Pending pick-up
“You see? You SEE? DO YOU SEE what all of your showing out and acting the fool leads to? And now everybody drives by is looking.”
How to land your kid in therapy
MFT intern Lori Gottlieb writes:
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
Dad takes embarrassing teenage son to a new level
Oddly, it isn’t a Onion article (via):
“You don’t want to see your dad dressing up in a wedding dress, waving at you on the bus,” Rain said.
And never did his dad use the same character more than once. Several props aided interpretation as well. Like the day he hauled a porcelain toilet onto the porch. One of the days he was sick, so a cardboard cut-out of a Lord of the Rings character stood outside in his place.
Mr. B.’s Vegas Posse
There, on the left.
from the comments
Oh my. This song. Mr. B. became obsessed at 5, a girl at school taught it to him. He would sing “drove my cheby to the leby but the leby was dry.” He was spooky quiet with the line “this’ll be the day that I die.” I would think okay, not playing Barney songs in the car, mistake. So I’d ramp up the Allmans about then. Something cheerful like “Whipping Post.”
headline of the day
Octomom’s fertility doctor has license revoked
Siam vs. Mexico
From The Saddest Music in the World. Guy Maddin (2003).
“The singers are giving us a sad peek into child burial customs ‘down Mexico way’.”
“The Mexican mama is being very firm with her dead infant.
“Now go away, she wails
You are dead
Don’t sneak in at night
to nurse from my breast
That milk
is only for the living
“To Canadian ears, that may sound harsh.”
My 6 year old from his bunk bed
R: Dad do you remember before I was born?
Me: Yes.
R: Was everything the same?
Me: You weren’t here, so it was different. We were lonely but we didn’t know it.
R: Where was I?
Me: You weren’t made yet.
R: Sometimes I think I remember.
Me: Before you were born?
R: Yeah. It just was like space or something.
Me: What did it feel like?
R: Sad. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what to think. Maybe I was lonely. I don’t know. It’s complicated to think about. I remember things from a long time ago.
[Quiet]
R: Did you ever travel to a high mountain before I was born?
Me: Yes.
R: I remember that. The stars were beautiful.
—
Later:
Flannery’s beer finds
You would think it would be an old guy like me giving my daughter tips about good beers–but for a while now it has been the other way around. She says, “Try one of these.” I take a sip and think damn, and I’ve been drinking that other shit.
Photos of kids
who are Too Big for Strollers.
(Thanks, Susan.)
from the comments
Those assholes spelled Fuck wrong. Great example for the kids, guys.
The Talk
This is mostly for Cindy, but it’s for everyone too. Julia Sweeney’s 8 year old daughter started asking questions about sex, and Sweeney soon found herself answering endless questions. Long but good, via the Hairpin.
tweet of the day
Ask a law librarian
Tall, blond man walks out of an L.L. Bean catalog and into the library: “I need to correct the father’s name on my son’s birth certificate.”
Librarian: “Is it just a misspelling, or a different person?”
Tall Blonde: “I’m Robert Hamilton,* but the birth certificate says Buck Hamilton.”
Librarian: “So uh, was this a DNA testing type situation with Buck?”
Tall Blonde: “Well, it’s complicated. Buck was my alter identity for about 10 years while I was doing all the crimes I committed. And Buck is on the birth certificate. But now Buck is dead.”
Librarian (thinking well I be gawddamn, this is a new one): “Well it sounds like Buck needed to been doin’ a name change. I mean, because you’re sayin’ the issue is not your son’s name. Normally they change the father’s name on a birth certificate because there’s two people and one name on the birth certificate. Yer sayin’ there’s one person and two names.”
Tall Blonde: “I’ve settled everything else. This is the last thing I need to take care of. I don’t know how I would go about it.”
Librarian: “I don’t know either. The usual situation involves paternity. Have you ever taken a paternity test?”
Tall Blonde: “I would be willing to do that. I could do that.”
Librarian: “Here’s all the papers.”
Tall Blonde: “Is there any place in these papers where Buck would need to sign?”
*The names have been changed because, you know.
quote out of context
Obviously, if this comes to the US, this is only going to be a procedure accessible to the most privileged of privileged, women who can afford to receive a womb transplant (or who has Crazy Dream Insurance that pays for things like post-NCAA tournament depression-related acupuncture), who can afford the ensuing IVF necessary to conceive, who can afford the expensive immunosuppressant drugs needed to prevent organ rejection and the cost of a hospital Cesarean section. They’d also have to be able to afford to have the womb removed after a pregnancy or two, as long term use the rejection-preventing drugs womb recipients must take can lead to harmful complications.
Dear movie watcher
via Amanda Mae in Google reader?
from the comments
Mr. B. has a friend whose mother would not let him have a computer or use hers. She is a physician and felt he could use his time in a more fruitful way. He was 12 or 13. He went online at school or a friend’s and described his problem on some computer forum. People started sending him parts, some of them broken, some from halfway around the globe. The kid built himself a computer.
Bonus:
The mother said uncle, Shelia.
from Sheila’s email
I send my friend a link to a live Google map of overnight shelters in Tokyo. I don’t know why. He lives in Dallas.
Jeezo. It looks like a map of the many aftershocks. I had to escape the media and watch the spider chow down on an ant.
Guitar Ensemble: “Our Kindergarten Teacher” (Kindergarten of Ch’ŏngam-guyŏk [Ch'ŏngjin-si, DPR Korea])
I don’t know what to say about this.
Deadbeat Diary, 2
Izabella arrived in July of 2008. Budgets were adjusted. 800 dollars a month was set aside for her daycare. We bought a second car. Our life didn’t just look good on paper, we were happy. This was the plan. We were in Hawaii in February of 2010 when we found out there would be a second baby.
Budgets were resistant to adjustment.
For six or seven months we calculated expenses and income. Expenditures were vetoed. We cut non-essential services and tallied the contents of our savings account. We decided to sell our house.
The decision wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just about the money. When all the debits and credits were added up and our final monthly budget was calculated, owning the home or not, we were in about the same place. The choice, for us, was about how we wanted to raise our kids. We could both work to pay a mortgage and $1600 in daycare expenses or we could rent and one of us could stay home with the kids.
By this time, September of 2010, our house was worth just over 50% of what we’d paid. A sale would mean a short sale and a short sale would be the end of our excellent credit scores and, more difficult for us, an adjustment to our values.
We talked to a Realtor and put the house on the market.
Ice Ice Baby
We all love meteorological one-upmanship, don’t we? I know I do. “Okay, y’all are colder than us, but we’ve got more snow. And more wind!” Or: “This week is nothing to January 1999.” “1999? That was a pussy storm. I was in Chicago in 1967!”
So I love acting all smug when my Texas friends speak of harsh winter weather. But in truth I know that winter in north central Texas is not all that balmy and that when a storm hits, it ain’t pretty.
Read more
quote out of context
Giving an “adult” camera to a three-year-old may seem like a recipe for confusion and broken electronics, but I’m continually amazed at kids’ thirst for knowledge and empowered responsibility.
from the comments
It has been such a long time since I actually considered my own hopes, dreams and aspirations in a serious way. Seventeen years, in fact. It’s like I took a long vacation from myself and am surprised to find emerging the person I was a very long time ago.
Motherhood left me vulnerable. Samson with his hair shorn, is the way it feels on the bad days. But I think that aspect also cracked ancient layers of defense.
Emotions I had forgotten came back. “Don’t think about crossing her when it comes to the boy, you’ll regret it ’til the day you die,” counsels the Iowan, in wonderment.
I found the super-sized emotions did not kill me. They are old friends, not enemies. They are showing me the way.
Daryl & Cindy–Christmas Letter
We have been in El Paso all week, and Cindy has been sick the whole time. We meant to send out Christmas cards while there but didn’t plan for the task very well. Here’s this year’s Christmas letter:
Mary Christmas from Randy Taylor and the rest of us,
We went out last night for a Christmas tree and ended up having to shoot some people. That can put a damper on the holidays, but it’s not the end of everything if it happens in Texas. We went to buy it down by the tamale place. The boys had got into their presents early like they do and were in the backseat loading and unloading them. When the police came they were real nice and helped us get the tree into the back of the Tahoe. They felt bad that we had this happen to us in the middle of a family tradition. This fellow pushing a stolen shopping cart full of frozen turkeys he had also stole got a little too close to the car with his friends, and you know how you have to act fast with carjackers. Bobby got one of the frozen turkeys that hadn’t got anything on it, but I made him put it back. That’s not what we believe in. When we got home Paula cooked us some scrambled eggs and that venison sausage I’m having made for us now. It’s been a hard year. First the Pastor getting too handy with Paula, then the internet thing going all venereal about my complaint to the Jimmy Dean sausage factory that the sons of bitches recorded and let out all over the goddam world. Then Mama dead and cremated in January and Rusty finds a bone in the urn, sharpens it, and stabs Daddy with it. And then Bobby nor Donny either one making the football team because of grades. I almost didn’t let them go deer hunting this year, but I think it does no good to punish kids in unchristian ways. And Paula likes to catch up on praying when we’re gone anyway. I don’t know what the deal is with Vanna. She turned twelve and can dress herself now.
Anyway, I got the tree out and up and lighted and the target deer look real good out front of the house since I used spackle and brown shoe polish to cover the holes.
This is all I want to write about now. I hope everybody will think hard about how worse it could be and have a good Christmas. Okay then—bye. RT
from the comments
I used to bring Love Potion No. 9 to the kids on Valentine’s Day. Hawaiian Punch with ice cubes in which I had frozen red hots and the little colored hearts with love messages written on them. That sort of thing. Some of the children guzzled it, seemed hypnotized. Certain ones were wary of the elixir. Like Mr. Boudreaux, who tended to eye me suspiciously, ask for a juice box, please.
