So  here’s the thing, I’m a mom who’s really big on rules. From the time the kids were little, I had lots of house rules which I drummed into their poor li’l heads.

My rules started when they were 1 or 2, yeah, old enough to understand simple logic if I explain it slowly to them. Rules like no sticking your finger in there (pointing at the wall plug sockets), no playing with knives and matches, always hold mommy’s hand when we’re out and stay where I can see you.

When they were older, we had the one about remembering to greet and say ‘hello’ people to friends and family we meet. Then the one about respecting other people’s property like not touching or using their things without permission. If it’s one thing that really irritates me, it’s when kids start running all over people’s homes, upstairs and downstairs, and playing with their things.

These days, the rules (I think we should be somewhere around #302 by now ) are more like advice and reminders. The biggie is Facebook, not something I necessarily approve of. To me, nothing on the internet is ever private no matter what they tell ya. And never mind what settings the radio deejay tells you to click to make things private. ’nuff said!

But I have to be realistic here and expect that, well, peer pressure may occasionally triumph over Mom’s warnings. So House Rule #302 says they’re not to post their real names, pictures or private stuff about themselves. Now let me see, what’s House Rule #303?

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Right, so we’ve got another teen at the crossroads now. Raine will be finishing high school this year and she’s trying to figure out what she wants to do next. Not surprising since school is abuzz with this topic lately, compounded by the fact that colleges are making their promotional rounds at high schools to recruit students for their next intake.

Suddenly it’s got the high school seniors thinking and wondering. One of Raine’s friends wants to be a pilot and that’s shocked her parents into going, oh no, you’re NOT! And they’re having big fights over this . Thank goodness Raine has no interest whatsoever in flying, whew!

We’ve all been at the crossroads before at that age and for some of us, it’s not been the easiest thing. I remember being clueless and then ended up being somehow nudged into the world of computers which I quickly grew to love. So mine has a happy ending.

But yeah, if you choose a field you’re passionate about, there’s a bigger chance you will do well and be happier pursuing a career you enjoy rather than having to drag yourself in to work every morning.

And I’m so excited for Raine. She has a variety of interests – writing, food, design, people – and there are so many ways she could go with these. She wants to dabble in a bit of everything, of course, but she knows she has to pick one to major in.

She’s feeling the pressure now because some of her friends have already decided or their parents will be deciding for them. We’ve been having these long chats, researching different options, exploring different combinations. We still have a ways to go but we’re getting there !

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And we’re just now discussing last-minute vacation plans which may or may not pan out depending on whether we can secure plane tickets at such short notice. That’s us, the “get up, grab the backpacks and get going” type.

Whenever we’ve gone on vacations, this is exactly what happens. Hip2bDad or I would jump out of bed one morning and suggest we go somewhere. When Steev and Raine were toddlers, we threw a couple of backpacks together and were soon winging our way to California. With only airplane tickets in hand. No hotel reservations. No tour bookings. No plans. Some would call it midsummer madness!

We arrived at LAX late at night, jumped on an airport bus which took us to the car rental place where we signed up for a Pontiac, tossed in the bags and the kids, and went in search of a motel in the middle of the night. Found one nearby and next morning, we were off to Disneyland, Anaheim.

In our 3 weeks there, we drove up and down the coast. When we weren’t visiting theme parks and local sites, we were looking for restaurants and motels at every stop with 2 toddlers in tow. Hip2bDad and I are crazy like that! We’ve been doing stuff like this even before we got married and having kids certainly isn’t going to stop us!!

Yeah, that’s the way we do it play the guitar on the MTV !!

Aaand here we are again, trying to pull off another one of “those”! Steev will be heading off to college in California in the fall and we’re thinking, hmm, maybe it’s a good time to make another impromptu trip to Disneyland and the coast.

Great idea, this time the kids can be their own pack mules, bwahaha but wait… so much left to do, so little time to throw everything together. Oh well, let’s see how it goes. If we don’t do it this year, we’ll definitely do it next year!

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Speaking of teens, I hear many high school kids are already pros at the clubbing scene, drinking, smoking, staying out all night and doing stuff that a mother’s darkest nightmares are made of. Sure, many of these things are probably happening behind the backs of busy parents.

But I’m told some of these parents are the very ones who drop their kids off at clubs and feed their expensive spending habits, apparently as some sort of compensation for not spending time with their kids . Aren’t hugs, kisses, picnics and the occasional personalized gift the stuff parents do anymore? Or am I falling behind in the ways of modern parenting here? Just sayin’.

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A group of Raine’s classmates are organizing an outdoor photo shoot for the graduating high school seniors sometime next week. This bunch of 17 year olds are going to get dressed up and have their photos taken at the mall (why the mall? beats me!) by a professional photographer.

My dear princess isn’t keen. It doesn’t surprise me, considering that Steev wasn’t that keen about stuff like that either when he graduated high school 3 years ago. But he being a guy, there was probably less pressure on him. Well, he did go to his high school prom but he came home early and wasn’t that impressed!

Raine tells me she doesn’t want to go. She thinks it’s blah, a waste of time, it’s not really her scene. Says she’d rather stay home and read a good book or hang out with us. I’m okay with whatever she decides. She definitely has a mind of her own, my middle child!

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Our bedtimes seem to have gone out of whack these days. When my kids were in primary school, bedtime was between 8:00-8:30pm. I was brought up early to bed, early to rise, hence my inspiration for the hours I impose on my kids.

In high school, the kids’ bedtime hovers around 9:30-10 as we have to be up at 6am on school days, and we have multiple alarm clocks to make sure of that. My bedtime is also around 9:30pm, even when I had a fulltime job . Lately we’ve been pushing 11pm and that’s late, really late for us and we have the eyebags to prove it too .

The long school hours aren’t helping. The girls stay up to finish their schoolwork, go to bed late, get up early next morning tired and sleepy, and after a long day packed with school activities, they’re up late again finishing homework. So it’s a vicious cycle, a very unhealthy one. Longer school hours don’t make smarter kids, only grouchy, sleep-deprived and unfocused ones.

Anyways over the past couple of weeks, we’ve worked it out so that we all try to finish up and call it a day by 10:30pm. On weekends, I make sure the kids are up before the bewitching hour of 10am. That’s a whole 2 hours longer than I ever got to sleep in when I was their age. Very generous of me, I know ! What sort of hours do your kids keep?

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