Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Scary Movie Previews

Back in July, I blogged about how irritated I was to find, prior to a 1 p.m. mid-week showing of a PG movie about wizards, a movie preview for a PG-13 apocalyptic film about the end of the world and one for an as-yet-unrated film which included examples of close-contact brutal violence. Both trailers terrified my 11-year-olds.

I was even more irritated a few weeks later when I went to see the PG-13 film about Julia Child — to which I’d considered taking my 11-year-old daughter — and was treated to a trailer for a movie about a homicidal stepfather who went after his stepkids with a chainsaw and a knife.

So I called a spokesman for a national chain of movie theaters and asked him to kindly explain to me: Who picks these previews to accompany the feature films, whether the time of day is considered when selecting trailers and if the expected feature film audience is taken into consideration. The result is my November GateHouse News Service column in which I argue that theaters aren’t making wise choices about which trailers they’re choosing to run prior to movies.

Item #2: Baby Einstein Refunds

Perhaps you’ve read the news that the Disney Corporation is offering people who purchased Baby Einstein videos a $15.99 refund each, for up to four DVDs per household (for DVDs purchased between June 5, 2004 through Sept. 5, 2009). Why the refunds? Because the videos aren’t quite as “educational” as the company made them seem, the New York Times reported.

Over on the web site Mommy Tracked — where I’m a contributing columnist — author/columnist Stefanie Wilder-Taylor had a snarkily funny response to the news:

“It made perfect sense to me that I could sit my children in front of a DVD that shows colorful sock puppets moving at a pace slower than my grandma on the interstate highway and expect them to come away a prodigy. The only movement any of my kids produced after watching Baby Mozart was in their Pampers.”

Item #3: The Jig is Up

Remember yesterday when I posted an item about The Eldest Boy having lost three teeth in the span on 15 minutes. Well, as of the morning, I was informed by said child that the jig is up and that he knows “the truth” about not just the Tooth Fairy, but the dude in the red suit. The news filled me with a twinge of nostalgic sadness.

Item #1: Work from Home Glitch

What’s the work from home glitch? That would be called noise, more precisely, kid-related noise. When I read the Stone Soup comics this week about a mom of an infant trying to work from home as the baby cries during a conference call, I could sooo relate.

When my three kids were very young (and the youngest was a toddler), I had scheduled a telephone interview with a local district attorney to discuss an anti-bullying legislative proposal. Planning ahead, I fed the children a snack, then, after their bellies were full, I set them up in front of their favorite PBS show and headed down the hall to my bedroom, where I shut the door behind me.

Mid-conversation, the toddler started pounding loudly on my bedroom door. When I didn’t open the door immediately, he started shouting, “MAAAMAAA!” I responded by sticking my head underneath my bed trying in vain to continue the conversation. (By the toddler’s tone, I discerned that he was fine.) Fearing that the DA would hink something was drastically awry in my house, I admitted to him that I was working from home and that my youngest child was making noise. Luckily, he was very understanding. (For those of you who were wondering, the crisis that compelled my toddler to pound on the door was the desire for more food.)

Even now – with kids ages 10, 10 and 7 – they STILL make a racket when I’m on the phone. Yesterday I was on the phone for a very long time with the insurance company and the 10-year-olds decided that, of all the places in the house, the floor in front of the open door to my office was the perfect location in which to stage a loud wrestling match.

Item #2: Balance-Schmalance

Just in time for the chaos of the holidays, my witty Mommy Track’d colleague – author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor – recently mused about how insanely difficult it is to try to do have a well balanced life while simultaneously raising young children. Noting that she and her husband haven’t had sex in three weeks, Wilder-Taylor, mother of three including infant twins, said the horizontal mambo is simply one of those things they just couldn’t fit into their hectic schedules, regardless of the false hopes offered by “experts” in parenting/women’s magazines who claim that parents can make space and time in their lives for everything if they plan well:

“I’m not quite sure what makes someone an expert in the field to how to manage a family of five, a full-time writing job and an eating challenged baby without needing prescription medication — they will suggest to make an appointment for sex . . . My husband and I both have jobs, responsibilities, friends we barely see, e-mails we can’t return, broken things in the house that never seem to get fixed . . . [N]one of us really ‘have it all.’”

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