Holiday Dinners Stress You Out? Play Dysfunctional Family Bingo

This year The Spouse and I are NOT -- I repeat -- NOT hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at our house as we have for several consecutive years. We will not be deep frying our turkey in the backyard while I pray that The Spouse doesn't set something on fire, arguing over whether the corn bread stuffing we've made is moist enough or whether we've made a sufficient amount of mashed potatoes.

But that does not mean we are immune to the stress that often accompanies attending BIG holiday celebrations. (And I'm not even talkin' Christmas yet.) Thus the creation of my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card that's currently up at my parenting blog, the Picket Fence Post. It's a bingo card whose squares are filled with potentially awful scenarios that could occur during a family holiday dinner. Believe me, this is a game you do not want to win.

For years, my friends and I would joke about secretly playing Dysfunctional Family Bingo, particularly after sharing a number of war stories about our experiences. Now we've opened up the game to everyone. Feel free to play along, or just add your own loony holiday dinner story(stories) in the comments section. Remember, no one ever has a perfect holiday celebration.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Three for Thursday: Presidential Election Begins, Maternal Profiling and Holiday Round-Up

Item #1: What’s Up with Iowa?

What’s up with Iowa? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s been hard to miss the mass hordes of reporters and politicos who’ve descended upon the farm state for the first official contest of the 2008 presidential election that starts tonight. What do the primaries have to do with parenting? That’s what my January Parents and Kids essay is about. If parents can get their kids all revved up about “American Idol” – as millions of parents do – why can’t they direct that energy and interest into something that really matters, like who’s going to be the country’s war-time commander-in-chief?

(Speaking of politics . . . the razor-sharp satirists at JibJab, who create funny animated bits about politics and current events, just released their 2007 year-in-review cartoon. Warning: The video is distinctly kid- and work-UNfriendly. Plus, it may offend those who are easily offended.)

Item #2: Maternal Profiling

The Huffington Post has an interesting entry this week about how the New York Times declared that the term “maternal profiling” -- a fancy way of describing the employment discrimination that some mothers encounter – was one of the hot buzzwords of 2007.

Item #3: Holiday Round-Up

Gifts: Santa bestowed upon my three rug rats: A Lego Star Wars Jabba the Hut barge, a Lego Star Wars Republic Cruiser and -- God help us -- a kid-sized set of drums. Grandma gave the Girl a karaoke machine (with which she’s been belting out all tunes “High School Musical” and “Hannah Montana” related. Non-stop.). Auntie Ellen gave the Eldest Boy a robot that, according to the box, not only is able to travel all around the house and see in the dark, but will develop its own personality and -- get this -- respond to aggression. Frankly, I’m frightened, and have already informed my beloved sister-in-law that if the four-legged robot gets out of hand, I’m going to abandon it on her front doorstep so it can exact its metallic aggression on her house.

Mirth: We got through Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, the Patriots’ regular season finale and a Festivus celebration (with my awesomely snarky friends) in tact. No one contracted a stomach bug (as I did last Christmas). No one was besieged by lice (as the Girl and I both were when were planning on marking the dark, grievance-filled holiday of Festivus with the same friends last year). No one died. So, as far as I’m concerned, ‘twas all good.

Family Togetherness: The day after Christmas, The Spouse and I took all three of our offspring, plus one friend apiece, to see “Alvin and the Chipmunks” at a movie theater. The three sets of friends all wanted to sit in three different rows, as if they didn’t know the grown-ups except when I distributed bags of popcorn and drinks . . . oh, and when our Youngest Boy wanted to hold his Daddy’s hand. After the movie, after they devoured Christmas cookies at our house, played the drums, played video games, sang karaoke and all the friends had gone home, each one of our children, one by one, got angry with The Spouse and I for insisting that it was time for bed when it was an hour-plus past their usual bedtime. Each one of the ingrates told us that we were ruining their lives. Plus we were accused of getting a secret thrill out of bossing little kids around. Nothing like gifts, a hyper-saccharine kids’ movie, time with friends, oodles of sugar and late bedtimes to bring a family together.

(Image from CNN.)

Three for Thursday Returns With: To Freeze or Not to Freeze, the Ghost of Christmas Eve Past and Dragon Vomit

After a hiatus, “Three for Thursday” has returned . . . consider it an early Christmas gift.

Item #1: To Freeze or Not to Freeze

It comes as no shock that trying to have a career and parent young children simultaneously is insanely difficult and makes legions of parents stressed out. It also comes as no surprise that when women strive to climb the career ladder during their childbearing years, they oftentimes find themselves torn. Some want to get to a certain point in their career before having children and then some find that delaying childbearing can make getting pregnant more challenging. Others have children without regard to career concerns and later find that hitting the “pause” button on their work can hurt their careers.

Enter into the fray this piece from the Wall Street Journal by Ronald W. Dworkin, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, about the evolving technology which allows women to freeze their eggs – therefore suspending their fertility — indefinitely while they work on their career. Dworkin wrote:

“Our culture encourages women to pursue high-powered careers. Many women must pursue at least some kind of career: With the divorce rate over 50%, women can no longer rely on the integrity of the family unit to support them. The culture paints a rosy image about career and family. Then biological truth breaks through, by which time these women have lost a decade of their best childbearing years.”

On the newspaper’s working parents blog, “The Juggle” blogger Sara Schaefer Munoz asked her readers whether, when they were younger, they thought that men and women would have the same “career trajectories” through their childbearing years.

Item #2: The Ghost of Christmas Eve Past

I just returned from visiting my first grade son’s classroom for a “holiday” party and, after hearing several mothers discussing the vast number of children who’ve recently succumbed to a vicious stomach bug – striking victims in not only my son’s school, but in my twins’ school as well – my own stomach began to churn. It’s nearly the first anniversary of the Christmas Eve From Hell when, just after I finished eating our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, I fled to the bathroom where I spent the next two days making close friends with my toilet. I missed Christmas and was miserable for days afterward.

I’d been trying to blot that experience from my mind as my family’s Christmas Eve dinner draws near (though I did tell my mother that I can’t bring myself to eat the baked stuffed shrimp she’s planning on making as not enough time has elapsed since The Incident for me to stomach that particular dish yet).

However hearing that there’s a stomach bug going around has sent me into a hand washing frenzy. But it’s hard to wash your hands when your fingers are crossed as you pray that the bug will skip your house this year.

Item #3: Dragon Vomit

Random pediatric comment of the week, uttered by my 9-year-old son after suspiciously eyeing a pan of lasagna his father made: “That looks like dragon vomit.”

At least he’s got a flair for colorful adjectives.

Six-and-a-Half Hours

That's how long it took me to get home from work yesterday.

Six-and-a-half hours.

I could've driven from the Boston area to Baltimore in that time. Instead, I spent those clenched, nerve-wracking hours driving on the snow-covered, clogged and slippery (UNPLOWED! Even on major highways that were not congested) trying to make it home in what is normally a 90-minute trip.

Before I even left work, I received an automated phone call on my cell phone from my children's school department telling me that school was letting out two hours early. Even if I'd left work the moment I got that call, given the conditions of Massachusetts highways yesterday (gridlock beyond belief) I would've never made it back in time. I wound up placing several frantic phone calls, trying to find anyone who could get the kids off the bus. Lucky for me, one of my neighbors was indeed available. Initially, I thought she'd only have to watch the three kids for a half-hour. Then, after I came face-to-face with the worst commute of my life, she wound up watching them for four-and-a-half hours and fed them dinner, which was a good thing seeing as though I still had no food in the house yesterday.

When I finally made it home, leaving my minivan in the street in front of my house because I couldn't get into my driveway, then trudged through 10+ inches of snow to my neighbor's house to pick up the kids, they, the charmers that they are, gave me grief. They didn't want to leave. It had been a kid-friendly winter wonderland over there. They'd gone sledding, had snowball fights, had dinner and snacks, watched "Rudolph" on TV, played a pretend game of Harry Potter and were in the middle of filling a Mad Lib with all manner of juvenile, toilet-related humor when I arrived and dragged them out of a warm, magical neighbor's home. As we slogged through the snow, they said they couldn't understand why I was in such a foul mood.

"I was in the car for six-and-a-half hours!" I wearily replied. "I had to stop on the side of the road tons of times to chop ice off of my windshield wipers. I was so nervous."

"You've already told us that Mom," my 9-year-old son quipped as he tossed his snowpants into the garage. "We get it."

As for The Spouse, he tried repeatedly to get home, but when his car got stuck in a snowbank, he abandoned it on the side of the road, until about 9:30 p.m. or so when he got a group of guys together to shove his car out of the snow and onto the streets. He rolled in at around 10:30.

Between now and New Year's, I am officially not singing any snow-related Christmas songs that speak in glowing terms about the white, freezing matter. Me and snow, to crib a line from an old "Gilmore Girls" episode, we're not on speaking terms right now.

(Image from the Boston Herald.)

Holiday Madness: When Everything Can’t Get Get Done

Why haven’t I blogged in, what, weeks? I’m going to brazenly pass the buck and blame it on Christmas . . . and Hanukkah . . . and the fact that, when you live in dual-career household while trying to raise small children, it’s virtually impossible to keep up with everything, especially in a holiday season where you celebrate not one, but TWO major religious observances. Seriously.

As Christmas cards started filling my mailbox beginning on the Monday after Thanksgiving (!), the pressure to get our family cards done and mailed has continued to mount. (I wouldn’t open the cards for a while, simply shoved them into a corner in the kitchen because their presence was making me anxious about the fact that I hadn’t yet done ours.) Because I foolishly hand-make our cards – my December essay in Parents and Kids attempts to explain the irrational rationale behind my holiday card mania – and I haven’t had sufficient time to work on them. I’m way, way behind, even by my lax standards.

Hanukkah, which we celebrate in my interfaith family, is over. Yet in my house, we’re still pretending as though it’s on-going. Why? I completely forgot about lighting the candles on Monday night. When the kids remembered that we hadn’t lit the menorah, just as I was putting them to bed way past their bedtime, they went nuts. Of course they didn’t remember about the candle lighting either and The Spouse, who’s been working late into the evening many nights recently, wasn’t around to remember to light the candles either. Regardless of what the calendar says, we’re going to keep lighting the candles until we’ve officially celebrated all eight nights.

What about our Hanukkah cards, which I hand-make at the same time I do the (*ahem* not even started) Christmas cards? Well, my Jewish friends and family members, we’re going to pretend that the Festival of Lights is a tad longer this year.

I haven’t finished Christmas shopping. I haven’t baked Christmas cookies with the kids. I only got our outdoor Christmas lights fully up and operational yesterday (we had one of the few dark, light-less homes on my street). I’m still trying to figure out what to get The Spouse as he’s one of the hardest and pickiest people for whom to shop. In a weak moment two weeks ago (my mind clouded by the medicine I’d taken to battle back against a cold that wouldn’t end), I allowed my eldest son Jonah to convince me to buy a gingerbread house kit. Yeah, we’ve got time to stop everything else and put together a gingerbread house which likely won’t make it a full 24 hours without getting crushed or irreparably damaged by my 6-year-old son.

My kids just wrote their letters to Santa this past weekend, which means they just decided what single present they want from the big guy. (They didn’t want to give Santa a list of choices.) Jonah, clever child that he is, wrote his letter in secret, then sealed it and taped it closed and has been “checking” on it for the past few days — shocker, I haven’t yet mailed the letters — to make sure that neither The Spouse nor I have peeked at its contents. (Yes, it’s a test.)

Oh, and did I mention that Jonah’s indoor soccer league is extremely active (two, count ‘em, TWO games this past Saturday, scheduled several hours apart by the genius scheduling gods). My 9-year-old daughter’s basketball team has a game a week, one practice and a separate “open gym” time. AND The Spouse coaches both teams.

My father-in-law’s 75th birthday party – which most of his grown children are throwing for him – is this weekend. (We have neither purchased a gift nor bought the ingredients for the food we’re supposed to bring and make.)

My father just had knee replacement surgery, yet I’ve only been able to take the kids to see him once since his operation.

My daughter has a sleepover birthday party this weekend (she’ll attend after her grandfather’s party) for which I had to scurry to pick up a gift.

A church religious class just decided to do a holiday gift swap which will take place after the nativity play where my 9-year-old son will play the role of an inn keeper who denied Mary and Joseph lodging on the first Christmas Eve.

Despite my repeated distribution of salt all over our icy driveway and front walk, there remains a slushy snow/ice mixture that I haven’t had time to shovel away. And since The Spouse has been out most nights or is coaching one of his kids, the mess just refreezes every night. (I’m praying it will melt away.)

Our pantry is precariously barren. (How many consecutive nights can I serve breakfast for dinner before the child nutritionists descend upon my house?) Throw in the fact that it’s the end of the semester where I teach and the pressure is on to read dozens of papers and calculate grades, it’s no wonder I feel buried with stuff, domestic and professional.

In the winter issue of Hybrid Mom Magazine, a publication that emphasizes stories for down-to-earth moms both at-home and working, I wrote one of the lead stories on how to embrace the “Reason for the Season,” how to try to chill out and streamline your holiday “To Do” list while being realistic about what parents of small children can truly accomplish during this very busy time of year. I interviewed several women for the article, many of whom offered very sage advice. Unfortunately, I haven’t heeded a word of it.

So I face this choice: Either I just chill and let go of some of these tasks (For example, do we have to make everyone’s favorite Christmas cookie?), or I’m going to be in a distinctly bah humbug/Grinch state of mind until January while attempting to get everything done and done well. For the sake of my family and my own sanity, I chose Option #1.

Leave Santa’s Jelly Belly Alone

Enough with the madness.

Seriously people, do you not have anything better to do than to take on Santa's waistline?

I stumbled upon this inane story that not only called for all Santa Clauses to lose weight but urged parents to have their kids leave Saint Nick -- get this -- celery instead of cookies on Christmas Eve. (Nothin' says homemade goodness like a celery stalk and wheat germ.)

Here are a couple of excerpts from the Boston Herald story:

-- “’It is really important that the people who kids look up to as role models are in good shape, eating well and getting exercise. It is absolutely critical,’ acting U.S. Surgeon General Rear Adm. Steven K. Galson said in an interview after a presentation on obesity at the Boston Children’s Museum. Touting NFL players who work with kids to promote healthy lifestyles, Galson added: ‘Santa is no different.’”

-- “’I thoroughly agree he [Santa] should lose weight and we should find ways to make healthy foods more palatable to children,’ said Dr. Meredith Harris, associate professor at Northeastern University. ‘Role models should be seen to be looking fit and living healthily.’”

-- “’While childhood obesity is a serious problem, we think Santa is fine just the way he is,’ said Donna Rheaume, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
But she added: ‘We would recommend people leave him healthier snacks this year like a nice apple or carrot and celery sticks, which have an added benefit because they are tasty for his reindeer, too.’”

If your kid is looking to Santa for healthy living tips, then you’ve got bigger problems than your kid’s potential pot belly. Leave Santa and his cookies alone.

Thanksgiving Thankfulness

I don’t normally traffic in the saccharine parental type of writing, the kind that is overflowing with sunshine, rainbows and unicorns and pretends as though there’s never a moment in your life as a parent when you’d ever want to lock yourself in a room alone just to get away from the insanity that comes hand-in-hand with child-rearing.

But it’s Thanksgiving.

Even though I’m going to be trying my best to not stress out too much when The Spouse and I prepare dinner at our house on Thursday (the last time I became so stressed out while making Thanksgiving dinner, I had sisters-in-law shoving glasses of wine into my hand and telling me to chill), even though I’m frequently jaded, that doesn’t mean that I don’t get sentimental.

And sentiment is what fueled my Parents and Kids column entitled, “What This Mom is Thankful For.” . . . Now I’m off to write about “Miracle on 34th Street” for another web site and then allow the 60-year-old film’s buoyant sentiment help me coast through dinner prep.

Three for Thursday

Item #1: Suburban Turmoil: I Love You Too

And I’m not just saying I love Suburban Turmoil because the blogger who runs the site wrote really nice things about The Book – A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. Blogger and mother of a newborn, a 2-year-old and step-mom to two, Lindsay Ferrier was kind enough to say of The Book:

“. . . Meredith comes across as smart, funny and real. While so many
published writers have a bit of that face it, I’m better than you air in their
writing, Meredith’s stories read like she could be telling them to you over
coffee at Starbucks.”

She also added, “The truth is, I wish Meredith lived in Nashville instead of Boston because then I would show up at her front doorstep and refuse to leave until she agreed to be my friend.”

Back at ya sista.

Item #2: To Steal a Line From Dave Barry, ‘I’m Not Making This Up’

My 8-year-old daughter just came home from school all upset, insisting she had to immediately go to a friend’s house to log onto the internet – seeing as though I’m using my laptop – so, get this, her Webkinz, the plush, fluffy white dog she owns won’t die.

“Mom! There’s a rumor going around that if you don’t go on Webkinz World [online] your Webkinz might die!” Abbey said without a shred of incredulity.

I burst out laughing, as this was the funniest thing I’d heard all day.

“I’m serious!” she said, putting her little fists onto her hips. “There are people who want to close down Webkinz World.”

I . . . I . . . I had nothin’ but mocking laughter to toss her way. So I dialed the number for the neighbor’s house, handed her the telephone and off she went to save her Webkinz.

Item #3: I’m Wholly (Holy) Unprepared

We’re celebrating Passover a bit late and are having a total of 18 people at my house on Saturday afternoon. Swamped with work and with the specter of the kids hanging around tomorrow because they have the day off from school (it’ll be Good Friday and all), I haven’t done everything I need to do.

We still need an extra table and more chairs. We haven’t cleaned. And even though I got groceries delivered yesterday by Peapod (a local grocery store service that delivers large quarts of gin . . . uh, no, silly, of course they deliver groceries), they were out of some key items I needed, like (*gag*) Gefilte fish, a must-have for Passover dinner. Even though my sister-in-law agreed to take care of that for me, I’m now realizing that I forgot to order horseradish and few other items.

Then, on Sunday, we’ll also be partaking of Easter festivities with my parents. Only the idiot Easter Bunny at my house has yet to go out and buy stuff to put inside the Easter eggs for the Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning. Oh, and my other sister-in-law is having an Easter egg hunt at her house tomorrow and I’ve done a big fat nothing to help her with that.

Luckily, ‘tis the season for forgiveness. (I hope.)

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