Families and Parenting – Page 5

They Can Pry My Birth Control from My Cold, Dead Hands!

Ladies, we need to talk about this. I call a general strike. Beginning September 21, 2012.

No cooking. No cleaning. No work. No sex. We will not nurse our babies. Let the men deal with warming a bottle of breast-milk from the freezer. We will not change nappies, or go to the grocery store, or give a BJ, or take the kids to school, or wake up early to get them ready, or go to our respective jobs because the majority of us work full time while being the primary parent… No. It’s all on them. Let them know the balance of work and family for once. Obviously, working, full-time dads, this does not apply to you. Continue reading →

Will You Attend? Yes, Maybe, No

I have a friend who when she receives an Evite to an event or party, always answers “maybe.” Not that she is any busier than the rest of us Connecticut housewives, but regardless, the initial answer is always maybe. It isn’t until the day of the event, or if you prod her with an email because you need to firm up your plans, that she finally give you a definitive answer. Her constant waffling drives my friends and me positively crazy. Continue reading →

How to Get Back at Annoying Parents

Ah, annoying parents. We are everywhere and we often forget that the world does not revolve around our special snowflakes. We can drive even the most tolerant among us to drink. To even the playing field, I will let you in on a secret: It is ridiculously easy to get revenge on us. You just have to know a few secrets. I will tell you a few in the hopes that you are more tolerant of me the next time I start yapping about how precious my snowflakes are. Continue reading →

The World’s Craziest Soccer Mom

I am a well-known crazy aficionado. My husband calls me a “crazy anthropologist”. I love to get close to crazy people and study them like a scientist. It’s a little hobby of mine. It’s pretty safe to say that I am well-versed in various kinds of crazy. Usually, I have to go looking for the crazy, but yesterday, God gave me a gift in the form of one of the biggest loons I’ve ever met. I was sitting at my son’s soccer practice, listening to some people yammer about building a deck when all of a sudden, this woman burst on the scene with her three children. One ran onto the field because he was late for practice. Continue reading →

Another Reason to Become a Mother

My children always get me lovely Mother’s Day gifts. I’m excited to discover what gifts I will be able to open with my breakfast in bed Sunday. Today I learned that my children gave me a great gift on the day of their birth: I became smarter.

Funny, after all of my children were born, I didn’t feel smarter. In fact, I felt downright stupid as my memory seemed shot from the lack of sleep. Little did I know that my maternal hormones were actually causing my brain to increase in size.

Continue reading →

Is the Time Magazine Breastfeeding Kid Totally Screwed?

Well, you’ve probably seen Aram Grumet. He’s the three year-old seen breastfeeding on the cover of the upcoming Time magazine issue, “Are You Mom Enough.” The youngster shown clad in camouflage pants and standing on a stool with his eyes slightly tilted toward the camera as he latches on was posed by photographer Martin Schoeller who wanted to make Aram seem bigger, taller, older and more independent to emphasize the unusualness of the activity. But the question remains how all of this, let’s say notoriety, will impact him? Continue reading →

Catholic League Slams Those Who Adopt

The Catholic League, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization (according to their website – I haven’t seen a study on this), is a group that “…defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.” Okay. That’s nice. It’s awfully brave of you to stand up for the largest religious group in the United States. It’s inspiring me to form a group to stand up for the rights of meth manufacturers and users in California’s central valley. Continue reading →

The Somber Ritual of Clearing Out Someone’s House

Surely there’s a better word, or term, for this function than what I’ve come up with in the title here, but I can’t lay my hand on it just now.

What it is, is when someone has died or gone into a long-term care facility, and someone – you – has to go into the house and deal with its contents. The object is to get all the person’s belongings out of the home so it can be sold, or rented out again if it’s an apartment. Continue reading →

QOTD: Were You Ever Bullied?

I was. I was a meek sort of kid, and my father was the public school principal. And a bully himself. My older sister and I might as well have had targets painted on our foreheads.

Bullying is a miserable experience for the child on the receiving end of it. It’s a miserable problem for teachers or parents to have to deal with, supposing that they even try, or get any support when they do try.

And what of the bullies themselves? Are they working off their own anger, fear, or learned behaviour? Where did they learn their behaviour? Their parents and extended family, presumably. Continue reading →

The Baby-Raising Advice Assault

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Any new parent can tell you that the village certainly seems to think so. When you have children, people come out of the woodwork to offer you unsolicited and often, unhelpful advice.

It starts when you are pregnant. The first thing I remember is someone telling me to spend the money on a high-end digital thermometer. That’s actually not bad advice as babies are squirmy especially when they are sick. Those thermometers are fast and are certainly better than the mercury thermometers that were around when I was a child. They took forever and were next to impossible to read. Continue reading →