Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Beware of the Mice

If you live in the MetroWest area outside of Boston and pulled one of those plastic Little Tikes Cozy Coupes from someone’s trash thinking it was your lucky day, boy were you wrong. The thing’s filled with mice.

My sister-in-law called me today and related the story of how, when my nephews were playing with their Cozy Coupe outside this week, one of them spotted a mouse sticking its head out of the hole where the steering wheel had been. (The steering wheel was busted soon after the boys got the car.) Horrified, my sister-in-law wheeled it away with the intent of dealing with it later until she realized there wasn’t just one mouse living INSIDE the plastic car, but a whole bunch of them.

She put the car out on its side on the street next to her trashcans this morning, but before the trash haulers arrived, she noticed the Cozy Coupe was gone. She then started feeling guilty that some unsuspecting parent had grabbed the car and might’ve put it inside his or her house not realizing that it’s filled with mice. They’re in for a big surprise.

Item #2: Old Christine Gets Guilted

Speaking of guilt . . . the latest episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine really hit home for me this week as it dealt with maternal guilt, specifically, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ character Christine feeling badly because she was working so much and missing things for her kid, including forgetting to submit the application for her 12-year-old to join a lizard club. She felt so badly that she missed the deadline — as well as a party she’d promise to attend — that she agreed to go on a date with the creepy head of the club in order to secure her son’s admission to the group. Only it didn’t go as planned. (Link to the video here.)

This week I missed several deadlines for my own kids. Papers requiring my signature and homework that I was supposed to initial and correct have been flooding my house like a never-ending onslaught of junk mail. For example, I forgot to sign The Youngest Son’s reading list one night (didn’t write down what he read) and we got the list back marked with a red question mark. Last night, I didn’t have the chance to listen to The Girl read me a passage aloud three times and then grade her reading skills. This morning I had to quickly write a note telling her teacher why the homework wasn’t done.

So when the lizard guy told Christine, “A good mother doesn’t miss deadlines,” I felt that one. Right in the gut.

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Item #1: Kid-Sick Parents

Read any of the slew of news stories recently about “kid-sick” parents who, when sending their children off to sleep-away camp, insist on constant communication with their kids and, in some cases, flouted the camp “no cell phone” rules by smuggling a phone into their offspring’s stuff? Well I have, and so has syndicated columnist Betsy Hart, the host of the “It Takes a Parent” radio show. She had me on as a guest to discuss what she calls the “Over-Tethered Generation.” You can listen to the show and sparkling conversation (at one point I use the pithy phrase “going all 007″) here.

Item #2: Tiger Beat

I had no idea that Tiger Beat magazine was still being published. To me, Tiger Beat means Shawn Cassidy, Rick Springfield and Mark Hamill. It resurrects a variety of memories involving flavored Bonnie Bell lip gloss, rainbow shoelaces for my hard Nike sneakers, a large comb sticking out of the right back pocket of my Jordache jeans and chewing multiple pieces of Bubble Yum.

To my daughter, however, who literally squealed when she spotted a Tiger Beat in the local drugstore this week and begged me to buy it – with all my nostalgia, how could I not? — Tiger Beat means the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato & the Camp Rock crew, some teen named Selena, the ubiquitous Miley Cyrus and, of course, the cast of High School Musical I, II and XXIV: The Social Security Years.

At the time of this post, posters of the aforementioned folks have been tacked all over her bedroom walls, alongside an inspirational, framed gymnastics poster I put up and the framed HSM poster I tastefully placed in just the right location in her room. It now looks like a Tiger Beat explosion in there, distinctly un-Pottery Barn Kid. Her ‘tweens have officially arrived.

Item #3: Obama Girls’ Crazy Sked

Any regular reader of the Picket Fence Post is familiar with my vociferous objections to over-stuffed kids’ schedules and the havoc those schedules wreak on family life. (As the beginning of the boys’ first football season creeps nearer — with four practices/week starting in August — I’m already getting the dry heaves about having to get them to everything on time while trucking my daughter to her travel soccer stuff. Oh, and have my own personal and work life.)

So when I read an AP story about the extra-curricular schedule for Michelle and Barack Obama’s girls — ages 10 and 7 — I was astonished. While Michelle Obama does have her mother at home to help her with the girls when Michelle is campaigning for her husband’s presidential bid, and Barack is busy on a global odyssey, imagine trying to keep up this kid schedule with everything else that’s going on with the Obama family: Piano and tennis lessons for both girls; soccer, dance and drama for the 10-year-old and gymnastics and tap for the 7-year-old.

Just reading that list — and knowing that Dad is never home and Mom has massive campaign obligations — I can’t help but wonder how in the world they accomplish all of this with just the help of one grandma.

Item #4: Girls & Math

Forget that stupid talking Barbie doll which years ago uttered, “Math class is tough.” A new study commissioned by the National Science Foundation says that, when it comes to boys and girls there is parity in their achievements. “The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems,” wrote Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. “They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.”

A study co-author told the Times: “Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance . . . But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

So let’s take up the cause and send our girls the message that they’re just as good as boys in the numbers and E=MC squared arena. You go (calculate) girls.

Image credit: Associated Press.