Scream Heard Round the Block

Last day of school! Last day of school! Last day of school! Could not have come soon enough. Just in time for kids about to overload from academic pressure. Just in time for parents about to overload from serving as both chauffeurs and ATMS. Just in time for teachers about to overload from students, parents, and administrators. Just in time for national donut day. Because we need a day for that! I was waiting in the car on the street when the last bell of the day rang at my daughter's middle school. There was a scream. A collective scream. It was so long and so loud that I was afraid glass would shatter. I wanted to scream, too. Last day of school. It couldn't come soon enough. Now the pace will change. We can relax a bit. Maybe even do something silly or stupid or both. It will be a long summer, just long enough so that come the second week in August, we will be not only ready, but eager to ship the munchkins back to class. But until then...summer fun! Happy Summer!

Antisocial Media

My 12-year old daughter got mad yesterday when she discovered that an older girl she knows stopped following her on Instagram.  Outraged, she vowed that as retaliation, she was going to stop following the older girl in return.  I realized that this antisocial social media was about to turn ugly and suggested that the point was to express yourself and not worry about who wanted to "follow" you.  Both my children looked at me like I was nuts.  "It's ALL about how many followers you have, mom!"  What do I know...in my mind people follow you if you are a cult leader, have a scout troop, or are a yellow brick road.

Puppy Politics

The Los Angeles mayoral election is on Tuesday. I have yet to make a final decision based on a thorough evaluation of each candidate’s record and position on a myriad of important issues facing the city. However my opinion is being swayed by an informal survey we’ve been taking in our house and based on that, Wendy Greuel is in trouble. In our survey, we take the annoying cardstock political mailers that have been clogging up our mailbox for the last few weeks and put them on the floor by the front door before we leave for work each day. Our dog, Franny, an adorable, but amusingly destructive terrier with abandonment and anger management issues, has taken to selectively destroying the mailers. Based on what is done to each candidate’s mailer, we determine how much our dog likes or dislikes the politician and their record. Eric Garcetti was on the floor for 3 days before our dog chewed off his corners. Kevin James was shredded after a day, along with Jan Perry, who received some similar biting. Wendy Greuel was left alone for a week. We thought, based on our survey, that she was the winner until Friday afternoon when I came home to find that not only had she been shredded into hundreds of tiny little pieces, but after a careful sniff, we suspect our dog relieved herself on the mailer as well. Not a good sign. I don’t know what Wendy Greuel did to enrage my dog. I can guess that maybe it had something to do with the city trees in our neighborhood, the district Greuel used to represent. The trees were scheduled to be cut only once every 50 years. Let me repeat…EVERY 50 YEARS! But we had branches falling all the time, damaging cars, destroying lawn furniture and eventually, falling and narrowly missing my then toddler who was playing in the yard. I called Wendy Greuel’s office repeatedly to see what could be done about getting the trees trimmed but was constantly transferred from on assistant to the next. I finally went to the source, spotting a city crew working down the block on some other trees. I told the supervisor about the near miss with the city tree limb nearly taking the life of my first born and he agreed to send a few of his crew down to trim the trees on our block years before they were due for their 50 year haircut. Dogs like trees, but not ones that fall on you. Sorry Wendy, but I suspect my dog was voting with her teeth. I haven’t yet decided who I am going to vote for to be mayor of Los Angeles. But based on our canine survey, Wendy, it doesn’t look good.

Twenty Tiny Coffins

Yesterday marked one month since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. After listening to all the coverage and the comments by the parents of the twenty slain children, I asked my nine year old Natalie if she was worried about security at her school. She didn’t bother to look up from a rerun of Gravity Falls on t.v. as she waved off my question and said, “Don’t worry, mom, I think Mr. Martinez has it handled.” Mr. Martinez is her principal, and yes, I think he does. I’m glad she thinks so, too. But I wanted to find out more about what made her feel safe at school, so I brought the question up again later. She looked at me as if she thought I’d developed early Alzheimer’s and repeated her early comment about her principal, this time talking louder on the off chance I just hadn’t heard her the first time. “Yes, that’s what you said before,” wanting to reassure her that neither my hearing nor memory were defective. “But why?” She rolled her eyes. I get a lot of that at my house these days. Eye rolling and requests for money. I used to kid myself that it was only a phase that would end once they graduated college until I caught myself over the holidays doing basically the same thing to my own father, rolling my eyes at his comment and secretly hoping he'd offer to pay for the very expensive meal we'd all just consumed. But I digress. What made her feel safe? She launched into a scenario of what would happen if a “bad guy” came to her school. “My teacher, since she’s the nicest person in the world, would try to reason with the bad guy,” she said, “She’d convince him to put his weapon down." Then she went on to describe how the science teacher would throw chemicals at him, the music teacher would sing a note so high that his head would explode, and she reminded me that the maintenance man “… has a baseball bat, a signed baseball bat.” She felt the signed part was very important and surely would make a difference. She went on to describe how one of the fifth grade teachers, a woman who used to be in the military, would beat him up, and how another - whose bark often overshadows his skillful teaching – would go on one of his tirades and scare the bad guy off. Then I asked her about the front office, and one staff member with a reputation for gruffness who has to put up with more stuff from the parents than most on campus. “Oh her," Natalie said, "She’s probably packing!” I didn’t even know my kid knew the term “packing,” let alone how to use it. And on second thought, if anyone would be packing, it would probably be this woman and I wouldn’t blame her. I laughed and smiled when I watched my daughter explain with great certainty how her school staff would keep her safe, endowing them with almost superhero qualities. She trusted them, as we trust them, with her life. That’s asking a lot more of them than teaching reading, writing, and enough math to get them through to middle school. That didn’t hit me until the tragedy in Connecticut - until I saw the twenty tiny coffins of the victims. Twenty children, six educators lost. I grew up in Connecticut, in a town fairly similar and not too far from Newtown. My father still works in the schools there. Now what happened there is not far from my mind every morning when I drop my kids off at school. We entrust the teachers with the lives of our children…pro ball players get fifteen million a year, some actors get twenty million a film, teachers get…not that much…certainly not enough to justify asking them to take up arms, real or imagined, to protect our kids. Isn’t asking them to teach enough? Maybe Natalie was right, they're superhuman after all. Visit www.sandyhookpromise.org

Figures

So I decide that 2013 is the year to get healthy again. I'd already returned to doing yoga and started running every week with an athletic neighbor who'd already tackled a triathlon and was kind enough to slow down and let me run along side her for a couple of miles while she trains. Yeah, so 2013 I decide to get healthy again - like I was in my 20s, hiking and swimming and running 1/2 marathons. I decide to get healthy; my daughters decide to start a business making homemade ice cream. Now my refrigerator is filled with more heavy whipping cream than anyone should purchase at one time and ingredients like mints and chocolate bits and caramel are stacked to the ceiling of the pantry. The girls are creating ice cream flavor names like "Sassy Cinnamon" and "Heavenly Hazelnut" and tasting each batch as it comes out of the freezer. Of course, insisting that I, as the major (only) investor in their business, taste each flavor as well. The only good part about their new enterprise? It forces them to clean the dishes - a lot! Yup, I vow to get healthy, my kids turn into Ben & Jerry. Figures.

Happy New Year!

The Mayans threw a doomsday party but nobody came. A fiscal cliff was diverted. And I finally got out to see a movie which didn't feature animated characters, need to be viewed in 3D, or have a median audience age of 8. If that's how I'm ending 2012, 2013 is gonna be great. Happy New Year!

Big Brothers, Little Sisters, Goat Cheese and Why My Children Talk So Much

We were sitting at the table the other night and of course there were four different conversations going on at the same time – which is difficult to do when there are only four people (and one dog) seated at the table. But given the love of gab that we all possess, somehow we managed to make enough of a cacophony to drown out what each other was saying, and making us all talk louder to compensate. Nicole kicks me under the table, it was intended as more of a nudge, but because of her sheer excitement in sharing a story with me it turned into a full blown kick. I howled and she apologized and then launched into her story. It had something to do with her friend’s brother who played a trick on her, not Nicole, but the friend. Now sometimes, at that point, when I know I’ve heard the story before or when it is a story which will add nothing to my life and in fact take up three or four minutes that I will never get back, I put on the listening mother face and check out. I’ll think about what I want to read before I go to bed, if I’m going to leave the dishes in the sink tonight and do them in the morning, or struggle to remember if I’d crossed all the must do’s off of my to do list for the day, all while nodding my head, smiling and looking like I’m enjoying every minute of her story about the cousin’s uncle’s brother’s sister’s niece. Oh, come on, you know you’ve checked out, too, I’m just the only one stupid enough to admit it in print. Someday, when my daughters are in therapy, they will look up this blog – because you know that NOTHING you write on the internet EVER goes away – and show it to their doctors as proof of my bad mothering…but until then… So, I’m busy not listening to Nicole, when she says something that catches my attention. She says, “My friend’s brother tried to convince her that goat cheese is made out of goat feces.” Well, that stopped dinner conversation. For whatever reason, I found it incredibly funny and very big brotherish to try and convince your little sister of something like that. My brother used to do things like that to me all the time, including the time he tried to convince me I was adopted. So I found it very, very funny. David didn’t. He made a nasty expression as he tried to choke down the last of the ricotta cheese from his lasagna and Natalie, who only caught half of the conversation, misheard it and asked, “What about goat faces?” Again, more laughter. Nicole went on to explain, and now I was really listening, that her friend’s brother not only told this to his little sister, but backed up the claim by putting up a fake entry on Wikipedia explaining how you make goat cheese from goat feces...not goat faces. Oh, this was getting better and better. David shouted at Nicole, telling her that goat feces was not appropriate dinner conversation. But he said the word feces again and like a group of kindergarteners, a poop word, even a sophisticated one like feces, made us start laughing all over again. I was impressed, in the 21st century a big brother could use the internet to convince and gross out his sister…note to self, reason number 907 not to trust entry postings on Wikipedia. So I asked Nicole if the posting was still up. She wasn’t sure, but said it was under, “How to make goat cheese…” save yourself the time, I looked it up and it’s not there. His parents probably made him take it down. But probably only after they had a good laugh themselves. This came after a week of weird dinners. We must all be a little punchy, tired from all the end of year activities and eager for our summer to start. A few nights earlier, on a Sunday night, we hadn’t managed to get ourselves fed before 8:00pm and as the clock drew closer to 9, decided we better get dinner in us before it was time for breakfast. Unsatisfied with what was in the cupboard and with me temporarily on cooking strike – I was ready to cook at 7pm but nobody wanted to eat then – David decided that we should go out to eat. We arrived at the restaurant and there were only two other tables taken. We ordered and for some reason, the more water the girls drank, the funnier they thought everything was. The waiter didn’t help the situation. He kept complimenting them for their manners and humor –one of which all kids should have – if you have good manners, nobody cares if you’re funny and if you have a good sense of humor and make people laugh, they’ll put up with a little bit of bad behavior…but only a little – so with all the attention, my girls reallly decided to put on a show. They were laughing loudly, guzzling back water to the point where I made a comment about them being camels and that launched them into another conversation about another friend which I really didn’t need to hear…particularly at 9:00 at night when I still haven’t eaten. But in our house, you can’t mention camels without mentioning Nicole’s best friend, who LOVES camels. So I tuned out for a bit, wondering when the waiter was going to bring my gluten free beer, if gluten free beer would be any good, and why I even bothered to order beer of any kind since I was headed for bed in less than 30 minutes. And Nicole continued talking about camels, and her friend, and next thing I know, I’ve agreed to let her and her friend go on some camel safari in Morocco for their sweet sixteen birthday! Hell, all I got for my sweet sixteen was a watch, which broke, and a warning that you could get mono from kissing boys. But my kid, she wants an international adventure tour. Serves me right for not listening. Oh, and next time, I’ll skip the gluten free beer. BTW – I asked Nicole something the other day and she looked at me blankly and said, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening to you…just blanked you out.” So clearly, I’m NOT the only one who does it.