To the person who loaded the dishwasher three quarters full and then left it all night:
Really? There are three children and two adults in this house and you couldn’t find anything else to shove in there? No pot lids? Coffee pots? Stray mugs or glasses? Containers full of rotten food in the fridge? Yesterday’s lunch boxes? Plastic toys? Scrub brushes? Anything?! I dream that one day I, too, shall find nothing more that could use a run through the dishwasher and then I shall lie down and die.
1. Vacuum up Rainbow Loom elastics directly from their packaging.
2. Buy new socks. Take half the pairs and immediately throw one sock into the garbage. Run the other half over rusty nails.
I’m often surprised by how different people try to parent their teenagers. They either seem astonishingly naive or unbearably controlling. Don’t they remember what it was like? Instagram and Snapchat or not, teenagers have always been teenagers. Maybe this is because my kids aren’t there yet and I can’t quite understand their position. Maybe it’s because these parents are often ten or fifteen years older than me and they really can’t remember their teen years as well. Maybe it’s because my teen years were more wild than theirs and I can’t be shocked.
But I was a bit shocked when I caught up with an old friend over the weekend and she vowed to never let her daughters do some of the things we did. Not to put too fine a point on it, but our parents didn’t exactly “let” us do those things either. How did that turn out? I expect my kids will do those sorts of things. I also expect I won’t like it very much either.
Something happened to me last week and I’m still annoyed. I’m bothered enough, in fact, to write this blog post about it. I should probably be writing a humdinger of a post that employs insight, humour and the parenting issue du jour ,and wraps it all up in an eminently shareable package that will garner crazy mad pageviews. That’s what I usually do. But today I just want to complain on my blog and not even bother with a big shiny image and the perfect metadiscription, like it’s 2008 or something.
Here’s what happened.
I was messing around on Facebook because I was either procrastinating or taking a break when a link caught my attention. It said something like, Following the Jay Z and Solange saga? Want to see even more pictures? Clearly the answer was YES. There are more pictures?! I only thought there was a video. This is going to be perfect. I can’t think of a better way to trick myself into thinking that I’m not actually avoiding work than by staring vacantly at more pictures of the Knowles family.
You would have done the same thing.
But there were no more Jay Z pictures. There was only an overly moralized scolding about how we’re not paying attention to the important things in the world and then there were pictures taken from other news stories this past week. There were pictures about the kidnapped Nigerian girls and of arrested Iranian youths and, I don’t know, like, Vladimir Putin or something. I didn’t really look.
At first I was mildly disappointed and then I was slightly annoyed. Then I became downright irked. You didn’t just use Beyonce-Jay Z linkbait to shame me, did you? Why don’t you just rip the magazine out of people’s hands at the coffee shop and ask why they’re not reading real literature? Â There are people right now playing volleyball at the beach instead of volunteering at soup kitchens. Quick, set up a beach volleyball league so you can lecture everyone who shows up about how selfish they are and throw aprons at them.
I will not even get into the hypocrisy of using the entertainment news story of the day to score pageviews for your own website and then scolding people for falling for it.
But it’s not just this one story. I don’t even remember what it was or how it came into my Facebook feed. It’s several times a day across various social media platforms people complaining about how the rest of us are shallow, celeb hungry idiots who aren’t paying attention to the real news and issues and events. Even if we do start talking about a serious news story, the choir comes out wonder why we only care about this story and not that story or that other one.
If there are important issues and stories some people wish would get more attention, I don’t understand why they don’t just start talking about those issues. Do they think tricking people into listening to them and then smearing them with shame is a more effective tactic?
Are we not allowed to do both? To sit down quietly and catch up on all the important world news stories that are reported on faithfully by all the major news organizations every single day AND ALSO to steal five minutes of mindless pleasure scrolling Facebook for baby pictures and celebrity gossip?
What else is the point of the internet?
Super big thanks to Lean Cuisine for sponsoring this rambling walk down memory lane. Who knew I had so much to say about frozen dinners? Make sure to check out the Lean Cuisine Rewards program that allows you to collect PIN codes from each meal that will earn you all kinds of amazing rewards from entrées to tablets and beyond.
âYou canât have a treat everyday,â I tell my kids.
Of course, thatâs a big fat lie. Whether itâs a glass of wine or a specialty coffee, I manage to reward myself with a little something almost everyday. And my latest obsession? Dinner for one after everybodyâs gone to sleep. Thatâs right, I kid you not. A Lean Cuisine in your freezer can make your day.
I can tell you all about when I had my first frozen dinner. My mom was working the late shift as an emerg receptionist at Sick Kids hospital and my brother and I were hanging out with my dad.
“Tonight,” said my dad, “We’re having TV dinners.”
He’d been talking about these TV dinners for a couple weeks. He thought we’d get a kick out of them; the little compartments for meat and veggies,  creamy mashed potatoes and even a teensy little dessert. So this one night he finally picked up three of these dinners at the supermarket and then proceeded to heat them up in the oven for 35 minutes.
Dudes. I don’t even know why they bothered inventing frozen meals before they invented the microwave. Just cook something, for crying out loud.
I checked my email this morning and, hidden halfway through a message about t-ball practice, were the words every parent dreads to hear: “The team-snack schedule is up.” Am I right or am I right!? Fine, I’ve been parenting from behind a back-lit screen long enough to know that many people seem to like team snacks just fine. They buy into mythological ideals like “nutrition” and “community”. They believe there is some sort of correlation between parental anguish and a happy childhood. They are delusional.
Here’s the real lowdown on team snacks.
Myth:Â Team snacks help foster a sense of community and team spirit.
Reality*: After a grueling hour and a half of doodling in the dirt while waiting for her turn at bat and then letting ground balls dribble all the way out to right field where they’ll finally be picked up and thrown short of first base, your child will line up to shake hands with the opposing team. Then there’s a team meeting during which a good coach will make everybody feel great about the game they just played. THIS IS WHERE the team spirit and community happens. Finally, the kids will spill off the playing field and make off with whatever snacks are on offer, dispersing in all directions while they gobble them up.
I get many emails in the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day telling me about various products and services that might make good gifts for moms. I guess this is because everybody knows that the only way people are going to know what to get for their mom is if their mom tells them what to get. AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT or else we’d all be bombarded with crap like this. These are real products, designed and produced with moms in mind.
The line at the Goodwill drop-off door would be around the block. Our faces would cramp under the strain of all that fake smiling. We’d cry. These are not what moms want.
3D laser images of our children suspended in a hunk of glass.
Twitter threw one hell of a wake last night. (It was good enough, in fact, to make you wonder if the eulogy published on The Atlantic earlier in the day might not be a bit premature.)
Rob Ford was the main draw for me, as I scrolled down looking for reactions to the early news that he was going to seek help. But the Raptors were also lighting up the court in a playoff game against the Nets, there were two Twitter parties being thrown by people I know and many more people were tweeting about the Mom 2.0 Summit. My feed was on fire.
But the news kept on keeping on, like a giant flood of bad trips that we’d all blacked out but could recognize as soon as we heard about them. The mayor at a dive strip-mall bar, the mayor gay bashing, the mayor making crude comments about Karen Stintz, the mayor digging deep into his repository of ethnic slurs and coming out with Dago.
Israel is observing Holocaust Remembrance Day today and stories and essays about The Holocaust have been trickling down my various news feeds.
What do my kids know about The Holocaust, I wondered. I don’t know exactly, but not very much. My eight-year-old probably has some sort of foggy idea, but my five-year-old almost certainly doesn’t. Have I ever talked to them about it? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
If we were Jewish they would know. They would. And that’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t have to be a Jew to remember and talk about how not very long ago at all, the leader of one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world corralled Jewish people like cattle and led them into concentration camps where they suffered and, for the most part, ultimately died.
Do you like what I’ve done with the place? Why yes that is a Santa figurine on the far left. It’s only the end of April, after all.
Holy dark week on the blog, Batman.
Is it crazy that my life is so finely calibrated that any extra thing is enough to derail an entire month? I’ll be paying for this past week, for example, until well into June.
We’ll start with an incredibly fun Jack and Jill shower I helped throw for my sister-in-law last Thursday. I was happy to do it. It was a great night. It wasn’t even that much work in the grand scheme of things. But there was a couple hours of running around and buying supplies, an afternoon of food prep, the actual party itself and then the recovery the next morning. (It went late, I needed aspirin.)
