Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Banning Kids’ Photos on Christmas Cards

Who amongst you, my dear readers, has sent out Christmas/Hanukkah cards with images of your kids on it? I’d venture to guess that if you have any children who are of grade school age, 99 percent of our holiday cards included some form of a photo of said kiddos.

After looking over the array of holiday greetings that  have been delivered to the Picket Fence Post family’s home, I couldn’t find a single one from a family with young kids that didn’t include a photo of said cherubs.

The Picket Fence Post’s family Christmas/Hanukkah card included photos of the kids and our dog Max, however they prominently featured anti-perfectionist snark. I included an image of the pillow fight the kids had in the middle of our disastrous Christmas photo session which was marked by tears, puffy red eyes (from the crying) and arguments over the fact that I was supposedly “torturing” my children with a cruel and unusual punishment of having the nerve of asking them to put on some nice duds and sit still on the sofa. They might as well have called it Gitmo-New England the way they were acting.

Anyway . . .  a former college newspaper colleague of mine at the Boston Globe penned a sarcastically funny column this week decrying the flood of generic, processed photocards with the “grinning moppets” on them that he’d been receiving, the kind you get from Shutterfly and the like (Full Disclosure: I got mine from Snapfish):

“I know this may come across as mildly offensive, but I am asking as nicely as possible: Please keep your kids off my Christmas cards . . .

Simply put, it’s a Christmas card, not an advertisement for your blissful existence. If I’m interested in seeing your children, your vacations or your dog dressed as an elf, I’ll look at your Facebook page, thank you very much.

. . . Before you paint me as a total ogre (I only admit to being half-ogre, on my mother’s side), let me say if you’d like to send a photo of your family inside an actual greeting card, along with a quick handwritten message, I’d be very happy.”

What do you think of the nearly unanimous use of photocards among families with young children? Do you think they should have something handwritten on them?

Item#2: Fluff-Eating Pup

I was on a tight deadline and was thisclose to completing a column. I needed some quiet and some major physical distance put between me and the three bickering kids, who’d still managed to maintain their near-constant arguements as they were cozily set up in the family room for their TV hour, though these days the definition of the word “hour” is more concept than reality.

“Please watch Max, I need to go upstairs to finish this column,” I said, referring to our now-7-month-old puppy who’ll still chew stuff up if he’s not watched carefully. Just this week, he’s killed a couple of Star Wars figures, gnawed on slippers and socks left within his reach, and has pulled kids’ backbacks off of kitchen chairs to root around for stuff inside.

The children all acknowledged that they’d heard me and acted as though they had it all under control, with Max curled up next to The Girl on the sofa.

About a half-hour later, The Spouse came home and I could hear his shouting from my upstairs bedroom to which I’d retreated with my laptop: ”What happened here? Argh!” Max had somehow eluded the TV-addicted children’s supervision, walked over to the pantry (which was open but I don’t know why) and found our big plastic tub of Marshmallow Fluff lying on the floor, its cover, as always, only partially snapped down. Then he’d proceeded to gorge on Fluff.

The Spouse came upstairs a few minutes later to inform me of the goings-on while I tapped away at the keyboard. “I don’t even want to see what he looks like,” I said. When I returned to the kitchen, I learned that The Girl decided it’d be easier to cut off clumps of the pup’s hair around his mouth covered with the sticky substance. Oy.

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The Picket Fence Post Family Christmas/Hanukkah Card Photos: Recent photo session with the three Picket Fence Post children was a disaster. Said session was punctuated by tears, parental threats, puffy eyes (still red from previous bouts of crying which delayed the taking of photos until children’s eyes were less red), forced awkward smiles (called to mind the web site Awkward Family Photos), an energetic (and slightly vicious) pediatric pillow fight and the labeling of yours truly as, and I quote, “the worst person in the world.” (No, the kid who said that does not watch Keith Olbermann’s declarations of who the “Worst Person in the World” is for each particular weekday. However the mere fact that I asked the children to put on nice clothing and brush their hair is clearly grounds for human rights violations. I should start planning for my trial at the Hague.) I’m contemplating actually using some of the odder, weirder shots and chronicling the photographic debacle for a bit of holiday humor, greetings for those with a sense of humor.

Mentos/Diet Coke: This summer I bought a six-pack of 16.9 ounce Diet Coke bottles and a six-pack of Mentos packets with the intent of reenacting the Diet Coke/Mentos explosion — the one you’ve likely seen on the internet – in our backyard. Long story short, I just — FINALLY — got the chance to do it this afternoon after weeks upon weeks of The Youngest Boy whining, “When are doin’ the Diet Coke-Mentos thing?”. What a bust. Maybe we did it wrong because it didn’t look anything like we thought it should. Maybe we should’ve used a two-liter bottle instead of those small ones. Completely anti-climatic.

Soccer’s Over. Hello Basketball: The final soccer games of the season for The Girl and The Eldest Boy were rained out on Saturday. (The Girl’s game was re-scheduled for Sunday, but we were at my niece and nephew’s combined birthday party. The Eldest Boy’s game has yet to be re-scheduled.) And just as I was starting to enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to race around delivering them to various fields for practices and trying to remember who had the game where and whose practice ended when, we’ve started receiving e-mails to alert us to the fact that basketball season starts in two weeks. (The Spouse is The Girl’s head coach and is assisting The Eldest Boy’s team so things’ll be insane around here in short order. Not many family meals together during the week I expect.) Meanwhile, The Youngest Boy just started a once weekly hockey scrimmage thing on Sunday mornings before church. (That doesn’t include his Saturday morning hockey skills sessions.) How is it that I was naively thinking about getting a break?

Going on Month Four of Working at the Kitchen Table: The Picket Fence Post family puppy Max, now 6 months old, is still not completely housebroken yet. Whenever he sets his paws on a carpet, he acts as though it’s the grass outside and he pees. So that means he spends his days in our kitchen on its hard wood floors (on which *knock wood* he hasn’t had an accident in a very long time). But since he’s a puppy who’s still teething, Max needs to be monitored or else he’ll gnaw on the furniture and get into stuff. (That’s when he’s not in his crate whining about the fact that I had the nerve to leave the room.) Guess who’s been doing the monitoring? That’s right. I’ve been working on my laptop at the kitchen table or the kitchen counter for almost four months so that I can allow Max to run around when the Picket Fence Post kids are in school. (Once they get home and heap their stuff atop mine, the kitchen looks like a Superfund site.) We recently had our backyard fenced in and that’s taken some of the pressure off because I can let Max out to romp around (and tire out) like the little maniac he is, but the world starts feeling mighty small when you spend most of your days confined to one room. Kind of feels like I’ve been grounded. Then again, maybe I deserve to be grounded, what with being the worst person in the world and all.

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.

This is a draft of the brief ”amusing anecdote” I was working on for our family Christmas/Hanukkah cards . . . the one that The Spouse said could be misinterpreted by some as too mean-spirited and anti-holiday-ish, therefore it got the ax. (For the full saga of the Redacted Christmas cards, go here.)

Her hairstyle — a high ponytail pinned atop her head resembled a Palin-do, before anyone knew what a Palin-do was – had been dubbed too “embarrassing” to wear outside of the house on a family walk.

“What’s up with that?” her husband asked, gesturing toward her brown spikes of hair jutting toward the sky.

“Mom!” shouted her exasperated-sounding 10-year-old son, “you CAN’T go out with your hair like THAT!”

“Yeah,” the 10-year-old girl chimed in.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s embarrassing,” the boy said.

Embarrassing. That’s what she’d become. An embarrassment.

As her family prepared to take a walk down the street to the park, she decided she’d show them embarrassment. Out of the hall closet came a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, the ones with the crazy nose and fluffily exaggerated eyebrows and mustache that the kids wore for last year’s Christmas card photos. The look of horror on the family members’ faces when she appeared in the driveway with her hair down but wearing the glasses was well worth the irritating accumulation of condensation inside the bulbous plastic nose and the annoying synthetic hairs poking into her eyes and mouth.

“Mooom! You’re NOT wearing that, are you?” the girl asked, visually scouring the street hoping there were no witnesses to this spectacle which could potentially destroy her budding social life with tales of the nut-job mom with a mustache.

“Wearing what?” she asked, coyly smirking as she crossed the street and strolled down the sidewalk, wearing the glasses all the way down the street until she’d sufficiently embarrassed those who had mocked her and, much to her relief, before any passersby spotted her.

Here are excerpts of the Q&A’s I did with the three kids when I was planning the family Christmas/Hanukkah card. The idea was to cut-and-paste these excerpts alongside copies of drawings the kiddos made, but, after I created the document on my laptop, The Spouse looked at it and declared it kind of blah. (For the original story on our Redacted Christmas cards, go here.)

The Eldest Boy, 10

Question: What’s the most annoying thing a sibling did this year?

Answer: That’s a good one. Hmm. I want to think of a good one. My brother and sister using my video game chair without my permission all the time, even when they’re not playing video games, I tell them, “Get your own chair if you like mine so much.”

Q: Who’s your favorite Red Sox player?

A: Mike Lowell, ever since he got the MVP award, I always started liking him.

Q: What ’s the single best movie or TV show you saw this year?

A: Harry Potter IV, The Goblet of Fire because you wouldn’t let us watch it for two years.

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Although I’m not a person who would typically be described as being ”crafty” (as in crafts, not sneaky), I used to love making our annual Christmas and Hanukkah cards. Ever since our twins were toddlers, The Spouse and I have been making different Christmas cards (in the shapes of ornaments, sometimes with decorative fabric ribbons, or vellum overlays) and including a short, funny story to serve as an antidote to the traditional family holiday letter where folks recount the previous 12 months’ events. Our Christmas card stories usually got laughs at our, or our kids’, expense.

But over the past two years, this Christmas card business has become a source of contention in my house. Why? Because I’m no longer allowed to write about anything that’s truly comedic because the kids say it embarrasses them. It’s one thing to write about our lives in this space where I don’t mention the kids’ names or post their photos. But it’s quite another thing, they maintain, to write a funny anecdote about them, attach their photos, and send them out to all of our family members, friends and neighbors, including kids with whom they attend school.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to come up with a topic that would: a) Be funny and b) Be acceptable to the Picket Fence Post family.

The story about The Spouse trying to prove he’s not middle-aged when he hopped up on the kids’ Rip Stick . . . and then fell flat on his back in the driveway, prompting the kids to fetch me so I could help him up? To make it funny, we were worried that it might come across as too mean. People who don’t get my sense of humor might pick up the phone and inquire about why I was being cruel to my husband and suggest it was un-Christmasy, maybe offer up a phone number for a couples therapist.

The story about The Youngest Boy plunging into mourning after we sold our tan mini-van (called “The Funny Van” since we got it seven years ago), complete with sobbing and angrily lashing out against our new family vehicle? The Youngest Boy got very upset at the prospect of me writing something like that. Then he told us, AGAIN, how much he missed the mini-van and was still angry we got rid of it.

The series of Q&A’s I did with the three kids where I asked them a variety of questions about their current likes and dislikes, with plans to excerpt the best parts on a card insert? The Spouse said it wasn’t funny enough. Nor was it cutesy enough. It was just kind of blah, he said.

The anecdote about The Spouse and the children telling me I couldn’t take a walk down the street to the park with them unless I fixed my hair (because it was “embarrassing” piled up on top of my head and “sticking out”) which prompted me to don Groucho Marx glasses as I strolled down the street? The Spouse thought it was too cutting toward me in the same way the Rip-Stick story was too cutting about him.

With the deadline for the Christmas and Hanukkah cards bearing down, I suggested that I create something I dubbed, “The Redacted Christmas card.” I’d write some sentences and use a thick Sharpie marker to draw lines through the nonsense, filler text as if I were a government censor. It would go something like this:

“It was at THAT moment, when The Youngest Boy was banned from eating chicken. The rest of the nonsense text would go on for a few lines and be unreadable as it would be covered by a thick, black line. But then, The Eldest Boy, chimed in, establishing why he’s been nicknamed, The Instigator. The quick brown fox jumped . . . now how does the rest of that cliched sentence go, the one my father used to type when he would try out new typewriters? But you had to hand it to The Girl, who, in November, decided to ditch her feminine name and replace it with ‘Nick.’”

I thought a censored Christmas card would be kind of funny (thought it was really just my passive aggressive response to being censored), but The Spouse disagreed, saying, “Maybe five of your friends would think it was funny. Everyone else would be confused.” He said he could envision relatives calling us and asking for an unmarked copy of the story.

Seeing as I found it creatively impossible to concoct an amusing card under such conditions, I opted for no story at all.

But I’m not planning on letting my efforts go to waste. I’m going to post the kids’ Q&A’s here, as well as some of the rejected holiday cards stories, ones that were deemed inappropriate for the family Christmas card. There shall be no redacting here.