Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Tony Who?

Mid-day Saturday, my seven year old son sat in our living room defying me.

"I'm NOT going!"

"You don't know you don't want to go," I said. "This is going to be so cool -- it's a skateboard event!"

"Mom," my seven year old daughter countered, "You think everything is cool."

I thought my twins - one of whom rides a RipStick to elementary school every day - would jump at the chance to play RIDE, Tony Hawk's new skateboard video game, even if they didn't yet know who Tony Hawk was.

My son, clad in his purple polyester soccer uniform, wouldn't budge from the couch. We had to triple-team him. My husband, our housekeeper, and I together changed all 75 pounds of him into his skateboard clothes. Finally, with a RipStick and skateboard in the trunk of my station wagon, we started the thirty minute drive to San Francisco.

The complaining continued. My twins told me the event was going to be "lame" and that they "would rather go play with the neighbors."

I countered with, "No, I think you'd rather go play with Tony Hawk." They were not swayed.

My luck changed on the 6th floor of the Mission parking garage. A dad and two teen skateboarders got out of a nearby car and rode their boards on the smooth parking lot cement toward the elevators.

Crappy Crocker

Last week I cemented my reputation as Crappy Crocker, the Domestic Not-ess of baking. It started with an email from a nice mom who (I thought) was going to bake Halloween cookies for my daughter's class. She wanted to know how she could accommodate my daughter's gluten intolerance.

How nice, I thought. That day I bought a box of sugar cookie mix so I could give her some pre-made dough. I thought she was going to make one more cookie for my daughter, in a gluten free version.

When the nice mom and I talked at school the next day, we seemed to be talking past each other. I kept offering to bring her some dough in a baggie so she could make one more cookie. This was making her exasperated. I didn't get it. Finally, she ended the conversation by saying that she would just bring me the cookie cutters and that I would be making 24 cookies. In my entire life, I have never used cookie cutters. I happen to think that cookies in their normal round shapes taste just fine. And, I had no idea that her agenda was to get me to bake an entire batch for public consumption. Gulp. That was totally unclear in her email.

At the elementary school, I'd previously suffered abusive comments about my baking.

"I just wanted to let you know," a kindergartner scolded me a couple years ago, "the top of your cupcakes was good, but the bottom reeked."

This girl waited a full five minutes until I finished an adult conversation to tell me this.

Rub a Dub Flub

How to turn your kitchen into Niagra Falls:

Turn on tub faucet like you always do. 

Add Epsom salts to calm and alkalize your body.

Add Vitamin C because you read somewhere it neutralizes chlorine.

Wait 45 minutes for your 110 gallon tub to fill.

Do other stuff, like cleaning the kitchen and answering email.

Run to the kitchen in a panic because you hear whooshing sounds.

Scream, "Oh my God!" when you see water gushing out of the ceiling lights that sit under the upstairs master tub.

Place giant pots underneath all flows.

Run upstairs to turn off the water. 

Notice that an overflowing 110 gallon tub looks like a thick sheet of water flowing onto the bathroom floor, which is already a few inches deep with water. Yes, a few inches deep, no hyperbole. Swear.

Try not to look at husband who does not have a friendly expression as the water laps his ankles and who is holding bath towels to start absorbing the mess.

Cringe when your husband says, sternly, "This is going to be $100K of damage to the house."

Ginger Rogers Moms

Do you remember the quip about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backward and in high heels? It struck me differently one day. As a mom with Lyme Disease, I realized that I appear to keep up with the dance of being an active mom, but in reality, I manage with a significant handicap. I have less time than most moms, as I go to bed early, get up late, and also nap during the day. I have a ten-year headache that slows me down mentally and physically. I have painful joints. 

I spent four and a half hours last Friday trying to make myself feel better so I could go on a boat with some friends. I napped, took a yoga class, napped again, then did some things my doctor advises would help me feel better. I hired a sitter to take care of my kids after school so I could complete these things. Then, I showed up for the boat trip and I was lively and "on." No one had any idea it had taken me that long to appear so peppy.

There are other Ginger Rogers moms out there, doing what other moms do with their own handicaps from invisible illnesses. My friend Kim who co-founded SpiroChicks - a blog about life with Lyme - is one of those moms, too. As is my friend Sarah, who has her own set of severe pain issues.

Medical Gaffes, Cancer, and Prevention

Seven years ago on a sweaty August day in Boulder, my mom's funeral took place on my birthday. She died from long term effects of radiation poisoning - high-dose radiation used in the late 1960s to treat blood cancers. It saved her life and saved me from being a two-year-old orphan. We were lucky. She enjoyed three more decades of birthdays.

Despite the fact that modern medicine saved my mom, I also resent it. In the early 1940s, medical doctors would screen a child for "enlarged thymus" before performing surgery which was known to cause sudden death in children. The theory was that a large thymus could compress the airway and suffocate the child during the procedure, so doctors would radiate the thymus to make it smaller. The real cause of death in kids getting surgery was, of course, anesthesia overdose. But, doctors were loathe to sign a death certificate stating the cause of death was iatrogenic - doctor error. Enlarged thymus was a good scapegoat. Thymus radiation was standard of care from the twenties until 1944, when it was finally recognized as bogus and abandoned.

In 1943, my mom was a child in need of surgery. I don't know what type. I do know she had her thymus radiated.

It turned out that thymus radiation was not only useless in preventing sudden death during surgery. It was also dangerous. Many of the people who had thymus radiation developed cancer in adulthood. It is linked mainly with breast cancer. In my mom, however, it manifested as a blood cancer twenty years later.

At age 24, my mom saw a doctor who gave her a death sentence: Hodgkin's Disease. Medical textbooks at the time said the disease was always fatal. She had two children under age two. Her husband, my father who was stricken by a Jack Kerouac type of wanderlust, was about to leave on a solo motorcycle trip around the country. As I said, we were almost orphaned.

Cat's in the Cradle

In my mind, I'm on a vacation from the kids, absorbed in reading on the Carmel beach while my seven year old twins dig mole crabs out of the wet sand, then transfer the squirming little beasts into a sand-filled bucket. Occasionally I glance up and marvel at how well my kids are playing together. I used to be their overgrown triplet playmate. It's a huge milestone to have personal time while they play without my help or intervention. Today, I spent the entire morning with them, but I wonder if I owe them my full attention this afternoon, too.

That parental guilt-inducing Harry Chapin song swirls in my head:

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home dad?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

OK, so it's not like I'm on a business trip, but my mental equivalent is to tune out my kids chatter more than once a day, and that makes me feel guilty, especially on a vacation I'm taking with them. At home I tune them out when working on my book or blogging. I wonder how much tuning out is too much? I never want to get to the point in the Chapin song where my kids say, "I'd like to borrow the car keys, see you later, can I have them please?"

Is My Saab Wagon a Clunker?

I remember the first time I drove my Saab station wagon, feeling like a mom before I'd even given birth to my twins. My belly, a driving hazard, barely fit behind the steering wheel. Roger Daltrey screamed from my radio speakers "Who Are You? Who? Who?" and I wondered Who am I? Am I the mom driving the station wagon?

Eight years later, I am that station wagon driving mom, but it's not mom enough for me anymore. I've now renamed it the Dirt and Dent Mobile. But, my blue wagon that drives like the sporty sedan I had before kids, is no longer big enough. I can only drive one extra child, in addition to my twins. What a huge departure from my childhood when my three siblings and I all fit in the back of our wood-paneled Country Squire wagon. Back when we had to draw imaginary lines so there would be no touching or invasion of personal space, as we sat shoulder to shoulder.

I noticed parents with minivans get stuck with a lot of carpooling since more kids fit inside. I feel like a carpooling leach, unable to reciprocate due to my three-child capacity wagon. To assuage my guilt, I've been borrowing our friend's van, a tan minivan that they outfitted with magnetic flames on the sides. The flames mock how uncool it is for them - former navy fighter pilots - to be driving such a behemoth marshmallow. I call it "Le Van des Flames," using my best French accent. I love Le Van. I love being able to drive five or six kids around!

A Recollection: Life as Mom of One Year Old Twins

Now that my twins are seven, I found myself recollecting what it was like when they were one year old. I got a clear image of walking them in the stroller to a Twilight Concert in Palo Alto and it reminded me of how far we've come: how needy the twins used to be, and how comparatively easy they are now. So, stroll along with me in a trip down memory lane:

A sunny day, Spring, 2003. I leaned into my red SUV, the only jogging stroller big enough to carry my litter, my twins, “my great big buckets of moona-fish,” as my mom said when she saw them for the first time. My mom always said, with an unapologetic broad smile, that her eccentric nicknames “just sounded right.”

A House Dress in Brown, Perhaps?

Can you hear that? The rumbling? No, it's not the bass sounds booming from my husband's subwoofer. It's my new household UPS mini-truck. I drive it from kitchen to bedroom, returning bedding to its rightful spot. Then I drive it to the garage to put a hammer back in the toolbox. And, in treaded tractor mode, I drive it to the basement to put DVDs near that subwoofer. I play in-house delivery person at least a half hour per day.

At 365 days per year, I calculate I've spent the equivalent of four and a half work weeks putting my lovable slob family's crap back where it should go. Some people say every dollar they earn through April goes to the IRS. My slob house equivalent: if I could do all the picking up at once, I'd spend every work hour through February moving objects from one place to another.

OK, so I don't really have the truck, but you can tell I'm a little pissy about this whole thing. I've taken pains to organize our house around point-of-use, but it's beyond me why I find can openers in the family room and embroidered linen hand towels - covered in grease - in the garage.

Trophy Kids

There's a new term in town: participation trophy. Apparently, it's now standard to give kids trophies for playing non-competitive team sports such as basketball and baseball. I'm talking about teams with kids so young that there is no score-keeping, no winning, no losing, and no Most Valuable Player. If your child is on the team roster, they get a trophy at the end of the season.

It struck me as odd, but as I polled other parents about it, I found out I'm in a lonely minority of parents who wants to Heisman* the whole trophy thing.

Other parents say trophies are a great memento of the season and of their teammates. They also say it makes each child feel good. True, I agree with that. And, most said as long as they only cost a few dollars, then why not?

Well, I must be next in line for Andy Rooney's job on 60 Minutes, because I'm finding myself annoyed with the whole trophy business. Here's why.

I grew up a competitive swimmer. We coveted trophies as rewards for working hard enough to win first, second, or third place. I wasn't the best swimmer. In fact, I only won backstroke trophies at the end of the season because no one else wanted to do that stroke. I did get participation ribbons when I lost, which was more often than not. Ribbons for participation in a competitive sport still strike me as fine. But, even in competitive sports, kids who competed and lost didn't get shiny 3D participation trophies.