror stories of getting caught in the act by their children, every parents’ nightmare scenario.

I’ve never really seen that horrifically awkward moment depicted well on TV. Until this past Sunday night, when Desperate Housewives – in the midst of a major creative comeback – had a storyline about Gabby and Carlos Solis being observed by their daughter Juanita, whom they initially told that they’d been wrestling. It was priceless. And funny.

The other parental intrusion scene I’ve seen recently happened on Mad Men – during an episode called “Three Sundays” — when two grade school-aged offspring barged in on their parents, Don and Betty Draper. When asked what they were doing, their father shouted, “Sleeping!”

The link to the Desperate Housewives’ video is here, but DO NOT WATCH it with kids around or when they’re within earshot. Trust me on this.

Item #1: ‘Mad Men’ Drawing Reflects My Mood This Week

Mad Men-loving artist Dyna Moe (who has created 25 Mad Men-inspired illustrations) expertly captured not just the frustration of betrayed 1960s housewife Betty Draper, but reflected my mood over the past couple of days, although I haven’t taken my dourness out on the furniture. (If you’re a Mad Men fan, check out the illustrations, particularly the one with Sally Draper serving as her parents’ bartending. Quite cheeky, the lot of ‘em.)

Item #2: Breastfeeding on Film

An Ithaca College professor surveyed has 150 films that included either a depiction or discussion of breastfeeding or a nursing mom and found that most of the depictions or references sexualized the subjects. “American women continue to be harassed and kicked out of restaurants, museums and swimming pools for nursing their babies, despite the overwhelming evidence that breastfeeding is the ideal way to nourish children early in life,” said Professor Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis, who wrote a piece called “Reel Milk” for Mothering Magazine. “Hollywood films illustrate and often validate these mixed messages and moviegoers continue to be informed by them.”

Huffington Post blogger Heather Cabot agreed, saying, “. . . [S]ince the entertainment industry and celebrity culture remain so influential it would seem really constructive for filmmakers to think more about the way they present breastfeeding and to depict it in a way that reflects what it is really all about — the health and well-being of baby and mother.”

(Rubenstein-Gillis also has a Reel Milk blog which lists films which mention breastfeeding.)

Item #3: Care for Breast Milk in Your Soup?

I was perusing the headlines on the Drudge Report and saw a sensational one about a Swiss restaurant which plans to serve dishes that include human breast milk. I felt compelled to mention it here because what’s a “Three for Thursday” blog entry with not one, but two breastfeeding stories? The Telegraph news story quoted the restaurant owner as saying, “We have all been raised on it [breast milk]. Why should we not include it in our diet?” The restauranteur has been advertising for milk donors.

I’ve got nothin’, absolutely nothin’ to add here.

Image credit: Dyna Moe.