Picket Fence Post

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.

A very kind BBC reporter sought me out last week to discuss the idea of a “mom vote” and how it might play out in tomorrow’s election. After our lively discussion at a Brookline coffee shop, she put together a report about women and the U.S. presidential race. he link to the BBC radio interview is here.

Also, did you happen to read that Boston Globe piece this weekend about one’s political leanings being related to your DNA? I’m just not buyin’ it.

By the way . . . am I the only one with election fever? I’m at once excited about tomorrow night — which will make history one way or another – while I’m also suffering from election fatigue. Makes no sense.

Boston Globe writer Joanna Weiss wrote an interesting piece this weekend about whether parents should impose their political views on their kids by having them wear politically-oriented clothing:

. . . [T]he idea of an activist baby is also a little disturbing, given the state of political rhetoric today. This is an arena of name-calling and knee-jerk hatred; comments on blogs can be nastier, and a fair amount more childish, than any spat I’ve seen in a playground sandbox. Even the candidates, some of whom strove to look noble for a while, are starting to act like schoolyard bullies or snotty tattletales. And it turns out you can have hostility printed on a onesie, too.

I did a quick search of CafePress and found that you can indeed get baby and kid political-wear. There were, for example, an ”I Hated Sarah Palin Before It Was Cool” shirts and ”Godless Liberal” bibs. Not cool, using a toddler or baby to promote a parental political position.

In our house — which is filled with all manner of political and current events talk — The Spouse and I emphasize that the kids can and should make up their own minds when it comes to which presidential candidate they support.

It’s kind of like the flirtation The Eldest Boy had with rooting for the Evil Empire, otherwise known as the New York Yankees a few years ago. Even though the fact that we bought The Eldest Boy a Yankees cap made The Spouse nuts, I told him we had to allow our kids root for (and vote for or support) whoever they want to. They’re their own people. We shouldn’t force our views on them, even though, in a house full of Red Sox paraphernalia and vigorous cheering, the Sox are clearly the favorites.

That’s why, I can’t even imagine suiting my kid up, particularly a non-verbal baby, with an “I Hate [Fill in the Blank of a Candidate or Party]” onesie. Feels too creepy.

“A lot of people care passionately about the upcoming election, the future of the nation, the pressing issues of our day,” Weiss wrote. “Here’s the reality check: Your infant isn’t one of them. Even if he’s wearing a onesie that said, ‘Tiny Democrat.’”

Image credit: CafePress.com.

Item #1: Are Football Parents Nuts?

The Eldest Son plays football, so I suppose, by definition, The Spouse and I would be considered football parents. And, from what I’ve been able to discern, the parents watching their sons play Pop Warner football are no more or less engaged — shouting everything from encouragement and cheers, to criticism and frustration at the refs — than are the soccer parents on the sidelines of The Girl’s soccer matches, or the baseball parents on the sidelines of The Eldest Son and The Youngest Son’s epic baseball games.

But a recent column in the Boston Globe makes football parents out to be a little bit more, oh, what’s the word, crazy, than your average, garden variety sports parent. While writer Chris Bohjalian did say that “parents scream at umpires and referees” at more than just football matches, he penned these observations after watching a middle school football game:

“All of a sudden, an attractive woman sitting near me in capri pants and a fashionable hoodie stands up and bellows, ‘Gut check, boys, gut check! Now’s when you have to stick it to ‘em!’ She is, apparently, a mother of one of the young warriors.

. . . Other parents were screaming at their children to ‘hit ‘em’ or ’stand tall’ or ’show ‘em what you’re made of.’ One grandfatherly looking gentleman in a windbreaker barked, ‘Take it to ‘em boys, take it to ‘em! Pop ‘em! Pop ‘em hard!’”

Wondering what it was about youth football that made parents go berserk, he wrote that the sport “appeals to our usually dormant atavistic core” and that he “left the field that Saturday morning feeling a little bit bloodied.”

And maybe, in some respects, he’s got a point. I know that whenever my kids are physically hit or knocked around while playing sports – whether it’s on the football field or during a soccer match — the mama bear inside me wants to rise up and protect my cubs. But I can’t. My only hope is that the refs and coaches watch out for all the children’s safety and that my kids hold their own against the wretched children who would dare to jostle my kin. Although if I were sitting near the woman Bohjalian described in his column, I likely would’ve rolled my eyes.

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