I've inadvertently proven that my family has no compassion. The question is: Did I create this, or is this a naturally occurring phenomenon?
So there I was, minding my own business, eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen when Boy #3 came up to me asking for something to eat. The something in question was peanut butter, and he signified his desires for peanut butter by bringing me the jar and handing it to me, saying "I want peanut butter." But as he was holding it, it slipped out of his hands and crashed to the floor. Fortunately for the floor, my foot was there, blocking the way, otherwise there would be a huge gouge in the wood. I don't think I've mentioned that this was a brand new jar from Costco, and therefore contained roughly 40 gallons of peanut butter. And it was Extra Crunchy.
Instead of a gouge in our wood floor, there ends up a gouge in my foot. The jar landed right on the joint where my big toe meets my foot, where there's normally a bump except that my feet are so puffy that you'd be hard pressed to find any bones there at all. There must be some nerves there or something, because the pain immediately shot through my entire foot, and I screamed and dropped my bowl of cereal on the counter.
Here's where the story diverges. I have one picture in my mind of how it should have gone, and another of how it actually went. I'll show you the way it should have gone first:
I scream, and drop my bowl of cereal on the counter. Since the back door is wide open, I run (hobble) into the living room so that the neighbors don't have to listen to me crying. I try not to aspirate the bite of cereal still in my mouth as I start crying into the couch cushion. That's how bad it hurts - I rarely hurt myself badly enough to cry about it. The kids, who are coloring at the table, ask if I'm okay. DH, who was on his way to take a shower, follows me into the living room, asks me how I'm doing. I say, "Horrible" and show him the giant lump that is now forming on my foot, bruised and blackened.
He goes and gets me a bag of frozen vegetables to put on my foot (by my request, even in my daydream I don't think he'd do that on his own) and deals with the kids for a couple of minutes so I can recover my composure. Then he goes and takes his shower, and I hobble into the kitchen and find that my spilled cereal was cleaned up, too. None of it makes the pain any better, but it was comforting.
Okay, that's the end of the "fake" story. Notice that I didn't embellish this at all, it's not like I was expecting DH to fawn over me, and carry my up to my room. Nor did I think that the kids would start coloring pictures that say "Get Well, Mom" or "I Love You Despite the Giant Growth on Your Foot." No, I believe I was fairly realistic about this. Here's how it really went:
I scream, and drop my bowl of cereal on the counter. Since the back door is wide open, I run (hobble) into the living room so that the neighbors don't have to listen to me crying. I try not to aspirate the bite of cereal still in my mouth as I start crying into the couch cushion. I hear a sound from downstairs - it's the shower turning on. The next sound I hear is Boy #2 asking "Can someone cut this apple for me?" Boy #3 has abandoned his peanut butter quest and instead gets a bag of Cocoa Krispies out of the pantry and pours it on the floor so that he can eat it, flake by flake. He eventually grabs a handful and brings it to the table so he can continue eating while he colors.
Boy #2 asks again if someone will cut his apple, and I say "No!" Boy #1 attempts to cut the apple for him, gets about halfway and gives up. I have been crying this whole time and finally get off the couch and see if, possibly, burglars have tied my family to chairs and that is why no one is coming to see if I need help. Nope, all free and, apparently, not suddenly struck deaf either, so theoretically they could hear me crying in the next room. I crunch through the Cocoa Krispies on the floor and go over to the freezer and find a half-full bag of diced green peppers. On my way back to the couch I say, "Do you guys have no compassion at all? Could you not even ask me if I'm okay?"
Boy #1, the designated spokesman for the group, replies, "Well, we drop peanut butter on our feet all the time, and it doesn't hurt." I say, "This time it hurt. Look at my foot!" I show them the bruise and they are slightly interested, but #1 says "We get hurt a lot and it doesn't matter." I go sit back down on the couch to green pepper my foot.
Again, I'm realistic enough to recognize that it isn't my kids' job to comfort me when I'm hurt, it's my job to comfort them, and I don't think it's reciprocal. But you'd think that it would be a good thing to teach them that if anybody is hurt, to whatever degree, they should at least notice! And sheesh, have we heard the kids complain enough about getting hurt that even my own husband tunes it out, even when it is someone else?
The green peppers bring down the swelling in my foot and I can walk if I don't put much weight on the left half of my foot. I sweep up the Cocoa Krispies and slice #2's apple, then go upstairs to pick out church clothes for #2, who actually gets dressed without complaint today. When DH is out of the shower I show him my foot and say, "I was really hurt!" He apologizes and goes to get some church things ready. Boy #1 says, again, that they get hurt all the time. This time he adds, "Mom, you always say you cry more when you're pregnant, I just thought you were crying because of that." Then he asks if I'm okay and I say yes, thank you, because at least I think he might be learning something from this.
But interestingly enough, I am left wondering if my response to my kids when they hurt themselves is appropriate. #1 is right, they hurt themselves all the time, but they cry when they do it and there's no way to judge how bad the injury is just from the crying. So I am fairly nonchalant about whatever their injury is until I look at it for myself, and then I can decide what level of attention is required. But I don't get too worked up about anything - if there is enough blood involved, I take action, otherwise I generally give them a hug and ask if they are okay and in 2 minutes or less they are off playing again.
There are times, though, when I should have gotten more worked up than I did. I have a few stories that show that not showing compassion when we should have could be a learned trait.
Story 1
Boy #1 was goofing off with Boy #2 in the living room while DH and I sat downstairs, presumably watching tv or something. We heard this massive CRASH and #2 says calmly, "That's why!" Boy #1 is crying, but not hysterical, so we say to ourselves, if he's really hurt, he'll come down and tell us what's wrong. A minute or so later, it is Boy #2 who comes downstairs and says, perfectly calmly, "#1 is hurt." The appropriate thing to say in this case was, "If you care at all about your carpet, you'll get upstairs right now!" Because, as it turns out, when we stroll upstairs we find Boy #1 with his head on the ground, the piano bench on his head, and more blood that I thought the human body contained pouring out of his nose.
Finally moved to action, DH takes him up to the bathroom to clean him off, and I start on the carpet. A minute later, DH calls down to me and asks what I think we should do - it turns out that Boy #1 is also bleeding out of the tear ducts in his eyes. I immediately call my friend who is a pediatrician, but of course he is at work, so his wife gives me the number of his office, since they take emergencies. I call the office and talk to a nurse, who asks me all sorts of questions and determines that since the bleeding is stopping, he can still move his eye, and there's no vision loss, that we'll probably be okay, but to take him in if anything gets worse.
He bleeds for probably 2 hours or so, and I spend almost all of that time, plus every container of carpet cleaner in the house, working on the stain. He turned out fine, the carpet is fine too, but there's one instance where maybe a little faster reaction would have helped, at least for the carpet.
Story 2
I was pregnant with Boy #3 and had the Activity Day girls over, doing an Easter craft. Boy #2 had been doing the craft with us, but then went outside to play. Only a few minutes after he left, I heard him crying. I went to look outside, and there he was, on his tricycle, crying as he pedaled home from our next door neighbor's house. How badly can he be hurt, if he chooses to ride his bike home, right?
He gets to the front door and I give him a hug, pat him on the back trying to get him to calm down. He's still crying, although he looks just fine. My neighbor comes over and explains what happened: #2 was sitting on the fence between my neighbor's yard and the next one down, when he fell backwards and fell into the other yard. The neighbor told me that #2 was bleeding, and I said, No, I don't think so. My neighbor replied, well, I just washed his blood off my hands. So I lift up his shirt, his chest was fine but his back had a giant semi-circle of flesh scraped down it. Apparently on his way down, his back hit a jagged wood post that was part of the retaining wall on the other side of the fence. I immediately took him to Instacare where they stitched his skin back together. He was so exhausted and traumatized from crying that he fell asleep in my arms while they stitched his back.
Story 3
This one is about my Dear Husband. When he worked at Dreamworks, he and some of his friends started bowling on their lunch hour. He really enjoyed himself, although there was the persistent joke about being too good for the golfing crowd, and preferring this clientele better. Anyhow, one day he came home hurt from bowling. Apparently, as he went to throw the ball, he clipped his ankle with the ball. It was bruised and swollen and hurt to walk on. He toughed it out for a few days, with me thinking (although I don't know how much I said out loud) that for Pete's sake, it's a bowling injury! If you're going to hurt yourself, couldn't it be something a little more noble, like saving a kid from crashing on his bike, or maybe more manly, like a football injury? But bowling? How bad could it be? If Homer Simpson can manage to bowl, surely this isn't the kind of sport where you get hurt?
Well, hurt he was. He eventually went to see a doctor about it, and had an x-ray, which showed that he had either bruised or chipped the bone, I can't remember which anymore. But the tendons or muscle or whatever goes over your ankle kept rubbing over the injury whenever he moved it, so that's why it was so persistently painful. A doctor saying something is wrong certainly gives even the weirdest injury some gravitas, so I felt bad for insulting his injury.
Incidentally, the bowling ball has never since seen the light of day.
My foot feels better now, just bruised and purple and hurts when you touch it. I feel a little bad for overreacting, but it did really hurt, and I really didn't like being ignored. But injuries happen in this house, and maybe I'll be a little more compassionate now that I've experienced the other side of it.
In the 45 minutes I wrote this before church yesterday, Boy #3 hurt himself twice. After church, he hit his head on the doorknob, and hurt himself outside somehow and came in crying. In a separate incident, I had to kiss a (very dirty) toe that had gotten stubbed. All of these injuries included tears, but were solved in under a minute. Later that night, DH and I were sitting in the backyard watching the kids play, and Boy #1 walked past, obviously hurt. DH asked him, "Hey, are you okay?" #1 says he's fine, and I look at DH curiously, as if to ask why he would ask that question.
"Well, I'm scared now" DH says.
"Why is that?" I ask, amused.
"You're bigger than I am," DH replies, not joking. I guess if nothing else will teach my family compassion, I can beat it into them with brute strength and intimidation!
Monday, April 30, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
A Birthday Wish List
Boy #1 has a birthday coming up, in three months. That would make it a quarter of a year from now, but it's the next opportunity for gifts so of course it's not too early. He was bored the other day and came upstairs presenting his wish list for his birthday. I thought it would be fun to transcribe it for you, although with some spelling corrections. The notes in parentheses are his.
1. New bike with gears and shocks
2. More of those card things that makes stuff
3. Gamecube
4. DS
5. Wii
6. XBox
7. Gameboy
8. Candy
9. Lego cars
10. Lego Star Wars (not the video game)
11. A castle that I can make with dad
12. More models of cars
13. Notebooks and folders
14. Models of planes
15. Pencils that are sharpened
16. Pringles, original
17. Soda
18. TV
19. Transformer Star Wars
20. Jango's ship
21. Fruit snacks (my own!)
22. I want to see Meet the Robinsons
I thought it was nice to see the list of junk food, as this is proof that we don't have this kind of stuff normally, and isn't that a sign of good parenting? (Grasping at straws here, but I'll take what I can get.) Also, note to grandparents: don't buy items 3-7 without talking to me first. A real gaming system might just put our family over the edge!!
1. New bike with gears and shocks
2. More of those card things that makes stuff
3. Gamecube
4. DS
5. Wii
6. XBox
7. Gameboy
8. Candy
9. Lego cars
10. Lego Star Wars (not the video game)
11. A castle that I can make with dad
12. More models of cars
13. Notebooks and folders
14. Models of planes
15. Pencils that are sharpened
16. Pringles, original
17. Soda
18. TV
19. Transformer Star Wars
20. Jango's ship
21. Fruit snacks (my own!)
22. I want to see Meet the Robinsons
I thought it was nice to see the list of junk food, as this is proof that we don't have this kind of stuff normally, and isn't that a sign of good parenting? (Grasping at straws here, but I'll take what I can get.) Also, note to grandparents: don't buy items 3-7 without talking to me first. A real gaming system might just put our family over the edge!!
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
When Honesty Isn't the Best Policy
It looks as though I barely missed shooting myself in the foot. The problem? Telling the truth.
Let me start by saying that I am honest. I'd say scrupulously honest, although that leaves me open to the kind of scrutiny that if I was ever a politician, I'd be afraid of. (Senator, do you recall telling your friend her haircut looked cute, when the truth was, you hated it?) But anyhow, as honest as a person can be. I get bugged by movies or tv shows that use a character lying as a plot device, and you spend the next two hours of the movie saying, Well if you had just told the truth maybe he would have been mad but you wouldn't have gotten into all this trouble! (An aside: DH felt similarly when we saw Miss Saigon, and the sum total of his reaction was, "If she hadn't been a prostitute none of this would have happened!" So does that make him scrupulously against prostitution? Let's hope!)
Honesty. Yes. I'm a big fan. There's really nothing to be gained by lying about something and so, so much to lose. If there is any behavior or action that a person does that they end up needing to lie about to cover up, then don't do that action in the first place! That's where the problem is! But how about when honesty isn't the best policy?
In my ethics class, this topic was brought up with this example: You're in Nazi Germany and hiding Jews. A Nazi official asks you if you know where any Jews are hiding. Do you tell the truth? Does the value of honesty outweigh the value of the human life you are protecting with your lie? Mine is not such a moral dilemma. Telling the truth in my case does not jeopardize lives. It might, however, stop me from going on a vacation.
DH has a cool opportunity to potentially teach Flash to animators in exotic Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There's a studio in Los Angeles who has a 3-year contract with the Malaysian government to bring American Flash animators to KL for 3-6 weeks at a time, to teach in a school they are setting up together. The studio would pay a salary plus all of DH's travel expenses, a per diem, and provide an apartment. Naturally, my first thought was, how the heck can I get in on this?
Well, it's both easier and more difficult than I could hope. The company encourages animators to bring their whole family - in fact, they want to do everything they can to make this a fun experience so that animators will want to come back more than once over the three year period. So it's a matter of a plane ticket for me, and we are good to go! Except for one thing: what do I do with my kids??
And that's where being a little less honest might have come in handy. Because, as it turns out, once I started chronicling real life in our household, I might have turned off potential babysitters. Dang me and my scrupulousness! Within about 15 minutes of DH applying for the job, I was mentally going over my options to get the heck out of the country, and as much as I hated to admit it, I knew that it would be really hard to sugar-coat what a babysitter would have to deal with.
So within about 24 hours of first hearing about the job (three weeks ago or so), DH got a call and had a phone interview, which went really well. The note that the interviewer left for the CEO who was to do the second interview said "Available after baby born in June. Call immediately!" All of the details that the interviewer gave DH sounded as good as we had first thought, and DH was even more excited about the opportunity, now that it looked like it was really going to happen. My daydreaming kicked into high gear, and I wished it wasn't too late to go out to a bookstore and pick up a tour guide.
By the next day, though, reality set in, and along with it, depression. It happened when I was standing in the kitchen listening to someone whine about something, and I had the thought "No one wants to do this! No one wants my life!" I recognize the level of melodrama here is dangerously high, of course I'm emoting for two right now. But I literally started crying when I realized that I couldn't even bring myself to so much as ask someone to watch my kids for 10 days or so. Sure, people like my kids, but do they like them that much? I'm not so sure.
At the risk of truly embarrassing myself with just how ugly I can get when I'm feeling sorry for myself, I'm going to insert a quote from a diatribe I wrote just for myself when I was in the depths of despair. I know this won't reflect particularly well on me, but it's a true indication of how I was feeling that day (dang honesty again!):
***
I called Ryan this afternoon and told him that this just isn't going to work out for me to go, and gave him the reasons why. He was surprised by the about-face, since the last time I had talked to him I was totally gung-ho about making this possible for me. But then came the usual line, "Your time will come." I hate hearing that. Yes, I know that most moms my age don't go to Malaysia for 2 weeks when they have 4 kids. I know that my own mom didn't have family to watch us kids, and the only time she got to go on vacations without us, she had to farm us out to neighbors. And now she gets to travel and do all sorts of things, and one day so will I. But, you know what? It sucks to be me right now. I don't actually care about 18 years from now when the child I haven't even had yet is 18. From what older people tell me, life only gets harder, but you know what? It's plenty hard right now and I don't want to hear about the fact that two decades from now I might actually be able to do what I want with my time. It's not a comfort.
***
Yikes. That is painful to re-read. Sorry about that.
Anyhow, within a couple of days I was not quite so suicidal and able to think a little more rationally (really - I'm not this emotional when I'm not pregnant, I'm really not!) probably due to a couple of nights of getting enough sleep, I revisited the idea. And started to try to come up with some way to get this to work. Amazingly, I came up with some ideas.
DH's oldest sister, while probably the most willing, has recently started a new job and has moved and I figured needs to concentrate on her own life. I considered offering to fly my brother and his wife out (if they could get the time off work) but it's the same week that my mom is going to be in Maryland to visit them specifically. So I thought I could ask DH's other sister, who is also responsible and seems to like my kids enough, and see if she could get time off work to babysit for some amount of the time, and maybe my mom could split the time with her.
I asked my mom first, the day that we got the second phone interview and the CEO told us to start getting our passports. No, actually, I called and talked to my dad and he said that my mom would be happy to watch the kids. I said, "Are you sure mom wants you volunteering her for something like this?" And he said something like, Well, no, probably not in so many words, but that he still thinks she'd do it. I talked to her the next day, and with some amount of trepidation, she said yes. Trepidation due to knowing exactly what she was in for, because I so meticulously documented every minute detail of life with my three boys. She said she was worried about bedtime specifically, it seems so hard from what I describe. No, I said, bedtime's a breeze, it's dinner you should be worried about. Doh! What a stupid thing to say!! I'm trying to recruit her, not scare her off! Honesty again rears it's ugly head.
She sounded a little more willing when I said she'd be splitting the time hopefully, and that I was only going to be gone 10 or so days, as she thought I would be gone the entire three weeks that DH is going. It's always hard to read my mom, as she's a quiet person, not like others in my family that have no problem speaking their mind, frequently to their detriment. So I think she's willing, she says she'll do it, but I'd say she seems nervous and apprehensive about it.
Dh's sister was receptive to the idea, although is also just starting a new job, and so offered to watch the kids with my mother-in-law, which seems like an ideal situation, because the kids can be intensive enough to require tag-teaming, and as much as I love my mother-in-law, I didn't know if she could handle it solo. (I think she feels the same way.) But she is super-enthusiastic, and very, very willing to come and do whatever we need as long as we need her.
The big difference? My mother-in-law doesn't read my blog. While she is more familiar on a day-to-day basis since she's around my kids more, she still only sees them under abnormal circumstances. My mom is making her judgement based on real life, things that I wrote myself about our family. So any trepidation on her part is due to my honesty.
One thought, though, that should be a comfort to my mother - the reason that it is harder for me than it will be for her is that I have to worry about setting a precedent in every single situation I deal with. My mom doesn't. Want to give the kids a handful of cookies 5 minutes before dinner? Sure, go ahead - you only have to deal with the ramifications of that for 5 days. I'd have kids asking for cookies every day until they leave for college. That's what it means to spoil grandchildren - do the things that make kids happy/quiet/think you're great, because if I did that, I'd have to live with the consequences. Eat in front of the tv? Skip bath night just this once? Go ahead, grandma, make it easy on yourself - this should go much better for you than it does for me!
If I had known that a foreign vacation was a possibility, could I have fabricated what life was really like in order to lull my mother into a false sense of security, thereby enabling me to get some free babysitting out of her? Nah, she's smart enough to know that life with little kids isn't perfect. And I've probably whined enough in the past that it wouldn't have done any good to lie at this point. So I can walk away knowing that my integrity is intact, and even with knowing the truth, my kids' grandparents love them (or me) enough to give me this opportunity, regardless of how hard my kids can be. But maybe I'll temper my honesty a little bit in the future, just in case!
Let me start by saying that I am honest. I'd say scrupulously honest, although that leaves me open to the kind of scrutiny that if I was ever a politician, I'd be afraid of. (Senator, do you recall telling your friend her haircut looked cute, when the truth was, you hated it?) But anyhow, as honest as a person can be. I get bugged by movies or tv shows that use a character lying as a plot device, and you spend the next two hours of the movie saying, Well if you had just told the truth maybe he would have been mad but you wouldn't have gotten into all this trouble! (An aside: DH felt similarly when we saw Miss Saigon, and the sum total of his reaction was, "If she hadn't been a prostitute none of this would have happened!" So does that make him scrupulously against prostitution? Let's hope!)
Honesty. Yes. I'm a big fan. There's really nothing to be gained by lying about something and so, so much to lose. If there is any behavior or action that a person does that they end up needing to lie about to cover up, then don't do that action in the first place! That's where the problem is! But how about when honesty isn't the best policy?
In my ethics class, this topic was brought up with this example: You're in Nazi Germany and hiding Jews. A Nazi official asks you if you know where any Jews are hiding. Do you tell the truth? Does the value of honesty outweigh the value of the human life you are protecting with your lie? Mine is not such a moral dilemma. Telling the truth in my case does not jeopardize lives. It might, however, stop me from going on a vacation.
DH has a cool opportunity to potentially teach Flash to animators in exotic Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There's a studio in Los Angeles who has a 3-year contract with the Malaysian government to bring American Flash animators to KL for 3-6 weeks at a time, to teach in a school they are setting up together. The studio would pay a salary plus all of DH's travel expenses, a per diem, and provide an apartment. Naturally, my first thought was, how the heck can I get in on this?
Well, it's both easier and more difficult than I could hope. The company encourages animators to bring their whole family - in fact, they want to do everything they can to make this a fun experience so that animators will want to come back more than once over the three year period. So it's a matter of a plane ticket for me, and we are good to go! Except for one thing: what do I do with my kids??
And that's where being a little less honest might have come in handy. Because, as it turns out, once I started chronicling real life in our household, I might have turned off potential babysitters. Dang me and my scrupulousness! Within about 15 minutes of DH applying for the job, I was mentally going over my options to get the heck out of the country, and as much as I hated to admit it, I knew that it would be really hard to sugar-coat what a babysitter would have to deal with.
So within about 24 hours of first hearing about the job (three weeks ago or so), DH got a call and had a phone interview, which went really well. The note that the interviewer left for the CEO who was to do the second interview said "Available after baby born in June. Call immediately!" All of the details that the interviewer gave DH sounded as good as we had first thought, and DH was even more excited about the opportunity, now that it looked like it was really going to happen. My daydreaming kicked into high gear, and I wished it wasn't too late to go out to a bookstore and pick up a tour guide.
By the next day, though, reality set in, and along with it, depression. It happened when I was standing in the kitchen listening to someone whine about something, and I had the thought "No one wants to do this! No one wants my life!" I recognize the level of melodrama here is dangerously high, of course I'm emoting for two right now. But I literally started crying when I realized that I couldn't even bring myself to so much as ask someone to watch my kids for 10 days or so. Sure, people like my kids, but do they like them that much? I'm not so sure.
At the risk of truly embarrassing myself with just how ugly I can get when I'm feeling sorry for myself, I'm going to insert a quote from a diatribe I wrote just for myself when I was in the depths of despair. I know this won't reflect particularly well on me, but it's a true indication of how I was feeling that day (dang honesty again!):
***
I called Ryan this afternoon and told him that this just isn't going to work out for me to go, and gave him the reasons why. He was surprised by the about-face, since the last time I had talked to him I was totally gung-ho about making this possible for me. But then came the usual line, "Your time will come." I hate hearing that. Yes, I know that most moms my age don't go to Malaysia for 2 weeks when they have 4 kids. I know that my own mom didn't have family to watch us kids, and the only time she got to go on vacations without us, she had to farm us out to neighbors. And now she gets to travel and do all sorts of things, and one day so will I. But, you know what? It sucks to be me right now. I don't actually care about 18 years from now when the child I haven't even had yet is 18. From what older people tell me, life only gets harder, but you know what? It's plenty hard right now and I don't want to hear about the fact that two decades from now I might actually be able to do what I want with my time. It's not a comfort.
***
Yikes. That is painful to re-read. Sorry about that.
Anyhow, within a couple of days I was not quite so suicidal and able to think a little more rationally (really - I'm not this emotional when I'm not pregnant, I'm really not!) probably due to a couple of nights of getting enough sleep, I revisited the idea. And started to try to come up with some way to get this to work. Amazingly, I came up with some ideas.
DH's oldest sister, while probably the most willing, has recently started a new job and has moved and I figured needs to concentrate on her own life. I considered offering to fly my brother and his wife out (if they could get the time off work) but it's the same week that my mom is going to be in Maryland to visit them specifically. So I thought I could ask DH's other sister, who is also responsible and seems to like my kids enough, and see if she could get time off work to babysit for some amount of the time, and maybe my mom could split the time with her.
I asked my mom first, the day that we got the second phone interview and the CEO told us to start getting our passports. No, actually, I called and talked to my dad and he said that my mom would be happy to watch the kids. I said, "Are you sure mom wants you volunteering her for something like this?" And he said something like, Well, no, probably not in so many words, but that he still thinks she'd do it. I talked to her the next day, and with some amount of trepidation, she said yes. Trepidation due to knowing exactly what she was in for, because I so meticulously documented every minute detail of life with my three boys. She said she was worried about bedtime specifically, it seems so hard from what I describe. No, I said, bedtime's a breeze, it's dinner you should be worried about. Doh! What a stupid thing to say!! I'm trying to recruit her, not scare her off! Honesty again rears it's ugly head.
She sounded a little more willing when I said she'd be splitting the time hopefully, and that I was only going to be gone 10 or so days, as she thought I would be gone the entire three weeks that DH is going. It's always hard to read my mom, as she's a quiet person, not like others in my family that have no problem speaking their mind, frequently to their detriment. So I think she's willing, she says she'll do it, but I'd say she seems nervous and apprehensive about it.
Dh's sister was receptive to the idea, although is also just starting a new job, and so offered to watch the kids with my mother-in-law, which seems like an ideal situation, because the kids can be intensive enough to require tag-teaming, and as much as I love my mother-in-law, I didn't know if she could handle it solo. (I think she feels the same way.) But she is super-enthusiastic, and very, very willing to come and do whatever we need as long as we need her.
The big difference? My mother-in-law doesn't read my blog. While she is more familiar on a day-to-day basis since she's around my kids more, she still only sees them under abnormal circumstances. My mom is making her judgement based on real life, things that I wrote myself about our family. So any trepidation on her part is due to my honesty.
One thought, though, that should be a comfort to my mother - the reason that it is harder for me than it will be for her is that I have to worry about setting a precedent in every single situation I deal with. My mom doesn't. Want to give the kids a handful of cookies 5 minutes before dinner? Sure, go ahead - you only have to deal with the ramifications of that for 5 days. I'd have kids asking for cookies every day until they leave for college. That's what it means to spoil grandchildren - do the things that make kids happy/quiet/think you're great, because if I did that, I'd have to live with the consequences. Eat in front of the tv? Skip bath night just this once? Go ahead, grandma, make it easy on yourself - this should go much better for you than it does for me!
If I had known that a foreign vacation was a possibility, could I have fabricated what life was really like in order to lull my mother into a false sense of security, thereby enabling me to get some free babysitting out of her? Nah, she's smart enough to know that life with little kids isn't perfect. And I've probably whined enough in the past that it wouldn't have done any good to lie at this point. So I can walk away knowing that my integrity is intact, and even with knowing the truth, my kids' grandparents love them (or me) enough to give me this opportunity, regardless of how hard my kids can be. But maybe I'll temper my honesty a little bit in the future, just in case!
Monday, April 23, 2007
A Lesson Learned
I wrote a few days ago about punishment and how difficult it is to appropriately punish a child so that they actually learn something. Well, Boy #1 learned a lesson today and I didn't even have to lift a finger - I just had to let him do what he wanted.
Let me start by saying that Boy #1 thinks he is invincible. He follows rules, mostly, but if there is ever a loophole or he thinks I'm not going to enforce a rule, it is out the window. Like the "Don't ride your bike without a helmet" rule that was called into question last week when he wanted to ride about a mile to a friend's house but couldn't find his helmet. I think he thought not being able to find the helmet made it acceptable to still ride the bike. Um, wrong. Additionally, he follows the buddy rule when walking home from school, unless he can't find his buddy, and then he'll just walk home alone.
This story isn't about personal safety - I brought that up to show that he thinks that consequences are for other people, and he is pretty much immune from head injuries or kidnappers or whatever. Apparently he thought that he would also be immune to the perils of a common childhood accident - the sleepover.
Here in our area, sleepovers are not too common. They've been replaced by the "late night" wherein kids get to hang out until later at night, but then go home and sleep in their beds, thus ensuring that sleeping actually happens. The prevailing opinion amongst the moms my age is that a late night gets all the benefits of a sleepover, without the potential dangers, like sleep deprivation, or having to pick up a scared kid at 2 a.m., or the crazy things that teenagers think up in the middle of the night. When a General Authority said that nothing good happens after midnight, I think he was pretty much right on. So the idea is that we never start with the sleepovers and then it won't ever be an issue.
That's fine for all of the moms that are my contemporaries. The problem comes in with Boy #1's friends, all of whom are either the youngest in their family or have substantially older siblings, so the parents of these friends are 10+ years older than me. And that must be the generational difference between the pro- and anti-sleepover factions, because they don't seem to have any problem with sleepovers.
So yesterday Boy #1 announces that he's been invited to sleep over at a friends house. Probably I should have stuck to my guns and said, regardless of what your friends are allowed to do, the most you can have is a late night. But instead, I told him I was okay with it, although in my mind I really wasn't. I warned him that his friend's family stayed up much later than he does, and that they sleep in, which my kids seem genetically unable to do, but he assured me that he would be fine. I told him not to stay up too late, to try to actually get some sleep, and he said he would.
Every parent on the planet knows how this story is going to end. Possibly every person who ever slept over as a child/teen knows the outcome too. I've never, ever seen a child look so miserable when he got home this morning around 10. Honestly, he looked like I feel when I've been woken up by kids all night after going to bed at midnight and then not being able to fall back asleep. To put it mildly, it looked like he'd been beaten with a stick, only without the bruises. His eyes were half closed and he walked really slowly, like every step caused him pain. I don't know when I've ever been able to empathize more! I feel that way all the time!
The only reason I really did feel some compassion for him is because he's never done this before. I asked him what time he went to bed, and he didn't know. I asked him what time was it the last time he looked at a clock, and he said 11:00. Note that standard bedtime for him is 9:15. So I'm guessing he went to bed at 12ish. I asked him what time he woke up, and he said 6:00. He said that he had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor and he was so uncomfortable that he couldn't stay asleep. His friend, on the other hand, is a regular sleeper-inner so I knew the answer when I asked, "Did you wake up before your friend?" He said yes, and I remembered the misery of being awake at someone else's house while they are still asleep, and waiting for what feels like eternity for them to wake up so I could finally get up too.
He said he didn't feel too good, his stomach hurt, and he wanted to go to bed. I didn't see him again for 2 1/2 hours. This is another pretty rare occurrence, because my kids are as unable to nap past a certain age as they are to sleep in. He must have been truly miserable. The misery didn't end there, as he spent pretty much the entire day sitting in front of the television, doing nothing. Even when a friend came over, they sat. And every time I went in the room and shut off the tv and told them to find something to do, they'd be outside or downstairs for 5 minutes before I'd hear the tv on again. He went to bed early that night, and the next day he was still a little off, although not as bad as the day before. He must have his father's genes - it took DH a full 48 hours to recover from his 24 hour campout the weekend before. Heaven forbid men ever gain the ability to bear children - they could never handle it.
The only reason I felt the least bit of compassion towards him is that he has never gone on a sleepover before. I knew that there was no way I could convince him of the pain and misery involved in not getting enough sleep - after all, he's watched me this whole pregnancy and heard me say that I barely slept last night, so be really good so I don't yell at everyone for no reason. He theoretically could have seen from my example or my teachings that the logic of going to bed too late, sleeping on the floor, and waking up really early combine to make anyone atrociously tired the next day. But I know in the deepest recesses of my heart that he would not have believed me. He would have said that he'd go to sleep earlier, or he wouldn't have a problem sleeping on the floor, or of course he'd sleep in.
So that's why I let my child suffer through a thoroughly preventable incident. I am hoping that he learns a lesson from this. That he will remember the consequences of this action, and it will be enough to prevent him from asking to do it again. That it will leave enough of a scar that when Boy #2 asks for a sleepover, Boy #1 can say with all confidence, You'd be happier with a late night.
But I'm a mom. And I'm getting a little cynical. I know it's just a matter of time before he asks again, and I have the same dilemma of, Do I say no and have the whole family feel the reverberations of his choice? Or do I say yes and let him suffer again? When it comes time for Boy #2 to go through the same ritual, do I stop it or let it happen? I'm leaning towards making a blanket rule of no sleepovers. At least while Boy #1 can remember the pain of this incident, he will be supportive. But I know it will seem less and less painful to him as time goes on, so I have a feeling that this is one lesson we're going to have to revisit.
Let me start by saying that Boy #1 thinks he is invincible. He follows rules, mostly, but if there is ever a loophole or he thinks I'm not going to enforce a rule, it is out the window. Like the "Don't ride your bike without a helmet" rule that was called into question last week when he wanted to ride about a mile to a friend's house but couldn't find his helmet. I think he thought not being able to find the helmet made it acceptable to still ride the bike. Um, wrong. Additionally, he follows the buddy rule when walking home from school, unless he can't find his buddy, and then he'll just walk home alone.
This story isn't about personal safety - I brought that up to show that he thinks that consequences are for other people, and he is pretty much immune from head injuries or kidnappers or whatever. Apparently he thought that he would also be immune to the perils of a common childhood accident - the sleepover.
Here in our area, sleepovers are not too common. They've been replaced by the "late night" wherein kids get to hang out until later at night, but then go home and sleep in their beds, thus ensuring that sleeping actually happens. The prevailing opinion amongst the moms my age is that a late night gets all the benefits of a sleepover, without the potential dangers, like sleep deprivation, or having to pick up a scared kid at 2 a.m., or the crazy things that teenagers think up in the middle of the night. When a General Authority said that nothing good happens after midnight, I think he was pretty much right on. So the idea is that we never start with the sleepovers and then it won't ever be an issue.
That's fine for all of the moms that are my contemporaries. The problem comes in with Boy #1's friends, all of whom are either the youngest in their family or have substantially older siblings, so the parents of these friends are 10+ years older than me. And that must be the generational difference between the pro- and anti-sleepover factions, because they don't seem to have any problem with sleepovers.
So yesterday Boy #1 announces that he's been invited to sleep over at a friends house. Probably I should have stuck to my guns and said, regardless of what your friends are allowed to do, the most you can have is a late night. But instead, I told him I was okay with it, although in my mind I really wasn't. I warned him that his friend's family stayed up much later than he does, and that they sleep in, which my kids seem genetically unable to do, but he assured me that he would be fine. I told him not to stay up too late, to try to actually get some sleep, and he said he would.
Every parent on the planet knows how this story is going to end. Possibly every person who ever slept over as a child/teen knows the outcome too. I've never, ever seen a child look so miserable when he got home this morning around 10. Honestly, he looked like I feel when I've been woken up by kids all night after going to bed at midnight and then not being able to fall back asleep. To put it mildly, it looked like he'd been beaten with a stick, only without the bruises. His eyes were half closed and he walked really slowly, like every step caused him pain. I don't know when I've ever been able to empathize more! I feel that way all the time!
The only reason I really did feel some compassion for him is because he's never done this before. I asked him what time he went to bed, and he didn't know. I asked him what time was it the last time he looked at a clock, and he said 11:00. Note that standard bedtime for him is 9:15. So I'm guessing he went to bed at 12ish. I asked him what time he woke up, and he said 6:00. He said that he had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor and he was so uncomfortable that he couldn't stay asleep. His friend, on the other hand, is a regular sleeper-inner so I knew the answer when I asked, "Did you wake up before your friend?" He said yes, and I remembered the misery of being awake at someone else's house while they are still asleep, and waiting for what feels like eternity for them to wake up so I could finally get up too.
He said he didn't feel too good, his stomach hurt, and he wanted to go to bed. I didn't see him again for 2 1/2 hours. This is another pretty rare occurrence, because my kids are as unable to nap past a certain age as they are to sleep in. He must have been truly miserable. The misery didn't end there, as he spent pretty much the entire day sitting in front of the television, doing nothing. Even when a friend came over, they sat. And every time I went in the room and shut off the tv and told them to find something to do, they'd be outside or downstairs for 5 minutes before I'd hear the tv on again. He went to bed early that night, and the next day he was still a little off, although not as bad as the day before. He must have his father's genes - it took DH a full 48 hours to recover from his 24 hour campout the weekend before. Heaven forbid men ever gain the ability to bear children - they could never handle it.
The only reason I felt the least bit of compassion towards him is that he has never gone on a sleepover before. I knew that there was no way I could convince him of the pain and misery involved in not getting enough sleep - after all, he's watched me this whole pregnancy and heard me say that I barely slept last night, so be really good so I don't yell at everyone for no reason. He theoretically could have seen from my example or my teachings that the logic of going to bed too late, sleeping on the floor, and waking up really early combine to make anyone atrociously tired the next day. But I know in the deepest recesses of my heart that he would not have believed me. He would have said that he'd go to sleep earlier, or he wouldn't have a problem sleeping on the floor, or of course he'd sleep in.
So that's why I let my child suffer through a thoroughly preventable incident. I am hoping that he learns a lesson from this. That he will remember the consequences of this action, and it will be enough to prevent him from asking to do it again. That it will leave enough of a scar that when Boy #2 asks for a sleepover, Boy #1 can say with all confidence, You'd be happier with a late night.
But I'm a mom. And I'm getting a little cynical. I know it's just a matter of time before he asks again, and I have the same dilemma of, Do I say no and have the whole family feel the reverberations of his choice? Or do I say yes and let him suffer again? When it comes time for Boy #2 to go through the same ritual, do I stop it or let it happen? I'm leaning towards making a blanket rule of no sleepovers. At least while Boy #1 can remember the pain of this incident, he will be supportive. But I know it will seem less and less painful to him as time goes on, so I have a feeling that this is one lesson we're going to have to revisit.
A Quiz, and A Review (or two)
I mentioned earlier that I was a mentor for a team involved in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, the business plan competition that I competed in two years ago and came in as a runner up. The team that I was assigned to had a fairly cool product, nothing earth-shattering necessarily but a new technology in an old product that seemed promising. What the heck do I know, though, the team didn't even make the finals. I figured the competition must be pretty stiff this year for them not even to make the top ten, and I was right about that at least.
I got a ticket to attend the awards banquet, which DH was super-excited about, because last time the food was, apparently, fantastic. All I can remember from the last time was being a complete nervous wreck, and I don't remember enjoying anything until I got the $5,000 check. So DH, who normally is so anti-social that anything that includes 30 minutes of networking over hors d'ouevres would be the equivalent of getting shards of glass in his eye, told me to get a ticket for him too and we'd make a date of it. Yeah, the food is that good.
So we got a sitter for Thursday and started our 5 hour long date. You know, when we were dating and before we had kids, the date really was about where we were going or what we were going to do. Now, the 45 drive to the University of Utah is as much the destination as anything. We kept marvelling over the fact that we could talk without being interrupted. Honestly, we could have gotten Wendy's take out and sat in the parking lot for 5 hours and it would have been just as satisfying to me, being able to complete my thoughts!
We grabbed some hors d'ouevres and punch (I love punch!) and mingled with each other during the social 1/2 hour, then slowly made our way to the banquet hall downstairs. Because we were among the last to get down there (and I took a bathroom break on the way) most of the tables were full already. Which was fine with us - we grabbed a table on the edge of the room and it just so happened that nobody sat with us. Even better! No need to make polite chit-chat with people that we don't know and who, most likely, don't care about us any more than we do about them. Although I'm sure they would have been lovely people.
No, instead we got to sit and continue to talk to each other over our dinner of steak and mashed potatoes and vegetables. The salad was served in a bowl made of parmesan cheese and herbs, which tasted fantastic. (DH asked me what the bowls were made of, and I told him I knew how to make those bowls and he said, Yeah, I know how to make a car, too, you just put the parts together in the way they go. I replied, Yes, but if you gave me some cheese I could actually make one of those bowls. I don't know if he was impressed or not.)
Here's the real reason that DH wanted to go to the dinner so badly - they set the dessert on the table before we ever sat down. He desperately wanted to be the only one at the table, so that he could have his choice of desserts. Tonight's dessert was cheesecakes - slices of regular cheesecake swirled with strawberry, or some kind of chocolate-raspberry cheesecake which wasn't as good as it looked. I think we probably had 5 slices between the two of us. It was so fun and relaxing to be there and eat whatever we wanted and just sit and talk, we had a fantastic time.
There was a point to the evening, however, and here's where your quiz comes in. They awarded $40,000 to the first place team in the Entrepreneur Challenge, and $5,000 to the 2 runners-up. We were given a program with a little write-up of each participating company, so DH and I tried to decide who we thought would be the winner. And for your entertainment, here are your choices.
1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. Their products are available in some stores currently.
2. The company that makes a 3-wheeled scooter which maneuvers like a motorcycle but is cheap, safer than 2-wheelers, and environmentally friendly. Reminded me of the Segway, with a seat. Has a working prototype.
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages.
5. The company that manufactures and sells racks to hold large, heavy items such as tires and propane tanks. Their products are currently in use at some tire stores.
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
7. The company that is a research lab to help pharmaceutical companies et. al. do FDA required testing.
8. The company that makes legal software for do-it-youselfers, who make their will or other documents and then get it reviewed by actual lawyers.
9. The company that automatically sends marketing tools to clients, like birthday cards/thank you cards, brochures, etc.
10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school.
Those are your top ten finalists! Pick which ones you think would be the best winner and runners-up and ponder that while you read some reviews of books and movies that I've found recently. Then I'll give you the winners at the end.
Books
The Pursuit of Happyness
I haven't seen the movie yet, but it must be better than the book, if only for the fact that the book uses the f-word so many times you start to think that it is the only word this guy and his acquaintances knows. The book details his abusive childhood, his horrible stepfather, the mistakes his family makes in dealing with the situation, all of which combine to make him say, "My life will not be like this. I will be a father to my children." Which of course doesn't stop him from cheating on his wife and having children out of wedlock (at least, I can't remember if he married the mother of his children or not... If he did he divorced her too, I know they didn't stay together.) But he does make being a father a priority, which is admirable, and works very hard to create a good life for himself and his family. You know the ending, he ends up as a multi-millionaire, and you have to love endings like that. It is uplifting to hear any story where hard work and perseverance can take you from abused childhood and homelessness to more money than you know what to do with, especially because it can only happen in America. I'd say, pass on the book unless you can handle that much foul language (it's seriously bad in parts) but I'd guess the movie makes the point just as well.
The Prestige
Another movie that I haven't seen, but have read the book. It was interesting, not quite captivating but the plot moved along enough that it kept me hooked the whole time. I kept thinking it would make a really boring movie, though, so I need to watch the movie and see how they changed the book. It was about 13 hours long, and the last 6 minutes were so terrifying that it kept me up that night, scared to leave my room. Seriously, 13 hours of average, 6 minutes of terror? You'd think if the author was capable of evoking this much emotion he'd do it a little more often in the book than just right at the end. It didn't help that I polished it off late at night right before bed and had to wake up with Boy #3 at 1 a.m. I'd say if you've got a credit to spare, or can get it for free somehow, it would be worth a listen, but I don't know that I'd tell you to spend money on it.
Left to Tell, by Immaculee Ilibagiza
A fascinating true story of a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She and a pile of other women hid in a bathroom for months at a time, while I went to my senior prom and graduated and went on a trip to the Mall of America. The most surprising part of the story, to me, was that I was alive when this was happening and knew nothing about it. Granted, I was 17 at the time, full of self-centeredness and before I had ever read a newspaper from start to finish on a regular basis. But seriously, this is the kind of thing I assume happened during the Holocaust 60 years ago, not now that we are all civilized people who have learned our lessons. It makes me wonder about the Darfur situation and what role regular people have in demanding that something be done. And what role governments should play in interfering with a country's civil war - it seems like we get in trouble if we interfere, and we get in trouble if we don't. This book showed me that there's a lot of thinking to be done on this subject. Very inspiring story, I would absolutely recommend it.
Movies
The Illusionist
This was a movie which my neighbors lent us, and we really enjoyed. It was entertaining and suspenseful with some nice twists. The best part, though, is that the audio commentary tells you how each trick was done, which is great because otherwise I was convinced that the whole thing was just computer generated images. Nope, every trick was done as much as possible the way a real magician would do it, although some things were done in 3D just for budget's sake. Very cool, I really liked that one.
Stranger Than Fiction
This Will Farrell-Emma Thompson movie was one that I really wanted to see when it was in the theaters, but we didn't make it. Will Farrell plays an IRS auditor who all of a sudden starts hearing a voice narrating his life, which is disturbing enough before he hears that he is about to die. I love both Will Farrell and Emma Thompson, who plays the narrator, but it's kind of a shame that Will Farrell didn't get to at least smile in the majority of the movie. He is somber and sedate most of the time, which is disappointing, but I liked the movie even for that. This one is worth renting.
Books I Have Started But Couldn't Finish, Just In the Last 5 Months
The Janson Directive, by Robert Ludlum
Why don't I believe the reviews on Audible? When every one of them says that it is long and drawn out with lots and lots of minute detail that is unnecessary, bogging down an otherwise decent storyline, why do I insist on wasting a credit on that? Am I trying to prove everyone else wrong? Or just to join ranks with my fellow long-winded writers? Just because I write that way myself doesn't mean I want to read it. I made it about halfway through the 20.5 hour torture-fest.
Water for Elephants
This book had promise, it was a seriously-hyped book, but I got turned off after a particularly descriptive sex scene followed by some bad language, all in the first 2 hours. It wasn't a premise that really captivated me either, an old man reminiscing about his days working with a traveling circus. My general rule of thumb, and not one that I can stick to all the time, is that if it is too vulgar to listen to in the car with my kids, or if I'd freak out if I found my 9 year old listening to it, I try to avoid the book. This one would have met the 9-year-old-freak-out requirement.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Country, Volume 1
How this author has the audacity to assume that enough people were willing to sit through the first interminable volume and would naturally be clamoring for more is beyond me. The story of a group of scientists and philosophers in colonial America who buy an African princess and her son in order to run tests on them to prove whether or not black people/slaves had the same capacity for intelligence as white people. The book tries to prove that, yes, the son is very smart, but the author does it by having him use ridiculously flowery language and high-falutin' words that this fairly intelligent white person barely understood. Does that mean something? I'm not sure, all I know is it was painful to listen to and I don't think I even made it halfway. At one point I realized that I had accidentally hit the back button on my ipod and was listening to a section for the second time - it took me about 20 minutes to realize it, though, because it all sounded new to me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I am not a classics reader, and this book is the one that proved it. I had to sit through a 5 or 10 minute introduction to the book by some other famous writer, who found this book so influential and inspiring that she named her child after the girl in the book. Whose name I can't even remember because the book was so boring I wanted to scream! We were reading this for our book group, and I got about halfway through. At the meeting, everyone filled me in on the details of the rest of the plot, and I have to tell you that they made it sound much more interesting than it really was.
The Places In Between
I don't know that I made it more than an hour into this yawn-fest. A story of a man who walked across Afghanistan and various other dangerous countries right after 9/11. You'd think with all of the potential of this guy to get shot, or kidnapped, or tortured, or something, that the book would be more interesting, but sadly, as far as I got it was just a guy taking a walk.
So now that you've had time to ponder your top ten finalists in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, let me give you my prediction. I thought the winner would be:
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
It's a popular, environmentally friendly idea that has broad potential for actually helping the world be a better place. I thought a runner up would be:
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
This team won a technology award for their process, so I thought they'd probably score well in this competition too. I've had this idea in my head since the first time I participated in the competition that tech companies have an advantage over traditional companies, because they are more cutting edge. After all, no one wants to invest in a new beauty salon or grocery store, they want to put their money in something with huge growth potential. Two years ago, the winning team was a bio-medical device that cost $3 to make and sold for $300, and everyone in the country needs like two of them. The money there was huge. Compared to that, I was really surprised that an animation studio (or the other runner-up, a pool table importing company) would be popular at all. I assumed that the competition just wasn't that stiff in my year, or we wouldn't have made it.
Turns out, that's not necessarily true. Here are the winners for this year:
1st runner-up: Calle - 1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. They took the grand prize in the BYU competition, which means they already had netted $50,000. For soccer balls??? Really???
2nd runner-up: Mobile OX - 4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages. Okay, is bookmarking pages and going to each one individually that much more work than having them all on one page? I still might try it, though... It's free after all.
Grand Prize winner: Zinch.com - 10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school. Apparently there is something to be said for this company, although I don't see its importance. They are already in talks with some other company to be bought out.
I was really surprised by these results - nothing really earth-shattering, but definitely trendy. Social networking sites and gathering places seem to be all the rage, and I wonder if this is not the start of another internet bubble, because really, how are these companies proposing to make any money? MobileOX claims they make money through their search engine, and that their cost per user is ridiculously small. But Zinch? Do colleges have to pay to access the information about students or to post their profiles or something? There must be something I'm missing. Maybe the tech companies had really poorly written plans, or bad business models, or something to rule them out. Because if a soccer ball and clothing company can beat a company that is trying to improve the world with a cheaper gas-alternative, there must have been a fundamental flaw in their plan. Well, at least the dinner was really good!
I got a ticket to attend the awards banquet, which DH was super-excited about, because last time the food was, apparently, fantastic. All I can remember from the last time was being a complete nervous wreck, and I don't remember enjoying anything until I got the $5,000 check. So DH, who normally is so anti-social that anything that includes 30 minutes of networking over hors d'ouevres would be the equivalent of getting shards of glass in his eye, told me to get a ticket for him too and we'd make a date of it. Yeah, the food is that good.
So we got a sitter for Thursday and started our 5 hour long date. You know, when we were dating and before we had kids, the date really was about where we were going or what we were going to do. Now, the 45 drive to the University of Utah is as much the destination as anything. We kept marvelling over the fact that we could talk without being interrupted. Honestly, we could have gotten Wendy's take out and sat in the parking lot for 5 hours and it would have been just as satisfying to me, being able to complete my thoughts!
We grabbed some hors d'ouevres and punch (I love punch!) and mingled with each other during the social 1/2 hour, then slowly made our way to the banquet hall downstairs. Because we were among the last to get down there (and I took a bathroom break on the way) most of the tables were full already. Which was fine with us - we grabbed a table on the edge of the room and it just so happened that nobody sat with us. Even better! No need to make polite chit-chat with people that we don't know and who, most likely, don't care about us any more than we do about them. Although I'm sure they would have been lovely people.
No, instead we got to sit and continue to talk to each other over our dinner of steak and mashed potatoes and vegetables. The salad was served in a bowl made of parmesan cheese and herbs, which tasted fantastic. (DH asked me what the bowls were made of, and I told him I knew how to make those bowls and he said, Yeah, I know how to make a car, too, you just put the parts together in the way they go. I replied, Yes, but if you gave me some cheese I could actually make one of those bowls. I don't know if he was impressed or not.)
Here's the real reason that DH wanted to go to the dinner so badly - they set the dessert on the table before we ever sat down. He desperately wanted to be the only one at the table, so that he could have his choice of desserts. Tonight's dessert was cheesecakes - slices of regular cheesecake swirled with strawberry, or some kind of chocolate-raspberry cheesecake which wasn't as good as it looked. I think we probably had 5 slices between the two of us. It was so fun and relaxing to be there and eat whatever we wanted and just sit and talk, we had a fantastic time.
There was a point to the evening, however, and here's where your quiz comes in. They awarded $40,000 to the first place team in the Entrepreneur Challenge, and $5,000 to the 2 runners-up. We were given a program with a little write-up of each participating company, so DH and I tried to decide who we thought would be the winner. And for your entertainment, here are your choices.
1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. Their products are available in some stores currently.
2. The company that makes a 3-wheeled scooter which maneuvers like a motorcycle but is cheap, safer than 2-wheelers, and environmentally friendly. Reminded me of the Segway, with a seat. Has a working prototype.
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages.
5. The company that manufactures and sells racks to hold large, heavy items such as tires and propane tanks. Their products are currently in use at some tire stores.
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
7. The company that is a research lab to help pharmaceutical companies et. al. do FDA required testing.
8. The company that makes legal software for do-it-youselfers, who make their will or other documents and then get it reviewed by actual lawyers.
9. The company that automatically sends marketing tools to clients, like birthday cards/thank you cards, brochures, etc.
10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school.
Those are your top ten finalists! Pick which ones you think would be the best winner and runners-up and ponder that while you read some reviews of books and movies that I've found recently. Then I'll give you the winners at the end.
Books
The Pursuit of Happyness
I haven't seen the movie yet, but it must be better than the book, if only for the fact that the book uses the f-word so many times you start to think that it is the only word this guy and his acquaintances knows. The book details his abusive childhood, his horrible stepfather, the mistakes his family makes in dealing with the situation, all of which combine to make him say, "My life will not be like this. I will be a father to my children." Which of course doesn't stop him from cheating on his wife and having children out of wedlock (at least, I can't remember if he married the mother of his children or not... If he did he divorced her too, I know they didn't stay together.) But he does make being a father a priority, which is admirable, and works very hard to create a good life for himself and his family. You know the ending, he ends up as a multi-millionaire, and you have to love endings like that. It is uplifting to hear any story where hard work and perseverance can take you from abused childhood and homelessness to more money than you know what to do with, especially because it can only happen in America. I'd say, pass on the book unless you can handle that much foul language (it's seriously bad in parts) but I'd guess the movie makes the point just as well.
The Prestige
Another movie that I haven't seen, but have read the book. It was interesting, not quite captivating but the plot moved along enough that it kept me hooked the whole time. I kept thinking it would make a really boring movie, though, so I need to watch the movie and see how they changed the book. It was about 13 hours long, and the last 6 minutes were so terrifying that it kept me up that night, scared to leave my room. Seriously, 13 hours of average, 6 minutes of terror? You'd think if the author was capable of evoking this much emotion he'd do it a little more often in the book than just right at the end. It didn't help that I polished it off late at night right before bed and had to wake up with Boy #3 at 1 a.m. I'd say if you've got a credit to spare, or can get it for free somehow, it would be worth a listen, but I don't know that I'd tell you to spend money on it.
Left to Tell, by Immaculee Ilibagiza
A fascinating true story of a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She and a pile of other women hid in a bathroom for months at a time, while I went to my senior prom and graduated and went on a trip to the Mall of America. The most surprising part of the story, to me, was that I was alive when this was happening and knew nothing about it. Granted, I was 17 at the time, full of self-centeredness and before I had ever read a newspaper from start to finish on a regular basis. But seriously, this is the kind of thing I assume happened during the Holocaust 60 years ago, not now that we are all civilized people who have learned our lessons. It makes me wonder about the Darfur situation and what role regular people have in demanding that something be done. And what role governments should play in interfering with a country's civil war - it seems like we get in trouble if we interfere, and we get in trouble if we don't. This book showed me that there's a lot of thinking to be done on this subject. Very inspiring story, I would absolutely recommend it.
Movies
The Illusionist
This was a movie which my neighbors lent us, and we really enjoyed. It was entertaining and suspenseful with some nice twists. The best part, though, is that the audio commentary tells you how each trick was done, which is great because otherwise I was convinced that the whole thing was just computer generated images. Nope, every trick was done as much as possible the way a real magician would do it, although some things were done in 3D just for budget's sake. Very cool, I really liked that one.
Stranger Than Fiction
This Will Farrell-Emma Thompson movie was one that I really wanted to see when it was in the theaters, but we didn't make it. Will Farrell plays an IRS auditor who all of a sudden starts hearing a voice narrating his life, which is disturbing enough before he hears that he is about to die. I love both Will Farrell and Emma Thompson, who plays the narrator, but it's kind of a shame that Will Farrell didn't get to at least smile in the majority of the movie. He is somber and sedate most of the time, which is disappointing, but I liked the movie even for that. This one is worth renting.
Books I Have Started But Couldn't Finish, Just In the Last 5 Months
The Janson Directive, by Robert Ludlum
Why don't I believe the reviews on Audible? When every one of them says that it is long and drawn out with lots and lots of minute detail that is unnecessary, bogging down an otherwise decent storyline, why do I insist on wasting a credit on that? Am I trying to prove everyone else wrong? Or just to join ranks with my fellow long-winded writers? Just because I write that way myself doesn't mean I want to read it. I made it about halfway through the 20.5 hour torture-fest.
Water for Elephants
This book had promise, it was a seriously-hyped book, but I got turned off after a particularly descriptive sex scene followed by some bad language, all in the first 2 hours. It wasn't a premise that really captivated me either, an old man reminiscing about his days working with a traveling circus. My general rule of thumb, and not one that I can stick to all the time, is that if it is too vulgar to listen to in the car with my kids, or if I'd freak out if I found my 9 year old listening to it, I try to avoid the book. This one would have met the 9-year-old-freak-out requirement.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Country, Volume 1
How this author has the audacity to assume that enough people were willing to sit through the first interminable volume and would naturally be clamoring for more is beyond me. The story of a group of scientists and philosophers in colonial America who buy an African princess and her son in order to run tests on them to prove whether or not black people/slaves had the same capacity for intelligence as white people. The book tries to prove that, yes, the son is very smart, but the author does it by having him use ridiculously flowery language and high-falutin' words that this fairly intelligent white person barely understood. Does that mean something? I'm not sure, all I know is it was painful to listen to and I don't think I even made it halfway. At one point I realized that I had accidentally hit the back button on my ipod and was listening to a section for the second time - it took me about 20 minutes to realize it, though, because it all sounded new to me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I am not a classics reader, and this book is the one that proved it. I had to sit through a 5 or 10 minute introduction to the book by some other famous writer, who found this book so influential and inspiring that she named her child after the girl in the book. Whose name I can't even remember because the book was so boring I wanted to scream! We were reading this for our book group, and I got about halfway through. At the meeting, everyone filled me in on the details of the rest of the plot, and I have to tell you that they made it sound much more interesting than it really was.
The Places In Between
I don't know that I made it more than an hour into this yawn-fest. A story of a man who walked across Afghanistan and various other dangerous countries right after 9/11. You'd think with all of the potential of this guy to get shot, or kidnapped, or tortured, or something, that the book would be more interesting, but sadly, as far as I got it was just a guy taking a walk.
So now that you've had time to ponder your top ten finalists in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, let me give you my prediction. I thought the winner would be:
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
It's a popular, environmentally friendly idea that has broad potential for actually helping the world be a better place. I thought a runner up would be:
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
This team won a technology award for their process, so I thought they'd probably score well in this competition too. I've had this idea in my head since the first time I participated in the competition that tech companies have an advantage over traditional companies, because they are more cutting edge. After all, no one wants to invest in a new beauty salon or grocery store, they want to put their money in something with huge growth potential. Two years ago, the winning team was a bio-medical device that cost $3 to make and sold for $300, and everyone in the country needs like two of them. The money there was huge. Compared to that, I was really surprised that an animation studio (or the other runner-up, a pool table importing company) would be popular at all. I assumed that the competition just wasn't that stiff in my year, or we wouldn't have made it.
Turns out, that's not necessarily true. Here are the winners for this year:
1st runner-up: Calle - 1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. They took the grand prize in the BYU competition, which means they already had netted $50,000. For soccer balls??? Really???
2nd runner-up: Mobile OX - 4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages. Okay, is bookmarking pages and going to each one individually that much more work than having them all on one page? I still might try it, though... It's free after all.
Grand Prize winner: Zinch.com - 10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school. Apparently there is something to be said for this company, although I don't see its importance. They are already in talks with some other company to be bought out.
I was really surprised by these results - nothing really earth-shattering, but definitely trendy. Social networking sites and gathering places seem to be all the rage, and I wonder if this is not the start of another internet bubble, because really, how are these companies proposing to make any money? MobileOX claims they make money through their search engine, and that their cost per user is ridiculously small. But Zinch? Do colleges have to pay to access the information about students or to post their profiles or something? There must be something I'm missing. Maybe the tech companies had really poorly written plans, or bad business models, or something to rule them out. Because if a soccer ball and clothing company can beat a company that is trying to improve the world with a cheaper gas-alternative, there must have been a fundamental flaw in their plan. Well, at least the dinner was really good!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Reflection Time
It's time to do a little reflecting, in this case on punishment for children. If you were raised in my family, you would have known the topic of this discussion after just reading the title, because "Reflection Time" was, in fact, a type of punishment in our household.
Reflection Time had it's inauguration when I was 15 and went out with some friends who had just graduated that day. I hadn't really ever gone out like this before, and since there wasn't a formal curfew in place at the time, my parents told me to "be reasonable." I thought 1:15 a.m. was perfectly reasonable for a school night! Okay, in all honesty, somewhere around midnight I recognized that I was going to be in big trouble when I got home, but we were at some restaurant like 45 minutes away when I had that thought, and I was with a bunch of people for whom this wasn't an issue, and having never been in a situation like this before, I didn't know what to do.
Similarly, when my parents were lecturing me the next day, they kept pointing out things that any logical person (read: not a teenager) should have taken into account. Like the fact that originally I was given permission to go to Friendly's but they were already closed when we were going to go there. Also, when one of my friends called her parents to make sure the change of plans was acceptable, they told her that it wasn't acceptable and to come home. Both of those things (plus the fact that she called home to check in) should have been a gigantic red flag about what makes a reasonable time to come home.
In lieu of the typical "grounding" that my friends got, my parents got creative and relegated me to "Reflection Time." Reflection Time was essentially grounding, in that I wasn't allowed to go out with my friends anywhere for two weeks, but by calling it Reflection Time, my parents' goal was to make me think about what I had done wrong, and hopefully convince me never to do it again.
Would a typical grounding without the additional emotional element have made the same impression as Reflection Time? I kind of think so, just because it was pretty rare for me to screw up quite so badly and I have always had a fairly strong conscience. I have never needed much to make me feel guilty. (For example, getting rid of stuffed animals as a child was akin to selling my children - I was convinced that they felt the sting of betrayal through their fluffy coats, and the hilt of the knife in their cottony backs.) An interesting development, though, was that my friends all thought my parents were great for giving a punishment that showed so much thought and creativity - I think it must have signified that they cared more than everyone else's grounding parents.
Here's the situation that is causing me to reflect on punishments. Boy #2 woke up surly and hasn't ever shaken it today. He was fighting with everyone in sight by the time I woke up at 7:15, and screaming at everyone to boot. I got him to eat breakfast at 8:00 but only after another screaming fit. When I requested that he get his church clothes on at 9:30 before he was allowed to play a video game, it was a nuclear meltdown, and I told him that he was banned from the computer today. The screaming and kicking didn't end, though, and DH took away the Lego Star Wars CD and told him it was off limits until some time to be determined.
Boy #2 was fine the rest of the morning and at church, but when he came home he barely ate anything and started fighting again. A parent can only be yelled at so many times before they just snap, is my opinion, and Boy #2 got there quickly. The final straw (after many previous straws that I won't get into here) was when #2 was playing Whac-a-Mole, which is a video game that you plug into the tv, and Boy #3 wanted a turn. A turn was given, but then #2 attempted to grab the controller out of #3's hand, which of course he wasn't letting go of. Boy #2 started yelling at #3 and after I told him to let go of it, #2 screamed "Fine!" threw the controller back to #3, and then kicked him as he stomped past.
So now we are faced with the responsibility of punishing our own kids, and it is not easy. We have to find a punishment that fits the crime, that is serious enough to teach a lesson but not Draconian, that I will enforce, and that won't be punishing me.
I spent a long time last year listening to my next door neighbor threaten her kids with the withdrawal of their video gaming privileges for whatever infraction she witnessed. It started to get old, at least in my mind, and I wondered how long the same punishment would be effective. Apparently, forever. It only took owning Lego Star Wars for about 15 minutes before I was ready to threaten to take it away, and it has similarly turned into the punishment du jour at our home.
The problem is, it works. It is the only thing that Boy #2 puts any value on, other than candy. But we can't take away candy, since he has to have it first, and if he has it, it's already been eaten. So candy is the bribe, and now Lego Star Wars is the threat. (DH and I went to a lecture on parenting by a psychologist who specializes in parents and children, and he said it was perfectly acceptable to bribe, so we happily embrace that dogma.) Boy #2 has always been hard to get to do things he doesn't want to do, because he was never easily swayed by the removal of privileges. Until Lego Star Wars came along, that is.
So we took away all computer and video game privileges for a week. And I feel horrible about it. I felt horrible immediately, although I can't tell whether it's because of the punishment being too harsh or because I wish that I hadn't gotten so mad at him in the first place. If he didn't push my buttons so well, would I have gotten so mad that I took away the thing he likes most?
What about my role in the situation? Have I given him enough guidance to help him learn how not to behave? If my parents had said "Be home at 11" I have little doubt that I would have told my friends I needed to be home by 11, and they would have been respectful of that, I think. Of course, all of us were new at the teenager-going-out situation, after that there was no chance that my parents would let any of their kids decide what a reasonable time to be home was. So what is my responsibility here?
DH and I talked about it, and it seems like the day that starts badly never gets better, so we decided to institute an Eat-First-Play-After rule for first thing in the morning, not knowing if this is going to solve the problem but it shouldn't hurt. My poor kids, having to deal with parents feeling their way through parenting. The only upside is that my parents were learning on me, and it took me until I was like 30 and doing it myself to realize it. So maybe it won't scar him too much!
Today is now Tuesday, and here's the update. We've had two days of all the boys playing outside for hours at a time. Boy #2 has eaten breakfast immediately after waking for the last two days, and has had no complaints or fights about it at all. Could it be that by letting him decide to "be reasonable" about when he ate breakfast was too much responsibility for him? Possibly, but it could still just be a novelty, the jury's still out. Today he was a little grouchy when he had to run errands with me instead of playing with friends, but nothing that I couldn't handle. Another bonus, he doesn't complain at all, not for one single second, about not being able to play his video games. I'm not sure what lesson to take out of all of this reflecting, all I know is that it's really hard to be a parent!
Reflection Time had it's inauguration when I was 15 and went out with some friends who had just graduated that day. I hadn't really ever gone out like this before, and since there wasn't a formal curfew in place at the time, my parents told me to "be reasonable." I thought 1:15 a.m. was perfectly reasonable for a school night! Okay, in all honesty, somewhere around midnight I recognized that I was going to be in big trouble when I got home, but we were at some restaurant like 45 minutes away when I had that thought, and I was with a bunch of people for whom this wasn't an issue, and having never been in a situation like this before, I didn't know what to do.
Similarly, when my parents were lecturing me the next day, they kept pointing out things that any logical person (read: not a teenager) should have taken into account. Like the fact that originally I was given permission to go to Friendly's but they were already closed when we were going to go there. Also, when one of my friends called her parents to make sure the change of plans was acceptable, they told her that it wasn't acceptable and to come home. Both of those things (plus the fact that she called home to check in) should have been a gigantic red flag about what makes a reasonable time to come home.
In lieu of the typical "grounding" that my friends got, my parents got creative and relegated me to "Reflection Time." Reflection Time was essentially grounding, in that I wasn't allowed to go out with my friends anywhere for two weeks, but by calling it Reflection Time, my parents' goal was to make me think about what I had done wrong, and hopefully convince me never to do it again.
Would a typical grounding without the additional emotional element have made the same impression as Reflection Time? I kind of think so, just because it was pretty rare for me to screw up quite so badly and I have always had a fairly strong conscience. I have never needed much to make me feel guilty. (For example, getting rid of stuffed animals as a child was akin to selling my children - I was convinced that they felt the sting of betrayal through their fluffy coats, and the hilt of the knife in their cottony backs.) An interesting development, though, was that my friends all thought my parents were great for giving a punishment that showed so much thought and creativity - I think it must have signified that they cared more than everyone else's grounding parents.
Here's the situation that is causing me to reflect on punishments. Boy #2 woke up surly and hasn't ever shaken it today. He was fighting with everyone in sight by the time I woke up at 7:15, and screaming at everyone to boot. I got him to eat breakfast at 8:00 but only after another screaming fit. When I requested that he get his church clothes on at 9:30 before he was allowed to play a video game, it was a nuclear meltdown, and I told him that he was banned from the computer today. The screaming and kicking didn't end, though, and DH took away the Lego Star Wars CD and told him it was off limits until some time to be determined.
Boy #2 was fine the rest of the morning and at church, but when he came home he barely ate anything and started fighting again. A parent can only be yelled at so many times before they just snap, is my opinion, and Boy #2 got there quickly. The final straw (after many previous straws that I won't get into here) was when #2 was playing Whac-a-Mole, which is a video game that you plug into the tv, and Boy #3 wanted a turn. A turn was given, but then #2 attempted to grab the controller out of #3's hand, which of course he wasn't letting go of. Boy #2 started yelling at #3 and after I told him to let go of it, #2 screamed "Fine!" threw the controller back to #3, and then kicked him as he stomped past.
So now we are faced with the responsibility of punishing our own kids, and it is not easy. We have to find a punishment that fits the crime, that is serious enough to teach a lesson but not Draconian, that I will enforce, and that won't be punishing me.
I spent a long time last year listening to my next door neighbor threaten her kids with the withdrawal of their video gaming privileges for whatever infraction she witnessed. It started to get old, at least in my mind, and I wondered how long the same punishment would be effective. Apparently, forever. It only took owning Lego Star Wars for about 15 minutes before I was ready to threaten to take it away, and it has similarly turned into the punishment du jour at our home.
The problem is, it works. It is the only thing that Boy #2 puts any value on, other than candy. But we can't take away candy, since he has to have it first, and if he has it, it's already been eaten. So candy is the bribe, and now Lego Star Wars is the threat. (DH and I went to a lecture on parenting by a psychologist who specializes in parents and children, and he said it was perfectly acceptable to bribe, so we happily embrace that dogma.) Boy #2 has always been hard to get to do things he doesn't want to do, because he was never easily swayed by the removal of privileges. Until Lego Star Wars came along, that is.
So we took away all computer and video game privileges for a week. And I feel horrible about it. I felt horrible immediately, although I can't tell whether it's because of the punishment being too harsh or because I wish that I hadn't gotten so mad at him in the first place. If he didn't push my buttons so well, would I have gotten so mad that I took away the thing he likes most?
What about my role in the situation? Have I given him enough guidance to help him learn how not to behave? If my parents had said "Be home at 11" I have little doubt that I would have told my friends I needed to be home by 11, and they would have been respectful of that, I think. Of course, all of us were new at the teenager-going-out situation, after that there was no chance that my parents would let any of their kids decide what a reasonable time to be home was. So what is my responsibility here?
DH and I talked about it, and it seems like the day that starts badly never gets better, so we decided to institute an Eat-First-Play-After rule for first thing in the morning, not knowing if this is going to solve the problem but it shouldn't hurt. My poor kids, having to deal with parents feeling their way through parenting. The only upside is that my parents were learning on me, and it took me until I was like 30 and doing it myself to realize it. So maybe it won't scar him too much!
Today is now Tuesday, and here's the update. We've had two days of all the boys playing outside for hours at a time. Boy #2 has eaten breakfast immediately after waking for the last two days, and has had no complaints or fights about it at all. Could it be that by letting him decide to "be reasonable" about when he ate breakfast was too much responsibility for him? Possibly, but it could still just be a novelty, the jury's still out. Today he was a little grouchy when he had to run errands with me instead of playing with friends, but nothing that I couldn't handle. Another bonus, he doesn't complain at all, not for one single second, about not being able to play his video games. I'm not sure what lesson to take out of all of this reflecting, all I know is that it's really hard to be a parent!
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Lessons Learned During a Pizza Hut Dinner
1. There is no end to how much food a 9 year old will try to eat in one bite. And remain fully convinced that of course he's chewing with his mouth shut!
2. The floor under the dining room table will be littered with pepperoni. I can't remember ever dropping a whole pepperoni on the floor, let alone several, but then again, I don't prefer to eat my pepperoni on the side.
3. Crusts are for handles only. They are UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES to be eaten.
4. The same children who refuse to eat their crust will have absolutely no problem eating a breadstick, which is basically just crust with cheese.
5. The child who refuses to eat a breadstick at the table will have absolutely no problem eating a breadstick outside on the swingset. Yes, you guessed it, we haven't had nearly enough swingset injuries lately, I'm trying to beef up my blog entries by encouraging a choking incident.
6. When a child requests "Cookie Bubbles" he's really asking for "Fruity Pebbles." This is the reason I'm pursuing an advanced education, to figure out stuff like that. Which has nothing to do with Pizza Hut, but I thought I'd throw that in there.
7. Somewhere around age 8, it turns into some kind of pre-manhood contest to see just how much of a pizza a boy can eat. Today's attempt: 6 1/2 slices from a medium pizza. He chickened out at number 7. Oh, and one breadstick.
8. You can't hide Pizza Hut from a dieting husband. You can only hope he comes home from his campout either happy enough that he doesn't care, or grouchy enough that he's grateful.
2. The floor under the dining room table will be littered with pepperoni. I can't remember ever dropping a whole pepperoni on the floor, let alone several, but then again, I don't prefer to eat my pepperoni on the side.
3. Crusts are for handles only. They are UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES to be eaten.
4. The same children who refuse to eat their crust will have absolutely no problem eating a breadstick, which is basically just crust with cheese.
5. The child who refuses to eat a breadstick at the table will have absolutely no problem eating a breadstick outside on the swingset. Yes, you guessed it, we haven't had nearly enough swingset injuries lately, I'm trying to beef up my blog entries by encouraging a choking incident.
6. When a child requests "Cookie Bubbles" he's really asking for "Fruity Pebbles." This is the reason I'm pursuing an advanced education, to figure out stuff like that. Which has nothing to do with Pizza Hut, but I thought I'd throw that in there.
7. Somewhere around age 8, it turns into some kind of pre-manhood contest to see just how much of a pizza a boy can eat. Today's attempt: 6 1/2 slices from a medium pizza. He chickened out at number 7. Oh, and one breadstick.
8. You can't hide Pizza Hut from a dieting husband. You can only hope he comes home from his campout either happy enough that he doesn't care, or grouchy enough that he's grateful.
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