Category: Parenting

Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.

Foodies and Babies

Published on January 30, 2014

Remember the Harryhausen’s scene from the Pixar flick Monsters, Inc.? A variety of furry, fanged, tentacled beasts are enjoying a civilized evening at a fancy restaurant, the kind where you have to pull strings to get a reservation. And the sudden appearance of a wide-eyed, pig-tailed human toddler — believed to be toxic — sends them all shrieking into the streets, summoning hazmat teams and inciting mass panic.

A five-eyed blob tells a news camera, “I tried to run from it, but it picked me up with its mind powers and shook me like a dog!”

An eerily similar scene recently played out in a super swank Chicago restaurant, sending foodies shrieking into the blogosphere for days on end.

It seems a party of four dared to bring an infant into Alinea, a sort of culinary art gallery, where the morsels of sculpted monkfish and squab resemble flowers more than food. Once named the best restaurant in the U.S., Alinea sells tickets in advance to its nightly tasting-menu-palooza at about $250 per person sans tax, tip, or wine — and believe me, when your dishes include fiddlehead fern, something called “mastic,” and, I kid you not, helium — you’re going to need a lot of wine.

Best Part of Parenting: The Music

Published on November 7, 2013

First smile. First steps. First day of school.

Certain moments in the parenting canon are aggrandized as monumental milestones that justify all the emotional trials of ushering infants into childhood and children into adulthood. You know the ones:

Learning to read. Hitting the home run. Passing the driver’s test.

And they’re all great; don’t get me wrong. But there’s another transcendent moment that no one ever talks about — and it’s so good that if you don’t have kids, you should consider getting some just so you can experience it.

It’s the moment when you discover that your kids dig your music. Not just recognize it or tolerate it, but genuinely love some of your favorite songs. When you happen upon them listening to the Isley Brothers while doing their homework, or singing Amy Winehouse as they unload the dishwasher, or blasting Bowie from the family iPod during a road trip — and not groaning and saying that they meant to click Bowling for Soup.

Those moments flood me with joy like a garden hose filling up a plastic backyard wading pool. Only much, much faster because those things take freaking forever. Why should it matter so much to me that we hanker for the same harmonies, throb to the same rhythms?

Manhattan Made

Published on April 11, 2013

Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it …

I grew up in a big city with billboards and litter and bellowing horns. We lived in a concrete jungle with beggars and highways and smog — and we vacationed, naturally, in charming, palm tree-punctuated beach towns.

Now I live in this charming, palm tree-punctuated beach town. It’s lovely — a safe, peaceful, pretty place to raise kids. And yet a part of my urban-bred brain wonders if there’s something missing from the soul of children who don’t know how to hop a subway turnstile or sleep through the blare of constant, distant sirens. Are they too content? Too … untested?

So when the tourists began pouring into Santa Barbara for spring break, I dragged my family to Manhattan for a lesson in culture, congestion, and crabby cabbies. We needed grit, I felt. Too much sustained simplicity makes ya soft in the head.

But could two laid-back pups from paradise really glean value from a week in a city that never sleeps? Could my dyed-in-the-wool country mice ever truly appreciate the bracing bedlam of Gotham?

Most of what the boys knew about New York came from Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”: “Yeah, I’m up at Brooklyn, now I’m down in TriBeCa, right next to De Niro, but I’ll be ‘hood forever. I’m the new Sinatra, and since I made it here, I can make it anywhere …”

Benefits of the Boob Tube

Published on March 14, 2013

I’m what you might call a selective consumer of news. I like stories that make me feel better about my flaws and foibles, that buttress my skewed and even irresponsible but terribly comfy world view. For example, I skim right over articles that beat the tired old “you should exercise” drum. But I memorize whole paragraphs of stories about people who got hurt or died while exercising, proving once and for all that no good comes from needless sweating, which is just as I suspected.

See how this works?

I eschew news reports about people who’ve failed in life because their parents were divorced or worked outside the home or fed them carbs. Feh, who needs the guilt? I’m always on the lookout for tales that justify my lazy parenting — but the dang things are hard to come by.

Or at least they were until Nicholas Joy whooshed into the spotlight last week. The Massachusetts teen became lost in the Maine wilderness while on a ski trip with his dad and was found by rescuers two days later — cold and hungry but otherwise utterly unscathed. How did the 17-year-old manage to survive two full nights in a blinding snowstorm with strong winds, temperatures in the low teens, and nothing but the clothes he was wearing?

By using skills he learned from watching TV.

No Children, No Comment

Published on February 28, 2013

As far as breeders go, I like to think I’m pretty tolerable. I don’t preach to my child-free friends about the unparalleled rapture that is (but kind of isn’t) parenthood. I don’t scoff when they call their pets their “babies.” I don’t sneer resentfully as they jet off to tropical, adult-only vacations in fricking February, when it’s not even a school holiday and they have no natural right to be warm and free and happy. (Okay, I do that, but they don’t know it.)

What I definitely don’t do is ask people why they don’t have children. My nonparent friends say they get asked this question all the time — sometimes by relative strangers. No one with a modicum of manners would ask, “Why aren’t you married?” or “Why don’t you earn more money?” Yet childless adults who appear within an egg’s toss of breeding age are often asked to explain why they’re not helping to populate this poor, desolate planet.

The real answer is often complicated, but my put-upon pals like to have a short, simple response at the ready — something that’ll call off the procreative inquisition and let everyone get back to vapid small talk, for the love of god.

Paranoid or Preventative?

Published on February 14, 2013

It’s a typical day in classrooms across America. Students turn in last night’s homework, take their seats, open their notebooks, and settle in for a lesson in handwriting. Or calculating the diameter of a circle. Or avoiding being shot by a madman.

Schools from elementary to high school are now putting students through “lockdown drills” to rehearse what to do if someone starts shooting up the campus. Some have been practicing like this since Columbine; others only began after the Sandy Hook school massacre in December.

The drills usually begin with a loudspeaker announcement from the principal, after which teachers lock and/or barricade their classroom doors, close any blinds, and instruct their students to huddle in a corner and remain absolutely silent for 10, 15, or even 30 minutes. Sometimes staff members bang threateningly on classroom doors or fire blanks in the hall to add realism. One school had students lay down “dead” with fake blood.

“I cried the first time my son came home and told me about these,” says a friend of mine. “They told him, ‘If you’re in the bathroom or hall when the classroom doors are locked, find somewhere else to hide because the teachers won’t let you in.’ He was 9.”

No to Botox

Published on January 17, 2013

I don’t know what “natural beauty” is, but if I ever had it, it’s been long since smothered by the increasing mess of products I use to remain presentable as I age: tooth whiteners, lip plumpy-ups, retinol creams. I believe that if nature had intended for us to be beautiful as-is, she wouldn’t have invented tweezers.

So I don’t begrudge people who undergo cosmetic procedures to reverse the ruthless tug of time. Who among us hasn’t fantasized about having a silicone rack up to here and out to there? Who hasn’t stood at a mirror and pulled her flesh up around her hairline, watching in amazement as her skin stretched back to its sublime teenage tautness? Who didn’t recently invest in a waist-cinching, “tummy-taming” camisole called Suddenly Skinny, which is now her very favorite item of clothing and without which she will never again leave the house? (Wait … was that just me?).

But there is one vanity procedure to which I won’t submit: injecting Botox to eliminate the creases on my forehead. It’s not because I have concerns about shooting poison into my face (says the woman who bleached her hair throughout her pregnancies). It’s not even because, at a few hundred dollars per Botox prick, I’d be trading my wrinkled-haggard look for a financially destitute-haggard look.

Tracking Your Teen

Published on January 3, 2013

I was a pretty good teenager. Straight-A student. Didn’t smoke pot. Never had a tussle with the fuzz. But I was a dirty little liar. I lied as all teens lie, and for the same reasons: I wanted to be somewhere, and do something, and see someone, that my parents wanted me not to. I wanted those things more than I wanted to be good or trustworthy or deserving of respect.

And so I said I was sleeping at Michelle’s house when I was really at my boyfriend’s. And I zoomed home at 89 miles per hour to avoid breaking my curfew. And I once drank vodka out of a paper bag in a park in the dark with a very-bad-influence friend and a McDonald’s strawberry-shake chaser.

Most of the things I lied about were merely stupid (duh, pour the vodka into the shake, rookie), but some were outright dangerous. And my parents never knew about them until right this second (Hi, Mom!), because they had to take me at my worthless adolescent word.

Parental Kissing: Ewww

Published on November 22, 2012

There are certain things a woman likes to hear after she kisses a man on the mouth: “Wow … please … more” and “Sweet cheeses, I’m in love” and “You taste like Wildlicious Pop-Tarts.”

But even “What do you think you’re doing, you trollop?” and “That is a LOT of saliva” would be preferable to what I hear after I kiss my husband: “Ewwww.”

The aspersion comes not from my spouse but from our 7-year-old son, an undersized-and-outspoken Puritan who finds even the chastest of our amorous embraces repugnant. Mind you, this child is not easily made queasy. He mixes fruit punch with Dr. Pepper and spoons applesauce onto his chicken nuggets, and I’ve seen the kid blithely pluck a strangled, desiccated lizard from a soccer net with a monkey wrench. Yet he finds nothing so disgusting as my lips touching his dad’s.

“Yuck.” “Nasty.” “Not again. Seriously? Come on!” It’s tough not to take that personally. I mean, why the horror? “Because the sound is gross,” he says.

Unfair! Sometimes we’re completely, no-slurping silent, I swear. He still cringes. “It just makes me … (sigh) … It’s just gross!”