The children are the future. Let them worry about it.

I am not worried about my children's future. There. I've said it. Sure, I worry about whether they'll find nice people to marry, or if they'll be fulfilled in their jobs, be happy in their choices. But I am not worried about the future of this world. I won't be one of those gloomy old whiners who says, "I've got a daughter! I've got a son! It's her money you're spending! It's his earth you're destroying!"

You know what? I have a son and a daughter, and if they find themselves 37 years old in a world without polar bears and social security, I expect them to figure it out. My adoptive mother used to say "You're big enough and old enough and ugly enough to handle this." Of course, she also used to say "You're free, white, and 21..." and attach the same optimistic sentiment. But we won't go there. She lived to be 92.

Both the right and the left invoke their children's futures to drive home a point, trotting out the next generation like some kind of diapered trump card guaranteed to end all disputes. "I don't want my children to live in a world without rain forests, a world of socialized medicine, a world where gays can marry, or NYC is underwater." It's a convenient argument. I may even have heard it coming out my own mouth. But guess what? It doesn't matter what kind of world you or I want them to live in. They're going to live in whatever world this one has become by the time they get around to living.

And there's nothing you can really do about it. Nor should you try. You can be responsible. You can do what's right. You can teach your children to understand your beliefs and work to make their lives great. But every generation has its own challenges and problems. Did your parents anticipate 9/11? The collapse of the mortgage industry? Internet stalkers? If they had blustered and fussed more, would those menaces have been avoided? No.

If you think you're going to fix the world for your children, forget it. The world refuses to be fixed. The good news is that we continue to deal with it, daughter after mother, son after father, since the beginning of time. We invent styrofoam, then we quit eating off it, we invent the internet, but we don't let our kids publish their phone numbers, we start wars, we pull back, we finish wars. We're big enough, old enough, and ugly enough to manage whatever the next thing is too.

Do you turn around and blame your parents for global warming? For nukes in Pakistan? For autism? Of course not -- how could they have prevented such things? The world is such a different place than it was 30 years ago, and in 30 years I'm betting it will be practically unrecognizable again. We'll be begging for our I-pods back while our children's contemporaries will be yelling that they don't want their children growing up in a world where the uploading port is wired to their brains and not their ear canals.

I think one of the reasons that the show "Mad Men" is so popular is that in watching that show we can see how far we've come. With an unflinching view of the 60s, and all the things about these people's lives that we find foreign (calling people "negros," not using car seats, slapping women's asses at work, drugging themselves through childbirth, etc) it's impossible not to wonder... what were these people worried about, for their children? What kind of a world did they not want their kids to grow up in? These were our parents. My biological mother was born in the 40s. What could she have wanted, hoped, or feared for me? What does it matter?

Protest. Work. Change. Do what you think is right, and fight for what you believe in right now. But don't drag out your children to make me feel guilty, as if they will be, 50 years from now, the helpless victims of my current whims. They'll do what they have to do, just like my kids will. They'll face problems we cannot imagine, until the debates of 2009 seem as antiquated as rules about driving a horse in Manhattan. Let the future take care of the future -- convince me that what you want me to believe is good for you today.

Six Ways to Stay Scintillating In Person When You've Already Twittered It All

You've been there, haven't you?

You: Listen, I had an incredible idea!
Her: Yeah, I know. I read your tweet about it.

You: I found the most amazing shoes! They were---
Her: Yeah, I saw a picture on your Tumblr.

You: You'll never guess what happened -- he's taking us to Italy!
Her: Yeah, I read your blog.

It's hard to stay scintillating in person, when you're very busy being scintillating online. Don't get me wrong. I know how important it is to document and express all the minutae of my existence on the internet. The many upsides to Twitter and Facebook are too numerous and obvious to mention. However, when I get to the park and the kids are playing and I just want to have girl talk with the other mommies, it's like they've been reading my diary. Whatever it is, they already know, because I've put the picture on Facebook, the link on Twitter, the anguish on my blog, or maybe I've Tumblred the whole conversation. What's a girl to do? Besides yawn and talk about the weather?



So how do you keep yourself relevant in an actual conversation, while simultaneously microblogging your entire life? Here are six ideas:

1. Go lower. There are always things to talk about in person that you can't talk about on Facebook. You know what they are -- utilize them. Yeah, you may need to fall back on gossip, unkind remarks, rumors, and unsubstantiated theories. When all your girls are on Facebook, your regular safe mom topics may be met with a chorus of "Oh yeah, I saw that." Get past it! No small talk -- whatever! The good news is that Facebook and Twitter themselves are sources of a brand new kind of gossip and bitter whispering behind the hand. "I saw her playing Lexulous when she was supposed to be taking the kids to the Planetarium!" "She flaked on our party because she was sick, but then she was tweeting all over the place, drunk as a goat!" Forego the pleasantries and mention the unmentionables. Pleasantries are over. Save them for the status updates.

2. Be more mysterious online. Try tweeting something like, "OMG! HELP!!!" or Facebooking an unexplained picture of a llama. Try "Whee!!! It's finally here!!!!!" or link to a book about stripping your way through college without explanation. The good news is that when you run into your buddies at the grocery store, they're going to be very eager to chat with you. The bad news is, you're going to have to come up with something to tell them.

3. Find new friends. It wasn't always this way for us, remember? Remember the acronym IRL? It meant "in real life." The world of the internet used to be a separate life. You could gambol about saying anything you pleased because only a very few people were listening, and you were unlikely to run into those few at the gym. Even after the advent of blogging, real life friends weren't always up on every bounce and jiggle of life online, and before Twitter and Facebook, news took at least a few hours to disseminate. Now it's immediate. If it happens, they know, and they're all online. Right now. Gathering info. So look: From now on, your current friends are newly categorized as your online friends, and your new friends are out there waiting for you. They don't have laptops, they don't understand their phones, and they think Twitter is a sound birds make. They want to hear all about what your kids did today.

4. Stop Twittering and Facebooking every damn thing in your life. Okay, I'm not saying stop! Because that's crazy, right?! Totally. I would never say that. I'm just saying, a little withholding. A tiny bit, in the interest of keeping it interesting. Withhold like 30%, and see where that gets you. Try not telling us what you're making for dinner. Maybe next week you could extend to privatizing the lunch menu. Just give us details from one child's diaper -- keep the other's excretions a mystery to be revealed only in person. If you find yourself about to spill the big news just before Girls Night Out, and you find yourself about to reduce to 140 characters a story which in person could be stretched out over a whole martini, withhold! You don't have to tell us now. You can tell us in a couple of hours. We promise to listen just as much as the whole internet would have, only with laughter you can hear.

5. Give up on "real life" interactions. Let's face it, the line between "real life" and the internet is gone. Why worry? When you and your friends get together, use the time to check each other's knitting progress, enjoy each other's children, and eat. Talking was overrated. All that hee=hee and yak-yak. Much more efficient to use the internet for that, and use the coffee shop for consuming pastries and smelling each other's shampoo. Zip it. If they want to know what's going on with you, they'll read your blog. You need the traffic. If they want to know how you feel, they'll check the results of your "What flavor of bouillon are you?" quiz on Facebook.

6. Be more, do more, say more. Hey, you're awesome. You can keep up with at least eleven more ways of expressing yourself and still have interesting things to say. If you fit it your entire brain into your Tumblr this afternoon, then think of something else, something new, something more, and put that in there tonight. There's not a finite measure of you, after all; there's plenty to go around. You could Twitter, Facebook, blog, bookmark, and still have something to say at the park, regardless of how dull a day it's been. You read books, don't you? Okay, well, you watch TV -- say something fresh, regardless. You owe it to your friends. They have the patience to listen to you, in all your various modes of blathering. Sharpen up. Rise to the new media. Adapt.

As for me, I need to work on 4. I think I'll start by withholding my thoughts on applesauce, and maybe my plans for 2013. The rest is essential info and I have to get it out there right away. In fact, I need to go Tweet about this blog post right now. See you at the park!

Trip to Humandales

Ahno takes her Chihuahuas to a groomer to get bathed and manicured. We take Leroy there too, occasionally, if he's gotten unmanageably vile in the back yard or if he's got something unmentionable to be done to his hind end. Something that involves glands and squeezing. You know what I'm talking about. It's one of those things I will happily pay someone to do for him. The grooming place we like is called Groomingdales.

Ahno also goes to a nail salon occasionally for a mani-pedi, and the kids call this place Humandales.

For a while, Sadie has longed to go to Humandales to get her nails done. I don't know if she had a clear idea what would actually happen there, but she was deeply intrigued by the concept, and drawn to the experience like a thirsty gazelle to a desert oasis. That is to say: powerfully.

So, recently since the old techniques involving waving rusty saws and shouting broad threats of public school were wearing a little thin, and the children were dragging their heels on school stuff, I instituted a new motivational technique. I am always looking for ways to shift the accountability onto the children, so that instead of me saying "These are the things we need to get done today!" I can now say "If you want your star for the day, you must do X, Y, Z. Do these things, or don't do them, at your leisure, but until the star is on the chart, there is no electronic device in the house that will function."

As an added bonus reward (since I've recently been enlightened on the point that using rewards with children is pretty much just as awful as using the rusty saw, I want to really ass it up to the max) I told them that if they have five stars for the week, then on the weekend they will experience something special. Maybe a movie, maybe bowling, maybe... a manicure. So a couple weeks ago Benny had not managed to accumulate five stars, but Sadie had, so we went to Humandales and had a manicure together.

Here are some pictures:


Picking a color.


Many choices.


Waiting her turn.


Clutching her colors.

During her manicure and pedicure (they did a child-friendly version that didn't involve cuticle cutting or anything, just lotion and polish) she was almost completely silent. She answered questions the lady put to her, but only minimally. Everyone in the shop was amazed and impressed at how un-wiggly she was, how much she was concentrating. I was almost worried she wasn't enjoying it, that it was scaring her or disappointing her somehow. Afterward she was exhausted, and almost went to sleep while waiting for her toes to dry.





I asked her, when we were leaving, "Baby, did you like it?"

She clutched my neck as I put her in the carseat and whispered, urgently, "I loved it."

I realized then that she'd had a profound pink-related experience, and that it *did* take a lot out of her! She enjoyed her manicure to the max, and was very sad when we had to take off the polish a week later for ballet pictures. I can see that this is the beginning of a lifelong habit. And more importantly, it is a very powerful bribe!

For the benefit of locals, I went to Chic Nails on 22nd. Very cheery, fun, low impact procedure for the tiny person, and at $10 for fingers and toes, who can argue with the price? My manicure involved the full treatment with cutting and slicing and scraping and all of that, and was only $13. I recommend. Do not expect aromatherapy and candles and murals on the wall and potted palms. However, they did take care of my little princess gloriously.

Homeschooling the Girly Girl

As Sadie starts her preschool years, I'm figuring out how different her little girl brain really is from her brother's. Today Benny and Dan went off to see a movie together, to have "boy time," or as Benny correctly specifies, "male time." Sadie and I stayed home for girl time (yes, "female time," thank you Benny). We played Barbies. We painted our nails. First hot pink, then sparkles. It was fun, and, as it turned out, educational. As usual, I learned as much as she did.

Sadie is a girl. A girly girl. Oh yes. And homeschooling a girly girl is a little different from homeschooling a math-brained, mechanically-minded, bouncing, fidgeting boy. In some ways, it's a lot easier, but you have to adjust. You have to accommodate. You can't apply the same principles.

For example, today while the boys were gone and I decided to get out the chunky big cuisenaire rods and have a nice fadoodle with them on the floor with Sadie. Might be nice to play math without Benny around to offer the answers and arrangements before Sadie can think of them.

I showed her the white block and said, "This is ONE, Sadie, this is ONE. Can you find the one that is two?"

And she found the red one. Marvelous. I showed her how two white ones line up on one red one, and then asked her to find the three. Could she find the three?

Instead she picked up the three pink/purple ones and said, "But I want these girl ones instead. I don't want the green one."

"Is the green one three, Sadie?"

"I just want these girl ones. They want to go for a ride in the Barbie car!"

"Sadie, can you find the three?"

After a few more times around the block, she was getting exasperated. "Mom, I don't want to LEARN these. I just want to PWAY them."

Okay, so the cuisenaire rods went for a ride in the Barbie car and the 8 rods were truculent and didn't want to put their seatbelts on and the 4 rods were girls, and then they all had a birthday part for one of the red ones. There's no fighting it. There is only joining it!

Here's another example: I've learned that Sadie is completely unmoved to practice writing letters with a marker and lined paper. But if the marker is Cinderella, and the paper is a dance floor, and the letters are dance moves, she is extremely motivated, especially if marker-Cinderella talks to her in a Disney princess voice and even more so if there is another prince marker whose dance moves she can copy. Are you getting me? Are you feeling me?

One more example: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Variation 1 was "Mississippi Hot Dog" when I was little. It was "Tuka Tuka Stop Stop" for Benny. For Sadie it's "Sparkle Glitter Princess." Are the dots all starting to connect here?

So here's how our nail-painting became our preschool lesson for the day:

1. Fine motor skills. Paint your nails. Paint Mommy's nails. Try to stay on the nail, but if you don't, celebrate the joy of life anyway.
2. Math. How many have you painted? How many are left? How many fingers does Mommy have? How many on each hand? How many together? If I have five here and you've painted three, how many more are there to paint?
3. Anatomy. Can dolphins wear nail polish? Can polar bears? How many toes does Leroy (the Boston Terrier) have? How many toes does Mommy have? How many toes does *everybody* have?

And here's what Sadie had to say:

"Mommy, I love pink. And I love sparkle."
"I know you do, baby. And I love you."
"I love you too. And I love Benny, and Daddy. I love all you guys."
"You're such a nice girl, Sadie."
"I know, Mommy."

As a bonus, I have a *very* interesting manicure to take to church tomorrow.

Imagination in the Junkyard

Anthony Esolen at Beliefnet has written a blog post about how kids don't hang out with adults doing proper jobs anymore, and therefore their imaginations are being stifled. We don't let our sons go down to the junkyard, we don't let our girls watch us roll out the crust for our apple pies. Therefore, the past is good, the present is bad, and the world is going to hell.

Here's an excerpt:

It used to be common for boys (I'm thinking of junkyards here, after all) to
hang around grown men and pester them, or to overhear their conversations about
bauxite, platinum, catalytic converters, drive trains, and cheap labor from
Someplace Else. That was bound not only to provide them with a fund of
general knowledge, but to stretch their imaginations -- as was, likewise, their
nearness to fascinating machines, like pile drivers or backhoes. People in
general were proud of the cleverness of human industry: old-time postcards would
include photos of coal-mines, fisheries, sawmills, lumber camps, and
quarries. You understood that without such places, as "ugly" as some snobs
might consider them, you don't have that city with the bright lights and the
fashionable people dining at Toots Shor's.

I'm not sure what has happened to that fascination with the human mastery over inert and difficult matter. I am sure that school teaches next to nothing about it;
if it does mention it, it is with a faint sniff of contempt or suspicion.
In any case, the boys (I'm talking about junkyards, again; you could say
analogous things about what girls used to learn by hanging around women doing
their work) who are not at the junkyards of the world, who are not hanging
around men-who-know-things, are having their imaginations stultified. Of
that I am sure.

I would guess that as much unfair scorn is directed at junkyards by school teachers... at least that same amount of scorn is probably directed the other way. Unfair or not.

It's as damaging for a bookish child with no mechanical tendencies to be ridiculed by an adult who doesn't value higher education as it would be for an athlete or someone who works with his hands to be scorned by an adult with a Ph.D. in philosophy. It goes both ways -- small-minded people on both ends of the spectrum devalue the people on the other end, to protect their own choices.



I have trouble buying the romantic (or defeatist?) notion that the past was so much better, cleaner, brighter, purer, and more interesting than the present. I probably wouldn't let my 7 yo go hang out at the junkyard with a bunch of unfamiliar men, no. That might be a good thing, though. Back in the good old days, there were plenty of rotten things going on that didn't involve good old fashioned values and honesty and love. The comment thread for Mr. Esolen's post was full of people saying the same things they always say: The playgrounds are too safe, the language is too disinfected, the literature is too nice, the kids aren't allowed to play with guns, TV is bad, we need more bloodsports, and all those high-falutin' jerky intellectual environmentalist tree-lovers need to learn to respect and appreciate people who are different from them. Yeeeeahhh.... Good. There was even a comment (my favorite!) about the monstrous parents who put tiny violins into their children's hands and expect them to play them. The horror!



I do get what he's saying, in a way. "Box of greasy junk" would be at the top of my son's Christmas wish list, if he knew it existed. But even without having a mentor with grease under his fingernails, he manages to fixate on inventing things, he manages to tinker with tools, and wonder about motors. His mother has a graduate degree and his father is a software developer, and still he likes Legos. Having been cruelly kept from the junkyard all his life, he still has an imagination you have to hack through with a machete to get to his consciousness, when you want him to eat dinner or avoid walking into traffic.

I think I'll skip the junkyard. He can read about it in a book.

The Power of Small Mammals

I really want Sadie to give up her pacifier.

I want her to be able to talk clearly, I want her to comfort herself with her own good brain, I want her teeth to be straight.

What I don't care about is when nosy people look at us with squiggly eyes when we're out and about and she is slurping away on it. I actually don't care about that. If the only factor were public scorn, I would let her take it to college. I'd even buy her a new (sparkly!) one for the occasion. She's small for her age. She might be able to pull of a binky at age 17. But for some reason, as she approaches the age of 4, I feel some kind of natural reasoning yanking apart my steadfast denial, so that I have to address the fact: she is too old for a binky.

Last week, this was the bribe:



"You can't take your binky to princess camp."

This week, I'm trying rabbit, rats, and guinea pigs. We went to Animal Jungle, the best pet store on earth. She petted a rabbit, she held a guinea pig, she ogled a rat, and at the end of the experience, she was claiming boldly that she wanted to get rid of her binkies so she could have a rabbit.

"Sadie, if you can do without your binky for seven days, Mommy will bring you back to Animal Jungle and you can pick out whichever rabbit you want."

Deal. Sealed in cedar shavings.

However, after lunch, there was a reversal.



"Mommy, I weed my binky!"

"Sadie, don't you want to give your binkies to the Binky Fairy so she can bring you a rabbit?"

"No, I don't WANT a wabbit, I weed my BINKY!"

What could I do? I gave her the binky. The sparkly pink binky. Now what can I try next?

Too Many Toys?

Too many toys? Kid can't keep his room clean because there's just too much stuff? Here are a few possible solutions.

1. Donate. If you can give a convincing enough speech about privilege and want, you can have your child cheerfully filling up boxes with his discarded playthings to give to Good Will. If, however, your child really feels that he can't let go of his possessions of his own accord, remember that he has to sleep sometime! When the child is asleep, away, or looking in the other direction, choose toys to get rid of that you know are not favorites, that will not be missed. Use your mommy discernment. As long as you know you are choosing things that are truly outgrown or unloved, it won't backfire, but keep the box of toys to donate in the garage for a week or two just to make sure you didn't accidentally scoop up something he can't live without.

2. Rotate. Get a big box that will fit lots of toys, and put a big pile of toys inside to wait their turn in the garage. Explain the rotation system to the child, so that she understands the stored toys will not be gone forever, but can be retrieved (if she wants) on a certain date, and put the date on a calendar, even, if she's worried about forgetting about them. Let her fill up the box, then give a reward (like making cookies, playing a game) when the box is full and in the garage.

3. Delegate. If all the toys have been gotten rid of or rotated out into the garage, and the room still isn't as clean as you'd like, try this. Put her in charge of cleaning up her space. The realism of this enterprise depends on the kid's age and maturity. We put our seven-year-old son in charge of cleaning his room recently, and he does a reasonable job of it. Set a time limit for your child to finish, and then at the end of the time, go in with a garbage bag and pick up whatever isn't put away. Tell her that next time (next Friday or Sunday or whatever day is clean-up day) you will put everything back on the floor from the garbage bag and she can try again.

Now I personally do not care if the kid's room is clean on a regular basis. I don't care if he leaves out his legos and dominoes and all his castles and rolls around in his books and blocks and whatnot. The only time Benny has to clean is every two weeks before the cleaning lady comes, and the garbage bag trick works nicely to get this accomplished. I'm not sure if everything gets put away exactly properly, and I don't really care, as long as the floor is empty and the cleaning cleaning ladies can get at the surfaces. He does have a place for everything, but everything isn't always in its place. I'm not a mother who demands the matchbox cars be neatly stacked in the box labelled "Cars!" or anything. But I do want him to learn to keep his room comfortable, so he can see what he has, and find what he needs.

His three-year-old sister, on the other hand, has never picked up a toy in her life. Oops... ;D