I present to you a vintage ad for a laxative that is currently making the rounds:

I’m not kidding when I say that this conversation could well have happened between my husband and me just yesterday.

Boing Boing via Sociological Images

I was born, raised, and still live in Southern California.  Yeah, I’m one of those people, wanna make something of it? I have never lived further than a half hour from the beach.  In high school, my friends and I practically lived at the beach during the summer.

And do you know what I’ve never seen in my life until today?

People in heels on the damn beach.

Leave it to Katie Holmes to blaze that trail.

I’ve kept my mouth shut on all the things that have kept her and Suri in the press, from midnight dinners to clutching X-rated candies.  Not a word from me. 

Let Suri take her shoes off, for the love of all that is holy.  She is at the BEACH.  It was not at all hot in Southern California this weekend, so there will be no theorizing that the sand was too hot to go shoeless.  That and all the other people in the picture have no shoes. 

One of the pleasures of going to the beach is the tactile feeling of walking on sand.  Feeling it beneath and between your toes, noting how it changes texture and temperature as you get closer to the water. 

I don’t care if they were at a party in a house prior to walking down the steps onto the beach.  That is where the parent is supposed to say, “Hey honey, let’s go walk on the beach!  Take off your shoes and let’s go!” Not “Yes, let us keep our fancy schmancy shoes on in the sand where the heels will sink in and we will get sand in our shoes, which is actually pretty uncomfortable and not much fun at all.”

Sheesh.

Or maybe crazily rich people don’t allow their, or their children’s, feet to touch something as common as sand.

According to this article in the Washington Post, researchers

… found that a lack of sleep led not just to poor performance on tasks that require “innovative thinking, risk analysis, and strategic planning”—though studies have shown all those to be true—but also to increased deviant and unethical behavior in both groups. Examples included rudeness, inappropriate responses and attempts to take more money than they’d earned.

And that is why my friends who are also mothers of young children and I have decided to go ahead and form a posse.  We’re toying with the name “Bad Muthas” but someone else suggested “Bad Mamma Jammas” and I’m sure we’ll have an argument about it before the final decision.

We will go around town with our strollers, terrorizing the locals with our rude behavior.  Why, when we order something at the local Starbucks, we WILL not tip.  

Then when someone asks us about how our day is going, we will point to our “special snowflakes” and ask them how they think it is going when we have to deal with twenty pound dictators all day long.  We will then rough them up and take their wallet.

Membership in the posse will be terminated once your child starts sleeping through the night, no exceptions.

We can’t afford the chance that one of our number might act ethically due to getting enough sleep.

When you see the stroller brigade coming your way, be very afraid.

Having a child is like playing the ultimate lottery.  You have absolutely no idea what is going to happen, but you know that the odds of it being completely in your favor aren’t all that great.

When I first found out I was giving birth to a son, I despaired for a short time.  I knew nothing about little boys, and I wondered what in the world I was going to have in common with this kid. 

Of course, how stupid was that?  I blame pregnancy hormones. 

I am always surprised by the small ways my son reminds me of myself, and our love of reading is something that we share.

I’d placed a certain book in his bookcase a very long time ago, simply because I wanted him to read it at some point, and yet I didn’t want to put it somewhere I would forget when we moved a little over a year ago.  Then I sort of forgot about it.

Until I opened his door one night and found himreading this.  He had never mentioned to me that he had started reading it, and I (excited that he was finally reading it, but hoping he wouldn’t hate it) casually asked him if he liked the book.

“Oh yes, Mom!” he answered.  “I think this is so funny, I’ve already read it a couple of times now. I love Miss Wormwood the best!”

That’s my boy.

Dear Daughter,

I bought you an outfit that I thought would look cute.

It was a three piece Calvin Klein, with jeans, a shirt, and a soft, furry vest.

I squealed upon seeing the furry vest, as it seems I have a weakness for children wearing fuzzy things.  Your grandmother had bought you a different outfit with a similar vest, and people could not get enough of you in it.

So the other night when we went to the baseball game, I thought the weather was perfect for your CK ensemble, as you’d never worn it before.  It was the perfect combination of semi-warm but not too warm, and I lovingly tucked your jeans into your adorable furry little boots that matched your vest perfectly.

I thought nothing of your outfit until I saw you walking with your dad about twenty feet away from me.  That distance gave me an entirely new perspective.

Your jeans had detailing on the back pockets I hadn’t noticed before, which made me uncomfortable. And they definitely qualified as “skinny” jeans. The vest looked chic, but a little too grownup for an 18 month old.  And the worst was your boots, which looked more like Uggs than anything else.  Good lord, they weren’t supposed to look like Uggs! How did I not see the resemblance? 

And Calvin Klein? What the hell was I thinking?  They are the ones who famously stood between a teen Brooke Shields and er, nothing. 

I solemnly promise on my Complete Works of Shakespeare never to dress you like a college sorority girl again.

Until maybe you are one, but that’s at least a good eighteen years away.

Love,

Mom

Quoted from Erma Bombeck, one of my all-time favorite authors:

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

Judge me if you must, but Erma and I are on the same page.

As a child, my mother forced me to make my bed every morning.  I never saw the point, unless the covers were so out of order that you couldn’t pull them over yourself completely.  Then, I certainly saw the wisdom of straightening them out.

I confess to not being a stickler about the Munchkin making his own bed.  In fact, I don’t really remember the last time he did it.

It doesn’t help that he has an all-in-one bed, the kind with the mattress on top like a bunkbed, and drawers and a desk underneath.  I certainly can’t make it up the ladder to inspect it, or let’s just say I don’t want to make it up the ladder to inspect it, shall we.  It’s difficult to make a bed that you must sit on in order to fix the blankets, so I give him a pass.

But to be honest, even if he didn’t have a bed like that, I probably wouldn’t force him to do it all the time, only when I was feeling the need to be anal about something fairly innocuous.

Which happens more often than you would think, but still not a priority.

My track record with my own bed is pretty poor, especially since our daughter is sleeping in it as well.  Since she also naps there, it means I would have to make it twice a day and mama just does not have the time for that.

But parenting is all about picking your battles, and I’d rather save mine for the thousands of Legos on the floor.

It seems that I am going against the grain, as a whopping 88% of you re-read books!  I rarely, if ever, re-read a book.  I figure there are so many new books out there that I haven’t read yet, so why spend the time on something I’ve already done?  There are not all that many books (that I have personally already read, which of course isn’t everything!)  that I would consider worth reading twice.   However, if I’m desperate to read anything, then of course I’ll grab whatever is nearest. 

As for today, I’m curious about your cell phone habits…

Last Friday was the Munchkin’s last day of “real” school.

Yes, I did the unthinkable.  At least, based on the reactions of almost everyone around me, I did the unthinkable.

What I really did was enroll the Munchkin in a school-at-home program run by the education department in my county.  So he still uses state-approved textbooks and a state-approved curriculum, it is just that he no longer attends a public school and I am his teacher.

I want to talk about  the way everyone acted when I told them he would no longer be attending public school and instead schooling at home.  I got everything from a “Good for you” (the tiny minority) to a long and dramatic “Ooooooooooh-kaaaaay” (the vast majority).  When my husband went to pick him up early one day during his last week, the secretaries, unaware of who my husband was, were actually gossiping about it at the front desk as he walked up! 

This was not a decision made lightly.  My husband and I have actually been pondering the idea for at least two years now.  I can’t tell you how many people have such a negative view of schooling at home, which I think in large part comes from a vision of a brood of children hunched over Bible verses instead of math books, but that is a story for another time.  A large part of our putting it off was based on how much people told us that it was a horrible thing to do, both to our son and to our sanity as parents.

But then it finally came to a point where I knew the Munchkin was losing interest in school. It was a fight every morning to get him out the door.  He was bored. He’s eight!  He has no business being uninterested in learning.  I figured I could never forgive myself if there was something I could have done to reginite that love of learning he used to have and used social conventions as my excuse to not do it.  We have done it at this point in the year on purpose, as the bulk of the year is over, and if for some reason the whole thing is an unmitigated disaster, he will not have lost much in the way of curriculum. 

I found the county-run program we are enrolled in almost by accident, but now I’m pretty sure there are no such things as accidents.  If you are considering taking the leap into schooling at home, but are intimidatd by thinking you have to do it on your own, it is well worth to check if your school district or county runs their own programs.  We meet with a teacher once every three weeks to check his progress, they gave me almost a thousand dollars worth of textbooks, and they have tons of field trips (much more than regular school) as well as computer, language, and music classes!  He will still take the state standards test, and he is given a report card, just like “real” school!

He always has the option to go back to public school if he wants to.  This is not something we are mandating, but a family decision that is flexible and committed to the best outcome for all involved.

We are only in day two of schooling at home, and I am still sort of getting the hang of it, as is the Munchkin.  But suffice to say that when we complete three day’s worth of work in one hour, I can’t help but feel vindicated.