My fourth-grader daughter's teacher told the class that there is no tooth fairy.
Lily told me on our drive to school this morning. I'm kind of glad. And I don't want to get the guy in trouble. He's a pretty no-nonsense teacher who tells them all kinds of interesting things about his life.
She said, "Mom, Mr. (Name Withheld to Protect Him from Crazy Parents) said the tooth fairy is our moms and dads!''
I burst out laughing and asked for the context. She said a boy who gets in trouble all the time was messing with a loose tooth, and the teacher said, "What, are you waiting on the tooth fairy? Well it's just your mom and dad, so give up."
I laughed some more, and she never did ask, and I never did tell.
I'm thinking fourth-graders, ages nine and 10, are probably a bit old to still believe in fairies and yes, expensive notions like Santa Claus that require us to buy two sets of gifts. I don't even remember how old I was when I stopped believing. Do y'all?
Last Sunday, I asked a group of children at our church who among them has seen snow. All but two of them raised their hands. One of them was my own daughter, Lily.
She's nine, and has yet to see one of the most amazing natural occurrences on the planet.
Having grown up in Iowa, it does make me sad to think of a childhood without snowballs, snowmen, snowdrifts, snowtunnels, sleds, on and on and on. My three sisters and I would bundle up in full-body suits with gloves and scarves and boots and hats and spend hours outdoors in the snow.
But we're raising our kids here in South Florida. And my 16-year-old son's first view of snow was at none other than the Broward Convention Center, and it was of course fake snow, a mountain of it. I've never forgotten it -- it meant something to him, and to me.
I know I'm not alone. Some of you parents haven't taken your kids out of state at the right time to view snow. So if you're feeling lousy about it like I am, take them to Hollywood Friday night to see some "snow'' from a snow machine.
My colleague Tonya Alanez reported this morning about the event. Read the details on the jum page.
Just in case your child did not inform you, and you didn't listen to your robo-calls from the Broward School District, here's some breaking news:
Today and today only, Wednesday, Oct. 19, you can go to the Broward Convention Center in east Fort Lauderdale and pick up a lot of college information.
The college fair is free, and many, many, many colleges in Florida and other states are represented.
I picked up materials from University of Florida, University of Chicago, University of Central Florida, Florida State University, the University of Georgia, etcetera.
There were representatives from federal student aid and loan programs, and applications for the SAT and ACT. Every kind of college info you need as a parent, I think, was there.
The fair resumes from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. tonight. It went on this morning from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Tonight there are workshops for parents, starting at 5:30 p.m. I'll be attending a workshop on financial aid and Bright Future Scholarship Programs, (5:30, 6:30 and 7:30 workshops) but there are workshops about how to get into highly competitive colleges (7:15 p.m.), and how to navigate the application process if you're a first generation college student (6:15 p.m., with Haitian-Creole and Spanish translations). Also available tonight: Making your college search count (5:30 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m.), Financial Aid en Espanol, 5:15 p.m., 7;15 p.m.) and in English, 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Hot Jobs and Majors, 6:30 p.m. Lastly, there is Becas, en Espanol, at 6:15 p.m.
The fair is free. You'll pay for parking. I was there an hour and paid $3.
The convention center is off 17th Street. Don't forget, you'll have to go through Port Everglades security. Bring a photo ID. Directions are on the jump page.
I know there are apps that would allow you to track your teenager as he journeys from one forbidden place to another. And a wise parent can log into their children's Facebook pages and spend hours upon hours reading things that will keep them from ever sleeping again without a prescription medicine.
But do you ever have second thoughts about all those electronic devices?
My colleague Paula McMahon would like to talk to people or families from Broward or Palm Beach counties who use a lot of electronic devices like iPhones or other smart phones, DVRs, store loyalty cards, Facebook, Twitter or other services that record information about where they go, what they like to do and what they buy.
If you’re willing to be interviewed for a story about related privacy concerns or you think the convenience and fun of these devices and services outweighs the potential hassles, please contact Paula McMahon at 954-356-4533 or pmcmahon@tribune.com
Now that so many women work and also raise children, there's a huge number of us feeling overwhelmed with housework. We're also overwhelmed with child-rearing. And the solution is just so obvious: The kids should be doing the housework.
I was inspired when a co-worker told me that she has her four-year-old mopping.
I decided it was time to stop protecting my children from suffering the overload of housework that I felt I suffered as a child. I decided I had to stop cleaning messes immediately, and learn to walk away, assigning the work to one of the kids.
It takes an adjustment.
Some readers might be appalled that there is any mom out there not forcing her children to help clean the house. But back me up, working moms. Do you always have time to get your child to clean her room, if you arrive home from work and childrens' extra-curricular endeavors at 8 p.m., feed your starving kid, make sure homework gets done, toss the kid in the tub if needed, and put her to bed well past a reasonable bedtime for a child?
Are you even home on weekends? And if you are, is your child at someone else's house playing, or having someone else play at your house? Are you at a sports game your child is participating in? A birthday party for a friend? Does your child, like mine, get homesick because she's never there?
Do you really always find time in a given week to check boxes on some kind of Martha Stewart chore chart?
If you are juggling all that and a more-than-40-hours work week, and ever getting five minutes to speak to your spouse, you are a better working mom than I am.
So here we are. And it takes effort to add housework to your child's day. But the child behavior experts seem to think it's a good idea.
My nine-year-old daughter resisted the first time I made her walk away from something fun, to do some housework. She moped around with her hair hanging over her face, her body slouched. She wouldn't speak to me as she trudged around cleaning. But she picked up steam as she saw the results of her work. Housework is so rewarding in that way. My daughter took pride in how clean her room was by the end of it. And she happily accepted the mop, too. I quickly progressed to giving her baskets of towels to fold.
Then she felt like she'd actually earned her allowance. Same with my son, a 16-year-old, who I decided would be cleaning the main bathroom from here on out.
Finally, a parenting decision that makes my house cleaner.
If 7-year-olds could storm out of the house and disappear for a few hours while you sit home envisioning them in the back of a child molester's van, they probably would once in a while. But at that age, they're still afraid to leave the neighborhood alone.
Teen-agers have the guts to pull stunts like that. ("Stunts'' is what my parents called it, using angry tones of voice.)
This cute and innocent looking Davie teen was
so mad about his chores he even left his cell
phone behind.
I have to draw your attention to this story we had in the paper today, about a Davie 14-year-old who scared the crap out of his parents by walking off his mowing chore and disappearing overnight. Click here to read it.
I absolutely love the end of the story. This is a story you can laugh about; we know the teen came home safe and sound. Plus, it wasn't my son.
But I know, believe me, that teen-agers have just the right mixture of independence and mobility to take their protests farther than you ever could imagine, as a parent. That is, it's hard to imagine that Little Johnny, whose every stinking whim you catered to for 13 or 14 years, would leave you home replaying the Adam Walsh story in your mind over and over.
The first time your teen isn't where he's supposed to be, and is unreachable for an hour or two, you'll know what I'm talking about.
With my darling 16-year-old, I insist on having the cell phone numbers of all of his closest friends, as well as home numbers. If he doesn't pick up when I call, and still doesn't pick up when I call again a couple times, I call the friend. No answer? I call the next friend. Yes, I might be known by them as Creed's Psycho Mom, and I know I owe these boys lots of good snacks at my house. But I just can't stomach the not-knowing.
I'll post the full story on the jump, of the wayward Davie teen whose disappearance sparked a huge police department kidnapping search.
The summer was long enough for me to forget the most annoying part about school. For my kids, it's probably the homework. For me, it's the annoying automated phone calls we get from the schools.
I called the number and re-listened to the nine messages I got.
I'll post them on the jump page. But for an example, I got one call to tell me that my son's bus stop is at such-and-such address, which happens to be about as far from our house as his school is, and what time the bus would drop him off after school. And then I got a second message telling me the same information, but it told me what time it would depart in the morning.
I know our bodies go through some changes as we progress through life. Women have hot flashes and all that. Men go bald, among other things. But when will we start hating kids?
I've noticed it happens to some people in their 40s. And I've seen a rare few make it through life still enjoying children and their laughter, their frivolity, and their temper tantrums.
My mother-in-law lives in one of those senior communities where most of the people hate kids. That is why they live there. (She's not one of them. How could anyone hate my kids?) My son jumped into the pool there, and was promptly attacked by a senior citizen, who said if he jumped in the pool again he would be kicked out. Nice to meet you, too!
A friend of mine sent me this news article about a restaurant that was going to ban kids ages 6 and younger, because they're rowdy and bother the customers. The news piece goes on to talk about such bans on airplanes.
Why are all these people so grouchy? And why do they expect parents to be able to keep their kids from crying?
If I were sitting next to one of these geezers on an airplane, and I began sobbing, runny nose and all, I'll bet I'd get some sympathy and a Kleenex. What's the difference?
My favorite part of the Broward County schools code of conduct is the dress code.
The public seems grossly obsessed with what kids wear, due largely to the "pants on the ground'' trend (resulting in a new Florida law signed by the governor on Jun. 2.
If you were to read the rules as an indicator of what is in style around here, you would conclude that kids still like to wear clothing with rips and tears in it, that bloomers and pajamas are tempting to wear to school, and that those stretchy biker shorts are in vogue. You'd also find that bodysuits or panty hose with lace trim probably would be worn without a large blouse, if it weren't outlawed by the schools. The gals might wear curlers in their hair. Wallets that are chained to the belt loop would show up on campus.
And then, of course, the bedroom slippers. Here's what is said about that:
For grades K-12, bedroom slippers are not allowed, and for elementary students, backless footwear is not allowed. Additionally, elementary students may not wear backless, sling-backs, or open-toed footwear. Socks may not be worn with backless shoes as a substitute back for backless shoes.
The code can't cover every conceivable fashion. What if feather roach clips (worn in the hair) make a comeback, for example?
So the rules do contain this catch-all warning:
Changes in clothing trends will not override the dress code policy.
(You can also find out about discipline, and what is considered a weapon. A compass can be a weapon, apparently, if used outside of math or science class. And thankfully, "shotgun'' made the list as well.)
I ran to the TV when I heard the newscast last night about the teen-ager up in St. Lucie County accused of beating his parents to death with a hammer and then throwing a huge house party as his parents' bodies remained in the back bedroom.
When you have two kids and a full-time job, it's easy to forget to tell your child that Bigfoot doesn't really exist.
Our daughter is 9. We spend a lot of time parenting her brother, the teenager, because he presents one parenting quandry after another.
We sort of assume that she will learn in school a lot of the basics, like the fact that the earth is not flat and the moon is not made of cheese. And we're teaching her the big moral issues, the character issues.
Who was supposed to teach her about Sasquatch?
A Bigfoot-watching show was on TV last night, and that's when we found out that Lily is a believer. My husband called me in to the living room to tell me. And Lily said, "No, I don't think. I know!''
I'm going to have to sit down with her and chat. It might be too late to tell her that UFOs aren't real, emails from Nigeria should be ignored and there never was a babysitter who got a call from a man who said "I'm calling from inside the house.''
I'm sure glad I didn't have an activist mom. I didn't have a weirdo mom. My mom didn't use me or any of my three sisters to make some social statement.
Check out, if you haven't caught wind of this, the story about a mom who is keeping the gender of her baby a secret. The baby's name is Storm, and it looks like a boy to me. But whatever.
If my mom had done that, suggesting I look plain enough to possibly pass as a boy, and dressing me in gender- neutral clothing so that she robbed me of precious pink baby photos, not to mention made me the center of a media "storm,'' I don't think I would approve. Nor would I want my name to be Storm if I were in fact a girl.
I'm at the point in my parenting that I need to look past Oprah, Fox News, the strict Chinese "Tiger mom'' or whoever else might have tips for me. I am going to the great philosophers of all time.
I happened to glance through some Plato this morning. It's not worth explaining why I was doing this. Suffice to say that I do not, on a regular basis, read Plato in the mornings. But this morning, I happened to.
And this one section grabbed me. I wanted to share it with you as food for thought. I don't know the context, except to say this was in his "The Function of the Rulers'' chapter of The Republic.
"... Our children's pastimes, then, as I began by saying, must be kept from the first within stricter bounds; if any license be admitted, they will catch the spirit and will never grow into law-abiding and well-conducted men. And so, when children have made a good beginning in their play, and musical education has instilled a spirit of order, this reverence for law will attend them in all their doings and foster their growth, restoring any institutions that may earlier have fallen into decay.''
This is another vote for strict parenting. How many votes do we need before we crack down?
Now that he's almost 16, and he's going through changes, my husband and I are going through changes, too. Namely, we're trying to wrap our minds around the fact that this creature living in a teen habitat in our house (I actually saw a lizard crawling on his wall this morning, and it had to scurry past a cobweb), is the same being that was our darling and obedient son not too long ago.
I think of it like a science fiction film, in which an adorable, little robot that likes to nod its head and carry out instructions gets huge, to where it towers over its owner, then goes haywire, sprouting random hairs, wrecking the house and shooting laser beams out of its eye sockets.
There's a lot of buzz out there about whether schools should still teach cursive writing.
My daughter is in third grade, and she's learning cursive now. And I have to say, when she started bringing this stuff home and saying that she'd been corrected for not writing her cursive capital "G'' correctly, I realized I hadn't done it myself since I was in third grade in Iowa.
Some of those letters are just way too time consuming, the capital "S" being another.
In fact, I don't use cursive writing, even though I take a fair amount of notes and need to do it quickly. And I don't know shorthand.
I couldn't even remember why cursive writing was taught. Obviously if you have a computer to type on, you certainly don't need cursive writing to make your task easier.
Some might think this mom engaged in bizarre teen abuse, but I for one was touched by the story.
Click here to read the full story. It recounts how a Tampa mom was so upset about her teen son's apathetic approach to high school, and his pathetic grade point average, that she resorted to a desperate effort to make an impression on him. She sent the 15-year-old out to the streets to hold a sign that asked drivers to "honk if I need an education.''
Of course the state is investigating the case. But neither the mom nor the dad graduated high school, and that fate was not what they want for their son. The mom wanted her teen to see what's it like standing out in traffic; if he doesn't make it through high school, he might need to get used to standing there asking for money.
We're always hearing that having parents who care is essential to a student's success. I support this mom's passion.
Society has largely come to accept step-families, mixed marriages, unmarried couples and other family arrangements kids might have, but single moms are still looked at like social failures, one mom complained in a magazine article.
I've even noticed when filling out emergency contact forms or sign-up forms for my kids that the schools now routinely include questions about whether there's a parent who is legally not allowed contact with the child. So there's an expectation that some of the parents will be involved in hideous breakups or have restraining orders against one parent.
But as this mom writes about in her magazine article, society still looks askance at moms who "mated'' with sperm donors at fertility clinics, or adopted a child with no father, or partner, present at all.
The mom in the above column said she was told she had “social infertility.” As if she's too anti-social to be able to form a lasting enough bond with someone to have natural reproduction. A divorced mom would get more credit, in other words.
I know a few moms who fulfilled their yearning for a child even though they didn't have a spouse or partner. They're warm, friendly people who have lots of relationships with others. Maybe they'll marry one day, maybe they won't. I consider them successes.
UPDATED with the additional three worksheet pages
On television right now, workers' unions are really getting beaten up. But in the classroom, our kids are learning how wonderful they are. On television, Americans are told we are still tangling with the Taliban, a network of terrorists that seemingly cannot be wiped out. But in the classrooms, our kids are told we already defeated them.
It's risky business writing "history'' about recent events, let's admit. And I'm fascinated with what these people come up with. It's also tough to present an ongoing controversial element of our country's politics, like unions, to school children in a balanced way.
Third-graders don't want to be taught that our country hasn't yet won the war that began almost 10 years ago, when they were newborns or still in the womb. They don't want to try to weigh the pros and cons of a labor union, in the past and present, either.
So I've been reading my daughter's news and history worksheets, just out of fascination.
The union worksheet is about the grape workers in California, not teachers' unions in Broward. Or the labor unions in Wisconsin.
Questions from the worksheet: "Unions can help their members preserve some of the things they have already won, such as higher wages.' Which definition below tells what the word 'preserve' means in this sentence?'' Another: "The union helped restore pride for many guest workers. In this sentence, the word restore means ...''
Click here to read the worksheet telling kids that "U.S. forces eventually defeated the Taliban'' and implies, I think, that the war is over.
On the morning news (FOX News) recently, I listened to a father saying that he requires his kid to give him his Facebook password, and warned the kid that the page could be checked at any time.
He is not the first parent I've heard say this.
The idea outrages me. It takes me straight back to my own teen years, when my parents instituted rules that I felt were so ridiculous and unfair that the only appropriate and logical reaction would be for me to run away, (which I did not).
To me, this would be like requiring a child to reveal the password to his or her diary, and warning that at any moment, the parent will read it.
Believe me, I don't come from a lax upbringing where I was allowed to hide lots of things from my parents. We spent my elementary years a few feet from a women's reformatory my father ran, and my mother obviously paid lots of attention to the ways of a warden, in raising the four of us (all girls.)
But I strongly believe these two fundamentals about children who are 13 and older:
1. They have a right to privacy. A parent doesn't require a kid to give up the key to the diary, nor the password to an online account where the kid communicates with friends.
2. Most information a parent would learn from reading a teen's Facebook page would be disturbing, might keep the parent up at night, but isn't really something a parent can take action on. You will feel incredible angst reading comments from the other kids that make you wonder if they're up to no good but never really provide sufficient evidence.
I'd takes this off the table if the kid starts acting incredibly strange and you suspect something is very wrong. But as a general rule of thumb, I say do yourself and your teen a favor and let your kid have those conversations, without a doesn't-understand parent listening in.
If you want to hear more voices on this, they're out there. Be aware, you'll see the tantalizing headline "can parents make their kids pay rent?'' when you do this Google search. I also ran across a Facebook link to join a page called "Kids whose parents watch too much Fox News.''
I have a few bonuses for you today. Below are two helpful links, and on the jump page, a really great "stay-at-home mom'' thing that was forwarded to me today.
Occasionally, I'll find an item that saves me so much time and frustration as a mom that I feel compelled to share it with you all on this blog.
We live a pretty chaotic existence, and I don't like wasting time at home searching for scissors, the bike pump needle and screwdrivers.
My life has improved significantly since I bought and installed the magnetic strip you see pictured here. It was less than $10. There are various sizes, and the strip can be installed vertically or horizontally. The magnet is incredibly powerful, as you can see.
It's made for cooks who want a knife strip. I'd always wanted a knife strip, because I can't stand looking for sharp knives, either, and the more stuff I can get off my counter (knife block), the better.
But I decided to use it to also hang items I'm constantly needing to run the house, and as you can see in this photo, it's getting lots of use.
There are a couple other must-have items I've blogged about, for parents of school-age kids. many of the items are school supplies. To refresh: In order to avoid a late-night dash to the store:
1. Always keep a piece of plain poster board on hand.
2. Buying a hot glue gun is well worth the investment.
3. Keep a glue stick and a bottle of old-fashioned Elmer's style glue in a convenient location at all times.
4. Buying a stapler is also well worth the investment. Throw in an old-fashioned pencil sharpener that can be attached to the wall, and you'll really be set.
5. Wait until a month or two after school starts, when the stores put deep discounts on folders and pencils and other supplies. Buy a lot of them, for the inevitable night your child tells you he absolutely must have a new folder to organize his papers or his teacher will give him an "F.''
6. If you spend the $25 dollars to buy one of those small helium tanks to blow up balloons, you'll probably want to hug yourself every time you get to use it to make a birthday present look better, or for a family member's party. No more wasting money on overpriced helium balloons.
I had a real rude awakening as a parent when I got my first Broward County school system robo-call.
It's beyond impersonal. Even junk mail addresses me by name. But the Broward school system robo-calls say "This call is for the parent of ... (long pause where you assume your child's name is coming next) ... the student.''
Lately, whoever is in charge of sending out these annoying spam calls has been drinking too much caffeine. I'm getting two or more robo-calls a day.
On our Christmas vacation, we got a robo-call every single day to tell us that Lily owes 10 cents on her lunch account. I am not kidding you. A dime!
So I was very amused when I saw a dad on FOX and Friends the other day who said he got a school robo-call in the middle of the night. He returned the favor to each member of the school board.
UPDATED with death of the mom:
The mom whose 12-year-old son was being taught to drive with the whole family on board has died. I wanted to update my blog post about this, because this story is so incredibly tragic. Imagine the pain this 12-year-old will live with. I'll post the latest story, about the mom's death, from our partner at The Palm Beach Post, on the jump. My original blog post is below.
I once considered giving my son a driving lesson before he reached the legal age of 15-and-a-half and had his driver's permit.
Rather than go through a lot of hypothetical disasters my son could have rained upon our
neighborhood with his driving, I just alert you to this story in this morning's newspaper. It, and the photo here, are from our partner, the Palm Beach Post.
The dad let the 12-year-old son take the wheel, with his mom, 1-year-old sister and six-year-old brother in the back seat. The kid drove straight into a canal in Loxahatchee. His mom and siblings are in the hospital. His dad is OK, and so is he.
I greatly sympathize. It's a tragedy I cannot wrap my brain around. The impact is yet to be known. The mom was trapped in the SUV for a time span described as "between 10 and 30 minutes."
Aside from something disastrous like that happening, there's another good reason not to give kids an advance lesson in driving. Why make your child familiar with driving at an age when he is so lacking in good judgment he just might take off in your car the next time he's really angry?
For another real-life horror story, consider this one that ran in our paper not long ago. A 13-year-old autistic boy stole the family car, drove to Fort Lauderdale airport and flew across the country. His dad said he'd never driven before, but if we all taught our early-teens to drive, this would be happening all the time.
If you think the 87-year-old drivers are bad, just consider adding 13-year-olds to the mix. It's chilling.
Of course I wasn't about to tell my son that "you don't need to learn how to drive yet. Then you just might steal our car the next time you're mad at us.'' All Creed would have heard was "Steal our car the next time you're mad at us.'' So I just stick with good ol' "That's illegal.''
(Riding with a 15-and-a-half-year-old isn't that great, either. I'm getting a window into the workings of a male teen's mind. Creed thinks he has to catch up with any drivers that are ahead of him, an ambition he described, wrongly, as "keeping pace with other drivers'' and being "a harmonious driver.'')
The lesson to pick up here, I think, is to lock up the car keys until your kid is legal age, and then immediately push the kid to get a permit so he or she can get as much practice as possible before going out there alone.
This might seem strange coming from a news addict, but I think it's time to censor the news from my daughter.
This weekend's horrific tragedy in Arizona, with the congresswoman and her constituents and staff being shot, played on our televisions every second we were awake. As a reporter who covers a lot of politicians, I just couldn't get enough of this story and all its awful details. But my daughter overhead talk of the 9-year-old who was murdered.
Lily will be 9 in March. She's met a congressman. She's come along with me on an assignment or two. Naturally, she seized on it, wanting to know what happened to the girl, why she was there, how she was killed, etcetera.
Just like we as parents shield our kids from graphic movies or television shows, I think we also have to consider shielding them from news. With news reporting being geared toward coverage of the worst in our society, I think we run the danger of giving our young ones the impression this world is riskier than it really is.
I've already fielded a lot of questions from her about crime, the safety of our neighborhood, and other news-related "reporting'' she does. This time I answered Lily's questions truthfully, as I always do (do parents still lie to their kids?). But I quickly followed up by telling her that "this almost never happens. This was extremely rare. That's why there's so much coverage of it.''
She accepted that. But she came crying into our room in the middle of the night, saying she'd heard a scary noise. Related? Perhaps.
On the other side of the coin, I over-expose our 15-year-old son to news of teen-age drivers getting into car accidents. He probably thinks it happens about every minute. Maybe it does.
Sometimes the best way to get a message across to your kids is to speak to them in a method they understand: By writing it on a chalkboard.
I let my 8-year-old pick the wall
color in our kitchen, and we painted the room
over Christmas break. I added this chalkboard
area around the wall phone (yes, they still
make wall phones, but I bought the last one I think.)
The great thing is that you can do this without buying a chalkboard. You can actually purchase chalkboard paint. It's one of those discoveries I made that I feel should be shared with the world because it's so cool.
You can buy chalkboard paint in many different colors, including pink.
I've used it to paint a concrete surface in my backyard that once was a shuffleboard court. I've used it to paint a portion of a wall in my garage (that the kids use as a playroom.)
And this week I painted it on the kitchen wall around the phone. (See photo.)
Even though it's a fun option, I will use it for messages that aren't fun at all, like today's "Back to school!'' note. I scrawl a note when I'm leaving to run an errand ("B.R.B. -- Mom"). I think I could post reminders like "If you didn't make your bed, get your rear end back in your room and do it.''
And of course, the kids can use it to tell us their requests and complaints. That's what the eraser is for.
Some of you are going to just nod and smile when you read this headline:
Having a sister makes you happier.
Here's a link to the New York Times column on this subject. A study showed that sisters are the root of happiness, or something like that. There's disagreement about why, but suffice to say that this should give you ammunition in your argument with your spouse about whether having just one kid is enough. (It's not!)
I grew up with three sisters. That should make me one of the happiest people in America. And I have to say, I am smiling most of the time.
My sisters and I. If we see clothes we like, we buy three!
It doesn't matter how many friends I pick up along my journey, and how great they are; the only ones I am in constant contact with are my sisters.
We were all born within two years of each other. When my little sister was born, I was 1 and a half, my next sister was 3 and my oldest sis (who, sadly, died in 2005), was 4.
I'll never forget the first time I saw our sad new reality reflected on the big screen -- meaning it was happening in all of your homes, and not just mine: The parents in the movie Coraline ignored their daughter because they were so busy tapping away on their laptop computers.
Lily's technology-free zone.
That was the first time I'd seen it acknowledged, in a big way. But privately, in our home, we'd been doing the same thing for about a year by then.
It must be upsetting to the younger kids, whose lives were interrupted by mobile technology in the rude kind of way a new sibling comes along, sucking all the attention away from them.
My daughter Lily was born in 2002. She was able to live her toddler years without competing for my attention with a smart phone; I just relented and got one this year. I had a laptop computer back then, but before blogs became prevalent in newsrooms, I wasn't half-listening to her while writing blog posts.
Lily recently instituted a new rule in our house. She said that she and I can't use electronics after 8 p.m.
She brought me her Nintendo DSI and asked me to hold it for her, saying she was becoming addicted. When she sees me checking emails on my Blackberry, she reminds me gently, "Mom. The rule.''
It made me feel bad. It reminded me of a blog post my colleague Anne Vasquez wrote a while back, telling you that her young son was asked to fill in the blank in the sentence "My mom likes to BLANK.'' He wrote "WORK."
A note to parents of young children, from the parent of a teen-ager:
Guess what? When that bundle of hugs that is your child grows up and has a mind of his own, he will be an expert on All Things You. He will see trends in your behavior. He will see your short-comings.
He will see right through you.
We have two children. Creed is 15; Lily's only 8. Lily gives us the benefit of the doubt, in everything. Creed is our hostile historian.
I was reminded of this Saturday night, when we all went to dinner. Creed said I'm not raising Lily correctly, because she doesn't know how to eat spaghetti properly. Of course, this isn't the only parenting advice I've gotten from Creed. He gives it to me all the time.
It's a good thing to keep in mind when your kids are young. You aren't going to fool them. You really have to live the way you want them to live one day. You really do have to set a good example, every day, every decision.
Just summing it up in a speech is not going to do it. That only works when they're 8. By the time they're teens, they're paying a lot of attention to what you do, and absolutely none to what you say.
I don't know about you, but I don't want my kids spending their adult years telling people about my bad days. So I'm trying to make them all good.
If you want to be shocked and outraged, do a search online for "pregnant Barbie.''
I'm not saying the concept of a preggers Barbie doll is shocking. What is outrageous is that they don't make these dolls anymore, and if you want to buy one online, you'll have to spend at least $70.
I cannot believe that in 2010, no toy maker produces a pregnant doll! Why in the world not?
Mattel actually used to make one. It wasn't Barbie herself; it was her friend "Midge.'' There was a whole lot of controversy at the time, (2002), about it.
But you'd think we would be over that now. You'd think a mom could buy her daughter a Barbie doll -- or any kind of doll -- who is "in the family way,'' so our daughters can act out their ideas about how Ken should put a footstool under his pregnant wife's feet, clean her doll house, brush her hair and put a cozy robe on her.
Lily and I were visiting friends when she encountered her first pregnant Barbie, and Lily fell in love with it. Our friends tried to give it to her, but I said, "Oh, don't worry about it. I'll buy her one online.'' (I say this about everything.)
I've had to tell Lily since then that pregnant Barbie is too expensive. To which she replied, "then I'll ask Santa for it.'' I told her I'd make her one using half of a plastic Easter egg and some tape.
Judging from the prices out there, this is a niche market someone should grab.
I'm not saying that your teen-ager got drunk this weekend. But chances are, if your child is in the mid-teens, he or she has heard of a drink called Four Loko, and knows someone who has tried it. And maybe your own child has tried it.
If you haven't heard of Four Loko, now is a good time to read up on it.
Four Loko is a new alcohol drink, introduced two years ago. It has a very high alcohol content (12 percent!), and a lot of caffeine. It's an energy drink that gets you trashed.
Four Loko and its allure for teens has been a huge national story lately.
It's been called "blackout in a can.'' Teens have been hospitalized after guzzling it. And many are complaining that teens are the target audience of this canned drink. Well, let's see. They're grape and orange, lemonade, blue raspberry and other kid friendly flavors. The can is brightly colored, and the cost is low, $2.
A couple days ago, it was banned from being sold in Michigan.
The company denies marketing to teens, saying on its website that "Four Loko’s can colors are no brighter or more appealing than the blue, red, and green labels of established beer brands like Budweiser and Heineken.''
I carried a Halloween bucket
last night while trick-or-treating
with Lily, but I sure as heck
didn't ask anyone to give
me candy, at this age.
I heard a new word today: Halloweenager. That's a teenager who doesn't dress up for Halloween, but still shows up at your doorstep begging for candy.
I saw quite a few Halloweenagers last night, as my 8-year-old daughter and I traversed the neighborhood in the rain, trick-or-treating.
And now I have to admit something: My own son was one of them. He's 15. And when he came home from hanging out with his friends, he had a sack of candy.
"Did you dress up?'' I asked him with a scowl on my face.
"No,'' he said, sitting there in shorts and a blue T-shirt. The blue T-shirt has a Monster energy drink logo on it, which looks like slash marks from claws. "I said I was a warrior,'' he said, touching the logo.
Sigh.
I think 12 is about the oldest a trick-or-treater should be. Anyone with hairy armpits should be disqualified.
I've finally had the chance to shake my head disparagingly and utter, "kids these days.''
And what gave me that opportunity to feel like an old person, a veteran of life, a person brimming with the wisdom that only people of my generation possess, is the fact that I'm seeing and hearing about a lot of teen-agers who don't bother getting a driver's license or learner's permit.
Please tell me that when you were a teen, you got off your lazy rear and took whatever test was required, and jumped through absolutely every hoop held out, in order to get those car keys in your hands. I know that I did, even though the keys were to the ignition of a stinking station wagon.
Yet now that my son, Creed, is 15, and he went through the not-very-laborious process to get his learner's permit, I'm finding out about a lot of teens who haven't bothered. I'm hearing from lots of parents whose kids haven't shown interest.
I have no good working theory on it. No one I've talked to is quite sure, either. I'm leaning toward thinking it's because kids these days are spoiled, which is my pat answer for all their ills, and in general is accurate.
Some of the most darling photos I have of both my kids are photos with their best friends. And oftentimes, they're in swimwear. And so ... I stop myself before posting them on my Facebook page, or uploading them to YouTube.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think it's OK to post a photo of another person's child online, without their permission. Yesterday I inched a little bit off of that position, and posted a photo of my daughter with one of her best friends, but I posted it on the Facebook page of the friend's mom. I figured if she didn't want images of her daughter online, she could easily delete it.
I think that's a good compromise. I also didn't write a caption to identify either girl.
I post videos and photos of my own 8-year-old daughter all the time. (I would post photos of my 15-year-old, but he doesn't allow photography much. ) Yesterday I posted a video of Lily singing in the backseat of our car, for example. It made her feel like her song-writing was being exalted. (I especially loved her line "Don't you talk to me in that tone.'')
Even though my son, Creed, is only in 10th grade, he and I already talk quite a bit about college. He and his friends are under immense pressure, constantly reminded how hard it is to be accepted even to the state schools where he has a pre-paid tuition fund awaiting him. (I'm a Gator!)
So when I saw that the school system is hosting a college fair for parents of high-schoolers, of course it caught my eye.
Here's the news release:
The Greater Fort Lauderdale National College Fair will be held on Thursday, November 4, 2010 at the Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 - 8:30 p.m. Sponsored by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) and hosted by the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling (SACAC) and Broward County Public Schools, this event is free and open to the public.
As the process of applying to and selecting a college becomes more and more competitive and complex, students and parents need all the help and information they can get. Attending a college fair is the best way to gather information about colleges and universities. The national college fair program provides valuable resources for students and parents attempting to navigate the college-admission process.
Read the rest on the "jump'' page, including how to register ahead of time, online:
I was busy at work when my phone rang. It was Pastor Chip, from Plantation Community Church. My church.
"Now don't be offended,'' he started out. I don't know about you, but I've never had anything good come after the words "now don't be offended.'' I braced myself for an insult. I had just volunteered to teach children's church classes, so immediately I wondered if Pastor Chip was calling to gently say that I hadn't passed the background check, so to speak.
"We got a prayer request,'' he delicately went on. Now I wondered if someone had suggested my family is so dysfunctional that we needed some extra attention from God. Which is true.
"Lily filled out a prayer card,'' he said. "She said she's hungry, and there's no food.''
What a relief!
I burst out laughing.
Lily, my 8-year-old daughter, had skipped breakfast that morning, looking forward to her church donut. But then she decided she was "starving'' and she wrote her concerns on a prayer card and dropped it in the offering plate. I had seen it and thought the church deacons would read it and chuckle.
Nope. My pastor was so concerned he showed up at my house the next day, ready to fill my cupboards. I wasn't home, so he called me at work.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think if i spend about 10 bucks on a magnet, my teen-age son's driving experience will be improved exponentially. The magnet I am threatening to buy him is pictured here. It says "Student Driver.'' They're available online.
I don't want a bunch of angry New Yorkers honking at my baby if he decides to stop at a yellow light instead of racing through it. If he hesitates before making a turn at an intersection, or drives below the speed limit, I don't want him to be attacked by a road raging South Florida moron.
So I told him I'm buying a magnet that says "I am a complete idiot when it comes to driving and I have no idea what I'm doing behind the wheel,'' or something to that effect.
My husband thinks I need the same magnet on my car. If it would cause other drivers to steer clear of me, I just might use it.
Grassy plains, grazing horses, white wood fences. It almost looks like Kentucky. But it's Coconut Creek.
Tradewinds Park horse stable is on the north side of
Sample Road, west of I-95. It's directly across Sample from the
entrance to Butterfly World, which is on the south side of
Tradewinds Park.
I paid a visit last week to the horse stables at Tradewinds Park, a county government property, and came away with another option for kids' birthday parties. The county is in the birthday party package business, unbeknownst to me.
For $10 per child, with a minimum of 10 children, a maximum of 20, you can give your child a horse party.
You get a tent near the playground. Five picnic tables, a grill, two pony ride tickets per child (kids have to be 52 inches or shorter), a barn tour and party invitations.
Food costs extra. So do jumps in the bounce house.
You know you're in for a bad time at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you pull up, you see a line of people standing outside in 94 degree heat, and someone is selling Gatorade from the back of his truck.
I certainly didn't expect to have a pleasurable experience at the DMV when I took my son to get his learner's permit the other day. And I didn't. But it could have been a lot worse.
My colleague Mike Clary has a story in today's newspaper about the Broward DMV offices, the average wait times and such. I'll post it on the jump.
It's worthy to note that one of the people in his story was there with her 15-year-old son getting his permit. It only took them FIVE HOURS!
My tips: First: Do NOT go to the DMV without first getting an appointment, which you can do online, even though you might not find an available slot until weeks in the future. Click here to get a DMV appointment for you and your teen.
Having an appointment allowed Creed and I to get in the shorter line at the Lauderdale Lakes office (maybe five people, 15 or 20 minutes) and go straight into the air-conditioned office to wait. Everyone else was in a longer line, (maybe 40 people, an hour or two wait time in 94 degree heat).
Second: Have your teen complete the written tests online. There are a variety of driving schools online whose testing is accepted by the state of Florida. Your teen must take a drug and alcohol test (the Traffic Law and Substance Abuse and Education Course) which can be completed online. And then your teen must take the written driving test, also available online. For the first test, you'll receive in the mail a certificate of completion to take to the DMV. For the second test, you'll receive a waiver number, which gets you out of taking the test at the DMV.
I make my best parenting decisions when I'm facing a hypothetical situation involving someone else's child.
When it comes to my own kids, I find the biggest difficulty in parenting is making up my mind. Should I let Lily eat a snack an hour before dinner? Should I let Creed skip the family trip to the west coast and stay here with a friend? Most of the time, I just don't care. I don't care enough to feel strongly either way.
My parents handled these things with aplomb. They said no to everything, and you could tell that they passionately felt it. NO! AbsoLUTELY NOT! That must make parenting easy -- feeling that strongly about all the permissions your child aks for.
When I'm around other parents, we spend most of the time comparing notes on parenting. It's a big help. I'm thinking it'd be great to take that idea to the computer, and start Parenting by Poll Question.
I seriously thought about letting you readers make one of my parenting decisions last week. I must be missing that Parental Indignation gene. The poll after the jump contains one of my latest dilemmas.
On Friday the Thirteenth, I have an appointment at the DMV.
The purpose of my visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles is even more frightening. My son
is getting a learner's permit. To drive a car. My car. That I have to pay the insurance for. On streets where other people who have loved ones at home are driving.
News flash: Teen-age boys do not have good judgment. It's a fact that they have worse judgment than any other species with the dexterity to turn a steering wheel. Teen boys are bursting with life, driven by adventure and handicapped by a giant heap of stupidity.
As I sat in my bedroom last night working on my laptop, I received a reminder of this truism. I heard footsteps on the rooftop, and got to the sliding glass door in time to see one of my son's friends flying through the air into the swimming pool. Shortly thereafter, Creed, my 15-year-old, flew into the pool from the roof.
Do you see what I'm talking about?
"Do NOT!'' I warned them. And they burst out laughing. "Why?'' was Creed's automated response to everything that makes good sense. Later, when I gave him my sermon about the boy who slipped while jumping off the balcony into the pool and landed on the pool deck and died (I have true tragedies to go with every possible risk, thanks to working at a newspaper all my adult life), he scoffed.
"I could survive that fall with ease,'' he said, then stood up from a chair, jumped up and touched the ceiling with his finger, as proof that it isn't that high. "I could jump off the roof and do a cannon ball into the concrete and survive,'' he said.
This is the young man I'm trusting my Volvo with?
When I hand my son the keys to my car for the first time, I'll have the same mindset that I walk into airplanes with. I wear sneakers in case I have to jump out of the escape hatch, I thank God for life, and I look for the vomit bag.
I have to be honest: One reason I bought my daughter a goldfish bowl for her 8th birthday is to expose her to the cycle of life. You know -- birth, growth and the inevitable trip down the toilet pipes. And then Fish Heaven.
Thank goodness the fish are only 25 cents. We've been through quite a few. This morning, we woke up to find all three fish -- whom she had named Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy -- floating lifeless in the bowl.
I've gotten to where I don't make much ceremony about the burial. I just toss them in the toilet. But friends have told me about burying these four-for-a-dollar beings in tissue paper and boxes, or floating them in a river, on a paper plate. I'm not sure how big of a deal to make of it. I didn't want her sobbing. But it might be important to put some value on life, even if it is just a goldfish, so she doesn't go on to become a serial killer.
As you can see in the above clip from this morning's service, I did at least utter a quick prayer before the ... FLUSH!
I'm not going to go so far as to recommend this to you, but I did find a pretty good way to obtain photographs of my teen-age son, Creed.
I told you before (click here for memory refresher) that when my son advanced into his double-digit years, he stopped wanting to be photographed by me.
The photo you're looking at is a fresh attempt, in fact. I shot this one on our family vacation.
But a serendipitous thing happened recently. I clicked on Facebook to play with my friends, and lo and behold, I found myself staring at my son's wall. I had attempted to Friend him, but as of yet, I was (and still am) awaiting confirmation. So there I was, with free access to my son's Facebook account. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
I would never attempt to hack into his account, but don't we all agree that if I innocently visited the Facebook homepage and found myself on my son's wall, that I have not committed any crimes of dishonesty?
Among the things I learned were: the new word for something we might have called "lame'' or uncool is "stale.'' As in, "that is so stale.''
The other thing I learned: that my son has no issue with being photographed by his friends. So I got very busy right-clicking and saving, and now I have enough really cute photos of my son and his friends to fill a quarter of the new photo album I just bought.
It's family vacation season. I have a small tip on how to prevent your travel time from being ruined by your offspring, assuming you've already checked with grandma and she said you can't leave the kids with her.
We just returned from a trip to Colorado. We had the misfortune of flying during a bad storm, headed towards the Denver airport, which was closed temporarily because of nearby tornados,
and being subjected to an extra hour of flying time in said storm, as we traveled in a "holding pattern'' awaiting permission to land, well after midnight, during which time we alternated between getting small bites of sleep and being frightened into wakefulness by the jet shaking like a blender due to storm turbulence. That was not the worst part. The worst part is that we were sitting directly behind a child who cried the entire flight.
Hence, I dedicate this blog post to him.
Parents, do yourself -- and the passengers behind you -- a favor and purchase special travel coloring books. It's not OK to just bring along used coloring books from home, or even a new coloring book from the dollar store.
The only thing that is really going to capture your kid's interest enough to stifle some cries is a SPECIAL coloring book that is made just for traveling.
I found one such book at a gas station. It's shown in the above picture, holding my daughter's attention for hours. It is published by the map-maker, Rand McNally. There are a few others in the set, including the one above that's entitled "Are We There Yet,'' another called "The Best Travel Activity Book Ever,'' a third called "Kids' Road Atlas,'' and lastly, "Coast-to-Coast Games.'' There are other publishers of kids' travel books, of course. You can find others online. But I happened to purchase this brand.
The books go beyond coloring to include mazes and crossword puzzles, songs, and a Fun-O-Meter to rate the trip. The contents are all travel-themed, of course. One maze challenges you to "hurry and find your seat before the plane takes off!''
I've already admitted to reading my son's Facebook wall even though he refuses to "friend'' me.
But now I see that my Facebook woes are petty compared to some other parents'. As a colleague of mine said, social networking sites cause parents to behave badly, moreso than kids. True!
I'll post the story I'm talking about on the jump. Suffice to say that if your Facebook dealings result in a conviction of any sort and an Associated Press article, your Facebook problems are worse than mine.
One of my best friends from childhood is pregnant, and she asked me what I thought of the name "Prince Raffa'' for her son.
What would you have said?
I already know what happens when you give your son a strange first name. My son's first name is something you say to him if you want to tease him. We named him Fulton Creed Norman knowing that we'd call him by his middle name.
We had no idea that in a large school system like we have in Broward County, it would be impossible for teachers to call someone by the name that doesn't appear on the computer printout from the office.
If anyone were to look through my family photo albums, they'd have to conclude that I used to have a son, but he disappeared when he turned 13.
That's when he stopped allowing himself to be photographed.
There was a progression. First he stopped smiling for the camera. The last packet of school photos we ever got, back in middle school, contained a mugshot of him that looked destined for the front page of a newspaper somewhere near a headline with the word "rampage'' in it. Creed confiscated the packet.
Then he started trying to destroy the historical record of himself, if it involved photographic evidence of anything he is now embarrassed about (for example, Creed in a Cub Scout uniform). Thus, he could no longer be trusted to look through family photos without supervision.
And then he moved to where we are now: full blown photo-dodger. He throws up the hand every time I pull out the camera. The photo you're looking at now is an actual recent shot of my son, who is almost 15. He's a good looking kid but you'll just have to take my word for it.
I noticed last night that his Facebook page is full of pictures of him and his friends, photos I'd never seen. Perhaps if he confirms my friendship on Facebook, (still waiting, yes), I'll be able to fill some albums. For now I have to figure out how to coax him into a photo.
I told him that "some day you will want to look back and laugh at yourself,'' but that just wasn't a compelling argument, I guess.
There's one thing you cannot forget if you want your child to do well in school.
It's not homework, it's not getting eight hours of sleep, it's not eating a balanced breakfast.
It's remembering that Tuesday, May 4, is Teacher Appreciation Day.
That means you should send flowers, or a note of thanks, a gift certificate, extra classroom supplies, or cookies. (If your child is one who causes problems in the class, the teacher might not trust home-baked foods from you, so better to buy something packaged.)
Teaching kids is a tough task. This is the day to say thanks.
That's what my dad used to say when my sisters and I started zapping him with question after question after question: "We're not playing 50 Questions.''
My mother would cut me short after a few questions and tell me I had to save them up for the evening, when she would address them all at one time.
I have to admit, now that I'm a parent, it does get annoying answering all those questions that require the general knowledge you never did acquire.
My daughter was hitting me with all variety of questions on a recent road trip to Orlando. Instead of crying or turning the radio up so loud she couldn't be heard, I started writing them down. Here they are, in order:
"Who invented hours?'' "Can I flush one of my goldfish down the toilet?'' "When you bury a fish does it turn into stone?'' "If you roll your fingers up in the window, will your fingers break off? Does it hurt?'' "What body part would hurt the most if you broke it? The eye?'' "What's the awesomest number?'' "Are lipsynchers good people?'' "When you lipsynch will you get in trouble?'' "What's the worst thing you could do on this Earth?'' "Who are you most embarrassed of?'' "Who's your worst enemy?'' "Were dogs invented before dinosaurs?'' "If I were a singer, would you put any of my songs on your i-pod?''
The problem is, these are not rhetorical questions. They all require an answer.
So I had to laugh when a friend of mine wrote on Facebook the other day, asking other moms if it's OK to tell her kid to "just *@#$#ing Google it!''
You like to think that when you take your child to sit on Santa's lap, you aren't providing fantasy fodder for a child molester. But this is not codified into law, apparently. State legislators in Tallahassee are working right now on this issue, with bills that would make it illegal for registered sex offenders or registered sexual predators to dress up as Santa Claus on Christmas or thereabouts.
The proposal would clean up the clown ranks, as well. We all know that unlike Santa Clauses, clowns are creepy, and some of them are way too fond of children. The bill would prevent registered sex offenders from wearing a clown costume, "or other costume to appeal to children.'' It also specifically names the Easter Bunny as a costume on the banned list. The offenders also could not entertain at children's parties.
None of the above would be allowed, that is, unless a judge approved it beforehand.
The proposed law's primary purpose is to set "safety zones'' around parks, day cares, schools and other kid hangouts, where registered sex offenders cannot loiter or prowl. The House version, HB 119, passed last week. The Senate version, SB 1284, has another stop in a committee before heading to the Senate floor.
One last provision in this law: Registered criminal pedophiles no longer could give out Halloween candy. (These legislators think of everything.) If you're interested in seeing which homes in your neighborhood would be dark on Halloween, under this provision, click here to see the registered sex offenders in your vicinity. There are two in my neighborhood, and another 161 in Broward County who either absconded from registration or gave "transient'' as their address.
Similar to what's going on at the Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale, the Boynton Beach Mall is showing a photo exhibit of 40 parentless kids, from March 31 to April 12.
The Heart Gallery dispaly includes bios of these kids, who are looking for permanent homes.
A program of Children's Home Society of Florida, the Heart Gallery works with local organizations to show photographs of kids in need of adoption.
The city of Sunrise alerted me to a cool-sounding event for kids.
It's the city's Earth Day Festival on Saturday, April 10, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Here are the particulars, from the city:
This free, family-friendly event will take place at Sawgrass Sanctuary (237 North New River Circle, Sunrise 33326), a 20-acre park and environmental learning center near the junction of I-75, I-595 and the Sawgrass Expressway.
The Earth Day Festival will feature a Kids’ Korner with hands-on activities, face painting, a bungee jump, inflatables and more.
And at 11:30 a.m., nationally-known singer/songwriter Randy Kaplan will perform on the Festival’s main stage. Kaplan’s Loquat Rooftop was named one of the “Top 10 Children’s CDs of 2008” by National Public Radio (NPR).
Also at the event, a farmers’ market, food, a fashion show, crafts, and live music for adults. The first 1,000 people there get a reusable shopping bag from Whole Foods Market, and a BPA-free water bottle from the city of Sunrise utilities department.
Alert: Mother's Day is May 9. You have seven weeks to thoughtfully consider how you will honor the Mother in your life. A lot of advance notice is needed for some people, apparently.
Last year, only my daughter showed me how much she cherished my existence. My son and husband carried on as if it were any other day, which is to say, leaving a mess in the kitchen and not picking up my vibes about wanting to be worshiped.
Consequently, I went on a Mom Strike. Click here to read my post about it, from last year.
I can now report to you that the Mom Strike was incredibly successfully, and is seared in my family's memory.
My son is terrified that he will forget Mother's Day again. I was reading a piece of advertising Saturday targeted toward Mother's Day, and he froze. "Is Mother's Day coming up or something?'' This is the first time the topic's been raised since last year. I told him it's not until May.
"Isn't that when you freaked out and went crazy?'' he asked, just to be sure.
"Oh, you mean my strike? Yes,'' I replied.
One day later, I was admiring a drawing Lily made for me, and as I read aloud her cute expressions about what a great mother I am, once again Creed suffered a minor heart attack.
"Wait,'' he said, "is it Mother's Day!?''
Seriously, I had just told him the day before that Mother's Day is in May. But this was a visceral reaction, a fear that seized him before his brain could kick in.
"You got me worried,'' he said in relief when he realized.
Wow. Time to study up on psychological warfare. Whatever works!
If I left the decisions up to my daughter, she'd never play competitive sports (and she'd eat Pop Tarts at every meal).
In real life, you're not always No. 1.
Her first season of forced sports, when she was four years old, she cried every time she kicked the soccer ball. She stopped on the way from the parking lot to the soccer field, wailing that her legs hurt. And worse, she cried, "I'm sweating!''
A few years have passed, and she just completed her fourth soccer season. She's starting her second year of softball. Sports trophies line her window sill.
When basketball sign-ups came along last fall, she said she wasn't interested. I signed her up anyway. It was one of the best experiences of her little-girl life.
I learned from the years of football, soccer and baseball in my son's youth that kids need to experience being on a team, and they might not beg you to sign them up. You might have to force it on them.
They need to learn about sacrificing, and about commitment. When my now teen-age son is forced to get up for a 9 a.m. baseball practice on Saturday, he's getting a hint of adult reality.
If you read parenting articles out there, you'll find plenty of folks who shy away from competitive sports because they want their kid to always feel like a winner. I don't know what kind of idyllic life these parents must be leading, but in my world, I'm thinking I need to sign my kids up for something that will teach them about life's devastating disappointments.
Hence, I think my daughter picked up some good life lessons when her team lost almost every game last season.
Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes you get a bad call, the people on your team suck, you're tired and don't feel like playing, the coach is mean to you, someone scratches you in the face and steals the ball, and the snack parent forgets to bring treats. And the next week, you put on your uniform, and you give it your best.
If all goes well for Harmony and her mate, Abe, a baby bald eagle will hatch on Wednesday. We stood within a few feet of the majestic eagles this weekend, at Flamingo Gardens in Davie.
The not-for-profit botanical garden and animal sanctuary is a great Plan B when you get tired of taking your kids to the beach. It's in Davie, at 3750 S. Flamingo Road in southwest Broward County.
Adults, you'll probably like it, too. Who wouldn't want to stand a few feet from a bald eagle? How many times have I tried unsuccessfully in the Everglades to spot a Florida panther? Where else could I have purchased a cricket and larva embedded in candy "amber" and considered edible?
This place has snakes, ducks, turtles, talking parrots, a historic home and gorgeous native plants and towering trees. Check out my video to see some of the highlights, including the bald eagle, Harmony, flapping her wings. Read the jump to find out more about Harmony and her Abe, both injured eagles, and their attempts to become parents. Also, admission info is on the jump.
When we visited this weekend, a little girl was having her birthday party there. Not a bad idea. Also, teen-agers 16 and older can volunteer, a good way to earn some of those service hours they need to graduate.
One thing I wasn't prepared for when I became a parent was how hard it is to discipline kids if you're a person who is slow to anger.
I could never be a child abuser, because kids just don't make me that mad. That also means I'm not a great disciplinarian, because I find it difficult to care very much about things like wire hangers.
In some families, a mother who lacks that school-marm instinct is balanced out by a dad who is scary. Or vice versa. In our household, both parents are laid back.
I find myself having to fake it quite a bit, and wondering how other parents find their anger so naturally.
When I'm in a great mood, and the phone rings, and it's one of my kids' teachers saying my child is talking too much in class, I know the expectation is that I'm supposed to go from copacetic to irate in two seconds flat. I wait two seconds, but I'm still in a good mood. So I sternly say something like, "Well, there will be consequences for him when he gets home!'' And that makes the teacher happy.
I found a helpful column about the seven signs of laid-back parenting, which I'll post on the jump. It's frightening, really.
Life would be so much easier if I had a deep well of Parent Anger to tap into, like my own parents did.
I read an advice column a while back that suggested it was OK to post videos on YouTube of, say, a children's birthday party, to share with other family members and parents of the kids who attended.
Whoa!
I'm not over protective, and I do have photos of my kids on Facebook. But I don't think it's OK for an adult to post videos of anyone else's child on YouTube. And I wouldn't post pictures of someone else's child online anywhere.
Here's a story in the New York Times that addresses this point. Parents are in wide disagreement about what's OK and what's not. The mom in the story posted photos of her daughter on Flickr and they turned up on someone else's page in Brazil.
I've heard parents warn that some pervert is going to print out childrens' pictures and paste them on his ceiling, but I don't spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like that. Is it possible that he's going to find my daughter and snatch her, or just salivate over her photo unbeknownst to me?
Any parent who has raised both genders would probably back up what I'm about to say: Females should be running this planet.
What in the world is this thing?
Yes, the boys of the world have many positive attributes that aid them in their positions as leaders of most countries. But I've noticed -- and talked to many other parents who've noticed -- that girls exhibit the behaviors of a successful CEO at a very young age, while their brothers are playing X Box.
A girl might lay her school clothes out the night before, tucking socks carefully into each waiting shoe. A boy might declare, at the moment it's time to walk out the door, "I can't go to school. I don't have any socks!''
A girl might warn you weeks in advance that school pictures are coming up, so she can be sure to fill out the form and bring in the money on the required day. She might even write it on her calendar. A boy might leave his picture form crumpled in a ball at the bottom of his backpack, which he then leaves at a friend's house for a few days, and then you find it the week after Picture Day.
Does anyone out there know what I'm talking about?
I'm not bashing boys. For the most part, they're the ones telling us girls what to do in this world, and I respect their authority, (in most cases). And I feel the need to say, just for the record, that I appreciate the things my son is great at, which are many.
If my daughter grows up to be a wife and stay-at-home mom, believe me when I say that would be fine with me, if she's happy and her husband treats her with love and respect.
But I want her to know that girls can do anything.
Boys already know that about their futures. Girls might not be sure. Lily has already asked me what monetary denomination has a woman's face on it. (Lady Liberty doesn't count!) And then, of course, I had to explain what in the world a "Susan B. Anthony dollar'' was.
So I tell her, quite a bit, that she's going to be the first female president of the United States.
Or maybe, by then, I tell her, you'll be the second or third.
My Dad didn't grow up camping. He grew up in North Miami and probably wasn't introduced to camping until he joined the Army. But he bought a pop-up camper and he and my mom took me and my three sisters camping all over the state parks of Iowa.
Don't let unhappy faces fool you. Camping is fun!
As anyone who was brought up camping understands, I arrived at adulthood feeling this compulsion to buy a tent.
We've been camping a lot over the years, and those weekends are some of the most memorable we've had as a family. Raising my son in Cub Scouts, we camped all over Florida. My daughter was sleeping in a tent as an infant.
Every New Year, I think about camping. I make a resolution to get the family out in the tent at least once, maybe three or four times.
For something new this year, I forced the family to go camping on New Year's Eve. Creed being a teen-ager, we let him bring his friend, Alex, along. We found a tent site at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Key Largo. If you're looking for a campsite, just search this site, Reserve America. It's easy.
I've been talking to a few parents lately about camping. Some have camped in cabins at places that have heated pools and bounce houses. In other words, you don't have to totally rough it if your spouse wants to camp and you'd rather be at a bed-and-breakfast.
On our trip to Key Largo, we grilled steak and lobster, we had hot showers, we rented canoes. We drank champagne, the kids drank bubbly apple cider. We hiked in the light of the full moon. We even played badminton. As others were partying back home in South Florida, we were sitting at a picnic table listening to a guy play John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads'' on his guitar. I cannot think of a better way to ring in a New Year. No TV, no ball drop, no mob of drunk people. Just the family and a tent.
When Lily returned to school after the two week Christmas break, her second-grade teacher asked each child to report to the class about what they'd done during the vacation.
We'd taken Lily to Miami Seaquarium, to Jacksonville, to Port St. Lucie, to the beach at Las Olas, to the movie Avatar, and a whole lot of other things. And the camping trip was just a 24-hour deal. But when asked to sum up what she did over the break, that's what she said. "I went camping.''
Do your family a favor this year and buy a tent. It'll cost you less than one night in a hotel room.
My son said you're not supposed to have "negative'' New Year's Resolutions.
This was after I announced that my No. 1. resolution this year is to "stop keeping the house so clean.''
Did someone say the living room is messy?
I can't see it from this comfortable chair.
He did a rapid-air-intake gasp of disgust when I said it. Ever since he became a teen-ager, he's been concerned with cleanliness. Nevermind that his own bedroom is a pit, and that he probably thinks you can sanitize something by spraying a third of a can of Axe cologne on it.
"The house never has been clean!'' he said to my New Year's resolution announcement.
This was after I had cleaned the living room. And his Dad had tossed one pair of dirty socks on the floor, to mark the space as his.
"I'm just not going to drive myself crazy trying to keep the house clean,'' I explained to Creed, my 14-year-old, as I chopped vegetables and lettuce to fulfill my No. 2 resolution ("Eat more salad.'') "I'm going to accept the mess,'' I told him.
This exchange was just days after a New Year's Eve campout in Key Largo -- planned, shopped, packed and executed by me -- during which he complained bitterly that I had not brought paper plates on which to eat the lobster, steak, scallops and baked potatoes I'd brought along.
"And your top resolution,'' I advised him, "should be to pay more attention to the hard work your father and I put in to make your life better.''
He went on and on in a teen-agerish way about us not teaching his 7-year-old sister to keep her belongings in her bedroom, about the supposed fact that none of his friends' homes are as messy as ours, that even when they are in the midst of cooking dinner, his friends' kitchens are spotless, and on and on. So I gave up.
But I've already left my mark. On the refrigerator is a new magnet I bought during the Christmas break, at Miami Seaquarium (annual passes!).
I took down all the photos, the A+ spelling test, the cutesy drawings of Mommy. And on this clean slate I put up one ceramic, square magnet. It has a fake button on it, kind of like a doorbell, and it says "Press button for maid. If no one answers, Do it Yourself!''
The sad thing is, everyone in the family, including my husband, actually pushed on the fake button. They looked around the kitchen, but there was no maid. Only me. And I'm accepting the mess.
I noticed a new piggy bank on the market that I wanted to share with you. It was featured in a story in our weekend paper. It caught my eye because I've been teaching my kids about saving money, and recently opened savings accounts for them at a credit union.
Well this story has a ton of gift ideas that tie into educating your child about money. And the piggy bank is one of them. (Click here to see it.)
It's a modernized piggy bank in that it has four segments: Save, Spend, Donate and Invest. You can buy a booklet to go with it. I have to admit the description made me laugh:
Kids can color the pages while they learn about important concepts such as bartering, interest on your savings, goal-setting, smart-spending, philanthropy, long-term investing and entrepreneurship. Other activities include establishing personal savings goals, creating a spending wish list, designing a worthwhile charity, and crafting a business idea.
Ok, whatever. In our household we haven't really gotten past "Let's go spend your allowance at the Dollar Store.'' I'm not sure if my daughter is ready to design a worthwhile charity.
But the idea of teaching investment is intriguing. You can actually buy one share of stock for your kid, framed, to get them started in the stock market. Click here to see.
Then again, if the stock drops, how much fun would that be? Would this be a good opportunity to teach our children why they will be taking care of Mommy and Daddy for the rest of our lives because of the performance of our 401(k)s?
By the time I read all this I had already bought my kids an investment of sorts, anyway: scratch off tickets for the Florida Lottery. Is that so wrong?
The thought didn't strike me until my son entered high school: Why am I still waking him up every morning, like he's some kind of toddler?
And so I am alarm-training him.
It's not that waking him up was a chore. In fact, we laughed about the fact that in order to wake him up, all I had to do was touch him with one finger on his arm. And I liked greeting him in the morning, welcoming him to a new day.
But we mommies aren't going to be in the dorm room. We aren't going to be around to make sure our kids get up for work on time. At some point, we have to stop wallowing in the joy of motherhood, and teach our kids to be self-sufficient.
I bought Creed an alarm clock. It has a loud, obnoxious ring. At first, he was taken aback by the whole thing.
"What the heck?!!!?!?!'' he shouted the first time his sleep was interrupted by a blaring alarm.
But now he's getting used to it. This writer says we should be alarm-training our kids much younger, as soon as they are school age. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Another writer suggests letting your child pick out an alarm clock. There are some cute alarm clocks on the market, for children.
But I'd add this one important bit of advice: Do not teach them about the snooze button!
I am still struggling with how to teach my kids about money. I can think of only a few things that will impact children more in life than their approach to spending, saving and earning money.
Last week I worried that my kids didn't appreciate the value of money, and that without the basic human instinct known as greed, they would never move out. I was concerned because they never ask for their allowance.
One of you guys told me I was a control freak who lords money over my children, because I don't give the allowance out unless they ask for it. Click here for a memory refresher on our discussion.
But I also don't want them pursuing money like it's the most important thing in life. Something Creed said this weekend caused me to warn him: "Money is the root of all evil.'' To which he responded "And happiness.''
(Actually, the true Bible verse says that LOVE of money is the root of all evil.)
I want my kids to learn the money basics, like how to save it for something you want, how to keep an accounting of it (which so far, in 9th grade, my son has not learned in public schools), a healthy hatred for credit cards, and charitable approach to the world, meaning that some of that money must be given to others.
So I'm thinking of starting something new this year. I doubled both kids' allowances this week (and yet, neither kid asked for their allowance on Sunday!). And next I'm going to tell them that some of this new money should be budgeted for Christmas presents.
I instituted a weekly allowance program in the Wallman-Norman household years ago. So far, I've barely paid any of it out. My rule: If you don't ask, you don't get.
Some of you might be trying to decide how to handle allowance. I weighed all the options a long time ago and came up with this:
My allowance program is a set amount. Creed gets $5; he's 14. Lily gets $1; she's 7. We don't have a checklist of chores on the refrigerator. But each kid has work to do, including making their beds in the morning. If either of them asked for a raise, I'd consider it. Of course I'd add to their duties.
Theoretically, the allowance gets paid as long as neither of them did something outrageous that week. I consider it a pre-job. I get paid my salary at work, whether I wrote 20 stories or two.
But neither kid asks for the money. And my Rule No. 1 is "You have to invoice the person who owes you money. You have to ask me for your allowance.'' I consider it a lack of responsibility if they don't come ask for the money. They have to ask on Sunday, too, because that's payday for them, I've told them.
It concerns me that they don't value money. I think that might mean they've never wanted anything badly enough to save up for it, and secondly, it means I've given them too much.
I know some parents set up bank accounts for their kids and are helping them save. But I hadn't done that yet. That's my next approach. I sent the papers off this week. But where did I go wrong, that my kids don't care about money? With that kind of attitude, they might be living with mom and dad forever!
Lily and I found a cool activity in the latest Real Simple magazine. It might be the only thing in my house that Martha Stewart would want to take credit for.
It was easy, and as crafts go, quite fun.
Assuming you use old crayons that you have lying around all over the place, including all those red, blue and greens the restaurants give you to color menus with, you only have to purchase a styrofoam ball for this craft.
I'm also assuming you have some kids' paint lying around.
You buy a round styrofoam ball at the crafts store. It's about $6. (I know, overpriced. I was surprised.) Cut the bottom so it's level. Paint it. Let it dry. Stick crayons into it.
The one I show you in the photograph above isn't quite done. You're supposed to stick crayons all over the ball, but we stopped mid-way because all the rest of the crayons we had around here were broken.
It's a very cool way to store crayons, and I think it looks pretty great. If you used all new materials, I think this would make an awesome kid gift, packaged with a new coloring book.
I personally know what Ivory Soap tastes like, after saying the word "crap'' when I was about 8 years old.
My mother actually made good on what probably started out in this world as just a weird threat.
Well now I guess we have to keep the bar of soap in the soap dish. There will be no using it to "clean out'' your child's dirty mouth. Someone might consider it child abuse.
Check out this story from our sister paper, the Orlando Sentinel. The couple in question had their kids taken away, and were charged with child abuse and child neglect.
I found it kind of amusing that when I typed in "washing mouth out with soap'' into Google, the second choice was "washing mouth out with soap abuse.''
I put this in the same category with schools doing away with paddling. (Click here for my thoughts on that.)
We are raising a Spoiled Generation.
I'll bet if I search for "spanking your child,'' I'll also be offered links about "spanking your child -- ABUSE.''
These disciplinary actions certainly lose effectiveness if afterwards, the police show up and put you in jail, and your kids go eat ice cream in a foster home.
I feel like I'm holding my child's unlocked diary in my hands: I have my son's cell phone.
It was confiscated by his teacher because it vibrated in class. In Broward County public schools, the kids are allowed to carry a cell phone, but it cannot go off in class. I think it's a sound policy. If it's taken away, it will only be released to the parent, on the next school day.
The phone was taken away on Friday. That meant Creed had a phone-less weekend. I told him it was good for him.
It didn't occur to me that when I picked up his phone, I'd have access to his text messages. I could find out what this 14-year-old is up to!
But that seems awfully close to something my own parents would have done, and I am very sure I would have seen that as a distrustful, dishonest move on their part.
We see a lot of women these days who are high-performing, over-achieving Supermoms we want to strangle.
Might Mommie have accepted
wire hangers with a shrug,
if she had been on prescription drugs?
But what about the moms who are drowning in life, the under-achieving, just-getting-by moms? I had to admire the honesty of one mom-blogger, who admitted that she resorted to taking medication to avoid creating a reality sequel to Mommie Dearest.
She felt remorse after screaming at the top of her lungs at her kids, who were ruining what might have been a wonderful Hannah Montana moment. She'd bought them a Hannah CD double-pack, and the kids were arguing over which of the two CDs to listen to.
This reminded me of when my sister and I took our kids to Disney World. (Click here for memory refresher about the trip our kids might remember as "the horrible day when I didn't get the souvenir I wanted.'')
Here's a link to the mom-blog about taking drugs to be a nicer mother.
Her conclusion:
"Maybe we moms should do more yoga, cut back our responsibilities, see a therapist, exercise more, put duct tape over our mouths every day after 5 p.m. Maybe we should do anything to avoid relying on drugs to become calmer, happier people.
But unlike Hannah/Miley I only have one world. And I want to enjoy it as much as I can."
I don't think drugs are the answer, myself. I think we should all just stay away from Hannah Montana stuff.
Maybe I'm a paranoid mom, but I consider any adult male whom I've just met, who spends more than 10 minutes chatting with my young daughter, to be a pedophile.
End of story.
If I'm wrong, so be it. But if I'm right, I've helped prevent something horrible from happening.
This weekend we were at a cute waterfront Inn in Jensen Beach, and a friendly guy was hovering a little too closely to my daughter in the swimming pool. It was 9 a.m. or so, and he was already drinking a beer. At that hour, I don't even think the idea of "it's 5 o'clock somewhere'' applies.
My sister called my daughter back to the room and reminded her not to be alone with strangers.
"Dan is not a stranger!'' was her response.
After that I mentally branded Dan as a pervert, and kept her away from him. Is this fair? Maybe not. Some men like little kids, right?
My sister has a neighbor who is an older gentleman, and he's shown a lot of interest in her young son. He recently offered to babysit. I told her the guy is a pedophile. Obviously!
How do you know who is safe and who's not? For starters, in your own neighborhood you can check regularly for registered sex offenders. Click here to do so now. You can also sign up there to get an e-mail alert if a registered offender moves into your neighborhood.
I might note that there are two in my neighborhood, and another 80 in Broward County who are listed as "absconded'' or not yet registered. With photographs.
This list I found offers Eleven Ways to Spot a Pedophile. It has some interesting insights on it, such as noting that something might be amiss if an adult man decorates his home with cartoon characters.
The writer ends by saying, "Don’t look for proof that your instincts are right or wrong. Trust them. They are always right."
Read the jump page for a proposed children's book text one reader sent me, on this issue.
Until earlier this year, dinner time at our house was a free-for-all.
The rarity of our all sitting down to eat together was evident in that it even had a name: "family dinner.''
But how hard is it to start a new habit, and to have your kids thinking for the rest of their lives that we ALWAYS sat down at 7 p.m. to eat?
Pretty easy, actually. Lily is only 7. Do you think she's going to remember eating Hot Pockets in front of the television in the back bedroom? Of course not! Not if I can help it!
Creed is 14. I have four more years to create a lasting memory he can miss when he's eating Ramen noodles in the dorm. I want him to tell people about the meals his mom used to cook, and there can be no name brands (like Totino's Frozen Pizza Bites) mentioned in this discussion.
So about a month ago, I started a family dinner routine. Every night, we eat together. I am still amazed at how quickly the kids adapted to it, and how easily it became the norm.
They say you can start any habit with just a few repetitions.
It's like re-writing your family history. You take a look at what you don't like in your family schedule and operations, and you do something about it.
A lot of research has established that human memory is malleable. So if you don't like the memories you're creating for your kids, change them.
I found the Generation Gap on Sunday. It was right there on my cell phone bill, on the "data'' page. That's where it logs all the text messages sent from the cell phones in our family.
So far in a little less than a month's time, our three-phone family has sent or received 2,979 text messages. About 100 a day.
Of those, my husband is responsible for eight of them. I can lay claim to 322. And Creed, the 9th grader, has his name on 2,649 of them!
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. My kids are growing up in the 00s. (How do you even say that?)
Their mode of communication is what I'd call "conversation heart-speak.'' Remember those? Those chalky candies were so tiny, they could only fit partial sentences like "2 Sweet 2B 4Gotten'' on them. And that wasn't considered "sexting.''
I have never considered limiting my son's text messaging. I don't know any parent who does. I accept it as a way for teens to communicate, even if it's inferior to actually speaking to people.
I'm taking advantage of it, to keep track of my teen. You can be sure that some of the hundreds of texts he received were from Mom.
I think public opinion is still forming on whether texting is good or bad for teens. Some say excessive texting is linked with anxiety and sleeplessness and immaturity. But isn't being a teen linked to those things?
Now that my kids are 14 and 7, I got the Phillips head screwdriver out on Sunday and removed the child-proof latches from the bathroom cabinets.
Freedom!
But now apparently I need to apply some kind of latch to the vodka, maybe to prescription meds in the house, and quite possibly to any cigars my husband might have lying around. Why? Because as I said at the beginning, I have a 14 year old.
A few weekends ago, I was in bed reading a book (John Steinbeck's The Red Pony, about an innocent young boy and his beloved horse), when I heard an ambulance, and sirens. Sounded like they were heading our way.
They were.
A group of young teens, my son included, were at a friend's house a block down the road, and her mom wasn't home. Some of them guzzled the vodka. One of the teens passed out, several vomited. A neighbor checked on them, found the grisly scene, and called 911. The sober kids, my son among them, were told that one of their friends "might not make it.'' Three of them were taken by ambulance to the hospital.
Did they learn a lesson? I hope they did. And so did we, the parents.
A lot of the important work raising kids is done by the time your child is 14. You've built the foundation, and when your kid's a teen-ager, you find out how sturdy it is.
Is there anything you can really do to stop a teen from drinking?
Don't automatically dismiss your child's jitters about returning to school, one child psychologist warns. They might actually be suffering from bonafide anxiety.
Wendy K. Silverman, a psychologist at Florida International University’s Child Anxiety and Phobia Program (CAPP), says parents might just dismiss child anxiety and that it could mushroom into depression, severe behavioral problems and even substance abuse later in life.
And really, would you want that pinned on you? I wouldn't!
Silverman and colleague William Kurtines are in the midst of a $3.3 million study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to develop state-of-the-art techniques to diagnose and treat children with anxiety.
(If you think your kid has had anxiety for at least six months, call the Child Anxiety and Phobia Program at 305-348-1937.)
Click on the jump for Silverman's tips for getting children ready for the school year:
A big deal, to me. I was waiting for a letter from the principal welcoming me as a parent, embracing me as we work together to help my son succeed, holding my hand as we step across this threshold together, nervous yet eager.
It came in the mail Saturday, from the principal of South Plantation High School, where Creed will begin his journey to adulthoood.
"I would like to set the record straight and ease any anxiety you may have,'' it said. Yes, Mr. Principal. Tell me more!
I read on: "As you may or may not know, our school grade is a 'D.''
Oh. No, I didn't know that. Thought it was higher. Um, keep going?
"How did we become a D?'' The letter went on to explain that the lowest quartile of students didn't make enough progress in reading and writing, and that instead of going up a percent, they went down. "That's it,'' the principal wrote, like we should be comforted by the reduction in progress. Well, Creed's not in the lowest quartile, but I am quite sure the parents of struggling students would not get a warm feeling from this letter. And neither did I. I was crestfallen, actually.
I wasn't fixated on the school's grade, until I got his letter. I've always been a supporter of public schools, and I continue to be. But this is disturbing. I have friends sending kids to St. Thomas or American Heritage or even Pine Crest. Am I accepting mediocrity by allowing him to enter a school whose grade would draw a severe grounding if it showed up on his report card?
Maybe I can send a letter to colleges when he's applying, saying, "I w
