Picket Fence Post

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup comic has a tendency to strangely reflect some aspect of what’s going on in my house at any given moment. It’s really starting to freak me out a little.

Take this week’s subject: The two grade-school aged girls — whose favorite pastime is mocking their mom’s lack of expertise in the domestic arena – have been forced to pick up the slack when it came to the laundry and preparing dinner, since their single (widowed) mom’s busy working and their grandmother, who had helped out around the house, is on an extended trip. The girls are finally going to get a taste of what it’s like to tackle the mundane and unglorified tasks of running a household. (I’ll bet the tuna surprise they’ve been making in the last two comic strips, with marshmallows and chocolate malted milk balls, will certainly surprise them when they dig into it. My hope is that, if they ruin the laundry and the dinner, that they’ll have a bit more respect for what their mom does for them. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

In the Picket Fence Post household, I’ve been trying to get the three kids (8, 11, 11) to be more comfortable with making meals as a way to help out. They prepare their own breakfasts on many school days — The Girl is confident enough to make pancakes and egg dishes — and they’re able to put together school lunches, though The Eldest Boy’s usually too slow moving in the mornings to prepare his lunch. The Spouse has also been trying to get them accustomed to doing the laundry and folding it.

Unfortunately, none of this has prevented The Ungratefuls from routinely kvetching about the dinners I make them. (Actually, that’s not fair. The Eldest Boy doesn’t usually complain and is a very good eater. One out of three ain’t bad I suppose.) However The Youngest Boy will drop to the kitchen floor and roll around in a fury, I’d estimate, roughly, 80 percent of the time when I inform him what I’m making for dinner. The Girl’s technique is to sit at the dinner table and eat nothing, fighting furiously with us if we try to coax her into taking just a bite out of dinner. (Last night, we had words when I tried to convince her to take a bite of the barbecued chicken, long grain rice and the baked butternut squash with pecans and brown sugar I’d prepared. You’d think I was trying to get her to eat beets or chicken livers.)

As of late, I’ve been declining to answer the question, “What’s for dinner?” I leave them on their own to deduce what I’m making, commence with their requisite griping and prepare for a bowl full of cereal for dinner.

Maybe it’ll work out better for the mom in Stone Soup.

Do your kids help out with laundry, making meals or other household chores?

Image credit: Stone Soup via Go Comics.

Once again, Jan Eliot hits the proverbial nail on the head with her Stone Soup comic strip today. Only in the scenario depicted in this comic, I’d be playing the role of the grandmom getting interrupted in the lavoratory.

A similar situation happened to me just this morning . . . I’d left the puppy and the three kids in the kitchen — everyone had been fed, dog had been taken out — and told them I was going to go take a shower. Less than three minutes later, The Youngest Boy came barging into the bathroom (I had a towel handy, thank goodness, otherwise his retinas would be burned and his soul scarred) to tell me that the dog had peed on the family room rug, even though I’d expressly asked the kids to please keep the six-pound ferocious canine in the kitchen until I returned. The puppy must’ve overpowered them with all his fluffy strength.

Image credit: Jan Eliot/Stone Soup.

I recognize that it is ironic to post this cartoon on the heels of the lively discussion earlier about childhood obesity and a Massachusetts proposal to weigh students in school, but it was too priceless to resist . . .

Jan Eliot hit it right on the money with today’s cartoon about the bizarre lunches that are occasionally packed by parents in a hurry . . . and I’d hazard to add that weird lunches concocted by parents can come from working and at-home parents alike, particularly if it’s close to grocery shopping day.

When we’re low on food, I send the kids to school with a plastic container of dry cereal and money to buy milk to put into it. Inevitably, the lunch box comes home wreaking of sour milk.

Image credit: Stone Soup/Go Comics.

Jan Eliot is scaring the crap out of me.

Just as I’m in the process of giving my twin 10-year-olds a little bit of responsibility – letting them stay home for small intervals of time while I go pick up their brother in town some place nearby, as long as they keep the phone next to them, don’t cook anything and don’t answer the door – I read this week’s Stone Soup. The storyline this week has focused on the teenaged girl who’s at home watching TV when her grade school-aged sister starts to choke on some food.

That settles it. The minute my 10-year-olds come home from school today, I’m going to teach them about the Heimlich maneuver, and pray they don’t use it for recreational purposes. Plus I’ll tell them they can’t eat anything when there’s no grown-up at home.

Image credit: Stone Soup via GoComics.

Item #1: Stone Soup Book

I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soup comics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.

“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”

The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.

Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer

Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.

Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.

Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment

Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.

Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.

Image credit: Amazon.com/Stone Soup.