Quick Hits: Clothes Shopping Hell, Oodles of Braces & No Second Dog (Yet)

Clothes Shopping Hell

The Picket Fence Post kids keep doing this growing this, lately in giant, sudden spurts. The amount of time in which they have to wear their clothes before they turn into high-waters or become so tight that they look like something the Hulk might wear seems to be shrinking. It seems like we're buying new shoes and cleats constantly. The boys' pants aren't worn enough to get rips in the knees.

Thus I took the three kids to Old Navy this week in order to pick up some inexpensive shirts and sports shorts, given that they said, "Nothing fits anymore!" It proved to be bad timing. Did every other mother with kids home for spring vacation have the same idea? The place was mobbed. Between following my offspring around to make sure they picked out the right sizes and nothing too expensive (or inappropriate, like 2-inch long shorts that the store was peddling to girls), it got chaotic, prompting me to start sweating and my patience to evaporate, which is why I think was of the kids who shall remain nameless, was able to sneak in a Lakers shirt without me realizing it. I'm not much of a shopper anyway, so having to go clothes shopping with three children in a packed store . . . well, let's say I'd rather have my teeth cleaned.

The spring shopping excursion then led to another one of my least favorite tasks, one I avoid as much as possible: Going through the kids' clothing to find items that no longer fit, determining which items can be passed down to someone else and making the kids try on certain items, even when they swear that they didn't fit when, in reality, they're just trying to get rid of the unwanted item so I can no longer bug them about why they don't wear it any more. (When I make them take the item back, they resort to cramming it in the back of a drawer hoping I won't see it until another clothing purge session.)

And we didn't even have an open bottle of wine in the house.

By the time all the sorting and shouting was completed, and after I'd uttered my version of "money doesn't grow on trees" and "do you know how much these clothes cost?" parenting classics, we all so needed the laughs that Modern Family afforded us. I love Manny.

Braces, We've Got Braces

Adding insult to the whole shopping debacle was the fact that The Eldest Boy got braces on his lower teeth before our Old Navy trip. Plus, his top braces were tightened. The kid was in some serious pain. And Tylenol didn't really help.

The Girl, meanwhile, was informed that in two months' time the palate expander on the roof of her mouth -- which has been pushing her teeth outward to make more space -- will be removed and replaced with a full set of braces on the upper and lower teeth. Cue the groaning and teenage complaining. Times two.

This ought to be fun: Two pubescents enduring frequent pain in their teeth, begging for milkshakes, soft food and Tylenol. I think I'd better buy the Tylenol by the gross.

No Dog #2 (For Now)

This searching for a second dog is stressing me out.

We've tried several times in the past month to adopt rescue dogs I've seen on PetFinder -- dogs the Picket Fence Post family thinks will fit in nicely and get along with our 3-year-old, 25-pound Max -- but our efforts have thus far been fruitless. We came close last week to getting an adorable Havanese puppy mix (Max is a Havanese/Wheaten mix), but alas, we submitted our application after another nice family who eventually adopted the little guy.

A few days ago, I scared the pants off of The Spouse when, after bringing some donations to a local dog shelter with The Girl, I wound up placing a $25 deposit on a puppy with whom The Girl absolutely fell in love. She'd insisted on returning to the puppy area multiple times, after I said it was time to go, and snuggled with this one adorable, silken puppy. Although I can now admit that the puppy, whose lineage is unknown, would grow to be a fairly large dog, larger than what The Spouse and I had agreed upon, I was in a vulnerable place having lost out on the other puppy last week. I foolishly acceded to The Girl's request to put a 24-hour hold on the puppy and even allowed myself to begin thinking of names for her.

However when I showed The Spouse photos and a video of the dog, he said aloud what I was thinking but didn't want to admit: The cuddly dog would be bigger than we wanted. I sheepishly followed The Spouse up to The Girl's bedroom and informed her that we wouldn't be adopting the puppy. I think I took it harder than she did.

I've decided to stop trolling the PetFinder web site for a while. I need a break.

Image credit: PetFinder.

Finally . . . We've Finished Reading 'The Half-Blood Prince.' Now Onto 'Deathly Hallows.'

*Warning -- If you haven't read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, don't read any more of this post unless you want the book's ending spoiled for you.*

It has taken The Spouse and I more than a year to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince aloud to The Youngest Boy (who, by the way, gave me special permission to write about him in this post). We finally finished the 652-page opus last night all the way to its sad and dreary conclusion. Harry Potter, the boy whose parents were killed when he was just a baby (his mother while putting her body in front of his), had to watch as his mentor, his fierce protector, was killed. It was only a little more than a year after his godfather, who he was just getting to know, was also murdered in front of his eyes.

Dumbledore's funeral, the lump in Harry's throat, that dread that was weighing on the boy's chest as he broke up with Ginny in order to protect her and his realization that he was embarking on a quest that could very well lead to his own death, all of it was so very bleak. Black hole kind of bleak.

The Youngest Boy was, as one might well imagine, quite melancholy and surprisingly muted when I asked him what he thought about how the book ended. When I first read it, not having known ahead of time what happened to Dumbledore, I shed tears, mostly for Harry who had already suffered so many losses and was really truly alone, with the exception of his teenage besties, Ron and Hermione.

I'm curious as to how The Youngest Boy will react when he sees the film's version of this tale (the weakest of all the Potter films) and sees Dumbledore die. (The Girl fled the movie theater when that happened, so tearful was she. It broke my heart.) Watching that movie is on our "To Do" list for the school vacation week.

As we prepare to embark upon the journey of the 784 pages that constitute Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I'm likewise wondering how The Youngest Boy will perceive the darkness that saturates this final book, the long periods of despair and loneliness our fearless trio faces as they attempt to locate and destroy the remaining Horcruxes before Harry attempts to slay Voldemort.

For those of you who are keeping track at home -- or keeping tabs on my Harry Potter: Reading Out Loud Project page -- between The Spouse and I, we've read 3,395 pages of this series aloud to The Youngest Boy. Wonder if it'll take us another year to tackle the last installment.

Image credits: Amazon.

Quick Hits: Sexism in Sports, 'Miss Representation' DVD & Dog #2?

Women Athletes Should Get Paid More, So Says The Girl

I'm so proud of my burgeoning feminist gal. She was recently assigned to write a persuasive essay for her Language Arts class. The Girl selected a topic near and dear to her heart: Women's sports.

In particularly, she wants to make the argument that female professional athletes, as well as those who coach them, should get paid more money and get more media attention. She settled on her topic days after we watched the NCAA basketball championship when Baylor beat Notre Dame and she was ticked to find that the following day, there was hardly any media attention paid to the women's championship as compared to the amount of coverage devoted to the men's championship.

After I gave her a recent New York Times article about the appalling, yawning gap between the financial compensation for coaches of men's NCAA hoop teams versus women's teams, she was all fired up to write her essay. Can't wait to read it.

'Miss Representation' DVD

Speaking of feminism . . . remember a while back when I wrote a post about the disturbing documentary Miss Representation about the damaging impact of media sexism on girls? Well it has now been released on DVD.

I've ordered a copy for The Picket Fence Post house and plan to watch it with The Girl. I'll report back here on her reaction. Given her anger over how women's sports are trivialized in comparison to men's sports, the documentary will likely galvanize her.

Dog #2?

I've submitted an application for the Picket Fence Post family to adopt a rescue dog who's 3-4 months old. Everyone -- even the reluctant Spouse who thinks adding a second dog is lunacy but has nonetheless given his blessing to this endeavor -- fell in love with the little guy after we saw a video of him online.

However we're second in line behind another family who submitted their application before us. We should know this week if The Picket Fence Post family is about to be catapulted into swift action in preparation for a new arrival, or whether the pup will find happiness in a different home. We shall see.

Image credit: Amazon.

American Parenting Requires 'Redefining Fun,' Being Okay with Missing Stuff

The New York Times' parenting blogger had it right when she wrote that, in order for American parents to have "fun" during their non-working hours, they need to redefine the word as we're seeing large hunks of our time commandeered by our children's extracurricular activities. Naming travel hockey tournaments, "Family Art Night" at school and team parties as activities in which her family partakes, KJ Dell'Antonia wrote, "This is what we signed up for, with our big, boisterous family."

She pointed to a recent essay by a mother who started raising her children in Europe but, upon moving to the United States, was gob-smacked to discover that the contemporary American parenting culture is completely child-centered. (The writer, Jennifer Conlin was commenting on the "French parents are better" conversation we've been having lately in the wake of the pro-Parisian parenting book Bringing Up Bebe.)

"Now our entire adult life revolves around the children's activities," Conlin wrote in the New York Times. As she detailed a crazy-busy set of weekends when her children were participating in musicals, softball, ensemble competitions, a forensics tournament (?!), baseball and a Science Olympiad, Conlin said, "It's easier to preach benign parenting from one's pretty perch in Paris than it is to import those traits to the trenches of America."

However Dell'Antonia said this all-in brand of contemporary parenting is "as fun as we make it" and again reminds us -- chastises us actually -- that "this . . . is what we have signed up for." I, respectfully, disagree. I didn't sign up for having my weekends sucked up in the vortex of children's activities. I didn't dictate (a la the Tiger Mom) what activities the Picket Fence Post children should or shouldn't do other than to limit them to one sport per season. I've allowed them to choose their activities and then tried to shoehorn those activities into a family life with two working parents, two 13-year-olds, a 10-year-old and a dog. But the shoehorning can be messy business.

My life is currently one big logistical nightmare as all three of my children play sports (soccer, hockey, basketball, lacrosse), two are in bands (one plays in three bands), one is on the Student Council, one belongs to a monthly book club, two take additional once-weekly math classes and one is going to start reffing soccer this spring. And that doesn't include the events they have at school like Colonial Days, talent shows, Art Nights, etc.

My biggest fear, aside from forgetting to bring a kid to some practice or event (The Spouse and I mistakenly missed a tryout session for our son's 2012/13 hockey team . . . whoops!), is that I'll accidentally strand someone somewhere. Leave no kid behind, that's my number one priority.

However there are many occasions when, if I can't get a kid to an activity because, shockingly enough, The Spouse and I actually have something of our own that conflicts with their stuff or we happen to want to do something other than a kid-centric activity. (For example, we had scheduled a St. Patrick's Day dinner at another family's home when a hockey game was rescheduled, with little notice, for that night. We went to the dinner.) The children just have to be okay with missing that activity from time to time. Our family, we tell them, is comprised of five people and sometimes, Mom and Dad or the family unit as a whole, comes first. We can't do everything, we tell them, and if they miss 25 percent of some activity, well, that's the price of being part of a team, the family team. Contrary to Dell'Antonia's assertion, I'm not at all content to surrender all my free time to trying to pretend that a picnic on the sidelines of a kids' soccer game is as good as enjoying a sparkling conversation with The Spouse about politics and current events at a nice restaurant that doesn't have paper placemats. We need date nights every once and a while.

It has taken quite some time for me to be okay with our approach, to not be wracked with guilt if we miss something, to not feel badly that I'm not enjoying all the child-centered events as much as other parents claim they do. I've had to try not to beat myself up if I mistakenly forget something. I can only do what I can do, as long as I don't leave a kid behind. (Have I mentioned that I'm paranoid that I'll do that?)

That being said, I still get resentful when a coach or the head of a particular activity acts as though his or her gig is the only one on a child's plate and exacts a punishment on the child should he or she be late or miss an activity because sometimes a parent simply can't get the kid there. Frankly, it's impossible for me to divide myself into thirds and deliver everyone everywhere simultaneously. I likewise don't cotton to attempts to lay guilt upon parents for missing events when there are a freakin' bazillion of them; they're not all litmus tests on our fitness and attentiveness as mothers and fathers.

I realize, as parents of older children have told me repeatedly, that this insanely, jam-packed period of my life has an expiration date. Sooner than I'd like to think, all three kids will be off to college and the house will suddenly be eerily quiet. I won't be worrying about leaving anyone behind on a soccer field because they will have left the home to start a new chapter of their lives. I'm trying to keep all of this in mind when I caffeinatealways choose the kid thing. I can't put my life on the shelf until the kids are in college. There's got to be some kind of balance . . . and a whole lotta coffee

Quick Hits: Scary Mommy Manifesto, B'Day Goodness & Gram's Bread

Scary Mommy Manifesto

Saw this 12-step pledge for moms, written by blogger "Scary Mommy" -- Jill Smokler -- on the Huffington Post this morning. Loved it. Well worth your time, unless you're a helicopter parent. Actually, if you're a helicopter parent, perhaps you should read it . . . and take heed.

A couple of items in the pledge:

"I shall not judge the mother in the grocery store who, upon entering, hits the candy aisle and doles out M&Ms to her screaming toddler. It is simply a survival mechanism.

. . . I shall not question the mother who is wearing the same yoga pants, flip-flops and T-shirt she wore to school pickup the day before. She has a good reason."

B'Day Goodness

The Picket Fence Post family, along with other friends and family members, kindly celebrated my birthday with me yesterday. Here are the highlights:

I was kidding around with a nephew of mine on the phone after he asked me how old I was. I told him I was 100. When he balked, I said, "Okay, I'm 101." Then I mentioned that I, along with his father, had a great grandfather who lived to age 99. The pre-schooler responded by asking, "When are you going to die?"

I got to spend the evening with the family -- after enjoying a homemade meal of pan-seared scallops, salad, rice and wine followed up by a mint chocolate brownie sundae (thanks to The Spouse) -- watching the NCAA championship game between Baylor and Notre Dame. We all marveled at the athletic prowess of Baylor's Brittney Griner and the unparalleled success of the Baylor team, the first NCAA hoop team to go 40-0 in a season.

The Girl printed out and colored, a la Andy Warhol, an image of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, with the words, "Great Comedian Figures." The image was taped to my bedroom door and greeted me when I woke up.

This from The Eldest Boy's homemade card: On the front, there was a drawing of me, "What you look like," which was a garden variety woman in a T-shirt (albeit with a sarcastic saying) and jeans. On the inside, there was another drawing of me as "Super Mom" (complete with a cape) with quotes beneath the image such as, "Deals with two teens and a tween without breaking a sweat" and "Her super yell can make anyone deaf," to "Washes dishes, does laundry, writes multiple columns and a novel, cooks dinner, drives kids to places and watched the dog all in a day!" (*big smile*)

Gram's Bread

I am so setting myself up for failure here, especially by writing about this subject in this venue . . . Why? Because I may attempt to make my grandmother Liv's -- Gram's -- Easter bread. (Actually, when I was looking through her recipe boxes, I found two recipes for Easter breads, one where you make the bread dough from scratch and one where you use frozen dough. Even though Gram once had me over to her house and spent hours schooling me on how to make the bread from scratch, if I do this thing I'm going with option two. I seriously don't have a whole day to devote to bread.)

Every year when Gram was with us, she'd proudly present a giant loaf of bread laden with layers upon layers of tangy meats. As it would land on my parents' kitchen counter with a hefty caloric thud, the bread would become a central focus of our Easter meal, giving the ham a serious run for its money. It was a big deal, the unveiling of this culinary masterpiece. And, as with many things Gram did, the bread was larger than life, about the size of an infant it was. Everything seemed bigger when my grandmother was around.

So for me, the lowly griping chef whose will to cook has been beaten into submission by my resident picky eaters no matter how many times I watch Julie & Julia, to even suggest that I'm thinking about attempting to make "Gram's bread" is a feat of enormous ego. I'm hardly a larger-than-life kinda gal. Snarky, dark and twisty, yes, larger-than-life, no.

Will I actually make the bread? It depends. Maybe. I'm making no promises. The Picket Fence Post family will also be hosting a Passover dinner for The Spouse's family this weekend so if I get the chance, I will work on the bread. If I don't get the opportunity, maybe I'll take a stab at making Gram's bread on a less auspicious occasion, like Arbor Day.

Two 'Lunatics,' One Snarky Suburban Dweller & a 'Blueprint' for Feminine Insight, Melancholy

The first one took me along a darkened, twisty trail as girls became teenagers rebelling against their parents and wrestling with their own personal demons, as teens became twentysomethings who still needed their own mothers, to women becoming mothers themselves (or wanna-be mothers) who struggled with their own rocky childhoods and tried not to replicate them with their own children.

The second made me laugh (sometimes at myself) as it took a great big arrow and skewered the not-quite-grounded-in-reality lives of contemporary suburban parents, mothers specifically, who desperately attempt to camouflage their own insecurities about their bodies, their decisions to abandon their careers for at-home parentdom and whether their offspring have what it takes to one-up the kid next door who's taking violin and calculus lessons as well as mastering French and Mandarin Chinese.

The third was just one big, absurd joke of an adventure that two suburban dads unintentionally embarked upon after a wildly intense dispute over an off-sides call during a pivotal moment during a 10-year-old girls' soccer playoff game.

I'm speaking about three new books featuring parents, specifically Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Linda Erin Keenan's Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from  Darkest Suburbia and the novel co-written by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, aptly entitled Lunatics. If you're looking for touching, albeit somewhat depressing insight into the lives of women and mothers, you should pick up Blueprints. However if you're up for laughs at the expense of hyper-suburban parents, grab a copy of Suburgatory. Laughter at bizarre antics? Lunatics.

Of the three books, Schappell's Blueprints is the one I can't get out of my head. It has stuck with me, long after I closed the back cover. Eight, interrelated short stories deftly depict women's journey from girls blossoming into adolescents, to college students grappling with intense adult issues and to mothers of grown children who still need their counsel. In one story, you see a troubled girl who battled anorexia while her mother felt guilty for not recognizing the symptoms sooner. In another story, the girl's younger sister befriended a woman at a playground who also happened to appear in another story as a girl who dropped out of college after she was raped at a party. The most intriguing though, were the stories about Heather Chase who went from being a teenager who was trying to gain popularity through sex, then later put herself romantically between two best friends (it ended badly) and eventually wound up trying to give her own son a valuable lesson in love and trust despite her checkered past.

One hundred and eighty degrees in a different direction, tonally and otherwise, is the deeply sarcastic Suburgatory, the title from which the ABC comedy took its inspiration and name. In the book, Keenan plays the role of the intrepid reporter and reveals odd anecdotes from the alien nation that is suburban parenthood. Many of Keenan's edgy and sometimes profane articles are send-ups of situations or people she observed when Keenan, the former career-centric Manhattanite, was dragged by her husband to the 'burbs after they had a child. A significant chunk of the book involves Keenan's self-deprecating humor, mocking what has become of the formerly hard-charging CNN producer now that she's gone native. It was a fun jaunt after the weightiness of Blueprints.

Lunatics, by contrast, is on an entirely different planet than the other two books. By humor columnist Dave Barry and Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, this strange novel was inspired by Barry's experience at his daughter's soccer games and Zweibel's experience with his son's Little League. The two writers assumed the voices of the two main characters and alternated chapters in their characters' voices. Zweibel wrote the part of Phillip, a mild-mannered, married pet store owner and father who made a controversial call as a referee at a youth soccer game that changed the outcome of the playoffs. Barry gave voice to the other character, the hot-headed Jeffrey, who went into a rage after Phillip called Jeffrey's daughter off-sides after she made what would've been the tying goal in a playoff game.

Out of their unhealthy obsession with youth sports, the unlikely pair formed an involuntary team as their story hurtled from a suburban book club where the women had perhaps a bit too much vino (and barely talked about the book), to being on the run from the police in Central Park, to assisting in a Cuban revolution and playing starring roles at presidential nominating conventions. While Lunatics can spark genuine laughter, especially at the beginning before it launched itself into absurd locales, if you're not comfortable with jokes about flatulence, bodily functions and crazy journeys, this might not be the read for you, although a soccer dad you know might thoroughly enjoy every part of it.

Image credits: Simon & Schuster, Amazon and Penguin.

Originally posted on Modern Mom.

It's Spring and the Rush is On (Hockey, Lacrosse, Soccer, School Projects, Concerts, Easter & Passover)

It used to be that the month of December -- when the Picket Fence Post family celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah -- seemed like my most tension-filled time of the year. My "To Do" lists were gigantic and the pressure to get everything right -- gifts, holiday cards, "big" meals, decorations -- could be intense. But as my kids have gotten older, I've come to believe that the spring has actually supplanted Christmas/Hanukkah time as one of the more intense time of the year? Why? Let me count the ways:

Hockey is still on-going in its pop-up-out-of-nowhere practices and games, wreaking havoc on my family calendar.

Lacrosse has begun (this is our first foray into youth lacrosse) and the sport has an extremely intense practice schedule (three practices a week and one game on the weekends . . . and The Spouse volunteered to assistant coach, after he head-coached two basketball team and assisted on another this winter). One of my children, who shall not be named, plays on both hockey and lacrosse teams, whose practices and games overlap until hockey concludes next month, ending the August to April season. (Yes, August to April. For grade schoolers.)

My e-mail box is getting deluged with missives from coaches/league organizers for the Picket Fence Post kids' travel soccer teams, establishing practice times and locations, then changing said times and locations at the last minute. (I now only pencil in these dates.) I currently am unclear as to where and when the games and practices will be for those teams and how they'll fit fit into the hockey/lacrosse picture.

The Girl has also become an official soccer referee (she had to take a long class to become certified) and is supposed to be officiating youth soccer games for the first time this spring. I've got no clue as to how this is going to work. I'm also hoping no lunatic sports parents give her a hard time.

School bands are suddenly switching into high gear with band competitions and performances cropping up all over the place like weeds. I just found out from a fellow band mom that after last week's jazz band performance, a week after a jazz band's talent show performance, a week after an out-of-state band competition, that there's another concert this week AND a competition on Saturday (but I knew about Saturday's, and it's local, yippee). That unanticipated concert happens to be at the same time as a hockey practice AND a book club meeting for a group I really want to join. (I missed the last meeting because of kid-related stuff.) The Spouse has a work engagement that night as well. Don't yet know what that night's going to look like.

Spring class projects. When the flowering trees start to blossom, we know that the smell of drying glue and a forest of tri-fold boards are bound to be taking over our dining room, because if it's spring, it's time for at-home school projects. This usually leads to 11th-hour pleadings from The Ungratefuls for me to rush out and get supplies that they "didn't know" they needed, despite the detailed supplies list their teachers gave them weeks ago.

Then there are the twin religious holidays which require that I temporarily re-locate those school projects from the dining room (usually they're shoved into my horrifically disorganized closet like everything else) in order to prepare for Passover and Easter. We typically host Passover dinner for The Spouse's family and then share Easter Sunday with my family. But before that occurs, I've got to buy lots of matzo (The Spouse and The Girl are the only ones to eat matzo for the Passover week, unlike the rest of us bread-eaters who only indulge in matzo during our formal Passover dinner) and other Passover accoutrements. Plus, I've got to buy tons of eggs (need 'em for both holidays) and an egg dying kit and Easter candy, actually remember to dye the Easter eggs with the kids and make whatever it is I'm going to bring to Easter dinner, provided we're not hosting.

*deep, cleansing breath*

It's all good, I keep telling myself. It'll be fine. We'll figure out a way to handle all of this and, in the meantime, I'll just have to color my hair more frequently to keep stress-induced gray hair at bay.