Quick Hits: NYC School Vacation Trip, Occupy Siblings & Margarita Bombs

NYC School Vacation Trip
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Intrepid. The United Nations. Top of the Rock. Wicked. Skating at Rockefeller Center. Zabar's. A nod to Linsanity.

The Picket Fence Post family headed down to the big city for a few days at the beginning of February vacation and, as was The Spouse's wont, packed so many activities into our brief three-day/two-night stay that I've been rendered exhausted for the remainder of the week as The Youngest Boy keeps bugging about where I'm going to take him next. (Copious amounts of coffee are not perking me up any.)

We packed ourselves into one hotel room -- seriously, New York City hotel rooms are so expensive that we couldn't justify getting two rooms, but at least The Girl got her own bed -- and we were able to make great use of my iPad (I got to watch episodes of Downton Abbey, my new addiction, in bed while the kids slept) in between dragging ourselves all over Manhattan and squeezing in a cat nap at a Starbucks at Rockefeller Center. (No lie. I was so tired at one point I had a very small nap while sitting in a Starbucks. After a latte nonetheless.)

The Girl loved visiting The Met with me, while the boys, or at least one of them, enjoyed going to the Intrepid with their father. (The disgruntled child kept texting me saying he was having a crappy time and wanted me to take a cab across town and rescue him from the horror of touring the museum with his father and brother.) Despite the complaints of that one child, it's a good thing we decided to split up and that I didn't take The Youngest Boy with us to the museum because, while he appalled by the paintings of naked people at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts when we went there several months ago, he would've been downright outraged at the plethora of naked sculptures throughout the Met. Really graphic sculptures too. (Every time we've tried to tell the child that it's art and that the human body is beautiful, he tells The Spouse and me that we're sick perverts.)

My two highlights from the trip: Seeing the Broadway show Wicked (which I didn't think I'd like because it's a musical and I'm not keen on musicals, but I wound up loving it . . . in fact everyone in the Picket Fence Post family enjoyed it, which is rare to achieve a consensus) and ice skating at Rockefeller Center even though I fell down on the ice twice, the second time landing really hard on my rear-end. It still hurts, days later. (Insert pain in the butt joke here.)

We tried, and failed, to get tickets to see Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' new basketball sensation, play at Madison Square Garden. I was told, in no uncertain terms by the two different ticket agents with whom I spoke on the phone, as well as by the Knicks/Ticketmaster web site, that it was "impossible" for me to buy tickets for all five members of my family. Losers. However we still got a taste of Linsanity by stopping by at the NBA store and getting The Eldest Boy one of the Lin T-shirts that the clerk with whom I spoke said is flying off the shelves. (My personal favorite souvenir from the trip: The "Knope 2012" T-shirt from the NBC Experience store honoring Amy Poehler's lead character Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation.)

On our way out of town, we stopped at Zabar's, the famous NYC deli/grocery store, and bought the most delicious baked goods I've ever tasted. The chocolate babka -- a shout-out to Seinfeld -- was delectable and the knishes were fabulous. It's a good thing that I don't live near Zabar's or else that fanny upon which I fell at the ice skating rink would most certainly balloon if I scarfed down those choice eats on a regular basis.

Occupy Siblings

Perhaps I've shared one too many news casts and newspaper front pages with the Picket Fence Post kids about Occupy Wall Street because after we got home from our trip, The Youngest Boy decided to stage a sit-in in front of his sister's bedroom door, complete with a little tent, an Occupy Siblings protest if you will.

Why was the little person protesting? Not because there's a 1 percent versus the 99 percent thing going on in our household -- though if you asked The Eldest Boy he'd say The Spouse and I are top-hatted, walking stick-carrying snotty 1 percenters while the kids are the powerless 99 percenters whose only option to make change is to protest -- but because he believes his sister is hoarding a bunch of notebooks and he wants her to share the wealth.

"Do you want to join the protest for notebooks?" he asked his brother, who declined as he was playing the role of the counter-protester taunting the Occupier, only he didn't have a snarky sign with him.

The ironic thing: I'm 100 percent certain that if I went to The Youngest Boy's Superfund Site of a bedroom I'd find 12 notebooks buried under various piles of garbage.

Margarita Bombs

The best line of the week came from The Youngest Boy who was telling his brother a story while we were driving home from New York, "And then the guy threw a margarita bomb!"

He meant Molotov cocktail.

Image credit: Photos of NYC by The Girl, photo of Knope shirt, NBC.

Three for Thursday: Baby Proofing Insanity, Parents 'Occupying' Wall Street with Kids & 9:30 AM School Lunches

Item #1: Baby Proofing Insanity

The very first parenting column I wrote after having my twins was one which lampooned the mania that all the parenting “experts,” baby stores and parenting media had whipped up when it came to baby proofing. Of course, like any parent, I wanted to make my house safe for my newborn twins, so The Spouse and I got to work and covered all the electrical outlets. We bought a multitude of gates. We put protective latches on cabinet doors and drawers throughout the house (including on the kids’ bureaus). We bought doorknob covers for most doorknobs and installed eye hooks on the sliding glass door so that when they were toddlers they wouldn’t escape. We had powerful baby monitors to listen to the goings on in the nursery even though we lived in a small ranch style house.

But according to the fear-mongering catalogues that were flooding into our mailbox and the articles in parenting magazines and online, we weren’t going far enough in attempting to bubble-wrap our children’s on the home front. That’s when I decided to write a satirical column about the insane levels people were going to in the name of household safety and suggested, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, that I’d hire some “pediatric body guard/childproofing safety service” to definitively make my house safe for the my kids. It was preposterous, of course, I thought at the time, because there was no such thing as a childproofing safety service.

Lo and behold, some 13 years later, not only are there baby proofing consultants out there, but a New York Times writer recommends that new parents hire such a service because mere garden variety parents might not be thorough enough (which sends a lovely message about parental aptitude, that it's more prudent for them to outsource their parenting throughout the kid’s life to “experts”). After running through an exhaustive and expensive list of things parents “need” to do to batten down the hatches in a vain attempt to make their baby’s world absolutely safe, the Times writer said, “Even if you follow all these childproofing steps, consider calling in a consultant. Every house poses different hazards – with fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, for instance – and first-time parents can’t see everything.” And he wasn’t joking. He was being serious.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor at the unnecessary fear that was being instilled into new parents who read this piece I had to remind myself that it was this same newspaper section -- the “Home” section – that ran a piece last December about the lethal threat posed to babies and toddlers by coffee tables. Enough said.

UPDATE: You can read my original baby proofing satire here under the sarcastic title, "The Joys of Baby-Proofing."

Item #2: Parents ‘Occupying’ Wall Street with Kids

Seeking to provide their children firsthand experience with the First Amendment right to protest, parents have begun bringing their offspring with them to the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, as well as to other Occupy protest sites around the country, the New York Times reported.
There’s even a web site – Parents for Occupy Wall Street -- which encourages moms and dads to bring junior to see democracy in action and to hear people wax poetic about economic inequalities. “With our children’s best interests in mind, we join together peacefully to support the Occupy Wall Street movement across the U.S. on our children’s behalf,” the web site says. “We’re speaking for the 99 percent that can’t speak up for themselves.”

Parents for Occupy Wall Street recently spearheaded a family sleepover event in New York City’s Zuccotti Park amongst the protesters -- featuring a sing-along, pizza party, arts & crafts and bedtime stories -- which organizers said would “not only be a great teaching moment for kids but a totally community driven peaceful protest with events throughout the weekend.”

The Times pointed out that children have been present at Tea Party rallies, the Egyptian protests in Cairo and “at many other events that marked the Arab Spring.” However the newspaper did add that during the Zuccotti Park sleepover, “families had to be moved at dawn to make way for new police lines and barricades.”

Would you take your kids to an Occupy Wall Street event, or a family sleepover next to the protesters in a public park as a “teachable moment?”

Item #3: School Lunch at 9:30 in the Morning?

NBC’s Today Show highlighted some Florida schools which are now scheduling students’ lunches as early as 9:30 in the morning. Why are they doing this seemingly bizarre thing? School officials told NBC that students today “start their days earlier,” therefore they’re hungry for lunch earlier, even though a federal mandate says schools need to serve lunch between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (These Florida schools obtained waivers for their early breakfast nosh.)

This seems nonsensical. Why not encourage students to have a healthy snack at 9:30 instead of serving them a full lunch? Who wants tacos or meatloaf at 9:30? Considering that most parents work and the family’s dinner isn’t served until sometime in the 6 o’clock hour, giving the kids lunch that early will throw off their entire eating schedule. They’ll be ravenous for dinner at 3:30. By 6:30, when many families eat, if the students consume a second dinner, I think we’ve got yet one more reason as to why American kids are gaining weight. There’s got to be a better way.

Image credit: Parents for Occupy Wall Street.