Ever since my kids were born, I have been dreading the prospect of one day selling a house and moving with young kids under foot. Since the interest rates are lower and our kids are a little older, we recently decided that this was great time to put our house up for sale so we could move closer to town. Shortly after 2 pm on Sunday, I found myself seriously contemplating ripping the For Sale Sign from my yard and living in the same house for the rest of my life. Or at least until the kids were away at college. My vacuum had just mysteriously stopped working while I was in the middle of cleaning the living room and potential buyers were going to be arriving to look at our house in approximately 23 minutes. In desperation, I picked up all the visible dirt from the carpet and used a broom to evenly spread the carpet fresh that I had already sprinkled on the carpet so that there was no visible white powder. I then realized that Laurel had somehow decided that this was a perfect time to do a science experiment that involved water, food coloring, Dixie cups and brown sugar. While I was disposing of the Dixie Cups filled with “scientific evidence”, I noticed that Trevor had set up a very elaborate game of Monopoly on the freshly cleaned glass coffee. I somewhat calmly asked him to clean up the game before “passing go.” With 12 minutes to spare, I breathed a sigh of relief as I buckled the kids in the car and then went to load up the dogs. Since none of my friends or family was going to be happy to see me arrive at their house with two kids and three dogs, our plan was to “drive around” for an hour while the realtor showed our house. After I put our two dachshunds in the car, I realized that our third dog was nowhere to be found. Since he is completely deaf and cannot hear me call for him, I spent the next few minutes running through the yard and house looking for him. When I found my dog hiding in the closet, he told me in no uncertain terms that he was not going outside in the heat. My kids thought it was hilarious to watch Mommy carry the 73 pound dog to the car. With everyone loaded in the car and the house reasonably presentable, I decided to grab three cold drinks for my two legged family members to enjoy during the hour-long car ride to nowhere. As I opened the fridge I knocked over a bottle of wine and watched helplessly as it shattered all over the garage floor. I picked up the pieces as quickly as I could and tried to ignore the fact that with the 100 degree heat that my garage was quickly going to smell like a frat house on a Sunday morning no matter what I did. As we pulled out of the driveway a few minutes later, a voice from the backseat said “Do you think that the people will like the My Little Ponies that I put on the kitchen table for them to play with while they at the house?” I took a deep breath, laughed and hoped that the potential buyers had a sense of humor. Or that they at least had kids of their own.
| 2 August 2010, 12:00 am
Sometimes John Rosemond just nails it in his column. From what I remember of my children’s toddlerhood, Rosemond was kind of the anti-Brazelton. While Rosemond focused on more traditional methods of parenting that most of us grew up with, Brazelton was more in vogue when my kids were little and focused on “flexible discipline boundaries” and “empathic involvement.”
Yesterday I was reading John Rosemond’s column in the N&O and he made me laugh out loud and applaud him at the same time. The question came from a Mom of an almost 2-year old who is into throwing. She says, “During a recent dinner out, he threw a fork that whizzed by a lady’s head, just missing her eye.” Rosemond’s response? “I have to ask why intelligent people would go into a restaurant with a not-quite-2-year-old who has a habit of throwing things at people. Can you say “common sense?”
Now I am a curmudgeonly Mom of teens who can look superciliously at those silly new Moms who end up “Brazelmonding” (my newly coined word) because they just can’t decide between the two methods. I’m so jaded that I wouldn’t even question the Mom’s decision to take a kid who throws to a restaurant…I question taking any not-quite-2-year-old to a restaurant. Period. But I’ve ranted about this before.
In some ways, as a Mom of teens, I look with envy at those whose disciplinary conundrums are over concrete issues such as throwing things, using bad words (like “shut up”…which became a very bad word in my kids’ day, prompting kids to look aghast at parents who uttered those words, but barely blinking when the parents inadvertently said, “S***” or some other 4-letter word) and not staying in bed at bedtime.
Now the issues are more nebulous. Sometimes we aren’t really sure if we are hearing a lie, a half-truth or some combination of the two. Believe it or not, many of parents of teens desperately want to believe when their child says, “Really. It’s not mine. I was just holding it for…” We roll our eyes at those parents, but then turn around and swallow similar lines hook, line and sinker. We want to believe that everything applies to teens…but not to MY child. Cell phones have given our kids a way to contact us to tell us they are going to be just a few minutes late for curfew. When I was growing up, five minutes late had the same consequence as a half-hour late, so believe me, I found a way to get home by curfew.
Discipline among the Moms-of-teens set seems to now fall into a predictable routine of:
I have heard threats of military school. I even know someone who sent his child to such a school with fantastic results. My friend’s son used to be a drill sergeant, maybe we should just have him set up a summer boot camp for our teens and see how they feel about real discipline. I look fondly back at “time out” as a punishment. There is no logic to sending a teen to his/her room because that’s where they spend most of their waking/non-school hours anyway.
What to do? I’m looking for ideas and answers here. Next week, I’m going to tell you about how the strategies my Mom-idol has used to raise three great kids and share ideas and answers submitted by readers.
| 28 July 2010, 12:00 am
The other day, I found myself watching the movie "My Baby is Missing" on the Lifetime channel. The script was bad and the acting was worse, but somehow it was just intriguing enough that I sat on the edge of my bed, procrastinating leaving home while I watched the melodrama.
In the first five minutes, I knew that the woman who was pretending to be a nurse was an imposter, that the new mother would discover the conspiracy that involved the imposter taking the newborn and selling the baby girl to unwitting (but willing) adoptive parents. It was obvious that the single mother and the baby's daddy would reunite, find the baby and that the bad guys would get caught-- all within two hours, including commercials.
And yet, I stayed to watch the show, even while cringing at the lack of acting. What's worse--even when I dragged myself away so I could actually get back to my real life, I recorded the movie so I could watch the conclusion later, which I did.
There are some shows I'm proud to say I watch. There are smart, funny shows like Lie to Me or Glee. There are cult favorites, like Grey's Anatomy or American Idol (at least until next year, sans Simon. Or Ellen.) But others are just guilty pleasures, and I bet you have them too.
These guilty pleasure shows are the ones you can't claim to just be watching because the TV was already on and you couldn't find the remote to change the channel. Like me, you may have even TiVo'd it in advance. Like you've never clicked over when you saw that one of the original episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 was on. Right. Sure.
It's the same with books for me. I'll tell you I read Andre Agassi's autobiography or Janet Evanovich's latest (and why she won't just choose Ranger already, I just don't know), but I probably won't tell you about my secret stash of Harlequins. Oops.
For me, and maybe for you, my guilty pleasures are pretty tame. I like my pleasure ratio to outweigh my guilt by a comfortable margin. And spending time with a TV show or a book that has a guaranteed happy ending, well, that's just the little lift I need to keep going during the day sometimes.
I've confessed mine: now it's your turn. What are some of your guilty pleasures?
| 3 August 2010, 12:00 am
I counted the oranges. That's how I know what my struggle will be. The older my twins get, the less unique my story. My challenges will become more and more like anyone with closely spaced children because having two two-year-olds or two three-year-olds is not all that different from having one two-year-old and one three-year-old. There will be quite a few more people in my boat as we move along on this journey.
Always wanting to be prepared, I started reading twin-specific books and articles almost as soon as I knew we were expecting our double blessing. Most of the literature focuses on twins as babies, partly because that is the most unique time, and partly because it’s just hard.
The majority of what I’ve read past this stage has centered on two topics. The first is whether or not twins should be in the same class in school or purposefully separated. I don’t see this as an issue for us. I fully expect G and M to adapt beautifully to whichever situation they find themselves. The other theme deals with preserving the individuality of twins. I admit I worried about this before they were born. I promised myself I wouldn’t fall into the habit of referring to little M and little G as “the twins.” This resulted in my constantly referring to them as “the babies.” I’m not sure that’s any better, except that they will not always be babies so there is a natural end to that habit.
But I no longer worry about their individuality. They’ve been displaying their inimitable personalities since birth. G is my sensitive observer, the one who notices every single time I try to slip out of the room, finds any new object fascinating and likes to snuggle. M never stops. She’s always after something and is so frustrated that she cannot talk. I can see in her eyes all the opinions that she desperately wants to share. I know neither one will let me forget how separate they are.
So what is this struggle that I see in the future? It’s the notion that fair does not always mean equal. Life is not fair of course. Some of us accept this earlier than others, but we all accept it if we ever want to be happy. But while life is not fair, Mom should be. I try to be. And most of the time I’m pretty comfortable that I am.
Every parent with more than one child wants to be fair. When your kids are different ages though, fairly different is easily fair. It doesn’t matter if one could sit at the table without being strapped in a whole year ahead of another or if one gave up naps at a younger age. You simply try to dole out privileges and responsibilities as they seem appropriate.
I’m afraid it won’t be as easy with two kids the same age. Already I’ve occasionally found myself trying to force an impossibly equal treatment for “the babies.” For example, I cannot physically put two babies to bed at the same time. Their beds are in separate rooms. In working out a bedtime routine, I first considered putting one baby to bed first every night, reasoning that at least that would be expected. Then I thought of alternating so each had equal turns staying up those extra ten minutes. Then I came to my senses and decided that the best idea was to put to bed first whichever baby seemed more tired (i.e. cranky) regardless of which baby was first on any other night.
Then there was lunch. I had opened up a can of mandarin oranges to feed the babies. At some point, I realized that I was counting the oranges to make sure each baby was getting the same amount. I made this discovery when I came across a particularly large slice and paused to consider whether it should count as two. I knew I was being ridiculous even as I knew it was not the first time I had counted their food.
Of course my husband admits to a different type of forced equality. He has slipped a few extra Cheerios to whoever weighed less at the last check-up and nudged along the twin who sat up and crawled later than the other. Both of us are normally rational people. I’m not concerned about our weird internal hang-ups scarring the children. (I’m not even worried about M and G accusing me of being unfair. I already know that’s a given.) This is just something I’ll be thinking about as they grow.
The other thing I wonder is whether or not I’ll miss the attention. There is a definite irony to the fact that as it becomes less and less obvious that M and G are twins, fewer people will feel the need to stop us and ask if they are. Fewer people will gawk and point us out in a crowd (because of our twins anyway, there will still be those who think four children in one family is some sort of spectacle). I’ve never liked the extra attention. It’s hard enough to manage all the buckles involved in car seats and stroller seats without feeling like everyone is watching to see how I do it. And it’s not my imagination. I once had someone start clapping in the middle of a parking lot because he was impressed with the way I folded the double stroller.
But I’ve gotten used to the fact that people regard my babies as something truly special. Will I feel like we’ve lost something when no one comments on their presence? Will I find myself telling strangers that M and G are twins when one hits a growth spurt ahead of the other? Will I be reluctant to let M ride her bike without training wheels until D can get her brother to catch up? I doubt it. I think we’ll adapt beautifully to whatever changes our kids throw our way and we will largely do it in private. But I know better than to say anything with certainty. I know better than to try and predict the future. After all, I never would have predicted that we’d have twins.
| 26 February 2010, 12:00 am
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