Picket Fence Post

How did the Picket Fence Post family ring in 2010? With a champagne toast for the grown-ups and sparkling cider for the kids? With a robust rendition of Auld Lang Syne? Fine food and good humored company?

Wrong. On all counts.

The new decade began with a trip to the ER, two broken bones and a kid running a high temperature.

We’d survived several days of Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations with friends and family highlighted by: A rather aggressive Yankee Swap, grown-ups developing a keen interest in a Spanish liqueur at a Christmas gathering, the kids receiving Wii(and quickly becoming addicted to it and annoyed by my desire to create weird avatars modeled after TV characters) and the Picket Fence Post puppy Max devouring a brand new Star Wars figure a half-hour after we finished unwrapping our presents on Christmas morning. A few days later, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve day, I was quietly reading The Book Thief  by the fire while the Eldest Boy was sleeping his way through a cold (and a fever), The Girl was playing at the neighbors’ house and The Spouse was ice skating at an outdoor rink in a town park with The Youngest Boy.

Then the call came.

“I’m hurt. You need to come and get me and take me to the hospital.”

I dragged The Eldest Boy out of bed and drove to the rink to find The Youngest Boy shaken and in tears, while The Spouse’s left wrist looked gruesomely swollen and lumpy as his whole face was contorted in one big clenching grimace. Quickly dubbed “the Ice Skating Guy” by the folks at the ER, we were waiting to find out if The Spouse’s broken wrist (broken in two places) would require immediate surgery when The Eldest Boy said he had to go home, NOW, because he felt ill. I touched his forehead. He was burning up.

In full scramble mode, I pulled out the cell phone to find someone to watch The Eldest Boy at our house — his temp wound up being 101.3 — as I arranged for The Youngest Boy to join The Girl at the neighbors’ house. I abandoned the Ice Skating Guy and quickly drove The Eldest Boy home, got him settled in, brought The Youngest Boy to the neighbors’ house and got a lift from one of those ever-so-kind neighbors to pick up The Spouse’s car that had been left behind at the park.

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It’s the day before the day before Christmas. Stress levels are high, particularly if you’re waiting for packages to arrive. (One of my blogging peeps tweeted today that she was praying to the FedEx gods for their divine providence . . . and on-time package delivery.)

I went to a grocery store in my area today and it was filled with angry-looking people who didn’t respond when I, wearing my cheery Christmas Red Sox baseball cap, smiled at them in an attempt to spread a bit of holiday cheer. Scowling New Englanders, all.

Fear not my Picket Fence Post readers, it’s my job to provide you with a laugh to help you remember that the holidays will be over soon and that the kids should soon return to their garden variety surliness, not the hyper-strain of surliness brought on by the Christmas/Hanukkah season.

While perusing Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch blog today, I realized that I’d forgotten to give a nod to the great modern American holiday called Festivus, which is today.

Time for you and yours to gather ’round the celebratory metal Festivus pole, air grievances to your own set of Ungratefuls and have the Mom or Dad in the house to be challenged to the feats of strength.

Fun for the whole family. After that, Christmas will be a breeze.

Thank you Larry David for the gift of Festivus.

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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Most people who possess reason and rationality were outraged yesterday when they heard news reports quoting a father who said that a Massachusetts school sent his second grade son home from school and ordered him to have a psychological evaluation after he drew what officials deemed a “violent” sketch of Jesus on the cross after his class had been asked to draw something that reminded the students of Christmas.

Following a national media uproar and a demand from the city’s mayor for school officials to apologize for the incident, Taunton school officials have finally spoken up. (Took ‘em long enough. Maybe they should’ve returned reporters’ calls and this would’ve never happened.) School officials are saying that the dad isn’t telling the complete story, that the child wasn’t suspended and that the drawing in question that raised concerns among the school’s staff — not the one circulated in the media (and posted here on this blog yesterday) – had nothing to do with Christmas, according to the Boston Globe, quoting the school superintendent, Julie Hackett. The Globe reported:

“Hackett said the student, age 9, was never suspended and that neither he nor other students at the Maxham Elementary School were asked by the teacher to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas or any religious holiday, as the[Taunton Daily] Gazette and other media reported and the father suggested, although his story changed as he explained it.

. . . She said the drawing was seen as a potential cry for help when the student identified himself, rather than Jesus, on the cross, which prompted the teacher to alert the school’s principal and staff psychologist. As a result, the boy underwent a pscychological evaluation.

She declined to comment on the results of the evaluation or whether the teacher had reason to believe that the student was crying out for help. The boy’s father showed reporters a report indicating his son was not a threat to himself or others and could return to school.”

The sad thing is, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to believe that something like this could’ve occurred as originally reported. In school districts which take a no religion approach — as opposed to embracing and celebrating multiple faiths and cultural celebrations enjoyed by their student population so kids obtain a wider perspective — it wouldn’t be surprising to read that a student got into hot water for creating anything with a religious connotation.

Okay everybody, a few deep breaths now . . . onto the next scandal of the day. What should we complain about now? Tiger Woods? The fact that Friday Night Lights got no Golden Globe nominations? That my Christmas shopping’s not done yet?

There are some news stories that cross my desk and make me blurt out a variety of profanities or other exclamations. Like the story this week about how, despite the horrendous fall-out from the Jon & Kate Plus 8 debacle (where the Gosselins’ marriage fell apart in front of a national television audience while their kids continued to be filmed by a film crew), 47 percent of 1,000 moms surveyed by Parents Magazine said they’d agree to let their children appear on a family reality show. Is that about money? Fame? Cluelessness? I wondered.

Then there are stories like this one that I found out about from a friend via Twitter: A second grader drew Jesus on a cross while he was at school. His depiction (see the image above) sent shock waves through the school after officials declared it “violent.” Here’s how the Boston Herald reported it:

“An 8-year-old boy from Taunton was sent home from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on a cross.

. . . [The father] added his son drew the picture shortly after visiting the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro [MA] to see its Christmas display. He made the drawing after his teacher asked the children to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas, the father said.”

That sound you hear is my head hitting my desk.

Image credit: The Taunton Gazette via the Boston Herald.

“We’re gonna pass into legend, the parents who canceled Christmas,” Claire, mom of three, in Modern Family.

I’ve loving Modern Family, a freshman ABC comedy, more and more with each new episode.

In the recent Christmas installment (available free on the ABC web site) Claire and Phil, parents of a teenager and two tweens, find a burn mark on the arm of their sofa on Christmas Eve and demand that one of their three kids admit wrong-doing. If someone doesn’t step up and cop to the charge, Phil spontaneously decides that they’re going to cancel Christmas, something with which Claire is not entirely on board but silently supports her husband nonetheless.

The entire episode is definitely worth watching, particularly the “Inocente!” part.

Item #1: Teacher Gifts

I thought we were in a recession, marked by high unemployment and people cutting back as they try to ride out these days of TARP and discussions of another possible federal stimulus package as industries wither away (auto, newspaper, etc.). So why did I read in the Boston Globe that Massachusetts school districts feel the need to warn parents against giving their children’s teachers “pricey” gifts? The story began as follows:

“School superintendents across the region are penning letters this holiday season to parents, cautioning them against going overboard with gift-giving to teachers, principals, and other staff members.

. . . While acknowledging that parents’ gift-giving gestures may be well intentioned the superintendents say that the state’s new ethics laws forbids public servants, including teachers on public payrolls, from receiving gifts with value in excess of $50. Violations are subject to civil penalties, the superintendents warn.”

Some of the examples of previous parental gift-giving excess, according to the Globe, were: $200 gift cards, fine wines, sports tickets, Rolex watches and HD TVs.

Hold on a sec, I thought. Who in the heck is giving teachers gifts that go for $50, never mind the ones the Globe was calling “pricey?”

Are people at your kids’ schools dishing out major cash for gifts?

Item #2: Decade of Overparenting

As part of its ode to the decade of the 2000s that’s about to come to a close, New York Magazine has a piece by writer Sandra Tsing Loh describing this past 10 years as a period of time when “Everybody Else Knows Best,” at least when it came to parenting, as parents have felt under siege by the volume of child-rearing advice. Tsing Loh focused on an anecdote involving her friend, the mother of a 9-month-old who won’t sleep. The friend didn’t know what to do about her son’s sleeping issues and fretted that she would make a mistake. Tsing Loh put a stake into the notion of relying on so-called parenting “experts” to tell us what we should do at every moment of our children’s young lives. Worth the read.

Item #3: Pregnancy Discrimination on ‘Housewives’

Desperate Housewives has had an irritating Lynette Scavo-centric storyline this season, one in which the fortysomething mom of four — who’s pregnant with twins, whose husband has gone back to college and she’s the only breadwinner — is being discriminated against by Carlos Solis, her boss/neighbor/friend, so much so, that after she was unjustly fired, she felt compelled to sue him.

She didn’t tell Carlos — who openly told her that he’d discriminated against another woman and not given her a promotion because she was pregnant and instead gave the promotion to Lynette —  immediately after she found out she was pregnant, but made arrangements, trained an underling and landed a big account so that she wouldn’t leave Carlos in the lurch. But when he found out (not from her) he acted as though, by getting pregnant, she’d let him down and hurt him, and that he was justified in forcing her out of a job.

This fictionalized version of pregnancy discrimination is the focus of my Mommy Tracked column this week, where Lynette’s situation is being played for laughs. I also asked readers what a woman in Lynette’s situation could/should do. (See video from the latest episode below for an example of Lynette being treated shabbily by Carlos’ wife Gabby.)

By the way, after this past week’s plane crash on Wisteria Lane, I began to wonder if this particular (fictional) street in Fairview is the most dangerous street in America. The results of my curiosity can be found here, where I documented every violent/criminal act that I could find that has occurred on Wisteria Lane over Desperate Housewives’ half dozen seasons. If I’ve missed any, please feel free to let me know.

Kick your Christmas season off right. Not by slugging it out to the death with another customer in Target over who gets which Wii game or hot Christmas toy. But with sarcasm and humor. Those are the twin saving graces of my December days since becoming a mom some 11+ years ago.

So, in honor of the Yuletide season, I’m offering to you two examples of said sarcasm and humor from the minds of Anne Taintor and Mina Lee, both experts in the perfect housewife/suburban mother satirizing business.

Image credits: Anne Taintor and Mina Lee.

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.

While we watched our fourth grade sons play soccer during a game recently, a parent said to me, “I used to think that the Thanksgiving/Christmas time was the craziest time of the year. But now I think it’s the end of the [school] year. It’s just nuts.”

I thought about her observation for a while and have come to the conclusion that it’s a draw. While there’s more hype and pressure pressure to get all the big Christmas/Hanukkah stuff done at once (you have to get gifts and cards simultaneously for a slew of people), the end of the school year brings with it a crush of non-stop To Do items in only a short amount of time. And if you have more than one young kid in school, you’re exponentially increasing the number of ways you – the parent who shoulders the blame for everything – can screw up and forget things.

Here’s a sampling of the Picket Fence Post family’s end-of-the-school-year schedule for the next three weeks:

– The Eldest Boy is in a school concert this week (which we only found out about last week!) for which I still have to run out and get him the right clothes to wear as he doesn’t possess black pants, a white button-up shirt that fits or a black tie. This concert occurs at the same time as soccer evaluations for “placement” for next year’s fifth grade soccer teams. (Don’t get me started on the idiocy of the annual evaluations which start with SECOND graders.) However The Eldest Boy’ll miss the evaluations and go to the concert instead, which means The Spouse and I are crippling his soccer career forever by making this choice . . . but we’ll have to deal with that guilt later.

– All three of my children have two field trips a piece in the next few weeks. The Spouse is chaperoning two of those trips, one to the zoo with second graders, the other to an IMAX theater with fourth graders to see some educational film whose title I can’t remember right now because my brain is overloaded.

– The Eldest Boy has a class event in the middle of a work day next week before which I’ve got to remember to send some cash in to his room parent so she can buy a gift for his teachers.

– The Girl also has an in-class event in the middle of another school day. I haven’t heard from her room parent regarding money for a teacher gift, but I’m confident that a request will be forthcoming.

– I’ve got to remember to send money to The Youngest Boy’s room parent for a teacher gift, as well as money to the parents who are collecting money for a coaches’ gift for The Eldest Boy’s soccer coaches. I’m sure that The Youngest Boy will have an end-of-the-year event in class as well which I pray it isn’t on the same day as his siblings’ events or field trips that The Spouse is chaperoning or else I think my head will explode.

– The Spouse, who coaches The Youngest Boy’s baseball team, will have ice cream (likely Hoodsies) after the last game as a treat for the players. (Which I’ve been charged with purchasing and bringing to the field.) The team has several more baseball practices and games (which go on for hours, even when I complain to the coach). The Youngest Boy is having such a blast with baseball that he has expressed an interest in playing summer baseball. Shoot me now.

– The Eldest Boy has a couple more soccer practices and two games left before his season concludes.

– The Eldest Boy and The Girl just completed a fairly involved fourth grade U.S. landmarks project (complete with papers backed with research and clay replicas they made of the Pentagon and the Arlington National Cemetery, respectively). Now they’ve each got to complete a “Business” project for which they each have to come up with a product, create it (or a protoype of it), and then figure out how to market it, how much they’ll charge, etc. The Eldest Boy’s going to make his own comic strips/books (I had to explain why had couldn’t just create new installments of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series since that’s kind of, you know, stealing copyrighted material). The Girl wants to design book marks. They haven’t yet informed me of what supplies they’ll need, but given that the projects are due VERY soon, I’d better remind them to hand over the lists, even though we parents only heard about the business project thing last week.

– The Girl has a second appointment with a Boston youth sports specialist soon to figure out what we’re going to do about her ankle problems. (If it weren’t for her ankle problems, we’d have her travel soccer schedule to add to this family’s scheduling hell.) After her appointment, it’s extremely likely that she’ll be given appointments for treatments to hopefully remedy the situation.

This list, of course, doesn’t include a number of personal/family events (social and work-related) that The Spouse and I have because, you know, we actually have lives outside of our roles as parents. Hard to believe. After re-reading the list above, I’m convinced that all I need is more coffee and maybe a case of Red Bull. Who needs sleep?

Which bring me back to my original question: Which do you find nuttier, the end-of-the-school time or the December/Christmas holiday season?

Image credit: From this web site.