NYC Moms

A Real Life, Like on TV

My eleven-year old son has started to realize that we aren't living the kind of 'normal' life he sees on TV.

"Why don't we have a real life, like on TV?"  he'll say when I'm asking him what he wants for breakfast. And yes, he probably is aware of the irony of that question, but still, it's his belief that there's a right way for this family life to go, and his own family isn't doing it.

"What's for breakfast!" he asks, with enthusiasm, every morning as he comes downstairs.  As if the answer is going to be different from one day to the next.

"Cereal or waffles?" we answer.

Fakebook

My eleven year old son is mad at me.  He's the only one of his peers who isn't allowed to have a Facebook account.  I can handle him being annoyed with me about this, it's simple to me.  I won't let him lie about his age and claim to be thirteen.  That just seems wrong. 

It's very clear-cut.  In fact it's just about the ONLY clear-cut thing to me these days.  When he's thirteen I'll sign him up myself.  I have an account.  I have nothing against it, and can see how it could even be a useful, if not insanely hovering, way to keep track of him, see what he and his pals are talking about, and so on and so forth. 

A few months ago I sat with him to help him sign up for Facebook and it kept refusing him.  Eventually I realized it was because he was too young.  We tried to sign him up again, and I just kept looking at the birth-years it was offering.  Having him claim to be born in 1996 was just so wrong to me.

I'm not always this clear on things.  I don't have a firm stance on teeth-brushing (once a day is fine?  skip it?  no problem), movie ratings (I took him to see R-rated Kick-ass a few weeks ago and we both loved it), and we have very few limits on television--even just let him watch this (particularly brutal) season of 24. And in many ways I'm more permissive than many of these other moms.  He's been riding the subway independently since he was ten, and did I mention I took him to see Kick-ass?

Armando Galarraga--My Hero

I haven't found any Armando Galarraga tee-shirts online.  Yet.  But when I do, you can be sure I'll order a few. 

The other night my husband promised our daughter that he'd play Monopoly with her, and her older brother was coaxed, away from some obscure MLB sports channel he was watching upstairs, to come and play. 

Our youngest child was nearing her bedtime and was watching the end of Sharkboy and Lavagirl on Disney. 

When my son came downstairs to play he casually mentioned that a pitcher was on the verge of a no-hitter and asked if we could switch the Disney movie to the baseball game in progress.  It took a little bribery, but we got the girl away from Sharkboy and Lavagirl and switched over to the game on the MLB network, JUST IN TIME TO WATCH the controversial play at first base.

Daddy Loves Me This I know....

...the fight we had about my allowance, tells me so.

Okay so this one is a shocker to me.  Yesterday my 6th grader told me that he had to write a series of essays for school, answering questions like when did you realize that life isn't fair, when did you first hear about the tooth fairy, and when did you first realize your parents loved you?

The reason it's such a shocker to me is that the reason he gave for 'the first time I realized my parents loved me' is something that continues to bother me, a conflict that we had in the family about allowance and spending vs. savings.

When my husband and I first batted around the idea of allowance it was clear that we had different feelings about it.  I felt like our children need to learn how to HANDLE money--as in 'hold it in their hands'--and he felt that it should be tied completely to chores around the house, and that they should be encouraged to save it. 

When the kids are away

Last Friday night we ended up with the miracle of all three children being off at three different sleepovers. We'd planned to get a sitter and go to a friend's event, and then all of the stars lined up and we were truly childless for the entire evening, and well into the next morning. 

So we went to the friend's event and had a great time.  And then the wind blew us towards a restaurant, that was just great.  But greater than the food itself was the fact that, when I was looking at the menu, I wasn't figuring in the cost of a babysitter in some corner of my brain. I'd never realized how much I do edit the financial part of a night out, when I know we'll be handing nearly a hundred dollars to a teenager before the whole affair is over, but apparently I do that.  And on Friday night I didn't have to.  The evening was going to cost whatever that meal cost. Full stop.  

Test Prep at the Playground

My children started their three-day citywide math test today.  They had the ELA version a few weeks ago.  We are lucky that they go to a school that seriously downplays all forms of testing.  The kids go into their tests completely stress-free, and the results are slipped to us parents so casually at the end of the year that I usually forget to open up the envelope.  I honestly couldn't tell you what they got on their tests last year. 

A few weeks before the tests the teachers go over basic test-taking with the kids--and their homework, for only a handful of nights preceding the test, consists of copies of pages from previous tests, just so that they're familiar with the layout and caliber of all the papers they'll be working on at school. But that's it.

Last week I asked a friend if my daughter could go with her daughter to soccer practice.  Turned out she couldn't, because her daughter was doing extra after-hours math test prep with a tutor.  Earlier this week we texted a local mom--who takers our daughter every Monday--if we were on for this Monday and her answer was 'we'd love to but {our daughter} is going to be doing her extra math work to prepare for the test.' 

Praying for Rain

 If it would just go ahead and rain I could figure out the next few hours.  If it doesn't rain it gets very complicated.  Very quickly.  

A neighbor just asked if we could drive his daughter to soccer on Sunday.  We'd LOVE to, I responded, smiling.  But then added, in what must have seemed like a very mysterious way, if it turns out that we are driving to soccer ourselves on Sunday.  But we take everything day by day and since Sunday is five days away we really have no idea if we'll be driving.  We weren't even sure there was soccer on Sunday.  I told him we'd let him know on Saturday, probably pretty late on Saturday.  His smile faded.  Mine stayed. The day I stop smiling about all of this will be a very sad day. 

This is our new life.  This is what we get for having three children (because they were cute?  what were we thinking?)--this is what we get for allowing each one of those three children to participate, full time, in two separate sports activities every weekend.

Ordinary Teenagers vs. Ordinary Moms

I happened across Ordinary People on TV the other day.  This is a movie that *should* be able to transport me right back into the middle of my teenage years, given how much I loved it at the time.  

The whole flavor of the movie is soooo senior year in high school to me.  I had an unnatural crush on Timothy Hutton, and wanted to look like Elizabeth McGovern.  Pachelbel's Canon (my first ever classical music?) played over scenes of brisk fall leaves blowing through quiet neighborhoods and the characters were always bundled against some kind of chill. There was untimely death, attempted suicide, successful suicide, peer pressure, humiliation, therapy, young love, passion, deep-wrenching sobs, and mysteriously distant parents.  What's not to love?  

One for the Road

Last year I took my middle child to India for two weeks.  At the end of the summer I took my youngest to Guatemala for a week, and my son and I just did a long weekend in London.  There are reasons for the particular amounts of times and destinations--the India trip was arranged around visiting her good friend who'd just moved there, the Guatemala trip thing was just a need for basic childcare.  I'd gotten a grant to study there for a week and it was less expensive to bring my youngest and have her in tow than it would have been to leave her here for a whole summer week while my husband went to work. 

Traveling with just one child is a blast.  My son is eleven and even though there are many things to recommend about keeping the family together--it's true that there won't be a ton of things out there that interest both him and his six year old sister, or hold their attention for the same amount of time.  It was fun to tailor an entire four days in London to his liking.  We did all the creepy stuff (London Dungeons, Jack the Ripper walking tour, etc.) and he didn't mind the occasional adult thing--like being dragged through the Chris Ofili show at the Tate Britain.  I even let him lead the way on the Underground system--because I could.  And there's no fighting over who gets to push the buttons in the elevator, or slide the room key into the hotel door.  We moved at his pace, not the pace of his sisters.  And shared some amazing memories.

Front Row to My Family

The other day the five of us went out for a walk around the neighborhood.  It was one of the nicer days we'd had in awhile and the idea of going out for a bunch of errands in various parts of Brooklyn was appealing. Of course sometimes this simple pleasure is complicated by the fact that it can put some pretty lousy behavior on display. 

A few summers ago my youngest had a twelve block tantrum, on foot (or on stoop, if she was refusing to walk)--right in front of all the young trendy families with babies in expensive strollers--babies who weren't yet old enough to be throwing twelve-block walking tantrums--or babies that looked young enough that a crying jag wasn't necessarily going to be a window into some enormous parenting flaw.  All the lovely people eating their lovely meals outside all the lovely sidewalk cafes.  And lovely me dragging lovely her past all of them.

We've continued to struggle with her spotty behavior.  Her highs are seeming higher, but her lows (because she's six) are seeming lower.  An acquaintance of mine did her astrological chart a few years ago and said that this particular Aquarius had a pretty rich fantasy life and so real life disappointments were likely to be MUCH more disappointing for her than for the average child.  Translation:  if you've convinced yourself that you're going to go ice skating with a unicorn and then you find out that the rink is closed, it's a much bigger disappointment than if you knew you'd be skootching along the ice haltingly, falling down a zillion times, and then finding out that the rink is closed.  There's just always too far to fall for her--given her imaginative expectations.