Breeched, yet unshod.




I went shopping today for back-to-school clothes for the kids. (Ouch! I thought uniforms were supposed to save money?). Passing the juniors section, I saw some of the trendy stovepipe jeans on display, and thought, oh, what the hell. I mean, I haven't eaten a carbohydrate in months. And for what, if not for the right to rehash styles from junior high?

In the dressing room mirror, I hestitated. They looked pretty good in the leg, and from what I could tell, not bad in the rear. But some things have changed since grade nine. I put in a call to my fashionista pal:

"About the new skinny jeans, I was just wondering, are there any out there that will hold in our tummies? Or, should asking that question automatically disqualify me from wearing them?"

I had to leave a message. But just as I was putting them back on the rack, I noticed all the long, blousy, tunics also on display. Long and blousy enough to drape over the low-rise waistband of a pair of skinny jeans. I chose a steely gray one.

I was feeling proudly with-it until I got home and realized I have absolutely no shoes to go with my ensemble (or anywhere to wear it, in 100 degree-plus weather, but that's beside the point). Like Edward Scissorhands, I am unfinished. What I think they need are candy-apple red pumps. Or silver pointy-toe stilletos. What I have are flip-flops. Let's not even go into the state of my feet, except to plead that I grew up in a place where you wear boots ten months of the year. Putting makeup on my toes is not something that naturally occurs to me to do.

My girlfriends try to help me, and I owe any accidental hipness factor entirely to my association with them. But really, I'm doing well if my clothes are on right side out before I leave the house. Accessorizing is beyond me. Also, I have anaphylactic sticker shock when it comes to fashion. Deep down inside, I believe I alone will be responsible for the starving of millions if I spend more than forty dollars at a time decorating myself.

So, feel free to intervene here...shoe suggestions, anyone?

filed under: money, fluffdrivel
Technorati Tags:
cheapskate, skinny jeans, postpartum abdominals, shoes

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All my chickens come home to roost.

That which I feared most about marrying a guy from Arkansas has finally come to pass.

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Slackers

My seven year-old son has figured out how to access and read the onscreen schedule for our satellite tv service. As I write this, he is sitting on the sofa, remote control in hand, scrolling through the listings, telling his five year-old brother what is coming on today at two in the afternoon, at four in the morning, at noon in the middle of next week. Thank god I discovered the "Hide XXX Titles" feature in the parental locks menu last week, or I'd be hearing, "Mom, there's a show about making sandwiches coming on next, can I watch it?"

"Sure, sure...Mommy's blogging, sweetie, now run along."

This is the same carefully considered response that has my five year old eating animal crackers for breakfast this morning.

Yesterday the mother of one of my firstborn's school pals asked me if we had kept up with the huge packet of "suggested learning activities" the kids came home with on the last day of school. I confessed I threw out everything but the reading list, and we have been hitting that pretty haphazardly. Call me old-school, but I think summer break needs to be just that, a break. I don't know what it is about that notion that freaks the culture out, but well before the activity packet came home, my mailbox was getting blitzed with offers to keep my children busy 24-7 from Memorial Day through August. There is a day camp for every interest under the sun, and they all sound great, even vital, once you've read all the way through the brochure. I would find myself wondering if I was going to be hurting my kid's shot at getting into a decent college by keeping him out of chess camp or if he would be humiliated on the soccer pitch next season because his teammates did the week-long skills intensive while he was goofing off at the pool.

The pressure intensifies after grade school begins, but it gets going long before kindergarten. It starts with whether your baby is listening to the right sort of music in utero, whether he gets the right sort of "brain-building" amino acids in his breastmilk or formula, where he is developmentally and physically on the pedatricians curve, whether or not you've got him in the right mommy-and-me play class. To a lesser or greater degree, those are all legitimate concerns. But in America every block in the pyramid of human needs is subject to commercialization, and thus is born the child development-industrial complex.

As with any other large scale capitalist venture, it requires complicity on the part of our major institutions. So the educational and healthcare systems help fuel the market by reinforcing our insecurity that Junior might get left behind. Case in point: friends of ours have a wonderful and precocious child who, although advanced verbally, happened to finish kindergarten not yet reading on his own. I don't remember that being so unusual when I was going into first grade, but the private school he was going to transfer to in the fall wigged out when they discovered it. God forbid a human variable should throw their test results off-curve. They insisted that he spend basically his entire summer in private remedial instruction getting with the Ayran program. His mom told them it was their loss.

Still, the seed of doubt had been planted. So his parents had him tested, and found a minor difference in his learning style that could be rectified with part-time tutoring. No big deal. Lucky to catch it early. That's what I say to his mom, and what she says to me, and we both know it to be true. It shouldn't be a big deal. But now that they've tripped the wire, the whole referrals mechanism has swung into motion. The reading tutor recommended some occupational therapy for handwriting. Somebody somewhere along the line made a speech therapy referral. The child in question has the most adorable lisp. "So, what, now you're not allowed to talk like a kid?" I said to his Mom when she told me.

I hope I didn't put her on the defensive with my indignation. I know she worries about what the sudden assembly of all this scaffolding communicates to her son, and at the same time, doesn't want him to go without support he may genuinely need. I have three kids, and at some point, some educator or doctor is bound to prescribe something for one of them that I don't dare refuse. Tossing out the flash cards on the first day of summer is easy, but what about a medication or a therapy? I know Moms who go all week without a break because they aren't about to capitulate to a preschool's immunization requirements. I personally think the chicken pox vaccine is a crock, but I've decided it would be more detrimental for my kids to be cooped up with me all day, everday. I haven't got the fortitude to live by my principals on that one.

I wish the scales weren't tipped so heavily, that it weren't such a David and Goliath proposition to face down the "experts", to resist the pressure to compete and compare. Was there ever a time when parents could take their doctor at his word, and not wonder if their child's prescription was written by the pharmaceutical companies? When people didn't plot their babies' milestones on an X-Y axis, and a "th" where an "s" should be wasn't cause for widespread panic? Whatever happened to, "she'll grow out of it?" When did wait-and-see become an act of negligence?

I admit, halfway through the summer I did start feeling guilty about not pushing the reading list a little harder. Maybe he'll have regressed in literacy, I irrationally supposed. Maybe I better enforce a reading time. But as with the varicella vacccine, I lacked the energy to fight about it. A week or so later, I turned off the tv and told the boys to go find something quiet to do in their room while I took a nap with the baby. I woke up an hour later, to hear my seven year old reading aloud theatrically from The King, the Mice, and the Cheese one of my own favorite childhood storybooks.

"...from then on, the king shared his cheese with the mice..." I knew his younger brother was sitting at his feet, enthralled. When you are five years old, having a big brother who can read is like being fifteen and having a big brother who can buy beer.

Go figure. The same kid who hadn't cracked a book all summer not only remembered how to read, but had taken a quantam leap, reading with a level of expression and ease he didn't have before. And I didn't have a thing to with it. It was all his own doing. Or maybe, in spite of what all the experts would have me believe, it wasn't anybody's doing. Maybe it happened while he was just being.

filed under: politicsculture, kids
Technorati Tags:
child development, the art of being, slacker parents, no child left behind, child literacy, commercialization of child development, The King, the Mice and The Cheese, summer reading list, kids summer activities, tutoring

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A House Built on Sand

This is the house that I built.
These are the crabs that live in their shells,
in the house that I built.
There is the water mister, the bath salts, the crabby bon-bons
that belong to the crabs that live in their shells
in the house that I built.
There is also the twelve dollar humidity guage
I watch all day
to measure the moisture in the tank
that belongs to the crabs
who live in shells
in the house I built.
And there are the five dollar coconut huts
and the extra shells
the dish for the salt bath
the dish for the purified water
that shelter and quench and moisten the crabs
who live in shells in the house I built.
There, on top, is the critter ball,
ostensibly
to exercise the crabs and their shells
outside of the house I built
and there also is the critter tank
I bought for 19.99 which came with a plastic palm tree
and which seemed like a deal until I got it and the first crab home
and made the gross error of looking up hermit crab care on the internet
where there is a whole culture of lonely and desperate people who live all alone with their hermit crabs
and have nothing better to do than maintain websites that lecture against keeping a hermit crab alone
in a compact and affordable critter tank which cannot hold in
uniform humidity of 70%
nor a minimum three inches of substrate
like we have now
for the crabs and their shells
who live in the house that I built.
Oh, where is the goldfish, the two-dollar goldfish,
for which we went to the store
to fill the bowl we already owned
that needed no sand, no toys, no climate control
like we bought for the crabs that stay in their shells
in the coconut huts
down in the sand
in the house that I built.

filed under: fluffdrivel, domestic, kidsTechnorati Tags:
hermit crabs, the pet store racket, sheer folly

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Gone Quiet

(or What I've Been Doing With My Summer Vacation)

...had old and new friends over for dinner and served up wicked good mojitos

...ate barbeque ribs, watermelon and ice cream on the 4th of July

...played some badminton

...took the kids to swim lessons

...spent a whole day reading a novel

...went to Memphis and met Marge Simpson's sisters, wearing Graceland t-shirts

...sat around in my pyjamas drinking coffee most mornings past nine

...bought a copy of Oprah magazine

...went out for a really expensive dinner with my husband

...wore a floppy hat

...let the kids watch too far much tv and fed them mainly cereal bars

...lost seven pounds and put all my slinkiest clothes back into circulation

...nothing really, to write home about.

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