Issues & decisions | Hip to be Mom

There we were at dinner one evening. At the table next to us was a family of 5. Daddy, Mommy, 3 kids – and 3 gadgets (see red arrows). Daddy is coaching the middle child (aged about 7). When I snapped this picture, they’d gone to the restroom. Mommy is coaching the youngest (aged about 5). The oldest child is well on his own.

Everyone is “busy”, “engaged”, eyes fixated on their screens. All is quiet. Not a beep from their table. The only communication in this family seems to be the wi-fi connection. Even after the food arrives, they’re still at it and barely ate. Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

It seems to be becoming more and more of a trend these days. Scary, I know. Families are spending time together – apparently – but they don’t talk. Couples are on dates but they don’t talk. The gadgets have taken over!

Was reading the news about a NC dad who pelted his 15yo daughter’s laptop for posting a rude piece about her parents on Facebook. Have you heard? Well, he posted a video response on her FB wall reprimanding her and then ended up firing 9 rounds into her laptop.

I can so see why he flew into a rage when he read the things she wrote. Frankly I would’ve too. She was ranting (with a healthy dose of expletives) about how she had to do chores around the house (like sweeping the floor and making her own bed, wow!) and saying that (get this!) her parents should pay her for doing stuff around the house.

That, if you ask me, was totally disrespectful and downright unacceptable! I’ll say he had every reason to be angry and disappointed but well, okay, his reaction might’ve been ju-ust a tad over the top .

I have to admit that at one point, I was contemplating if I should pay my son to wash my minivan. Many parents pay their kids to do chores around the house, to help out, even to score good grades in their exams (wow, this one’s really got me ). I know.

Well, at first, I thought it might be a good way for them to learn how to manage their money. Then again, they can always learn to do that with their allowance, right? So I changed my mind before I started what might’ve been a dangerous precedence for turning money into an incentive for everything they do.

Turns out Tommy Jordan, the laptop-shooting daddy, has it along the same lines as what I was thinking. His argument is this.

You live here in this house where we, your parents pay for everything – your laptop, your cellphone, your clothes, your shoes, your holidays, your education, your everything… And all you have to do is go to school, get driven back and forth heck, eat meals you don’t even have to cook yourself, collect your allowance and I have to pay you to do stuff around the house??!!

Indeed! Thanks for saying it out loud. Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m your parent, not your employer, and as the family, we shouldn’t be bringing dollars and cents into every little thing we do. Well, that’s just me. What do you think?

My 3 kids grew up on fairy tales, the classics. It was our nightly routine. I’d get home from work and after dinner and shower, I would settle down with the kids to read them a bedtime story (or 2 or 3 ). My kids were around 2+-3 years old at the time but they loved every fairy tale we read and they would eagerly pick out the book they wanted me to read.

But a study by the British TV channel, Watch seems to say that some of the classic fairy tales (as we know them) are just too scary, or could be inappropriate if kids with overactive imaginations took them literally.

In the case of Snow White, the idea of a wicked witch for a stepmother who tries to poison her is perhaps too much for little kids. Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin involve stories about kidnapping, and in The Little Red Riding Hood, the big bad wolf gobbles up a helpless grandmother.

So apparently some parents are ditching these classics. To be honest, I would never have thought of these storylines as a problem. The question never even arose. At least, they make more sense than Teletubbies and Spongebob, just sayin’. Anyhow my kids loved reading these stories over and over, and these books are now part of our prized collection.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was a big favorite for us. Don’t ask me how many times I’ve read this book!

So how do you feel about the classics? Would/do you read them to your kids? What do your kids read?

It seems there’s been quite a lot of discussion in the news lately about keeping (I won’t use the word banning) kids out of airplanes and restaurants. In the latest article I read here this morning, a family restaurant in Atlanta has issued a statement to parents to please take their crying and unruly kids outside so the other diners can eat in peace.

The Grant Central Pizza in Grant Park put up this disclaimer in their menu:

“Dear all present and future patrons: GCP is proud of its reputation as a family restaurant, a title that we will work to keep. Unfortunately a number of our diners have posted unpleasant experiences because of crying and unsupervised children. To ensure that all diners have an enjoyable lunch or dinner with us we respectfully ask that parents tend to their crying tots outside.”

Apparently the restaurant owner was prompted to take action after receiving negative reviews, and an unpleasant encounter with a parent whose child throw a toy which hit another diner on the head. OMG, I hope it was a soft toy .

These days, children’s so-called toys can be lethal weapons. My idea of a toy would be, say, a harmless doll or a few tamiya models. But it seems, more and more, parents’ cell phones and iPads are becoming playthings and a source of distraction for kids.

As a mom, I’m all for bringing the kids out and having a fun time. Granted, kids will be kids but if they start misbehaving in public, we’ll just have to step in now, won’t we?

What do you say?

Apart from the usual groceries and eating out, we’ve been tracking the progress of Happy Feet, the emperor penguin who somehow made his way from the South Pole to New Zealand in June and was recently released back into the ocean to find his way home to the Antarctica.

It’s a 2,000 km journey back home for a little penguin in a vast ocean so obviously we, like a lot of folks all over the world, are concerned. What’s even more worrying is that his tracking device hasn’t been updating his location for the past few days. Skye, our animal lover, confessed she said a prayer for Happy Feet that he would find his way safely home to his family.

We also spent some time on the internet looking at the 911 pictures in the news and feeling incredibly saddened (again). It’s as incomprehensible today as it was back then. It was indeed a sad day for mankind. Our thoughts are with those who have lost their loved ones and those whose lives have been changed forever. I hope they find the space and time to heal and move on.

Stuck at home with the sniffles last weekend, the girls and I cuddled up for several movie nights and one of the movies we watched was The Switch. Okay, I had no idea Jason Bateman was still acting but hey guy, you’re still pretty hot! This is where my girls start grimacing and contorting their faces at their Mom’s choice of cute.

Never mind, on with the show. So Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) wakes up one morning to the loud ticking of her biological clock and decides she must have a kid. So the hunt for a sperm donor begins and she finally settles on Roland, an overly energetic and enthusiastic guy who would probably be out trying to tame a set of maxxim custom wheels as soon as he runs out of rocks to climb.

At the insemination party (harhar!), Kassie’s BFF, Wally (Jason Bateman) inadvertently switches Roland’s ingredients with his own. I’m not going to give too much away here in case you haven’t watched the movie.

Fast forward 7 years and Kassie returns to town with her son, Sebastian, who not only hits it off with Wally but also bears an uncanny resemblance, characterwise, to the man. And as parents, we all know how it thrills us to catch nuances of ourselves in our kids .