Picket Fence Post

Who among us hasn’t hosted or attended a holiday dinner/event from hell? I’ve had a number of them myself.

There was the year my grandfather died on Christmas morning . . . and no, he wasn’t run over by a reindeer walking home from my house Christmas Eve. And we didn’t debate what to do with his gifts, thank you very much.

There was the Christmas when my mother, sidelined by a neck injury, still managed to engage in a sweet potato tossing incident with my father and hurled the F-bomb at him, all while my then-fiance cowered in an adjacent room having overheard the whole exchange but was unable to flee because the only exit was through the kitchen.

We can’t forget Christmas Eve from two years ago where The Spouse and I hosted my family’s traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner for the first time. All was going swimmingly well until the moment I put down my fork at the end of the meal and I succumbed to a nasty case of what I believe was food poisoning that felled my father within hours. I spent Christmas lying in bed feeling like stuff you scrape off of the bottom of your shoe.

Then there was the year when my mother was recovering from a serious illness and my father, The Spouse and I had to call a plumber the night before Thanksgiving in order to fix the gas stove which I’d accidentally busted while trying to make a potato dish.

When my twins were 2, they literally ate decorations off of our Christmas tree, leaving it looking as though it had been ravaged by rampaging wild beasts.

There’ve been family gatherings punctuated by lovely arguments between relatives about the best, fastest route from point A to point B.

The list could go on and on.

But for you, my faithful Picket Fence Post readers, your holiday anecdote could pay off. Parents & Kids Magazine is having a special contest. The magazine is looking for funny, snarky or really interesting family holiday stories. Four winners will be selected and will each receive an autographed copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, which is a testament to my life filled with snark, messy family gatherings and all manner of imperfection. E-mail your tale to: parentsandkids@cnc.com. The deadline is December 22.

Shameless self-promoting addendum: Copies of Suburban Mom would be fantastic — and inexpensive – Christmas or Hanukkah gifts (available via Amazon.com.) They would add some laughter to the life of a suburban mom you know and love, as well as provide relief that her parenting’s not as nutty as mine, as she’s free to laugh at my many foibles mentioned throughout the book. I’ve been told by moms who’ve read Suburban Mom that, because it’s a collection of brief columns, it’s easy to dip into when they’re out and about picking up kids from activities or while waiting in the car pool line.

In its October review of the book, a Literary Mama writer:

“In this collection, O’Brien adroitly handles the balance between relating what could have been tedious anecdotes about the specific frustrations and joys that come with three young children and offered a universal message. With essay titles like ‘The Scrapbooking Cult’ and ‘To Yell, Perchance to Scream,’ it’s easy to picture O’Brien as one of your funniest friends, the one who can make you laugh through your tears and shore you up with the all-important validation that you’re not alone.”

And by sharing YOUR holiday anecdotes, you’ll be doing the same thing . . . letting other moms know that they are not alone with their less-than-perfect family celebrations. I’ll post the winning ones — once Parents & Kids editor Heather Kempskie shares them with me – here on the blog.

Remember, by December 22 people!

Image credit: Wikipedia.

If you saw my Q&A with Pamela Paul, author of Parenting Inc., you read all about how almost every aspect of modern parenting has been commoditized. You need to potty train your kid, you can buy special potty training books, clothes, diapers/pull-ups, videos, all manner of potty seats, stickers and, last, but not least, even obtain the services of a “professional” potty training coach. (I kid you not.)

My recent GateHouse Media column tackles the outsourcing of parenthood and focuses on how, when my kids were babies, I used to joke about hiring someone to take care of the madness otherwise known as potty training. Now, the joke’s apparently on me.

If you are the parent of a toddler — or know someone who is — Stefanie Wilder-Taylor is like a fun house mirror, reflecting back the insanity that is raising a toddler today. In her tongue-in-cheek book, Naptime is the New Happy Hour and Other Ways Toddlers Turn Your Life Upside Down, she chronicles through a series of essays, struggles such as setting up playdates, pre-school application mania and transitioning to a big kid bed. Wilder-Taylor recently fielded five of my questions about her new book:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: This book focuses exclusively on how to handle your child’s toddlerhood without losing your marbles. Do you think parenting a toddler is more difficult than parenting a baby, or just different?

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, Naptime is the New Happy Hour: That’s a good question. I thinking parenting your first baby is harder than handling a toddler. When you have your first child, you are a complete mess of hormones and confusion. When that child is a toddler, you know them better — their moods, idiosyncrasies, etc. so it’s easier to make them happy. On the other hand, when you have a new baby in the house, it’s tougher to deal with your toddler than the new baby because your toddler needs to be entertained while your baby just needs to eat and sleep. It sort of makes you look back and think, “Wow, I had it so good when I just had one baby and I didn’t even appreciate it!”

O’Brien: I got a huge laugh out of the chapter on scheduling playdates for your toddler and dealing with other mothers who aren’t necessarily compatible with you.

You wrote: “Having someone you genuinely get along with and can just ‘hang out’ with, comparing notes on post-baby sexual activity and bikini waxing while the kids play oh-so-happily, only happens in the best circumstances or when Supernanny’s Jo Frost is supervising. But still, to me, it’s more important to take pleasure in other parents’ company and share some similar parenting attitudes, because an afternoon with the wrong mom can feel like spending two hours on the StairMaster with the TV stuck on a George Lopez Show marathon.”

Have any of the moms with whom your daughter has had playdates taken umbrage at your characterization of playdates gone bad or at your parenting style? Do you think that it’s a good idea, before a playdate with a new kid, that you should test the mom’s reactions to certain things, like assessing her response to showing up with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, as you did?

Wilder-Taylor: After reading my book, one mom at my daughter’s pre-school worried that she was the type of mom I wrote about. In fact, she wasn’t at all. She was pretty cool and easy-going. The ones I’m talking about would never know it’s them. It’s sort of like how if you’re insane, you’re the last to know. It’s the sane people that worry they might be insane.

To answer the second part of this question, I do try to suss out the personality of a new mom playdate situation. Life is too short to spend even an afternoon with a boring or insanely uptight mom. I might try dropping the f-bomb when we’re alone and seeing if she makes a gas face or makes like a sailor herself. Unfortunately, now that I’m back on a book deadline, my drinking in the afternoon days are over. The way I can tell a cool mom now is if she lets me drop my kid off at her house for a few hours to give me some time off.

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I previously heaped praise upon two books — The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys – which remind me of the good old days when kids played outside without parental interference and didn’t come back home until it was dark out. The publishers of both books recently released new pocket versions of each, focusing on “Things to Do.”

When they arrived at the Picket Fence Post HQ, I decided that instead of having me wax nostalgic about making God’s Eyes out of yarn and sticks during summer camp and playing lively games of SPUD until dusk, I’d turn to my two resident experts to see what they think. I gave my nearly 10-year-old twins — The Girl and The Eldest Boy — copies of the pocket editions and a stack of Post-It notes with instructions to put sticky notes on suggested activities they liked or didn’t like. I then sat down with each child individually. Below are the interviews.

The Daring Book for Girls

Lemonade Stand: When I asked the Hannah Montana/High School Musical/sporty/Manny Ramirez loving girl what she liked from Daring, the first thing that caught her eye was the entry on how to make and run a lemonade stand. “If you ever want to earn money, here’s a fun way to do it,” she said, sounding as though she’d been paid off by the book’s publisher. “If you want to earn money, it’s not a boring way to do it, like chores.”

What ideas did the book give her about setting up lemonade stands? “When I pictured doing a lemonade stand, I just thought of lemonade and cookies, but this had different ways to draw attention,” she said, noting that she was intrigued by suggestions to dress up the stand with decorations and music. (Can you say, “The Best of Both Worlds” crankin’ in our ‘hood?)

Frying An Egg on Sidewalk: “I thought it was fun, but weird. You need to live in a warm place where there’s a lot of sun on the sidewalk to do it,” The Girl said, adding that the book had explanations about why this “odd but fun” activity would or wouldn’t work under certain conditions.

How to Be a Spy: “It says the word ’spy’ comes from ancient words . . . I don’t really get that, but I spy a lot around my house,” she said (*mother tries to camouflage her concern as to exactly what her child has discovered during her covert ops*). “. . . It gives me different ways to make codes that my brothers wouldn’t get, but I could teach my friends and they have siblings who they’d want to fake out.”

How to Run Faster: This was the only item The Girl singled out as something she did not like in the book. Why? “It’s kind of like cheating because it doesn’t really matter how fast you run as a kid . . . until, like, high school,” she said.

Her Overall Assessment: “I think it was pretty good,” she said. “It gives girls a lot of fun stuff to do over the summer. If they’re bored, all they have to do is pick up the book and flip to a random page.”

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Item#1: OK Free Play

The Boston Globe ran a great column this week by Derrick Z. Jackson extolling the benefits of letting kids play on their own without adults chasing them with bottles of Purell and micro-managing everything. Jackson quoted Susan Linn, Harvard psychologist and author of the book The Case for Make Believe, as saying, “In saving make believe, we are saving ourselves.”

Jackson added: “What it means is an America where boys and girls are encouraged to not use the screen as a first resort of socialization. The first resort becomes themselves, scripting fantasies on porches and yards, becoming their own heroes and heroines, or just sending a letter to their teddy bear.”

My childhood summers were marked with great flights of imagination ranging from re-enacting Star Wars scenes in our living room with my brother using his action figures and ships (I always had to be the Evil Empire . . . fill in your wisecrack here), creating myriad secret clubs with convoluted rules, and staging countless shows with my brother and neighbors in our driveway (anything from dancing and singing performances to puppet shows . . . in fact my first boyfriend told me he once paid ten cents to see a puppet show at my house.)

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Three for Thursdays (or Four for Fridays if I don’t post on Thursday) will be a regular feature here on the Picket Fence Post. This feature will include newsy/fun/intriguing items that I stumbled upon in the past week. If you happen to see something — an interesting news story, a funny video, an outrage, etc. — that you think would be perfect for Three for Thursdays, please be sure to send it my way.

Item #1: Grey’s Finale

Will Meredith and Derek finally end the on-again/off-again romantic dance and commit already? Certainly the challenges of being a couple can provide drama and comedy, if it didn’t, then Mad About You would’ve been canceled after its pilot episode. Will Miranda figure out a way to repair her relationship with her estranged husband and reunite her family? Will Christina emerge from her “Like a Virgin”-singing funk? We’ll find out tonight in the Grey’s Anatomy finale. But, as with most bonus-sized finales — tonight’s show is two hours long — they tend to disappoint. Hopefully that won’t be the case tonight. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that nothing totally absurd will happen. Like Gizzie, part II.

Item #2: First-Born Rule-Followers and Their Strict ‘Rents

I KNEW IT! As the oldest child in my own family, I’ve always felt as though it’s harder to be the older kid than the younger one, even when you factor the hand-me-downs into the picture. Now a study in the latest issue of the Economic Journal confirms it.

“The study showed that older siblings were much less likely to drop out of school or, in the case of girls, get pregnant, than the youngest in the family, perhaps because of a lifetime of being held to higher standards,” reported MSNBC. “That stricter parenting style [used with the older child] often shapes the first-born kid into a play-by-the-rules perfectionist.”

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You might have heard of Jen Singer from her web site/blog MommaSaid. But it’s likely you’ll be hearing more about her as her new book, You’re a Good Mom (And Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either) starts getting more buzz. (See the book trailer — yes now there are book trailers — above.)

I sent Singer five questions about the book – which promises to provide readers with “14 Secrets to Finding Happiness Between Super Mom and Slacker Mom.” She kindly answered them below:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: You’ve been blogging and writing about motherhood for some time. Why did you decide to write this book and how did you come up with the idea of 14 tips for moms?

Jen Singer, author, You’re A Good Mom (And Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either): I’m a recovering Mom-aholic. Though I spent upwards of 100 hours a week with my two toddlers as a full-time stay-at-home mom, I felt guilty folding laundry because I wasn’t giving my children “teachable moments” all 100 of those hours. But when I started to ease up on my impossibly high standards of motherhood — the standards that 21st century mothers created — I realized I was happier, and so were my kids.

Still, I saw other moms slide down the slippery slope into giving up on parenting almost entirely. They stopped being their kids’ filter, letting their fifth graders have cell phones and allow them to show The Sopranos on the back of the school bus while thinking it’s cute to let their daughters wear “Future Trophy Wife” T-shirts to middle school.

I felt that there’s a sweet spot in between where you can be happy and turn out perfectly good kids. So I boiled it down to 14 steps for finding that spot and staying there, and put it into a book.

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You may know Christie Mellor from her Three Martini Playdate books which lampoon today’s parenting trends. Now, the humorist takes on not the grade school set, but twentysomethings (who need a little direction in their lives) in her new book Were You Raised by Wolves?: Clues to the Mysteries of Adulthood. Mellor fielded some questions from your intrepid Picket Fence Post scribe:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: Your two previous tongue-in-cheek Three Martini Playdate books urged parents to raise their children to become civilized, well-rounded adults and to conduct that child rearing in a way in which parents actually get to enjoy being adults and not simply serve as their kids’ executive secretaries and all-purpose servants.

Were You Raised by Wolves? aims to tell young adults — whose parents couldn’t benefit from your Three Martini sage advice in time for their kids — how to be civilized, well-rounded adults. Why did you decide to write this and how do you think college grads will respond to such counsel?

Christie Mellor, author of Were You Raised by Wolves?: It started as a nugget of a suggestion from my publisher — but I had been taking notes for a while on the very topic, I just didn’t realize that I’d already started the book in my head. I wanted to put the fun back into being a grown-up. I remember when I was a kid, being a grown-up seemed all cool and mysterious and fabulous. So I wanted to put the fabulousness back into it, but with some gentle suggestions on behavior and etiquette, to fill in the gaps that may have been left by an overly supervised upbringing.

As far as the twentysomethings responding, well, I’m hoping that since I’m not their mother and I’m not being naggy, that they’ll have fun with it. And maybe they’ll want to pass the book around to people they know. They may not recognize themselves as needing any help, but they may recognize friends or coworkers. And of course, it’s always fun to laugh at friends and co-workers.

The hope is that through the humor, a seed will be planted. A very good and thoughtful friend wrote me this in an e-mail regarding my book which I really should have printed on the back cover:

“It really is a common sense manifesto for injecting a better theology and philosopher into the world (to borrow Ignacious J. Reilly’s refrain from “Confederacy of Dunces”) — which modern culture so desperately needs — using essential older world values in newer world togs, all with your unique and magical style. And never mind the adorable, original illustrations.”

Now isn’t that just the sweetest? I would like to think he’s right on target and that Were You Raised by Wolves? will catch on as an etiquette book, albeit a humorous, hip etiquette book, with recipes and hangover cures. (more…)