Archive for July, 2009

It’s fair to say that my brother, Scott, and I are middle-aged. It’s just that we keep forgetting that. When we’re together, we tend to lose sight of the fact that we are responsible 40-something parents with jobs and mortgages. That’s why all too often we wind up playing soccer together in my backyard or challenging each other to “find the Oompa Loompa” in the fine restaurant where we were dining. (He found her — an older woman who apparently had endured a run-in with entirely too much self tanner.)

So it’s no surprise that we ended up on the Dance Dance Revolution game after dinner at a rather nice restaurant during a recent family trip. (It’s also no surprise that his 13-year-old daughter went on to crush me at the game something like 5 million to 53,000. And I’m not exaggerating the numbers.)

We also led the family – my kids, his daughter, my husband and our mother (who is the Queen of Never Grow Up) — to cram ourselves into a photo booth for a series of pictures that mysteriously showed only my 10-year-old’s smiley face. (My mother has already scrapbooked them, or I’d scan and share.)

Rewind 20 or so years, and Scott and I are in charge of the Christmas night trip to New York City’s Dan Lynch Blues Bar in a Rent-a-Wreck decorated with Christmas lights and tinsel. Kazoo, anyone? Why, of course.

In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We are half-way through the summer, almost exactly to the hour. To celebrate, I am yelling at my kids. (more…)

If a toddler throws a temper tantrum and no one is there to see it, does it count? In the case of this persistent kid, apparently not. Probably not in your house, either as toddlers are, well, I’ll let Colleen from Tuscon, Arizona, explain it, as she did in my book Stop Second Guessing Yourself — The Toddler Years:

“I wish someone had told me that it’s like having an unmedicated schizophrenic suicidal know-it-all without bladder control, on uppers 24/7.” (Page 134)

In some circles, that’s pure blasphemy. But those circles probably aren’t staring down a total meltdown in the frozen food section at the supermarket or a hairy canary in parking lots across the land. As I wrote in the book: “Living with a toddler is like being in a biker bar late on a Saturday night: you never know when all hell will break loose.”

The key to surviving the tantrum years isn’t Happy Hour, though the thought can be very appealing at times. Rather, it’s anticipation, prevention and follow-through.

Whether you’re dealing with tantrums or sleep problems or Tonka trucks stored in your fridge (It happened to my sister-in-law), I’ve got some tips for the 3 Mistakes Moms of Toddlers Make, in this video from Parents TV when I was in desperate need of a haircut and some grown-up talk:

He was spending an awful lot of time perfecting one of the tentacles. My 12-year-old, with help from his father, had already created the top half what would become a 10-foot-long squid created in sand on the beach at the Jersey Shore. But for now, he was busy trying to make one of the tentacles bend up and off the beach. If only he had that kind of patience for his math homework.

But it was July, and there was no homework, except, in his case, to find a drawing of a squid as a model for his four-hour project: The Giant Squid of 2009, Wildwood, NJ Edition.

Meanwhile, I sat under an umbrella and read Do-Over! a memoir by a man who tries to overcome the disappointments of his childhood by, well, doing them over, including summer camp and the prom.

As I looked up from my book, I thought of the article I’d read before our trip that asserted that, over the summer, kids forget a lot of what they learned in school, a.k.a. “The Summer Brain Drain.” It reported that most kids lose up to 2 1/2 months of math skills during summer break.

But my son was not doing math. He was making a squid — and a spectacular one at that. Kids who passed by said, “Whooooa!” and “Cool!” Adults praised his work, which was helped along by his father, who, I might add, was not doing math, either.

I remembered that the article also said that students can re-learn pretty quickly. Also ,that it didn’t say anything about the fact that my son will have just one quarter of art next year in middle school — a total of hours not much longer than he spent one day making his sandy squid. But art isn’t on any standardized tests, which is, perhaps, why you never hear anyone worrying about the Summer Art Drain.

My son rushed off to the ocean to get more water for his grand project, and I went back to reading my book, confident that there would be nothing about that day at the beach either one of us will ever want to fix in a do-over.

I mean, really. Creativity + Fun in the Sun? You do the math.

I blame it on my vacation buzz. Though we’d been home for 24 hours, I was still feeling and acting like I was on vacation. Which is how I found myself on a Monday afternoon in the back of a nearly empty Hallmark store not far from my house, sniffing candles. I mean, who does that except tourists and drunks? Also, drunken tourists. And yet, I was none of these things.

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If I liked math a little bit more, I wouldn’t have found myself up so stinkin’ high, my feet dangling over the water below me. If I liked math a little more, I might have taken some time while I was still standing safely on the beach to estimate how high up the parasailers go when they leave the relative safety of the boat.

But I’m not a math person. I am a word person. (more…)