Picket Fence Post

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.

Item #1: Golden Smiles

The U.S. Women’s Soccer team triumphantly won gold this week at the Beijing Olympics. Not only did they emerge victorious, the players — whose ranks included moms of young kiddos – inspired a whole new generation of soccer players, as you can see by the beautiful photo to the left. Makes ya want to cheer, “U-S-A!”

Item #2: Parents Followin’ College Kids

The New York Times ran a story that I found disturbing. It was about a mini “trend” among parents who, once their offspring goes away to college, decide to buy a second home in the town where their kid is attending school:

“. . . [S]ome parents are investing in college towns in an unexpected new way: they’re following their kids to college. From South Bend, Ind., to Oxford, Miss., from Hanover, N.H., to Knoxville, Tenn., they are buying second homes for themselves near campuses where their children are enrolled.

Many, like [M.J. and Jim Berrien], want front-row seats to watch their family athletes perform. Some seek a gathering place for football games or family holidays. Others long for a retreat with the amenities of a college town — and why not the one where they have children attending?”

One of the parents said she’d “been seduced” by a college town, while another said the college community would make “an ideal retirement place.” Some said that their kids (and their kids’ friends) are thrilled with having access to the home, free laundry plus home-cooked meals parents cook when they’re in town.

Helen E. Johnson, author of Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money:The Essential Parenting Guide to the College Years, told the paper that she hopes parents are buying the homes for the “right reasons,” and urged them to seriously ponder the answers to these questions: “Would I like to be in this town even if my child wasn’t?” and “Does this have more to do with my need than theirs?” Then she threw in this killer line, “You might be making your child more fragile, not less.”

Another contrarian opinion was voiced by DenYelle Keynon of the University of South Dakota who has studied “the parent-student relationship” once the kid goes to college. She told the Times: “Research has found that the parent-child relationship grows better once the child has left the house. Parents should be careful not interrupt that process.”

Ouch.

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