Chicago Moms Blog

How did we get so overscheduled?

Before I became a parent, I was never one of those people who made lofty promises about how I would eventually raise my child.  You know what I mean, the "My child will never _______" promises?  I had taught elementary school, and I knew how quickly ideals could get compromised in the face of an uncooperative child.  The way I saw it, making all kinds of unrealistic and lofty promises would just lead to feelings of disappointment and guilt down the road. 

So whenever I saw those ridiculously overscheduled kids whose harried parents were frantically shuttling them to one sports or enrichment activity after another, I never judged those parents and swore my child would be different.  I knew time was precious and after-school activities were plentiful, so overscheduling was inevitable.  I always assumed that at some point, my son's calendar would be jam-packed with activities. 

I just didn't think it would happen when he was two years old. 

Anybody want to be my business partner in a drive-thru toilet paper store?

Why don't I ever remember to buy toilet paper when I'm shopping at Target/Jewel/Walgreen's for everything else? 

Well, actually, the problem is not actually that I forget to buy toilet paper, it's that I don't want to.  The package is just too big.  And it costs like $10.95, which I don't want added to my already-huge grocery bill. 

So I don't buy toilet paper when it's convenient to do so, because who knows?  This could end up being the one week in our lives when we don't actually need to use toilet paper, and then I'd feel like such a fool for having bought it. 

And then one day when I'm totally frazzled and don't want to do one more errand ever again in my whole life, my husband says, "Shannon, we're out of toilet paper."  Which translates to, "Shannon, you need to go buy toilet paper."

Is the Internet really giving you permission to be a bad parent?

Babble runs a regular feature called "Bad Parent."  It's a series of essays in which various contributors admit to relatively minor parenting transgressions.  Such transgressions include letting kids pick out their own clothing, serving kids fast food, or taking a long time to bond with a baby.  Oh sure, there are some essays that are a little bit weirder, but overall none of these authors deserves to be reported to DCFS.

So while these parents aren't necessarily bad parents, they are honest parents.  They aren't perfect parents, and they're willing to admit it.  Which makes them ... pretty much like every other popular blogger in the parenting blogosphere.  If you're willing to admit you aren't Parent of the Year, you're going to get a gaggle of followers who can totally relate. 

But in a recent essay, Babble's own Katie Aliison Granju argued that our Internet culture of brutal parental honesty is actually giving parents permission to engage in some parenting choices that aren't all that wise or safe.  Granju recounts a situation in which she blogged about accidentally forgetting to pick up her child from the babysitter's.  As is the norm in our supportive mommyblogging culture, readers were quick to reassure Granju that her mistake was normal and she shouldn't beat herself up for it.  Still, Granju argues, her mistake was really no different from parents who accidentally leave their babies in carseats in the sweltering heat, with tragic consequences.  Should people really be so supportive of parents who make mistakes that are just a step away from the kind of mistakes that lead to tragedy?  Does reading brutally honest, supportive parenting blogs actually make you more careless by giving you permission to slack off? 

The Adults-Only Wedding

Recently I called my friend Sarah to arrange a playdate.  During the initial hi, how are you, fine, how are you? pleasantries, she revealed to me that she was angry about an e-mail she had opened just seconds before I called.  The e-mail was from a bride-to-be, RE: the adults-only guest policy at her wedding.  My friend had incorrectly assumed that her three-year-old son was invited, and had RSVPed for him to attend the wedding.  The bride was e-mailing to say that the kid was not invited. 

Shortly thereafter, in an unrelated incident, one of my Facebook "friends" used the status update box to ask people for advice on how to indicate that kids weren't invited to his wedding.  One commenter suggested that he say, "Leave your rugrats and tit-jockeys at home."  Other, slightly less crass, friends commented on the stupidity of parents who can't read the invitation envelope carefully enough to realize that only the adult members of the household are invited. 

It's Finally Here!

This past winter was my fifth in Chicago.  Each winter seems to get successively worse, though I know that can't possibly be true.  In the five years I have added home ownership, which equals shoveling, and a child, which equals stir craziness and a battle to put on winter coats.  And somewhere in there with the shoveling and the kid and the coat wars, I also developed a pretty good case of seasonal depression, which just makes the whole endeavor that much more fun. 

The thing about winter is, it throws you very few bones.  Aside from all that coziness and nesting (which get old around January 10), winter is nothing but hassles.  Getting out of your house is difficult.  Driving is difficult.  It's dark 16 hours a day.  Everything you could possibly do for fun involves a major drive, an expensive fee, and pain-in-the-ass parking.  (Well, except for the McDonald's playland, but there are only so many times you can do that before you feel like the worst parent ever.) 

But in summer?  Everything is awesome!  Recreation is as simple as throwing on flip-flops and walking out into your backyard!  You can go to the pool in your bathing suits (in my case, with a massive cover-up) and leave in your bathing suits; no major dressing and undressing effort like at the indoor pool in the winter.  You don't have to put on coats and boots and gloves and scarves just to go to the gym (or take out the trash, for that matter).  The sun is shining and everything is happy.

Laundry: A Rant

Is there any household chore that is less efficient or less satisfying than laundry?  I mean, sure, it's not the most vile task, not like cleaning toilets or scooping out the cat's litter box.  It's just that it's mind-numbing and ever-present. 

Some chores are a major pain, but there is satisfaction in having them done.  You can vacuum and then sit back and admire your clean carpet.  You can wash a pile of dishes and see your countertop again.  But when you finish a whole bunch of laundry, it doesn't matter because as you and your family are going about your daily lives, you are wearing clothes that are slowly getting dirty, thus necessitating the washing of more laundry as soon as the previous load is complete. 

Every mother I know complains about having too much laundry.  I kind of wonder if maybe our expectations for how much laundry we should have are just too low, like maybe we think we are supposed to do laundry once a week when in actuality it almost needs to be a daily chore.  Perhaps this is because we formed these expectations early in our laundry careers, at a time when our laundry loads and responsibilities were a lot lighter.  Remember college when you dragged your bag of dirty jeans and sweatshirts to the dorm laundromat every two weeks?  Or your first apartment where you trekked to the laundromat and had an entire week's laundry done in two hours? 

What I learned from going to the gym every single day in March

If I had to complete the sentence, I am good at _________, the only truthful action verb I could use would be swimming.  I mean, yeah, technically eating and sleeping are action verbs, and I'm very good at those, but in terms of actual, athletic-based action verbs, my only skill is swimming.

So, I swim. 

Mostly it's a mental health thing.  Swimming a mile is really the only thing that keeps me even remotely close to sane.  And since I typically like to stay as close to sane as possible, I set a goal to swim at the gym every single day in March.

March seemed like a perfect time for the goal.  There are no holidays in March.  It's unlikely that March will bring a massive, shut-down-the-whole-world blizzard or inhumane sub-zero temperatures.  (Yes, I swim in an indoor pool, but there are some weather conditions that don't exactly invite you to go outside with your hair wet.)  And now that I wasn't working, I had a lot more flexibility in my schedule to get to the gym. 

But still, it was hard to go to the gym every single day in March.  And as I swam in that pool, back and forth, back and forth, for what seemed like hours every single day (actually only 45 minutes), I discovered that my new goal was teaching me a lot.  Here is what I learned:

Maternity leave, motherhood, and me

I came across a British pro-breastfeeding ad that concludes by telling mothers to "speak to your midwife or health visitor" for more information about breastfeeding.  I didn't know what a "health visitor" was, so I turned to my favorite font of information, Wikipedia, which defined the British health visitor as follows:

"They work with mothers once postpartum care is handed over from the midwives, advising on feeding, care and support to both infants and parents, providing routine child development checks and have responsibility for child protection issues."

Ahh, yes, as we all learned from Michael Moore's movie Sicko, women in other developed countries get a lot better postpartum perks than we get here in the U.S.  These perks include, of course, much better paid parental leave time.  Here are a few examples of parental leave policies around the world, again from Wikipedia:

• Sweden: all working parents are entitled to 16 months paid leave per child; to encourage greater paternal involvement in child-rearing, a minimum of 2 months out of the 16 is required to be used by the "minority" parent (usually the father)
• Bulgaria: mothers are entitled to 45 days sick leave prior to due date at 100% pay, 2 years paid leave, and 1 additional year of unpaid leave; the employer is obliged to restore the mother to the same position upon return to work
• Canada: 15 weeks paid maternity leave for mothers (55% pay), plus an additional 35 weeks parental leave that can be split between parents (though this is paid for mothers and unpaid for fathers)
• France: 16 weeks maternity leave at 100% pay for mothers, 26 weeks at 100% pay for mothers having their third child; 15 days paid leave for fathers
• Denmark: 52 weeks paid paternal leave, 18 to be taken by the mother, 2 weeks by the father, the rest as they see fit
• Japan: 14 weeks paid maternity leave (60% pay)

Chicken Soup for the Facebooker's Soul: A Serious Message with a Silly Title

You can't go a week in the blogosphere without reading about somebody's recent adventure on Facebook.  This is mine. 

Let me start with some miscellaneous background facts  I have been battling serious depression for about a year now.  That wouldn't normally be the first fact I'd use to introduce myself, because there are many other more important and cheerier details about my life, but the depression thing is most relevant part of my life in terms of this blog post.  My mental health has steadily improved, but anybody who tells you that curing depression is as simple as swallowing a pill seriously doesn't want to cross paths with me. 

One lifestyle change that has helped me tremendously was my decision in October to quit my full-time job and stay home with my son.  Although this life change has been 100% positive for me, I wasn't so sure it was the right thing to do at first.  I wondered if being home full-time would actually make me more depressed.  So, like any modern woman, I admitted my angst on my Facebook profile, in a slightly watered-down, sugar-coated, I-don't-need-that-random-person-from-middle-school-to-know-I'm-on-Prozac kind of way.  I just set my Facebook status to say, "Shannon is quitting her job.  Please send good vibes." 

Whatever happened to the Great American Hobby?

I am going to begin this post by admitting that a lot of my knowledge of historical periods is based on television shows.  Oh sure, I had a formal education with books and stuff, but what do those really tell you about the day-to-day lives of our predecessors?  Television gives you hours and hours of reference material, allowing you to gain a complete understanding of what it was like to live in the particular historical time period in which a show is set. 

Yeah, yeah, I know, TV is ridiculously inaccurate.  You certainly wouldn't want somebody in the year 2050 watching Friends or Sex and the City to get an accurate picture of life around the turn of the 21st century.  But, since this is a blog post and not a dissertation, and since it helps me segue into my main point, I'm going to cite television as the main source for my argument here. 

And that argument is that people in other generations appeared to have hobbies.  I'm not talking about people in the Little House on the Prairie days, because they had to spend all their time focusing on basic survival.  And by the 1980s, Roseanne had to spend all her time trying to make ends meet, while Murphy Brown was completely focused on her career and single motherhood.  But somewhere in the middle, in, say, the Mad Men years, people had hobbies.  Friends are shown coming over to play cards.  Betty leaves her children with a sitter so she can go out and ride horses. 

People don't seem to have hobbies like that anymore.