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.

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.’”

(more…)