Half Changed World

Kids restaurant week

You've probably heard of the "Restaurant Week" promos that happen once a year in a lot of cities -- a bunch of restaurants all agree to offer a limited fixed price menu at the same bargain price for one week a year.  It's a nice way to get to try restaurants that are usually out of your price range, and gets the restaurants more customers during a generally slow time of year and lots of publicity and goodwill.

Well, this year Cookie magazine helped organize "Kids Restaurant Week" in three cities, including DC.  Adults pay $29, kids pay their age, special early seatings.  We generally have given up on going out with the boys to any restaurant fancier than Applebees, because it's just not worth the money to buy food that they won't eat, and it takes too much of our energy to keep them sitting nicely.  (Although we've discovered that a pair of bubble teas will buy us a good 45 minutes sitting at the local dim sum joint.)  But we decided to give Wasabi a try, since N likes the takeout sushi from Trader Joe's, and I hoped the food on a conveyor belt would distract D even if there was nothing he was willing to eat.  And it's right near my office.

We got there a little late, due to some parking issues.  (We discovered that our minivan no longer fits in the parking structures downtown since we installed a bike rack.  And most metered spots are off limits between 4 and 6.30.)  But they were very welcoming when we got there.

It turned out to be far more of a success than I had anticipated.  They had a kids meal planned out, with chicken karage, avocado rolls, sweet potato tempura and strawberries with ginger.  Somewhat to my surprise, D adored the chicken.  And adults could just eat of the conveyor belt or the menu.  The boys were thrilled by how the staff turned the standard wooden disposible chopsticks into kids chopsticks with the clever use of a rubberband and the rolled up paper wrapper.

At the end of the meal, the manager (or owner?) stopped by and was very welcoming.  He asked where we lived, and when we said Virginia, he told us they were opening a new branch in Tyson's in the fall.  He said that would be a more kid-friendly set-up, with more room, and the chefs working on display in the middle. 

I wouldn't have imagined taking the boys to Wasabi without the incentive of kids restaurant week, but at the end, they asked if they could go back.  And we probably will.

life with my crackberry

The New York Times had an article last year on how smartphones are becoming seen as a necessity.  Overall, it was sort of an eyeroll inducing article, and most of the commenters on the site did seem to be rolling their eyes.  But I do think it made a good point about how as a group (whether a work team or a group of friends) reaches a saturation point with the technology, it becomes harder to be the outlier.  People start to assume that you don't have comments on an email if you haven't responded in a few hours.  People get sloppy about making detailed advanced plans because they assume they'll be able to reach you by phone.

At work, they asked us sometime last fall if we wanted blackberries, and I said no thanks.  I check email from home anyway, and didn't feel like I wanted to be on constant call.  But most of my team got them, and within a few months, I went back to my boss and asked if it was too late to change my mind.  As it turns out, she had also said no previously, and was having second thoughts as well.  So we both got them.

I've had it for a couple of months now, and I'm pretty spoiled by it.  I still hardly use it as a cell phone -- but the always-on connection to the internet and email is darned addictive.  Before I had it, I couldn't imagine paying for a data plan out of pocket -- I was quite content with the combination of my iPod touch and a cheapo pay-by-the-minute cellphone -- but now if I went to a job that didn't pay for the service, I might come up with the money to pay for it myself.  It's a perfect demonstration of the hedonic treadmill.

This week, there's been some buzz about IRS guidelines saying that personal use of a company cell phone is a taxable fringe benefit, just like use of a company car.  This is apparently something that's been the official policy for years, but essentially no one has known about it (and it's pretty small change compared to use of a car).  My understanding is that the new IRS guidelines were designed to clarify the rules and create a "safe harbor" so you didn't have to track all your use and allocate it across business vs personal, but what they actually did is draw attention to the policy.  I think that in theory, it does make sense to treat these phones as a fringe benefit, but in practice, it's way too much hassle for the amount of money that would be collected.

Dadiaries

This week I'm looking at two of the recent series of books about parenting from a father's perspective.  If the female version of these are "momoirs," does that make these "dadiaries?"

Of the two, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis, is the more recent and the more hyped.  Lewis is the author of one of the better books I've ever read (Liar's Poker, about the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s) and so I had high hopes for this book. And it has some really funny moments.  But basically, it reads like the slapped together collection of Slate columns that it is.  In it we learn that parenting can be absurd, exhausting and messy, but that "If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work.  it's only in caring for a thing that you become attached it." 

I'd actually be interested in reading a book by Lewis in which he uses his journalistic talents to look at the contested territory of parenting in the 21st century, because he does nail some issues: "For now, there's an unsettling absence of universal, or even local, standards of behavior.  Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it.  But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both breadwinner and domestic dervish -- doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting.  The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace.  At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure."

Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table by Cameron Stracher doesn't try to describe modern fatherhood in general.  Rather, it's the story of one man who decided to be home for dinner, 5 nights a week, for one school year, and how it changed his life.  And yes, it looks like it started out as a blog. 

In order to do this, Stracher started working from home a few days a week, and eventually wound up quitting one of his two jobs, and thus having more time to coach his kid's teams, and generally be part of their lives.  Stracher acknowledges that everything he does would be unremarkable almost anywhere but in the suburbs of New York City, but he also doesn't downplay the difficulty in changing patterns of behavior when he works a two-hour train ride from home, he's expected to travel regularly for work, and all of the kid-focused activities are scheduled for at-home-parents. 

The other major theme of the book is Stracher's desire to cook "real" (e.g. grown up) food for his family, and his frustration when his kids turn up their nose at it again and again.  He writes with passion about the pleasure of feeding people you love, and how easy it is to put undue weight on it.  (I know that one of the reasons I make waffles and muffins so often is they're pretty much the only things I can make that the kids will appreciate the effort.)  He's not the elegant writer that Lewis is, but I think I enjoyed this book more.

Camping

We had a really nice weekend camping.  We went with several other families, so there were a total of five kids, with ours the youngest at five and eight, and the oldest being twelve.  We went out to Wolf Gap, which is right on the border between Virginia and West Virginia.

I was impressed at how well the boys did hiking, since last year they were pretty whiny on a much shorter hike.  There was one section where you really needed to climb up some rocks, and both boys made it with only a few helping hands.  (They needed a bit more assistance on the downhill there.)  D whined a fair bit on the way up, but then raced down ahead of us trying to keep up on the way down.  N was a trooper for most of the time, but was clearly wiped by the end.

Other than the hike, the boys mostly spent the time obsessively poking the fire.  There were enough adults there that we were able to take turns supervising them, and no one got set on fire.  The kids all thought we should have a fire going at all times, so we told them they were responsible for collecting enough firewood to make that happen, and the older kids even each took a turn with the saw.  The adults were able to actually have some conversations, as well as reading, and staring into the fire.  We all ate far too many roasted marshmallows.

This was car camping [e.g. we could drive right to the campsite, but we slept in tents, not the car] so we were able to bring a ridiculous amount of supplies.  We had folding chairs and tables, a two burner stove, big tents, beer and soda, barbecued chicken, watermelon, coffee w/ cream, you name it.  This is the sort of camping that I did with my family when I was growing up, but as an adult I somewhere along the way decided that I only wanted to do backcountry camping, where you only have what you're willing to carry.  That's obviously not going to happen with the boys until they're old enough to carry their own gear, but this weekend made me realize that it's some sort of stupid snobbery to think that car camping isn't worth doing.

The two burner stove that my friends brought is pretty much identical to the one my parents bought at Sears 40 years ago, and a quick online search shows that Coleman still makes pretty much the identical model.  I remembered that when I was little we were able to buy the fuel for the stove at gas stations, which makes me think that car camping must have been far more popular then than it is now.* We hypothesized that it's been driven out by the combination of:

• Camping as a cheap way to travel has been driven out by cheap motels and low-fare air travel.
• Those who do travel and camp mostly use RVs.  (When did RVs get popular?)
• Now that air conditioning is so ubiquitous, not to mention television and the internet, not so many people are interested in sitting in the woods and getting eaten by mosquitoes.  (My boys did complain about our not letting them bring their DSs.)
• Those who do still camp are more likely to be the hard core folks who want to backpack and not car camp.

*I'm not entirely sure that's true -- it looks like white gas was used for things other than just camping stoves and lanterns.

What do you think -- has car camping declined?  Will it make a comeback in the recession?  Do you do it?  What's the one piece of gear that you couldn't live without?

Ok, I found some statistics from the outdoor industry foundation.  I think this is the trade group of the people who sell gear.  It's a little hard to read, but I think they're saying that 49 million Americans went car camping at least once in 2004, down 18 percent from 1998, and 13 million Americans went backpacking at least once in 2004, down 23 percent from 1998.  If anyone can find longer-term trends, I'd love to see them.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

I've been reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to N at bedtime.  I hadn't read it since I was in 2nd grade, and am pleased that it's almost as good as I remember (although the mother is pretty annoying).  But I had realized how much it would be a guide to the changes in parenting practice since it was written (1972).

• Peter (age 9) gets to go to Central Park without an adult, as long as he's with another kid. 
• But not because it's safer than today -- Peter says his friend has been mugged three times, and he assumes he'll get mugged someday too.
• Three fourth graders are left alone in charge of a 2 1/2 year old.
• The reason Mrs. Hatcher goes back to the apartment is that she realizes that she forgot to turn the oven ON. 
• At Fudge's 3rd birthday party, the other kids are all dropped off and their parents leave -- even though one kid is a known biter and another is terrified.

It looks like all of the Judy Blume books are still in print.  I remember reading a few years ago that she had updated Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret to update the references to sanitary napkins with belts (which were dated when I read it 30 years ago).  I don't know if she made changes to any of the other books.

What children's book of the past decade do you think our kids will be reading to their kids 37 years from now?  And what in them will seem most dated?

Mother's Day Links

Some interesting links in advance of Mother's Day:

• Send Michelle Obama a Mother's Day email thanking her for supporting child care.
• Tell your favorite mother you think she's the Mother of the Year (thanks to MomsRising).
• Mother's Day Facts from the Census Bureau:  I would not have guessed that having a birth outside of a hospital was only twice as common as giving birth to your EIGHTH or more child.  
• Ayelet Waldman reading from the first chapter of Bad Mother.  Nothing profound here -- she's not the first person to notice that we set impossibly high standards for mothers, or that it might be easier to compare ourselves to fathers -- but funnier than I had expected.

I'm feeling a bit guilty because I'm going away for work this weekend -- I agreed to do it months ago, and just realized last week that it would mean I would be away for mother's day.  Whoops. 

In going through my archives looking for a post I wanted to link to, I ran across this one from two years ago, commenting on the number of end of year activities scheduled during the day.  It actually somehow reassures me to remember that this is an ongoing issue, and I'm actually far less stressed out by it than I used to be.

TBR: One Big Happy Family

With Mother's Day approaching, I realized that I never posted a book review for One Big Happy Family.  Yes, it's another anthology of essays about families, this one with the twist that all of the families are nontraditional in some way -- the subtitle is "18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love."  I'll admit that when they emailed me to ask if I wanted a review copy, my first thought was "Househusbandry makes the cut?  I'm not hopelessly uncool and traditional?"

Anthologies are always somewhat of a mixed bag, and this one -- with the members chosen for their breaking the norrm in some way -- is probably more of one than most.  Some of the voices were ones I've read before -- Dan Savage reports on his son's mommy, and how he copes with her erratic communications, Dawn Friedman writes about Penny, Madison, and open adoption, Amy and Marc Vachon make their usual pitch for Equally Shared Parenting.  Some were new to me.  Overall, I enjoyed most of the essays, although a lot of them were a shade too didactic for my taste.

That said, the one essay that I truly disliked is the one by Neil Pollack, which is the one that I think is supposed to be about "househusbandry."  For one thing, Pollack explicitly says he's not a househusband and his wife isn't a housewife -- they both work from home, and neither of them seems to do much housework.  And they both come across as incredibly passive aggressive and annoying.  If Marc and Amy make sharing things down the middle seem impossibly perfect and easy, Pollack makes it seem like chewing broken glass would be far preferable.  I think the last time I read an essay by Pollack that was causing a shitstorm on the blogosphere, the conclusion was that it was supposed to be satire.  I truly hope this essay was satire, although it wasn't funny.  Because if it's just true, it's sad.

KaBOOM!

I knew about KaBOOM! as the folks who come in and help people build new playgrounds, but now they're doing something a little different.  They want people to submit info about playspaces in their neighborhoods -- descriptions, ratings, and photographs -- which they're mashing with Google Maps, so that wherever you are, you can search for a playspace* to visit.

I'm doing this as part of a MomCentral blog tour, but I really do think it's a great idea.  As I've written before, there's a lot that goes into a successful playground, and a lot of the factors that go into it won't ever show up on a city's website.  So being able to tap into real people's experiences can make a big difference.  Some of the parenting bulletin boards capture some of this info, but they're not linked to maps.  Oh, and you can win prizes by entering new playspaces, and Julianne Hough is donating $1 per playspace to JumpStart.  They're trying to get 100,000 sites identified in 100 days.

I'm on the late side posting this because I wanted to include photos of our local playground, but I haven't gotten out with my camera yet.  It's the playground at Mason District Park, and they just redid it this fall.  They've got some great equipment now, including a climbing volcano and drums.  And there's some cute details, like dinosaur "bones" molded into the underside of the playstructure.  And there's a pond nearby where you can see turtles and fish.  The only negative -- no coffee.

*"A playspace can be a field, skatepark, horseshoe pit, roller hockey rink, disc-golf course, playground, lake, dog park, community center, basketball court or ice rink - any public place where anyone can engage in unstructured play either for free or for a nominal fee."

I don't know about the flu, but the hysteria is catching

There are only about 100 cases of swine flu confirmed in the US so far, but nearly 300 schools have shut down to prevent its spread.  Fort Worth, Texas has ONE student with the swine flu, but has shut down the entire system for 10 days.  This, in a country where nearly half of workers don't have any paid sick days, and many of those who do have paid sick time aren't allowed to use it to care for a family member.

But, not to worry, Vice President Biden "said he hoped U.S. employers 'will be generous' in allowing parents to take time off to keep their children home if there has been a confirmed case of flu at their school.”

“Fort Worth officials urged parents not to send their children to day care or 'any venue where groups of children may gather' and pleaded with the employers and the general population to make it possible for parents to accommodate this request.

"This is indeed an example of how the community can rally to support the health and well-being of students, their families and the District," schools superintendent Melody Johnson told reporters.”

I can write a report or take a conference call from home, but you can't cook and serve a restaurant meal, clean a hotel room, or care for a sick patient from home.  So what's going to happen?  Some parents will bring their kids to work.  Older kids may be left at home alone unsupervised.  Some parents will stay home, lose wages, and maybe not be able to afford to get their prescription filled this month, or will fall a little further behind on the electric bill.  But no one will point fingers at Ms. Johnson when a 12 year old left home alone sets a piece of toast on fire.

N has had a nasty cough the last few days, but no fever.  I'm 99.9 percent sure that it's allergies, but we've kept him home anyway, because there's not much downside to him missing a couple of days of preschool.  But there are real costs to closing schools, and I think it's hysterical overreaction to do so without any evidence that this is worse than an ordinary flu.

Harry Potter

I've been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to N as his bedtime story for the past several weeks, with D usually coming in to listen as well.  (I read it to him when he was about N's age.)  We finished it over the weekend, and tonight N asked if I'd start another chapter book.

I said, sure, how about Harry Potter?  This was a devious move on my part, because I tried reading it to D last year, and during the letter delivery sequence, he decided it was too scary and refused to go any further.  But N is much less freaked out by "scary" books and movies (remember, he's the one who came to see Coraline, even though he's almost 3 years younger than D), and he said ok, mostly because he could see that it was a big fat book that would get him my attention for a long time.

So I read the first half chapter to both boys, and then D asked if I'd read the rest of the chapter as his bedtime story.  Gee, I guess you can twist my arm.  So we finished the first chapter, and then D asked if he could keep going on his own.  I said yes, overruling N's pout, and D made it to Diagon Alley before I made him turn out the light.

I'm feeling pleased as punch, both because I think he'll enjoy it, and also because D has been resistant to reading chapter books on his own, in spite of the fact that he's quite capable of doing so.  He reads lots of manga, and has read some of the kids' novelizations set in the star wars universe, but that's about it.  And while I'm willing to concede that Harry Potter isn't great literature, it's a heck of a lot better than those star wars novels. 

Fundamentally, I think I've been feeling a bit left out of D's interests.  I'm not fascinated by Pokemon, and I can't fake it.  I'm not a big fan of manga.  I'm really bad at Lego Star Wars.  So I'm excited to have him interested in something that I like too.

stages

I noticed this week that I seem to have arrived at a new parenting stage, one where the emotional work of parenting is often harder than the physical.  My boys can dress themselves (most of the time), use the bathroom without assistance (most of the time), get themselves a glass of water.  D can entertain himself for hours between reading and playing with his DS.  N isn't quite so self-maintaining, but on a weekend morning, the boys generally can play together for a good hour before the arguing gets loud enough that we can't pretend not to notice any more.

But the emotional work is challenging.  N gave me huge hugs and kisses before I went away on a 36 hour trip for work, but then ignored me on my return.  D says "sorry" for hurting his brother without thinking or meaning it, but bursts into tears when we press him.  Both of them are constantly complaining about headaches or stomachaches, but it doesn't seem to stop them from running around like lunatics.

still buzzing

OK, I know you're all probably getting sick of my obsessing over the inauguration, but indulge me for one more post.  I'll get back to being my usual jaded wonky self soon enough, I promise.

I loved these pictures of Obama's first day on the job.  It still hardly seems real that he's actually the president.  So it's amazing to see him in the Oval Office, getting down to business.

At work, everyone was trading their inauguration stories.  It sounded like the people who just wandered down to the Mall and found spots near the Washington Monument generally had a better experience than many of the people who had tickets, who spent a lot of time on lines to get through security (and some of whom didn't make it in at all).

I really enjoyed reading about the experiences of these kids from Chicago who were selected for a trip to DC at Share My Inauguration.*  They clearly appreciated the historic moment, but also had a definite kids' perspective on the whole experience.

As I said yesterday, I had a better time at the inauguration for not being responsible for keeping D safe and happy.  I think he probably showed good judgment in turning down my invitation to come with me.  But I'm also a little sad that I don't think he appreciates quite how momentous a day it was.  He's learned about segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr. in school, but it's a pretty abstract concept to him.  And there's something lovely about that innocence too.  But I wonder if 8 years from now, he's going to be pissed that I didn't schlepp him down to the Mall so he could claim bragging rights.

One of the things that was interesting about the inauguration is that everyone there was consciously aware that it was a Historical Moment.  I wonder if the people who attended the March on Washington knew right away that it would be Important.  I'm pretty sure that most of the people who attended Woodstock (the other comparison I heard a lot) didn't know that it was an Event until after the fact.

* Full disclosure: I was asked to plug this site as part of MomCentral blog tour, but I'm happy to do so.  They seem to be great kids, and I'm glad that they got the opportunity to be here.

TBR: Whatever It Takes

On the plane last week, I finally had the chance to read Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.  Tough is a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and this is his expanded coverage of the Harlem Children's Zone, which he's reported on over the years.  Obama has said he wants to create 20 Promise Neighborhoods, modeled after the HCZ, so I thought it was important to read the book.

HCZ is an attempt to change the odds for kids in a poor neighborhood by providing an extensive range of services, everything from parenting classes to preschool to charter schools to summer programs.  What makes it different from most other attempts is:

• it tries to cover kids from birth through college, on the assumption that no program lasting just a few years is going to keep kids on the right track in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  This is in many ways an implicit rebuke to the extravagant claims sometimes made for  Head Start or  home visiting  programs.
• it tries to reach enough kids -- ideally it would be at a scale to reach every kid in the target neighborhood -- to change the culture of the neighborhood for the better.  Canada explicitly argues that the well regarded KIPP charter schools encourage students to separate themselves from the community as a whole

Tough doesn't hide that he's a believer in the HCZ approach.  In general, the book is overwhelmingly positive about Canada and the HCZ, although a long section is devoted to the struggles at the charter middle school they operate, and the choice to give up on the first class of students after two years of disappointing results. 

I think HCZ is a fascinating experiment, but Whatever It Takes isn't quite a fascinating book.  It's a solid book, well-reported, with a decent popular summary of the academic literature behind the theory.  But, fundamentally, the story of HCZ is really only in its first chapter, with no one knowing how it will turn out.  Geoffrey Canada's personal story is quite intriguing, but Canada himself has already written that book.

If you like to listen to the radio, I might suggest the coverage of this book on This American Life or Talk of the Nation instead.

TBR: Mother on Fire

This week's book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf#%&ing Story about Parenting, by Sandra Tsing Loh.  I had high hopes for this book, as I generally enjoy Loh's essays in The Atlantic, in particular those about how she sent her kids to public school in Los Angeles and the world didn't collapse. 

Unfortunately, Loh's decision to send her kids to public school is the conclusion of this book, not the beginning.  Most of the book is an extended meditation on how terribly unfair it is that two artists don't earn enough to send their kids to fancy private schools.   I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic.

The book is based on her one-woman show, and it does have some funny moments.  My favorite was her discussion of how she suddenly became famous when she was fired from public radio for cursing on the air.  But it's not a good sign when, of the four humorous quotes on the back of the jacket, three of them show up in the first chapter.  And making fun of the pretentiousness of ultra-expensive liberal private schools is shooting fish in a barrel. 

Talmudic wisdom

The background for this story is that we went to Simchat Torah services tonight. Since it's a weeknight and lots of people were coming straight from work, the congregation ordered pizza and we had dinner before services.  And while we were getting ready, the half dozen or so kids in attendance were chasing each other around in circles.

One of the members of the congregation gave me this learning as a gift.  R said that he had been studying a section of talmud with a partner, and that they had worked through a long section about what you should do if you're praying, and need to use the bathroom.  In particular, the rabbis addressed the question of if you're wearing tefillin and you need to use the latrine, what should you do with the tefillin.  If you wear them into the latrine, it seems disrespectful, but what if you leave them outside and they're lost?  The rabbis concluded that it was better to somewhat disrespect the teffilin than risk that they be lost.

So, R said, he and his partner were trying to figure out what lesson they could take from this section of talmud.  And they concluded that maybe the children of the congregation were like the tefillin.  Better that the purity of the ritual be somewhat compromised, than risk that they be lost from the community...

judgment

In response to my initial post about Palin, Beth posted a comment questioning her judgment as the mother of a child with Down syndrome choosing to take on the responsibilities of being VP.  I wasn't particularly swayed by that argument -- for one thing, I suspect that the day-to-day responsibilites of being VP are probably less than those of being Governor of Alaska.  Not to mention that with the employment opportunities for oil field workers being somewhat limited in the greater DC area, her husband would probably wind being available for parenting duties more or less full time.  (I've heard some people say he's already doing the SAHD thing now, on leave from his other jobs, but haven't read anything authoritative.)  I did wonder a little about the time/travel involved with campaigning, but was planning on ending with a somewhat smug comment about basically trusting people to make good decisions about their families.

I'm feeling less smug and more judgmental today.  Not because Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant, but because, knowing that her daughter was pregnant, she accepted the VP nomination, and the media frenzy that goes with it.  And that seems like a pretty crappy thing to do to a teenager who is already in a stressful situation.

Does that change my vote?  Not in the least -- I was never going to vote for McCain.  But it does make me think somewhat less of Palin as a person.  And it makes me eat a little crow about my claim not to judge other people's parenting.

tough questions

I was working in the kitchen and listening to the convention coverage on the radio, but when it  was time for Clinton's speech, I went to watch it on TV.  D popped out of his room (I had put him to bed an hour earlier) and asked if he could watch it with me.  I had already promised he could stay up tomorrow to watch Obama's speech, and he doesn't need to be up early tomorrow morning, so I said ok.

So we sat down to watch and after a few minutes the questions start:

• Where are the soldiers again?
• Why did you say that "we're in Iraq"? (I meant the U.S.; he interpreted it as him and me.)
• Is Iraq in America?
• Why are American soldiers in Iraq? [I try to answer in a way that gives my opinion, but acknowledges that there's disagreement about this.]
• Why can't we just leave?
• Someone said that the reason we can't leave is that they might follow us.  Daddy said that our army is too strong and they can't do that.  Is that right? [I say yes, our army is the strongest in the world.  But then I try to explain about terrorism, and September 11...  He's seen The Sphere and knew that buildings fell down, but I believe this is the first time he's understood that it was intentional.]
• Did the people who flew the airplanes die as well?
• Good.  I think they deserved to die.  Do you think so?
• [Looking at the cat...]  How do they move their tails?
• But where do the tails come from?
• What's "evolve"?
• Do you know about the birds that sit on top of sand iguanas?
• [I unpause the TiVo and try to watch some more of the speech.]
• Why do the parents have to die so their children can be ok?  [I explain that "starve" doesn't really mean that the parents died.]
• Why do needs have to depend on money?

Back in town

Back from vacation.  Had a good time, but could use a vacation from my vacation.  For a week, I was on my own with the kids.  The program I was at had children's activities during the day, and evening babysitting, but that still left me with maybe 6 hours a day with the boys. 

The main issue is that there were a lot of kids who were a few years older than D, whose parents gave them a lot more freedom than I was willing to give D, so he was testing the limits every few minutes.  And whenever I let him do something, N wanted to do it as well, so if D wasn't arguing with me, N was.  And neither of them quite got the concept that I'd want to have a conversation with other adults over meals.

D also desperately wanted to play with the older kids, especially when they broke out pokemon cards and a portable game machine, but mostly they saw him as a "little kid" and weren't interested.  It did help a little when I borrowed Munchkin Fu from someone who was attending, and he was able to demonstrate his ability to play complicated games.

It made me realize that D has a lot more experience playing with younger kids than with older ones.  I had D when I was 29, so few of my friends have older children, and mothers groups tend to attract parents of younger children more than school-age kids.

All you can eat

Last weekend, I took the boys to the big Air and Space Museum annex, out by Dulles.  Like all the Smithsonian museums, admission is free, but they charge $12 for parking.  After some agonizing, I signed up for an annual parking permit.  I'm something of a sucker for unlimited admission passes -- we also got season passes for Six Flags.  I'm not sure they always make economic sense, but I'm a more relaxed and happier parent when I know that we can leave as soon as the boys start to fade, without having to endure the "death march of fun" in order to wring out the most value from our admission.  Economic logic says that once you've paid the admission it's a sunk cost, and thus the price of admission shouldn't affect how long you choose to stay, but I don't know anyone who actually behaves that way.  (I'm also pretty sure that we're still not mentally accounting for the price of gas when when we decide to go to the museum because it's "free.")

The Six Flags passes are an interesting case, because they cost barely more than a single admission.  As far as I can tell, they're a loss leader to get you to buy food and rent lockers at the park.

The Maternal is Political

Today's book review is part of a MotherTalk tour.  That means I got a free copy of the book and an Amazon gift certificate to review the book.  But, given the topic, I'm confident that I would have reviewed the book in any case.

The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, is a collection of essays by women writers about "the intersection of motherhood and social change."  Some of the authors are famous, either as politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto), activists (Cindy Sheehan), or writers (Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Anna Quindlen), but most of them are by women you've never heard of, talking about how their motherhood has affected their political activity.  In most cases, the essays are about how mothering has inspired them to take action, but some of them are about the struggles to balance the demands on their time from their families and their activism (the essay by Valerie Weaver-Zercher about "Peace March Sans Children" made me grin in recognition).

One of the things I liked about the book was the wide range of issues covered,  Several of the essays are about opposing war as a mother's issue, but others touch on abortion, homeschooling, public schooling, religious freedom, disability, environmentalism, sexual harassment, adoption and more. Of course, I have some quibbles about the topics that are missing... I find it hard to believe that there's not one about health care (Flea could have done a great job with that one) and in general, I think economic justice issues were under-represented.  (And yes, I should have submitted an essay... I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I posted the call for submissions here when it came out.)

In spite of that long list of issues, the voices were different enough that the book never felt like a litany of complaints.  Anna Quindlen's piece on being pregnant in New York made me laugh, and two essays made me cry -- Cindy Sheehan's anguished farewell to activism to "try to regain some of what I have lost... before it [the system] totally consumes me or any more people that I love" and Kathy Briccetti's joyful account of her family's second-parent adoption.

I also liked the recognition that there are many ways to be political.  A few of the writers were elected officials, and some engaged in politics by writing letters to the editor, going on protest marches, or submitting testimony to their state legislators.  But many of them were political in everyday ways -- raising feminist sons and daughters, choosing to reduce use of hazardous chemicals and natural resources, speaking up about equality in personal encounters, standing up to a man harassing another woman (who is someone else's daughter), helping out another mother by taking care of her kids when she's in a crunch.  I think those examples may really help people who feel like they don't have time to be politically active -- or that nothing they do will make a difference -- to think of ways to incorporate activism into their lives.

My one real complaint about the book is that there are two essays about personal relationships with people who are (gasp!) Republicans, but no actual Republicans -- or even conservatives -- in it.  I would have liked to read an essay by someone whose experiences as a mother made them an anti-abortion activist.  I would have loved to read an essay by Cathy McMorris Rodgers on the challenges and insights of serving in Congress as the mother of an infant with Down's syndrome.  I don't know if Strong made a deliberate choice to only include liberal voices, or if it's a function of the way the call for essays was marketed, but I think it limits the audience for the book unnecessarily.

Incentives

Via Kathy G at the G Spot, I found this debate between Gary Becker and Richard Posner on the NYC experiments about providing cash incentives to parents and older teens to reward school attendance, parent-teacher conferences, and good grades.  This is part of Bloomberg's broader anti-poverty strategy, something that I had been meaning to discuss for a while, so I'll jump on in.

Becker has what is probably the classic economist's take:  "boys and girls as well as adults respond to incentives."  While recognizing that there may be challenges with targeting the program correctly, he thinks that it's worth trying the experiment to see if it work.  I basically agree with this -- I think it's funny that people get horrified about "bribing" kids to do well in school, but aren't upset when workers get bonuses for good performance.

Posner comes up with a number of nitpicks of the program, but his fundamental concern is that poor attendance is a symptom, not the disease: "Paying children to attend school will reduce truancy rates some but without improving school quality, and perhaps without improving the education of the children receiving the payments."  (He thinks that school vouchers are the solution, but that's another story.)

Interestingly, this has a lot in common with Margy Waller at Inclusionist's concern that the Bloomberg anti-poverty initiative assigns the blame for poverty to poor people's bad choices.  If the schools are fundamentally falling down at their job of educating kids, giving the kids money for passing tests is like giving me money to make a jump shot.  Similarly, low-wage workers have high job turnover in large part because that's how the jobs are designed.  But, that said, MDRC has been studying programs designed to improve job retention and advancement.  And so far, one of the most effective programs has been one in Texas, which provided financial incentives to former welfare recipients who were employed full-time.

I agree that I worry about the framing of these payments as all about overcoming poor people's bad values.  You can also tell a convincing story about how the financial incentives make it possible for a worker who is paid by the hour to take off from work to go to a parent teacher conference, or wait in a crowded medical clinic to get the kid immunized, or let the parent keep their job by hiring a more reliable babysitter, but that's not how these payments are being covered in the media.

Kathy notes that behavioral economics also raises the issue that there are some times when cash incentives can have perverse effects. In Ariely's language, a financial incentive can shift things from a social setting to a market setting.  So people were less likely to help someone load a car when offered an insultingly low wage than when asked to do it out of altruism, and were more likely to pick up their kids late from child care when the center instituted a late fee.  That's one of the reasons I won't tie my kids' allowances to their picking up their rooms or helping out around the house -- it would implicitly allow them to choose to forgo the allowance and not pitch in.  But I'm not convinced that this analogy applies to the incentives in the experiment.

Incomparable

All week, I've been blinking away tears as I read or hear the news.  This morning I turned the car radio from NPR to the classic rock station because I just couldn't cope with listening to the story about the middle school that collapsed in the earthquake in China.  The disaster in Burma is even bigger, but because the government isn't letting aid workers in (let alone reporters), there aren't the first-person stories that tug at the heart.

This NY Times story suggests that the grief of the Chinese parents is made worse by the fact that the one-child policy means that most of the dead children were their parents' only child.  I'm not sure I believe that -- I don't believe that the grief of a parent of two children is cut in half when only one child dies, or the grief of a parent of five is only one-fifth.

I -- and most (if not all) of my readers -- am lucky to live in a time and place where the death of a child is a rare tragedy.  At other times and places, it has been less rare, but no less tragic.  Reading 18th and 19th century diaries, it  is quite clear that the frequency with which children died of disease did not diminish the pain felt by those left behind.

But even here and now, we are never entirely safe.  Last week I learned that the son of one of the women on the birthmonth email list I joined when pregnant with D was killed, along with his grandfather, in a car accident.

TVR: 51 Birch Street

This week I've got a video review instead of a book review.  This is actually one that a PR company sent me as a review copy, but then I didn't get around to watching it for over 6 months.  Oops.  51 Birch Street is an autobiographical documentary about the filmmaker's parents, and how after his mother's death and his father's swift remarriage, Doug Block discovered that their relationship was a lot more complicated than he had believed.

The inevitable comparison is to Capturing the Friedmans, because of the use of extensive home video footage.  But unlike the Friedmans, the Blocks don't have a deep dark secret.  The surprise for Doug Block is that, as he reads his mother's diaries, he discovers that she was deeply unhappy in her marriage, and that during the 70s she had an affair.  Not exactly earthshattering.  But what makes the movie compelling, although deeply sad, is that as Block shows more and more of the family footage, it becomes increasingly obvious that his mother wasn't exactly hiding her unhappiness.  And yet, although Block opens the movie by saying that he and his mother always had a special connection, he was clearly blind to it.

My take-away from the film is that when Block says that he was close to his mother, he means that he was able to talk with her about himself (as contrasted with his father, whom he had difficulty talking with).  It doesn't mean that he was able to listen to her, or to see her as a person separate from her role as a mother.  That's probably pretty common, but I found it sad.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to all, and a particular prayer for children who have lost their mothers and mothers who have lost their children.

My mom's been busily trying to give things away to reduce the "stuff" in her life, and so asked me to make a contribution rather than buy something for her.  In case you might be similarly inclined, here are two organizations that seem appropriate:

• UNFPA -- the United Nations Population Fund.  They support contraception, maternity care, fistula repair, and HIV/AIDS prevention.  The Bush Administration has refused to release congressionally appropriated funds to UNFPA since 2002.

• UNICEF -- the United Nations Children Fund.  They're collecting money for relief in Myanmar/Burma right now, but it's probably more useful to donate without restriction, and let them decide where it's most needed.

Picky eater, sneaky foods

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine.  This is one of the two cookbooks that came out last fall with recipes for how to hide vegetable purees in a variety of foods to get a little more nutrition into kids.  (The other one was Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, and there was some discussion over whether she stole the other person's idea, and got a lot more attention because of who she's married to.)

I'm not morally opposed to sneaking vegetables into my kids' food -- I've been known to put pureed black beans into brownies when I was desperate to get some fiber into D's diet -- but I haven't actually used the cookbook very much.  The main problem is that both cookbooks (I took the Seinfeld one out of the library at some point to compare) assume that all kids will eat things like macaroni and cheese and tomato sauce, and D won't.  When you're talking about a kid who eats his peanut butter without jelly and doesn't like ketchup, there's not a whole lot of opportunities to disguise food.  A few weeks ago, I did make sweet potato puree when I was making sweet potatoes for myself, but then I never got around to using it before it got all yucky and moldy in the fridge.

So, this morning, since the boys had off from school and I decided to work from home rather than hazard the ice, D asked if I'd make pancakes.  So I decided to try the chocolate chip pancake recipe, which involves a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and ground almonds.  I made some with chocolate chips, some plain, and some with blueberries.

Both boys loved the chocolate chip ones. Neither would eat the blueberry ones -- and N usually adores blueberry pancakes.  They said the plain ones were ok, but not as good as my usual ones.  So, is it worth it to add the chips as a bribe to get them to eat some extra whole grains and protein?  Maybe occasionally, and especially if the alternative is bisquick, which is pretty low in nutritional content.  But Julia's Oatmeal Buttermilk pancakes have just as much whole grains, and taste a heck of a lot better.

Oh, and having a book called "The Sneaky Chef" isn't so sneaky once you have a kid who is old enough to read the title and ask what's the ingredient he's not supposed to notice.

To ski?

T's dad has been saying that we should take the boys skiing.  In particular, he's suggesting that if D doesn't learn to ski soon, he'll never be "really good."

Cons:

• Skiing is ridiculously expensive, even at the dinky little mid-Atlantic ski areas that have almost no slope.  Between lift ticket and equipment, it gets up close to $100 a day per person.  We think long and hard about spending that kind of money.
• Especially when there's no guarantee that the boys wouldn't try it for 5 minutes and then want to go home.  D still has his training wheels on his bike, because when we take them off, he panics when he picks up any speed and puts his feet down.
• Downhill skiing is never particularly environmentally friendly, and is particularly not-so in the mid-Atlantic, where pretty much everything you ski on is man made.

Pros:

• Skiing is fun.  Downhill skiing is as close to flying as I'm ever likely to get without mechanical assistance.
• T's dad is right that it's easier to learn when you're young, and not as discombobulated by falling down.
• D picked up skating this winter (on an indoor rink) pretty well, and many of the skills are transferable.
• I can imagine that at some point in the boys life, they will have friends who ski, and they may feel deprived/outside/something if they don't know how.  Yes, this is a huge marker of class privilege.  But both T and I did learn to ski as children, and in some real way, I think we both feel slightly guilty at the idea of not passing this opportunity on to our kids.  Especially since we're probably slightly more affluent, not less, than our parents were when we were young.  But -- even setting aside the fact that T grew up in Michigan and could learn to ski on a local hill -- I think skiing just wasn't as crazy expensive a sport at the time.

money, class, parenting

When I blogged about the "privilege meme," I promised a post about the differences, and overlap, between privilege as measured by money and privilege as measured by social class.  I keep postponing that post, because it's a complicated topic and I want to get it right.  But if I wait until I get my thoughts totally sorted out, I'll never get to it. So here goes with some rough thoughts, and hopefully it will at least get the conversation started.

As noted before, the privilege meme included a bunch of questions that are mostly about money -- did your parents own their own home, were you aware of bills, did you have a phone at home, do you have student loans, did you get to travel abroad -- and a bunch of questions that are more about social capital -- did your parents read to you, did they take you to museums, did they attend college.  Some people got very heated about this, arguing that they shouldn't be considered "privileged" even though they were read to, had books, etc, because their family was very poor, and it was just because their parents prioritized education that they had these things.

So, the first thing to lay on the table is that these are in fact two different dimensions of social class, and it's possible to be privileged in one respect but not the other. But, the next thing to point out is that, in practice, there's a great deal of overlap between the two.  I'm thinking of the chapter in David Shipler's The Working Poor about the upper-middle class mother who is impoverished by her divorce and her subsequent choice not to work full-time, so as to be able to spend more time with her children.  She's quite low-income as a result, but is able to leverage her social capital to get her children scholarships at fancy private schools and other middle-class privileges.  Her experiences prove that you don't have to have lots of money to have privilege, but it's also quite clear that she's got a lot of things going for her that the typical low-income single parent doesn't.

There's a couple of different explanations for the overlap between poverty and lack of home-based educational experiences, and depending on which one you think dominates, you come up with very different policy solutions for fixing this (if, in fact, you think there's a need to fix it):

• One school of thought argues that it's really about the money -- if a parent can't afford food, then books are a luxury, and parents who are working 80 hours a week to pay the rent don't have the time to do things like attend parent teacher conferences.  This points towards cash transfer solutions.
• Another explanation is that parental characteristics like lack of English skills or learning disabilities lead to both poor labor market outcomes and to inability to navigate systems (such as libraries or schools) on their children's behalf.  This points towards two-generational approaches, and education aimed at parents.
• A third explanation is that it's cultural.  This has lots of variations, ranging from the stereotypical -- poor parents don't value educational opportunities for their children -- to the sophisticated -- Annette Lareau's work on "accomplishment of natural growth" versus "concerted cultivation."  This points towards lots of tongue-clucking and finger-pointing, and possibly towards conditional cash transfers, which give low-income parents cash incentives for desired behaviors.

And I guess the fourth option is to say that it doesn't matter the explanation, but what we need is better schools and preschools so that even kids whose parents don't provide educational opportunities and support have a chance to get ahead.

kids and race

At dinner tonight, I asked D if he knew why we were celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday.  He said that King was famous, and that he worked so that blacks and whites could both do things equally.  Fair enough for a first grader.

Last year, D's class was almost entirely African-American, with one other white kid.  This year, at a different school, his classmates are more diverse, with a majority Hispanic, but a scattering of white, black, and Asian kids.  He considers almost all of his classmates his friends, with Pokemon the main unifying interest. When he draws a generic person, he reaches for the brown crayons.

But we're not living in a non-racial utopia.  One day D came home sad because a classmate didn't want to play with him, and he explained it as this boy only wanting to play with other kids with brown skins.  I didn't know what to say. We've been trying to set up a playdate with another kid for months, but it hasn't happened -- I'm not sure whether it's the language barrier, cultural issues, or just that family's lack of interest. 

D's invited about 8 of his classmates to his birthday party next week, and we haven't heard back from most of them.  I'm afraid that my super-sensitive kid is going to be heartbroken if they don't come.  And I'm concerned about what message he's going to take away if it's only white kids who wind up coming.

I don't think it's race per se that's the barrier, but economic class and language may well be issues.  Some of the kids' parents probably don't own cars. Our house is only about half a mile from the bus stop, but the buses run very seldom on weekends.  Or non-fluent English speakers may feel awkward about calling us to RSVP.  We're going to ask his teacher if we're allowed to bring in cupcakes so he can celebrate with his friends in any case, but I'm still worried.  I'm probably overdoing it with the party preparations (a papermache pokeball pinata, a jigsaw puzzle with a secret message) to compensate.

First Games

This is a sponsored review, part of a MomCentral blog tour.

When I was asked if I would be interested in participating in a blog tour for some new Cranium games, I jumped at it, because we've enjoyed everything we've tried from them.  The Super Fort was N's big Hanukah present this year, and Hullaballoo has been a mainstay of kids parties for several years. 

The games are part of their new "Cranium Bloom" line, which is aimed at preschoolers.   The boys were excited to see what was in the package that arrived, and hovered over as I opened it.  N loves to cook, so he immediately focused on the Let's Play Count and Cook Game.  It's a cute game, where by rolling a die, you find the ingredients needed to make different dishes.  Each round only takes a few minutes, and after I played it with the boys once, they understood the game well enough to play against each other without my help.

Things I liked about the game:

• Quick play is a big relief to any parent who has desperately tried to cheat to let their kid win chutes and ladders just to end the game.
• Everyone works together to find the ingredients, so it's basically luck that determines the "winner."  So the 4 year old and the 7 year old can play together and both have a chance.
• The game has some good suggestions for how to build on the cooking theme.

Things I didn't like about the game:

• Not particularly interesting for adults.  Probably inherent in a game for preschoolers.  For slightly older kids, I think Cranium's Balloon Lagoon is more fun, because there are some activities (like launching the frogs into the pond) that are challenging for adults too. 
• The box only had pictures of girls and women.

The other game they sent was the Let's Go to the Zoo Seek and Find Puzzle.  This is a puzzle with big pieces, that once assembled turns into a "can you find" game?  This was of more interest to D than to N, who likes very simple puzzles, but gets frustrated with harder ones easily.  So this got less play, but I still think it's a nice idea. 
***

While I'm on the subject of games for young kids, I wanted to toss out the names of some others that we've enjoyed.  You really don't have to torture yourself with Candyland:

• Hisss
• Zingo
• Catch the Match

Normal

In the movie Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater character has a line where he says "At some point, I realized I was never going to be normal. And I said, f--- it, so be it."  I saw this movie with a friend from high school, at a theater somewhere in the middle of Queens, and I laughed so hard at this line that I literally fell off my chair and the few other people in the theater all turned around to stare at me.

I was reminded of this line by Laura at 11d's comment this weekend that "I think it helps that I have never placed a whole lot of stock in normality."  It made me realize that while I've long ago made my peace with being weird, I'm not quite there yet with respect to my kids.  I want them to be happy.  D's already come home saying that kids have teased him, and I know that's part of life, but I still want to strangle them.

D says they call him short. And you know what?  D is short, and he's probably always going to be short.  Physically, he seems to take after me, and I'm short. Plus he's on inhaled steroids for his asthma.  So what can he do?  He can ignore it, or try to turn it into a joke.  He can tell them they hurt his feelings, or find other kids to hang out with.  He can try to fight the kids who tease him, or tell a teacher.  Mostly I think he needs to get a little thicker skinned, but I don't think that's something you can learn by being told -- you need to figure it out yourself.

He's also said that kids laughed at him because he was licking the sweat off of himself after they were running.  I had to work hard not to laugh myself when he said that.  D can't control that he's short, but I don't think it's crazy to think that he could choose to save licking his own sweat for when he's in private. I wouldn't suggest that someone pretend not to be smart, or hide her sexual orientation in order to fit in, but this doesn't seem like such a fundamental thing.

When we were talking about Madeline L'Engle after her death, one of my friends who does a lot of work with gifted kids commented that Meg clearly thinks it makes sense to pretend not to be as smart as she really is; she only gets in trouble because Charles Wallace is totally incapable of doing so, and Meg gets in fights defending him.  The problem with pretending is it's hard work, and you miss out on friendships with the people who might actually like you the way you are, and if you're good enough at pretending you sometimes forget who you really are.

The best fiction I've ever read about these issues is a comic called Zot! by Scott McCloud. Zot is a teenage superhero from a parallel dimension, but in the last 8 or 9 episodes that McCloud wrote, he gets stuck on our Earth and hangs out with his not-quite-girlfriend Jenny and her group of weirdo high school friends.  They've never been published as a trade paperback, because the press that put out the earlier volumes of Zot! went under.  I just found out that HarperCollins is going to publish all of the black and white Zot! episodes next year, as a single volume.  I'm really pleased.  (The Zot! book is now available for pre-order.)

my reader

The other morning I asked D to get dressed, and when I went into his room 10 minutes later to check on him, I found him sitting in his underwear reading.  I just had to laugh, because I can't tell you the number of times my mom found me with one sock on, reading or just staring into space.  While it can be annoying to have to repeat myself 3 times before it registers on him that I've even said anything, I'm just pleased as punch that he's becoming a real reader.

On the other hand, I'm sort of selfishly bummed by his choice of reading material, which is almost exclusively manga.  He's read all the Naruto that the library carries, and is now working his way through the Yu-Gi-Oh books.  It's not that I think that comics aren't "real" reading --but it's not the stories that I dreamed about sharing with my children.  D still wants to be read to, but he's less and less willing to let me pick the stories, and has almost no patience for chapter books of any sort.

Added to clarify: I'm thrilled that he's reading, regardless of the content.  But there are so many books that I was personally looking forward to reading with him that he's not interested in....  He won't watch baseball with me either.

Negotiations

In general, when the boys are watching TV, T. lets them alternate choosing what to watch (from the menu of shows that we approve and have TiVo'd).  I sometimes follow that pattern, sometimes tell them that if they can't agree on something, there won't be any TV watching.

Lately, D has figured out that he can improve his bargaining position by offering side deals, or bribes.  So, tonight he offered N one of his water bottles for choosing Tom & Jerry over Max and Ruby.  N happily accepted.  Yesterday the price was a nickel.

I'm not sure why this bothers me.  Both boys were happy with the deal, and neither one gave up something irreplaceable.   (D has other water bottles; N will get another chance to pick a show in a day or so.)  And they're learning how to negotiate without our intervention, as suggested in Siblings without Rivalry.    But I still feel like something's wrong with this picture.

another caption contest

Here's the latest cartoon for my office's caption contest:

Vote here for your favorite caption.

***

One of my friends said that she thought the cartoon was anti-working parent.  I can see where she's coming from -- the idea that the baby is being neglected because the parents are so busy.  But that certainly wasn't our intent.  We thought of it more as a comment on non-family friendly work environments, and how frazzled parents are as a result. (Heck, even with T. home full-time, I still often feel like we're running a relay, passing the parenting baton as we race past each other.)

These cartoons are an attempt to be lighthearted about serious subjects, to start conversations outside our usual wonkish circles.  But they're inherently a bit ambiguous, with potential for varying interpretations -- someone told me she thought one of the captions in our first contest was anti-immigrant.

Solicited reviews

I've got a backlog of solicited reviews, so here's a bunch of bullets about various things that I've been sent recently:

• The good folks at PBS Kids sent me a DVD of their new educational show, coming this fall, Word World.  The learning gimmick is that key words are spelled out, and then the letters transform into the thing itself.  The site says it's aimed at 3-5 year olds; I think my 3 1/2 year old has already mastered the idea that letters make words that represent things.  But both N and D watched it eagerly, and thought it was very funny.  I asked them whether they liked it more or less than Between the Lions (which is aimed at 4-7 year olds), and they said they liked it more.  N said "it wasn't scary."
• Yamaha sent me the Konga drum from their new "real rhythm" line.  I rolled my eyes a little at the literature they sent me about how important drumming is to brain development, but it's a nice drum.  (I do think music is important to kids, but they can make it with a jar full of beans as well as with a fancy drum.) I know my parents spent quite a while looking for a solid kid's drum when D was a toddler (without a stick, so he couldn't put anyone's eye out) and this one is nicer than anything that was available at the time.  And it's got a shoulder strap, so you can march around the house with it.
• I got a CD of a new release -- Lullaby Appetite, by Alexa Wilkinson.  If you're wondering what the title means, so did I.  And having listened to the title track a couple of times, I still don't know.  So, I'll send the disk to the reader with the best (as judged by me) explanation.  Overall, I found the lyrics on this album evocative but not quite meaningful.  But the music is catchy and Wilkinson's voice is fine.
• Usually publishers email me and ask if I want a review copy, but Friends and Mothers, by Louise Limerick, just showed up on my doorstep.  It's mommy-lit, Australian style.  I read the first few chapters, and thought they were ok, but put it down in the middle and felt no compulsion to pick it up again.  But Flea read it, and she's pretty positive about it, so I might give it another try.

poison

All of my parenting email lists and many blogs are abuzz with news of the recall of a bunch of Thomas trains for lead in the paint.  I think it's drawing a lot of attention for several reasons:

• These trains are awfully popular.  Pretty much every kid I know has some.
• They're expensive, and they're made of wood, so they have an old-fashioned aura.  People aren't surprised that the cheap plastic crap from the dollar store is made in China or Mexico, but they don't expect the stuff that's $15 for a little train to come off the same assembly line.
• It's coming right after there's been a lot of attention to the impossibility of protecting the food supply from contaminants.

Realistically, I don't think there's a need to panic, unless your kid has been walking around sucking on James all day.  While it's clearly a bad thing, all of us who grew up when leaded gasoline was in common use got exposed to much higher levels of lead.   

(Don't worry, I will check our train bins to see if we have any that are affected -- I think all of ours are older than 2005, though.)

But it does highlight how interconnected -- and how vulnerable -- we all are in this global economy.  There's really no way to avoid it.  The part of that NPR story on the food supply that struck me the most is that China produces 80 percent of the world's Vitamin C.  Unless you're going to go try to play Robinson Crusoe somewhere, you can't avoid it.

The Science of Puke

Skip this one if you're squeamish.

The boys now have their own rooms, but have been moving back and forth between the two, sometimes in their own rooms, sometimes both in one.  Last night, D asks if he can sleep with N in N's bed.  N says ok, so I say sure, as long as you guys actually settle down and get some sleep (because they both have school today).

N is fussy in the night, and we're both up a few times to check on him.  At one point, I hear him crying, but let T go downstairs since I handled the last one.  But then I hear T saying "oh my god" and then asking "what did you have for dinner?  Did you have ketchup for dinner?"  I know we didn't have ketchup, so I figure I had better get downstairs.

N has thrown up.  Not onto D, but onto his bed and the floor (which has light colored carpet).  And it's bright red.  And we can't figure out what it could be.  What it looks like is pomegranate seeds, but N says that he didn't have any at school.    So we're a bit freaked out, but not too panicked, because it doesn't really look like blood. 

So we send D to sleep in his own bed, and change N's pjs and sheets and start cleaning the carpet.  But as soon as we put oxyclean on the stain, it turns blue.  Suddenly I realize that what we're looking at is the blackberries N ate for dessert.  Blackberry juice is an indicator, so in the acid of his stomach, it turned bright red.  And the oxyclean is a base, so it turns it blue again.

I've promised the boys we'll experiment with some mashed up berries so they can see the effect in a less gross context. 

(BTW, the oxyclean did a fabulous job of removing the stain overnight.)

Mommies and muffins

So I blew off the first session of my conference today to go to Mommies and Muffins. And you know what?  I loved it.  I enjoyed watching N negotiate with his friends over the toys, and bring me into his play.  (Did you know that patting your knees is needed to launch a little people airplane?  Neither did I.)  I loved watching him point out his scabs to everyone who would listen, and explain that he had a boo-boo but it was getting better.  I liked watching him clean up, far more cooperatively than he ever does at home.   I loved sitting with him on my lap at circle time, happily singing in English and Hebrew.  I liked the concentration with which he strung beads on a plastic lanyard to make me a necklace (which he pronounces exactly the same as his name).  And the muffins weren't bad.

Would it have been a disaster if I hadn't gone?  No.  Not all the kids had parents there (one boy's daddy came).  The ones whose parents didn't come didn't seem to particularly mind.  The teachers and other parents helped them string their necklaces.  N enjoyed having me there -- and having some extra time with me without having to share with his brother -- but he wouldn't have been traumatized if I hadn't.  Not even worth a quarter in the therapy jar.

But I'm glad I went.

(I'm scheduled to participate in MotherTalk this Friday, so no Tuesday book review today.)

Mommy guilt (end of school year variety)

Over the next two weeks, I have been "invited" to the following activities:

• Field day at D's school -- 9 am to 2 pm tomorrow
• "Mommies and Muffins" at N's preschool -- 9 am to 10 am next Tuesday (they had "Daddies and Donuts" earlier in the year.
• "Moving Up" ceremony at N's preschool -- noon to 2 pm next Friday
• "Coming Out" ceremony at D's school -- 9 or 10 am the following Monday.  (Yes, that's what they call it.  It's to celebrate the Kindergarteners.)

Meanwhile, I have an in-town conference to attend Monday through Wednesday of next week, and a business trip the following Monday evening through Tuesday.

I'm definitely skipping Field Day and the Moving Up ceremony --  T will attend the Moving Up ceremony, and may go to some of Field Day.  (N also has a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon, scheduled before we knew about Field Day.)

I'm feeling like I should really go to the Mommies and Muffins event, because if I don't, N may be the only kid there without a mommy present.  (Since preschool is 1/2 day, 3 x a week, most of the families have a SAH parent.)  But that would mean missing part of the conference.  And then D will be hurt if I don't go to his Coming Out ceremony.

Why do schools think it's a good idea to schedule daytime events that parents are expected to attend other than graduation/moving up/coming out ceremonies during the last weeks of school?  Grrr.

Wii? Oui!

As I mentioned at the time, T went out the first day that the Wii went on sale and got one.  I meant to write a review, but when they became impossible to buy, I felt sheepish about doing so -- it felt too much like gloating. So here's the long postponed review.

In case you hadn't heard, what makes the Wii cool is the controller, which is wireless and motion sensitive.  So, to play tennis you swing the controller like a tennis racket, to race a car you turn it like a steering wheel.  It's incredibly intuitive, even (especially) for a non gamer like me.  And it's an awful lot of fun.

We have four games -- Excite Truck, Super Monkey Banana Blitz, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Wario Ware -- as well as the sports pack that comes with the system.  We played them a LOT for the first couple of months we had the system, less often now.  As with most games, it's a lot more fun to figure out how to play the game and develop an initial level of competence than it is to keep hammering away trying to get the last 5 points needed for a perfect score. 

So, a couple of months ago I got an email at the address on this blog, from a Nintendo publicist, offering to send me a system to demo.  They're targeting moms, arguing that this is a gaming system that you don't have to worry about your kids playing, because it gets them up and jumping around, not just using their thumbs.  And it's certainly true that D gets an aerobic workout playing, because he often gets so excited that he jumps up and down the whole time he plays, even when it's not required for the game. And I broke a sweat trying to get through the dance sections on the Rabbids game.  But overall, I think it's a stretch to suggest that Wii games are all that more physical than your average video game.

Laura at 11d and her commenters (especially Tim Burke) have an interesting conversation going on about the value of video games.  She's focused on their role as a form of social interaction, which hasn't been an issue for us yet -- whether because of D's age or the makeup of the neighborhood, I'm not sure.

For now, we're ok with the TV-based system -- it seems to substitute pretty directly for TV time, and that doesn't seem to be a problem. It hasn't been an issue yet, but we're really reluctant to even consider handheld systems, because D would definitely want to play with them all the time.  (Someone gave him a silly handheld electric Yatzee game, and he totally obsessed over it, even though he doesn't really understand the rules.)  And I'd rather have one argument over getting the system than constant arguments over turning it off.

As a parent, I'm most impressed at how much D was willing to persist and keep on trying until he got S (super?) scores on Excite Truck.  As discussed before, he sometimes thinks he's supposed to be able to do things perfectly from the start and gets frustrated when he doesn't.  So that's a plus.

Effort, Spirit and Opportunity

Ok, I'm coming really late to this discussion, but I really liked Penguin Unearthed's comments on the research about how it's better to praise effort than results.  I had a reaction similar to Phantom Scribbler's to the New York Magazine article that kicked off much blog discussion -- I'm pretty sure that no one is  going to break their kids by praising them the wrong way.

But the idea rang true that kids who are always praised for their smartness -- particularly if they don't feel smart -- might get afraid to do anything that might show that they're not so smart after all.  Among adults, it's the same phenomenon sometimes called the Imposter Syndrome.  (This is supposedly far more common among women than men, but I think that's probably a story for another post.)

I definitely worry about this for D, who already shows serious perfectionist tendencies, and an unwillingness to do things that he can't do well.  I actually think this is at least in part a matter of innate temperament -- we're talking about a kid who didn't take his first steps until 15 months, and then was walking without hesitation within days.  So I was very pleased that the imax film we saw today about the Mars rovers emphasized the parachutes shredding upon impact in the tests and the frantic work that the scientists needed to do to make them work before launch.  D adored it, and I was wiping tears from my eyes.

TBR: Arlington Park

I can't say that I liked the first book I read by Rachel Cusk, her memoir A Life's Work.  While I thought her prose was remarkable, I found it incredibly infuriating that as intelligent a woman as Cusk clearly is, would do something as irrevocable as having a child with so little forethought about how it would affect her life.  It's one thing to hate the tediousness and isolation of parenting a newborn; it's another thing to be surprised to discover that caring for a newborn can be tedious and isolating.

But her writing was powerful enough to make me pick up her new novel, Arlington Park, when I saw it at the library. The good news -- Cusk still writes some extraordinary sentences.  The bad news -- Cusk doesn't feel compelled to have any plot at all.   The book is just about a group of women who live in a suburb of London, and what they do one rainy day -- drop children at school, drink coffee, go shopping, take care of children, go out to dinner.  But when I say it like that, it sounds something like Mrs. Dalloway.  So imagine Mrs. Dalloway if the author didn't have any affection for her subject, and you'll have something like Arlington Park.

Here's a paragraph chosen pretty much at random to illustrate what I mean:

"'Gypsies,' Maisie said.  She shook her head.  'What a place to have to live.  Right where people come to pick up their sofas.'

Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie's remarks signified.  It wasn't the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn't the end of the world either."

Ultimately, for a book like this to work, I think you need to enjoy the company of either the author or the characters, and I was left quite cold about both.

Stats on parenting and class

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child's Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It's full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau's description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" -- children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.

blackmail?

So, N's preschool has a casino night/auction every year as its major fundraiser.  Admission is $50 a head, plus you get an "opportunity" to buy your child's artwork. 

So, last week, we get an email from the fundraising committee telling us that there will be treats for each class where 100% of the kids' parents buy tickets to the auction.  In other word, if we don't buy a ticket, we're the bad guys who prevent the whole class from having cupcakes.

Does this seem like a reasonable policy to the rest of you?  This sort of thing makes T and me *less* inclined to buy tickets, not more.  Are we over-reacting?

black mothers' sons

Last year, Landismom wrote that the essence of organizing is to give people anger, hope, and a plan.  In that spirit, I offer these links:

• Anger:  I was filled with fury at this story in today's Post, about a 12 year boy who died for want of a dentist.  By the time he was seen, the infection in his abscessed tooth had spread to his brain.  My office is opposite the break room at work, and all day I heard my coworkers exclaiming in outrage as they picked up the newspaper.  We work on poverty issues, and so sometimes we get a little jaded, lose a little of our outrage.  But this story hit home.
• Hope:  Via Miriam at Everyday Mom, and Nanci at From the Mom Zone, I read about Wakanheza, a program of the Ramsey County public health office to get people to identify people in stressful situations and reach out with a helping hand.
• A Plan: Campaign for Children's Health Coverage.  Insuring all children is only a start of a solution -- adults need health insurance too.  But kids are relatively cheap to insure, and there's an existing program -- the State Children's Health Insurance Program -- that provides a lot of the framework for doing so.  And it's up for reauthorization this year.  So sign the petition, and write your Senator and Representative.

I've had Ella's Song stuck in my head for half the day.  I'd like to see as many people learning about the death of Deamonte Driver as about the death of Kyle Miller.  (And yes, I know the odds of dying from an abscessed tooth are probably about as low as the odds of dying from seat belt failure.  But a kid shouldn't have to walk around with his teeth rotting out of his mouth for months either.)

wear sunscreen

Today I'm reviewing two books that were sent to me by their publishers.  Both are about health and disease prevention, and have a forward or introduction (what's the difference?) by the authors of YOU: The Owner's Manual.  One focuses on kids, while the other is organized decade by decade, from pre-natal to "the eighth decade and beyond."  Both of them basically tell you to exercise regularly, eat your veggies, and wear sunscreen.

First up is the book about kids: Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, by Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD.  The email I got offering me the book showed the cover, which has the title spelled out in refrigerator magnets, with a carrot and some broccoli magnets thrown in for good luck, so I knew it was likely to push some buttons for me.  As long-term readers of this blog know, I have some issues around nutritional advice for parents -- I know darned well what a healthy diet looks like, and that my older son's diet isn't quite making it to Planet Power but have more or less accepted that we can only control what we offer him, not what he eats.

So, when I got the book, I was predictably irritated by the blithe assumptions that involving children in food prep and cutting food into fun shapes would be enough to win over a picky eater.  But I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the book covers far more than nutrition, covering topics from good hygiene (wash your hands, floss your teeth) to safety (buckle your seatbelt, wear a bike helmet) and emotional well-being (spend one on one time with kids, develop relationships with extended family).  Overall, the book offers pretty solid, standard advice. 

My fundamental concern about the book is who is the audience for it.  It seems to me like the sort of well-educated middle-class parents who are likely to buy this book will generally know almost everything that's in it already.  Certainly, that seems to be the conclusion of the parentbloggers who have reviewed it.  Anxious new parents might buy it, but relatively little of the book is about babies. Maybe it could be a text for a parenting class?  Or you could give it to grandparents who might listen to a doctor about seat belts more than to their children?  I don't know.  I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone reading the book cover to cover.

The second book is The Checklist: What you and your family need to know to prevent disease and live a long and healthy life, by "Dr. Manny" Alvarez.  I focused on the chapters for 0-9 (the age of my children) and 30-39 (that would be me). 

The chapter on young children suffers from the problem that they've only got 38 pages to cover a huge developmental range.  So Alvarez makes no attempt to discuss the full range of health issues, but rather goes through a checklist of topics that you might have heard about in the news -- cord blood, circumcision, vaccines, autism, ADD.

The chapter on 30-something adults has a different problem, that there are very few health problems that are unique to this age group.  So instead you get a bland discussion of nutrition, skin care, and urinary tract infections, and then a laundry list of ailments that (fortunately) relatively few people in this age group are actually likely to experience, from cervical cancer to MS.

Fundamentally, I think the decade by decade organization just doesn't work.  Good preventative habits don't really change that much from decade to decade, and the litany of diseases would have worked better in simple alphabetical order.   The only people I could imagine reading this book cover to cover are hypochondriacs looking for new diseases to obsess about.

Also, the writing/editing was sloppy.  For example, from the circumcision discussion: "The AAP also found that the risk of penile cancer in an uncircumcised man is three times more likely than in a circumcised man, though penile cancer is rare in the United States, just one in one hundred thousand males has it."  Someone get this man a semicolon.

Car seats and fear

If you're on any parenting listserves, you've probably seen this YouTube video already.  It was made by the family of a little boy who was killed in a car accident; even though he was in a booster seat and belted in, the seat belt failed, and he was thrown from the car.  The video is a tearjerker, and argues for keeping kids in car seats with 5-point harnesses for as long as possible.

A friend forwarded me the video today, and I responded with this link from CarSeat.org, which points out that seat belt failure is extremely rare.  She responded that both CarSeat.org and AAP recommend keeping kids in car seats until they reach the height/weight limits, and so that it seems like a "no-brainer" to use a seat with higher limits if one is available.

I had to think for a while to figure out why I had such a strong reaction to this argument. Part of it is defensiveness -- at 6, D is shorter and lighter than many 4 year olds.  He's probably going to need a booster until he's 12.  Or maybe 21.* But we haven't made him stay in a car seat.  He's happier in the booster, and it's vastly easier to move it from car to car.  I don't like being made to feel like a neglectful parent as a result.

But it's also that I object to the idea that we're supposed to protect against any risk we can, no matter how low probability.  It's the same reason I'm not a fan of cord blood banking.  So much of parenting seems to be driven by fear these days, and I don't want to buy into that world view.

* Heck, I sit on a wedge that is essentially an adult booster seat when I drive our older car, which doesn't have fully adjustable seats -- I'm 5' even, and without the wedge, the curve in the seat hits my back in the wrong places.

Valentine's Day (observed)

Two years ago, I was horrified to read at Not Quite Sure that one was expected to provide Valentines for the kids at preschool.  I continued to pretend that I hadn't gotten the memo, and didn't worry too much about the one or two kids who did distribute them.

Two weeks ago, D's kindergarten teacher sent home a letter saying that they wouldn't be having a Valentine's Day party, but that we could, if we chose, provide Valentines to be distributed.  The letter said that if we did so, we should provide them for all the kids in the class (and a list was included) and that they should be pre-addressed since the teachers didn't have time to address them for us.

As it happens, we had bought a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts last month and they had included a pack of 12 donut-themed Valentine's, each one with a coupon for a free donut. D thought this sounded like a fine idea, so Tuesday night he sat down and carefully wrote his classmates names onto the cards and signed them all.  Of course, there was no school yesterday, so the celebration was delayed.  After reading the V-Day posts at Uterine Wars and On Balance, I wondered what we'd be getting back.  Handmade cards with glitter hearts?  Bags of candy?

As it turns out, D received one bag of candy, two Cars-themed cards, one Spiderman-themed card, and one Thomas-themed card.  (All of these of the sort sold by the dozen at CVS.)  So we neither upped the ante embarassingly or fell short.  Does it make me a bad mommy to think that I'm going to look back on this nostalgically if we move to a better school district with more involved parents?

Travel product reviews

Having survived our weekend of travel, I'm back with reviews of some of the products we used:

1)  Dramamine.  I decided to be proactive about N's tummy and gave him dramamine before the flights.  I don't know that it helped, but he didn't puke on either flight.  But what idiot decided that chewable dramamine -- which is most likely to be used by kids who haven't figured out how to take pills -- should be packaged such that the recommended dose for a small child is 1/4 to 1/2 a pill?  Particularly now that you can't bring a knife on a plane? It doesn't help that each pill is in one of those ridiculous bubble packs.

2)  The sit-n-stroll.  As a car seat, it's a great stroller, and as a stroller, it's a great car seat.  But it beats the pants off of trying to lug any other toddler car seat around an airport.  The weather was crappy on Friday, and we got through security 30 minutes before our flight was due to take off.  And of course our flight was at the furthest possible gate.  We strapped N into the seat and just cruised through the place at a trot.  (Our flight was delayed, so it turned out not to matter, but we would have made the flight if had been on time.)  You don't want this as your only car seat -- the seat belt has to go over it, rather than through it, so you have to refasten it every time you use it -- but if you fly with a toddler more than once a year, it's totally worth it.

3) Trunki.  I saw this ride-on suitcase for kids in a magazine last fall, and thought it was incredibly cute.  I found out that the MOMA store sold it, and suggested it to my parents as a hanukah present for the boys.  We've used them around the house (N adores using his to store all his treasures, and sometimes insists on sleeping with it) but this was the first time we tried them in an airport.  The good -- the boys liked riding on them, and they charmed everyone who saw them.  The straps make them easy to carry when you hit the escalator and need them off the ground.  The bad -- they don't corner well, so they're not good for when you're really in a rush.  And the latches don't stay shut.  Fortunately, we had used them enough to see the problem with the latches, and had bought luggage straps to wrap around them and keep them shut.

Update: when I wrote this post, I also emailed the company and told them the latches didn't stay shut.  They asked me what colors we had, and I said one of each.  No further word, until late April, when replacement latches showed up -- direct from the UK -- with a cute letter saying that they're sorry our trunkis were "feeling poorly."  The boys were just thrilled.

Update 2: Trunki is now listed for sale on Amazon, although they don't seem to have any in stock yet.  Order it in blue or pink!

random bullets

Feeling frazzled, so you get some bullets tonight:

• The blog world is buzzing over the story of the family who got kicked off of an AirTran flight because the little girl wouldn't sit in her seat and so the flight couldn't take off.  Assuming that the story is being reported more or less accurately, I basically agree with Mir.  I can't promise you that my kids won't make noise, but I can get them in their seats.  And most of the parents commenting at On Balance seemed to agree as well.  But a few seemed to take it as an opportunity to vent their spleen about crying kids, which is a different story entirely.  Yeah, I'd rather not be trapped in an airplane with a crying kid too, but you don't always get what you want.  Trust me, the parents are even less happy about it than you are.
• As it happens, we're flying AirTran this weekend to attend a family event.  My boys are both quite excited about flying, and I'm hopeful that they'll be reasonably well behaved.  D's been on a 16 hour flight, so an hour and a half shouldn't be a problem.  But of the 4 times that N has flown in his life, he's thrown up on two of them.  We're bringing a big box of wipes and extra clothes, but is there anything else we should be doing?  Is there a nonprescription anti-airsickness drug that is safe for kids and actually works?
• I've learned about a local farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and makes deliveries nearby.  After reading The Omnivore's Dilemna, I want to give this a try.  But I have no idea what to get that a) won't bankrupt us and b) will give us a sense of why it's worth the extra money and hassle.  Here's the price list -- what should I get and how should I cook it?
• I've mostly stopped worrying about my stats, but I happened to take a look at them this afternoon and discovered that I got over 2,000 hits on Monday, which is about 4 times what I usually get and more than 2 times my previous high.  I think it's because of this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  This is far more than the increase in hits I got last year when quoted in the NY Times.  I think the difference is that the Post-Intelligencer used a hotlink to the post it referred to, which the Times never does.

You blog so I don't have to

Here are some links that readers have recently sent me:

• Parenting as a wiki (e.g. everyone's got an opinion and they're all different.)
• Investment banks woo employees with shorter hours
• A new Wharton program for women with MBAs and other graduate degrees returning to the workforce after a 2-7 hiatus.  (And yes, it does say women.  I don't know what they'd say if a SAHD applied.)
• A blog post from Prarie Mary on how educational outcomes on reservations were affected by casino money.
• An article on the growth in SAHDs in Scotland.

And don't forget to send your comments on the FMLA.