The Five Minute Phone Call and Another Use for Play-Doh

You know those friends you want to talk to, but you put off talking to because you know the conversation will be long and you just don't have time for long because it's late and you have to make dinner and your kids are screaming and even if they weren't screaming your brain is mush? A few years ago my husband instituted The Five Minute Phone Call. This is where you call a friend but you keep it short and just say: "AAACK. I can't believe the #&#& sox are out of the playoffs!" (him) or "So did you watch Glee?" (me). We don't do it nearly enough, but it's a fine way to make you feel like you're in real touch -- beyond a superficial Facebook update or a group e-mail, I mean.

I've been thinking that I should approach my blog the same way. Instead of not posting because I haven't formulated what I want to say in thoughtful, polished prose, I should just go for the five-minute post. So here's a stab at that, because I wanted to offer a bit of parenting advice, just in case you have to take your kids to a nursing home to see a relative. It's one of the best bits of parenting advice I figured out on my own, so, as the clock ticks, here's the grand advice:

Bring Play-Doh. Seriously.

I've always loved Play-Doh. When I was a kid I played with it and, okay, maybe tasted it once or twice. As an adult I kept it on my desk at work as a de-stresser. And over the past few years, I've packed it with me when I've had to make nursing home visits. It's great because it gives the kids something to do and it could even give the ailing adult something to do. But the main reason I bring it is because it's great for blocking the SMELLS that go along with nursing homes. Especially if you have a kid with a sensitive nose. Which I do. (Note that this works for parents as well as kids.) I usually go armed with three of those small, purse-sized containers. Okay, that's it. End of advice. End of post. Viva la Play Doh!

That is all.

advice

I try not to go too heavy on the parenting advice, the underlying reason being that basically I'm just winging it. But I just thought I'd mention that, if you happen to have a 6-year-old boy and he happens to have a best friend, it is a very good idea to take the training wheels off of their bikes at the exact same time.

tv turnoff week

I should not be posting today. I have this little internet problem and TV Turnoff Week (April 21 to 27) is about screen time, not just TV Time. In other words, they're talking to ME. They're saying: you don't really need to play Scrabulous on Facebook this week. They're saying: you don't really need to read a half dozen blogs. Shouldn't you be writing? Shouldn't you be practicing your guitar? Shouldn't you be going outside with the other slack-jawed, zombie-eyed children and trying to catch some sun?

So just this short note, to direct you to www.tvturnoff.org. And to recommend that if you happen to have young children, you should start TV Turnoff Week at the library. I did, and came away $44 poorer (see previous post about daughter's book-ripping incident). But I also came away with 20 books, including Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator.

Tomorrow, hit the hardware store and buy some seeds. Climb a tree. Write a poem.

Tomorrow night, consider listening to NPR for your election returns. Consider taking a valium to make it easier.

crime and punishment

One of the hardest things for me about parenting is finding the appropriate punishment when my kids do something wrong. Too often I go for No Television, even if the crime had nothing to do with television. Yesterday my 3-year-old pulled a doozy and did something that was completely out of character for her. She and a friend were in her room while everyone else was downstairs. After the friend left I went upstairs and found that they had shredded four library books. This hurt on a few of levels.

1. Books are sacred in our house
2. We're still on financial lockdown. One of the reasons we use the library so much is so that we always have lots of new books that are FREE, something I would never take for granted. Replacing these books is NOT going to be free.
3. One of the books was an Ezra Jack Keats book
4. Her crime was a combination of mistreating books and being a blind follower, which we discussed but which is a hard thing to get across to a 3-year-old.

So what do you do as punishment? Parenting books are always saying the punishment needs to fit the crime. In that case, I should probably take away her books or refuse to read to her for a week so she can appreciate the value of a book. But taking away books is like taking away breathing. Plus, I don't want her to go a week without me reading to her. Which leads me right back to television, which is something I don't want her watching anyway. She also loses her bedtime book choices for a week. I told her I would read to her brother and that she could join us and listen, but that since he respected the books in our house this week, he gets to chose which books we read. She will also have to pay one dollar the next time she comes into money from someone (a grandparent, an aunt, etc.) to help pay us back. (This one is tricky; she doesn't get an allowance so we can't take that, and the next time she gets money from someone is likely to be August, which is pretty far removed from the actual crime.)

I also took her to the library last night and had her apologize to the librarians. I tried to point out that this wasn't part of the punishment; when you do something wrong, you apologize for it. End of story. I called the children's librarians first and I told them we were coming in advance.

I'm still not completely satisfied with the punishment. But I am satisfied that it's something she won't do again.

meds

So my son can't take medicine without gagging. He hates the taste. He hates the smell. When he woke up with a headache this week, I asked him if he wanted to take a caplet to make him feel better.

"You mean Motrin-easy-to-swallow caplets?" he asked between sniffles and tears. Now that's some scary marketing.

One last note from the parenting front: Sometimes it takes less time to hunt through the dirty dishes, find the blue plate and wash it than it takes to serve the eggs on the already washed green one.

desires

Things my 2-year-old wants:
Heelys
A swing
Crocs
Cookies
Fairy wings
For her friend Gabriella to live with us

Things my 5-year-old wants
A fiddle
Crocs
A boy-sized rocket that really works
A different ending for Stuart Little (the book, not the movie)
For his preschool friends to be in his kindergarten class
A playmobil cruiser
New Legos
A brother-in-law

Things I want:
Dining room curtains
A black cardigan
A new pair of chucks
Stronger thighs
For Toyota to start making station wagons again
Glow sticks
A hermit crab
A different administration
World peace

Deprivation

My definition's certainly different now, but when I was a kid, I considered myself deprived because I never had the following:

Cowboy boots
Glow sticks
A prairie skirt (that's because I was short, I think, and not because my folks said "no." They did say "no" to the rest of this list.)
A hermit crab
Designer jeans
A cap gun

Expanding horizons

My son went on a field trip with his preschool class to Harris Teeter.
When I picked him up I asked him if he'd learned anything new.
"Harris Teeter sells five different kinds of peppers," he said. "And they have a very nice wine department."

kia addendum

We went downtown with our neighbors yesterday in an SUV that's bigger than my daughter's bedroom. My son checked out the built-in DVD player. "Mommy!" he said. "Look! They have a Kia Sedona."
(For the record, it wasn't a Kia. It was a Yukon XL.)

a short rant

Almost daily, we're assaulted by new marketing campaigns created especially for my kids. Last month, for instance, we taped their favorite TV show, "The Backyardigans," off of Nickelodean instead of off of their commercial-free Noggin. Instead of talking about the new episode (they'd seen "Knights are Brave and Strong about 20 times), my son came upstairs and asked for a Kia Sedona.
"Why do you want one of those?" I asked him.
"It has lots of safety features," he said. "AND it has a DVD player." I know it's not quite fair to blame a car for loss of innocence, but suffice it to say, our family will never own a Kia Sedona. And we're going back to taping our second-run shows off of Noggin (which has this horror-show of a slogan: "It's Like Preschool On TV!" I'll save that rant for later.)

Assault No. 2 My mom and I took the kids shopping this weekend in search of a suit for my cousin's wedding. We checked Once Upon a Child first, but apparently, nobody dresses up in Blacksburg, Va. So we checked J.C. Penney We didn't find a suit. But the kids did discover T-shirts, bright red, with a dinosaur plastered across the chest. It wasn't the dinosaur that interested them, so much as the trains and remote-control trucks that were encased in plastic and hung over the hangers. Cost: $17 bucks. It's probably a losing battle, but suppose I'll try boycotting J.C. Penney for awhile, too. I'm not a huge fan of Raffi's music, but I do appreciate his involvement in the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (http://www.commercialexploitation.org/) It's time to get radical. Past time.