Mommy, what's that?

Another reason to stop your kid from watching TV: As of this month, condom ads have broken the, ahem, barrier of TV advertising and will now be appearing during primetime programs. Trojan swears that they're going to be responsible and focus on STDs and HIV and not make sex look like fun or anything, but that's not going to make it any easier for parents to explain to Junior exactly what that product is for. Some articles on this new advertising development have mentioned a survey that shows only one in four Americans objects to having this kind of content during family viewing hours. I wonder whether they called any household that actually had parents in it. They sure didn't ask me.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

My son got a buzz cut last week. This is something I've been lobbying for, because when you have a kid with major sensory-integration issues who hates to have his hair combed, you look for ways to avoid conflict. He and his dad had major battles over post-hairwash combing, with much yelling and screaming and gnashing of teeth (and that was just my husband). I, on the other hand, usually avoided the issue, even if it meant letting him go to school in the mornings with cowlicks like you wouldn't believe. With short-short hair in vogue now for boys, that seemed like the most logical solution: a no-comb style for a no-comb kid. He requested it himself when he popped into the barber's chair, and his dad begrudgingly went along. I'm happy to have this struggle out of the way, at least for the time being, and he looks cute enough, I suppose. But I do miss my little shaggy-headed boy. Even the cowlicks, just a little.

Big Brother is watching you, and wants your dessert

Do you know what your child eats for lunch at school? Do you care? Big Brother may soon give you the opportunity to stay right on top of that topic with a program that lets you electronically prepay your kids' lunch bill, and then see what he or she gets for it. Even items bought with hoarded change will show up, so there's no hiding that jumbo cookie or extra Snapple from Mom and Dad. I've been moderating a lunch-hour book club at my daughter's school for the past couple of years, so I've seen what sort of a la carte combos kid come up with; one boy routinely bought a lunch consisting of two or three pieces of cake. And I'll admit, it would be interesting to see just how many times a week my daughter eats pizza. But I can also see a few flaws in the system. For one thing, unless it tells you how much of what your child paid for he or she actually ate, you're still not getting a good idea of how much balanced nutrition is going on. And I've got to believe that it won't take long for the kids whose parents either don't participate in the plan or don't care what they buy to set up a pretty brisk business in ordering goodies for their friends. Where there's a will to eat a jumbo cookie, there's a way.

What did he say?

Boy, there's nothing that makes you feel older than reading the words of your children's favorite songs. I've gotten into the habit of doing Google searches on the lyrics of ditties my daughter wants to download from iTunes, unless I recognize the artist and am pretty darn sure the song's not nasty. But some of the ones I've looked into have made me drop my dentures. It's hard to believe some of this stuff is getting by the FCC, because I know she's hearing them on the radio, and they don't all have "clean" versions. I guess if you avoid four-letter words and load on the metaphors, you can sing or rap about just about anything. That's the only explanation I can thing of for the fact that 50 Cent's "Candyshop" is on the radio. I finally read through all the lyrics to that and, oh my goodness, there's no way you could clean up those lyrics without just starting over and writing a different song. I don't know what's scarier, the fact that the song's basically pornography with a beat, or that about half of my son's fifth-grade class listed it in the yearbook as their favorite piece of music. I know they don't understand the words and just like the rhythm, but ... sheesh. Do you think my parents felt this scandalized by, like, the Bee Gees?

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner's latest "Family Man" column deals with his family's tendency to have medical emergencies in the middle of the night, necessitating emergency room visits at a time of day when dad's not exactly at his best. I'm guessing that most parents of children with special needs can relate to that, with the added degree of difficulty of having to remember your child's arm-length list of diagnoses and medical background when all your head wants to do is hit a pillow.

Mom as MVP

My son is playing in a special-needs baseball league this year, and it could not be more low-key. They play three innings, tops; everyone gets to bat each inning, everyone gets pitched to until they make contact with the ball, everyone gets on base and stays on base, and at the end of the inning, everyone who's on base runs home. There are a few kids who can actually catch and throw the ball, but there are also quite a few like my guy, who are more interested in playing with the dirt in the infield. It's nice, though, for him to put on a uniform and go outside and play with other kids, or at least in the vicinity of other kids, and it's nice for my husband and I to go out and be sports parents, even if it's in a league where everybody cheers for both sides. I'm hardly a "sports mom," though, not close to the pro level of the mom of sports writer Mark Dewar, who pays tribute to his MVP in his Contributor's Corner essay, "Athletes Choke, But Moms Don't."

Dropping like flies

Boy, you know, I just can't get a break. I've been working feverishly to try to prepare my son's way into middle school next year, and it seems that every time I think I've got things lined up, they fall apart. I had a good relationship with the speech therapist from her work with my daughter, but when I went to talk with her about my son she told me she was quitting. I didn't even get a chance to talk to the guidance counselor before hearing that he was retiring, and a new person would be there in the fall. And now I find that my daughter's child study team leader, who had been extremely helpful in advising me on my son's IEP and whom I had made sure would be his CST leader too, is leaving at the end of this year. It's getting so I'm afraid to talk to anybody. I've actually had a couple of nice conversations with the principal, so I figure he's doomed for sure.

I've always had a policy of thinking only six months ahead because so much can change in a school or a district, but this is getting ridiculous.

Book lover

My son loves the Shiloh trilogy of books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Just loves them. Loves them beyond all logic. For a kid who has about a 30-second attention span for all but a handful of obsessions, he can converse on Shiloh at length, apply life lessons from the book to other situations, and sit still, rapt with attention, for chapters upon chapters. As a big reader myself, I'm thrilled to see a book take such a strong hold on a youngster, even if, well, maybe, from time to time, we could, like, read a different book? No? Okay.

He's been on a particular Shiloh kick lately, dropping observations about evil Judd Travers and noble young Marty and the sweet beagle that one of them abused and the other saved. This is fine when he's talking to me, because I know what he's talking about, and the things he says make sense. But it can take other folks by surprise. Like Sunday, when we were down at the animal shelter looking for a prospective pet of our own. As we took one little pooch on a get-to-know-you walk with a shelter volunteer, my guy started talking about how mean Judd Travers was to his dogs, and how he chained them up, and yelled at them, and kicked them, and starved them, and hunted out of season. The volunteer's eyes got wider and wider until she asked me, "Is this a real person he's talking about?" She was pretty much ready to call the police on this scumbag, and was relieved to hear that he was a fictional scumbag, and one who got plenty of comeuppance. Maybe now she'll seek out the Shiloh books, for herself or her children, and my son will have passed on his passion. Or else she'll make some secret "nut-job" notation on our application to ensure that the closest we get to a real dog is a well-thumbed paperback.

Becoming one of those moms

I feel like I've gone over to the dark side: After years and years of refusing to go to Home & School Association meetings (got two special-needs kids at home, don't you know, need to be there every second), years and years of finding my little nitches that allow me to work at my children's school without having to deal with personalities and politics, I've actually volunteered to be vice president of the HSA at my daughter's middle school. It will be my son's middle school next year, and that's the real reason I'm joining up; it's all part of my plan to raise my profile among the administrators there, so that when my guy inevitably misbehaves he won't be "that horrible little boy" but "that horrible little boy whose mom is on the HSA board." Will it make a difference? Maybe, maybe not. But at least they'll know where to find me.

Heavy duty

I ordered my son a weighted blanket for his bed from Dream Catcher Blankets a while back, and it finally came last week. He was thrilled with it -- Eileen Jackson, who makes the blankets, found a really cute Scooby Doo fabric for my Scooby-loving boy. He likes having weight on top of him, and so my hope is that this will help him sleep better, and also calm him down when he needs it. The jury is still out on whether it's going to work for him -- he's been going through a really silly phase, and I'm not sure even a two-ton truck could weigh him down -- but hey, I crawled under it one time and I felt calmer. That's got to count for something.

Your name is what now?

I helped chaperone my daughter's last seventh-grade dance last night. This time, much to the delight of my poor elderly ears, I was not in the over-amped gymnasium but standing by the front door of the school, checking the names of arriving children off a list of all students in good standing. Let me just give my fellow parents a piece of advice here: If you are dropping your young person off at an event which might require them to have their names checked off a list, please drill them a bit before they get out of the car as to what letter of the alphabet their name starts with. I can't tell you how many kids stood, dumbfounded, staring at the signs that said "A-L" and "M-Z" and using up every last brain cell trying to figure out what line they belonged in. And they still got it wrong more often than not. Since the room was noisy, what with all those cerebral wheels whirring, I often had to ask kids to just tell me the first letter of their last name, at which point most of them told me their first name. I'll tell you, it all made me feel a lot better about my daughter and her learning disabilities. She, at least, got in the right line.

Sick days

My son was calm and well-behaved this weekend. He listened well. He paid more attention than ever at his special-needs baseball game (not much, but more). He was quiet all through church. He played by himself happily and didn't bug me for attention every two minutes. So I should have known he was sick long before the thermometer read 102.8 and the doctor confirmed my diagnosis of strep throat.

Do your kids get good when they're sick? I'd expect the opposite -- feeling bad should make sensory sensitive kids go nuts -- but this is a regular pattern with my guy. Adding this to his experience with a splint on his arm after a bad fall, in which he was calm and focused even though he couldn't suck his fingers as he so constantly does, I'm wondering: Maybe we should stop thinking about finding medication that can "cure" our kids of their neurological problems. Maybe we should start thinking about medication that keeps them always in a state of low-grade illness or injury. What's up with that?

New on Mothers with Attitude

In "Miracles," the latest installment of her "Thinking It Over" column, April Cain considers the connection between the late Pope John Paul II and her son's addition to the family. ... In "Three Little Words," special education director Amy Krause realizes how much she takes for granted ... and in his latest "Family Man" column, Ken Swarner wonders whether his wife even needs him to be there for some of their conversations.

Theme park fun

We just got back from a week in Orlando, and I once again got a lesson from my son on fun being in the eye of the beholder. With theme park upon theme park of rides and attractions to choose from, his absolute favorite spot was the display of GM cars that you pass when exiting from the Test Trak roller coaster at Epcot. It's just supposed to be a stroll by, maybe check out a car and watch a commercial, and then be on your way to the next meticulously designed and scripted Disney amusement, but for my car-obsessed guy it was the be-all and end-all. We got a Park Hopper pass so that no matter where we started the day, we could end it with those six or seven cars. He crawled in and out and all around them for hours and hours. Sometimes we'd feel guilty for not forcing him to experience more, and sometimes we'd get him to try a ride or two, but really, he was as joy-filled amongst these down-to-earth vehicles as a hall full of Small World marionettes. The happiest place on earth? Behind the wheel of a showroom Hummer, my friend.

In great shape for the shape you're in

This just in: It's okay to be fat! Or, if not okay, at least less "not okay" than it had appeared to be. Estimates of the number of deaths supposed to be caused by obesity have recently been revised down, making it seem as though all the hysteria over the overweight was misplaced and maybe more about selling health services and diet plans than actual medical fact. But not so fast: Others are interpreting the statistics to say that it's only okay to be fat if you're fit, "lack of fitness" being the real danger sign rather than a high scale reading. Fit and fat! Fat and fit! It just sounds like a marketing slogan, doesn't it?

How unsuperficial of them!

When you hear a Hollywood couple is breaking up, it's natural to assume that the cause is something seedy or career-related or otherwise removed from the realm of mere mortal relationships. Certainly, when Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards announced their breakup, the stories popped up pretty quick that he'd returned to his prostitute-friendly ways. But recently, while researching the topic of vaccines and autism for my About.com site, I turned up a fairly bizarre bunch of articles from British gossip sites and a few other sources indicating that the reason for the breakup is far more mundane: They fought over whether their toddler should have the MMR vaccine. Apparently, the difference of parenting opinion between Richards, who wanted to vaccinate the youngster, and Sheen, who feared it might cause autism, grew so heated that she decided to pack the marriage in, despite the fact that she was pregnant with the couple's second (and clearly soon-to-be-vaccinated) child. I've done enough research to know that the topic of whether vaccines cause autism is heated and divisive, but do couples really break up over it? Hollywood couples?

Opting for exclusion

My daughter just finished her first week in resource room for reading and math. That's something I've been fighting against for a long time, pretty much since she was in fourth grade, but in the end I'm the one who suggested the switch. She was doing great in seventh-grade inclusion, getting decent grades, liked by her teachers, keeping up to the best of her ability. It seemed like my theory of putting her in the most challenging environment possible was working. But of course, I wasn't the one having to live through the most challenging environment possible all day, every day. I've had jobs that were the most challenging environment, and I've quit them. My daughter can't quit; she's a good girl, she does what I say, and she tries to believe me when I tell her she can do it. But her feelings of anxiety and overwhelm-ment kept popping out in headaches and stomachaches and crying jags and teeth grinding and a raging case of negative self-talk. I could tell her she was doing fine until I was blue in the face, but if she couldn't own that feeling herself, pushing her was some kind of torture.

So I asked at her IEP meeting, "Do you think she'd be better off in resource?" I sort of hoped everyone would say, "No! Why would you think that! She's doing so well!" Instead, the response was something along the lines of, "Well, duh!" The decision was made to switch her for the last quarter of this year for some immediate stress relief and to ease her anxiety about next year's classes. She's never been one to enjoy changes in routine, but she jumped at this chance to switch and has been beaming about it most days this week. For the first time in a long time -- maybe ever -- she's noticing that she understands things a little better than some of her classmates. I'll always fear that this means she's in a class that's too easy and without a challenge she'll get lazy and fall back; but I also can't deny that leading the pack instead of struggling along behind it is an empowering feeling she could darn well use. We'll see how it goes.

Innovations in eyewear

I remember when I was a teenager, way longer ago than I care to admit, one of my great battles with my dad was over getting contact lenses. I wanted them, and he thought they were awful. Of course, he didn't wear glasses himself, so he had no idea what it was like to have your nose and ears pinched, how uncomfortable it was to have spectacles sliding down your nose in sweaty weather -- not to mention how much they messed up your makeup or clashed with your outfit. I eventually got what I wanted, as I usually did, mostly in this case because my mom (a glasses wearer herself) wanted me to have contacts even more than I did. My eyes never did adjust to them very well, though, and after years of tears and redness and crawling around on the floor looking for popped-out lenses, I went back to glasses and never looked back.

Contacts have come a long way since my teen years, and I'll bet there aren't many parents anymore who object to their kids getting them. No, kids who are looking to establish their independence by demanding things their parents are discomfited by have to be a little more creative nowadays than popping pieces of plastic on their eyeballs. They have to do things like this: sticking a rod through the bridge of their pierced nose and perching little eyeglass lenses on top. That's just the sort of extreme idea that makes parents shudder and talk about their dead bodies. But maybe because I've been wearing glasses most of my life, and feeling the weight on my poor little ears, I have to ask: Just how painful is piercing the bridge of your nose, anyway? Worse than facing the sunlight with scratchy contacts?

Who needs an Evil Genius when you've got a mom?

I went to see the movie "Ice Princess" with my daughter the other night. It was pretty standard Disney Channel fare, blown up for the big screen, with that timeless theme of Following Your Dream and having the courage to stand up and tell grown-ups they Just Don't Get It. I was able to enjoy the plot enough to suspend my motherly disbelief at the time, but the more I think about the film, the more it ticks me off. Let's just say it's not something you want your kids to take you to for Mother's Day, no matter how much you may love ice skating.

While the film is certainly formulaic, it does away with two of those staples of teen and Disney flicks: the nasty Alpha Girl who makes the less cool but nonetheless scrappy heroine's life a misery, and the Evil Villain whose diabolical plot the heroine somehow stands in the way of. It's hard to imagine a teen movie without an Alpha Girl, or a Disney movie without an Evil Villain. And yet, in "Ice Princess," the Alpha Girl becomes an ally pretty early on, and there is no Evil Villain bent on world domination or puppycide. Instead, as the perpetrators of cutting comments, confidence busters, dirty tricks and dire consequences, we have ... moms. And not even evil stepmoms. Just plain old striving smothering over-loving single moms who commit that unforgiveable teen movie offense of wanting things for their daughters. The nerve!

Joan Cusack, who either allowed herself to be filmed entirely without makeup or was wearing some sort of harried middle-aged mom spackle that made her look exactly like I do most days, plays the mom of a bright honor student, the kind who spouts complicated scientific formulas when she's flustered and does math sums in her head to such a degree that it makes other kids uncomfortable. The girl seems to be on a fast track to Harvard, and happy about it, until a summer science project turns into a fascination with figure skating. Because it's a Disney movie, she has such enormous natural talent that she's suddenly besting skaters who've been working at it since before they could lace up their own boots. It's not long before she's letting her grades slip, ditching college interviews, and squeezing into little sequined outfits. And a mom's not supposed to have her reservations about that? If it were drugs or drinking or bad boyfriends that were luring this good girl from the straight and narrow, we'd be slapping that mom silly for letting her out of the house. But figure skating? That's Following Her Dream, Mom! Back off and get your own!

Of course, the mom who wants her daughter to be a figure skater -- played by Kim Cattrall, who must have had it in her contract that under no circumstances would she be wearing the harried middle-aged mom spackle -- is also an evil dream-squishing killjoy. Because her beautiful blond child, who has devoted most of her young life to leaps and lutzes, just wants to do better in math! Please, Mom, don't make me cut class, she pleads. All this ice princess wants is to go to the homecoming dance and maybe get into college and marry her stupid football-playing boyfriend and drop out and have babies and a miserable life in a trailer somewhere and ... whoops, I'm letting my essential mom-ness get in the way of a girl and her dream again. Skating Mom was herself a skater who never fulfilled her promise, and so it must therefore be true that she's living through her child; the fact that she's the one who does the dirty tricks against a rival pretty much seals her deal as a Bad Mom Who Has Lost Perspective. And again, I say: If this was a movie about a promising athlete who was distracted by drugs or drink or bad boyfriends, we would be cheering as the mom fought those bad influences with a baseball bat and the fire of motherly love. But going to class? Doing homework? Being a normal kid? Well, why would you want to get in the way of that? Because we all know that being happy in high school is what really sets you up for success in life.

Yeah, I know, I'm touchy. I'm reading too much into a little piece of you-go-girl fluff. We moms, you know, we Take Everything So Seriously! The movie hits me at a time when I've just deviated from one dream for my daughter in order to maybe make her a little happier, and so watching the geek girl land her triple leaps and the Alpha girl hug her math tutor should fill me with reassurance that the path we set is not always the right one for our children to follow. But it doesn't. I still wonder. It's still such guesswork. You can tack a weepy, feel-good ending on it, but I'm not convinced that a few years down the road, those daughters and those moms aren't going to be second-guessing their decisions. Sometimes pushing our children is a bad idea, but sometimes it's the only way to get them where they're going. That's something you just can't skate around.

Busy girl

I've been a bad little blogger this week, but have pity: I had my son home from school on Monday with an Easter-onset illness, IEP meeting for my daughter on Wednesday during which I reversed my own policy so quickly I got whiplash, son home again on Thursday and also Friday morning with an eye infection, an annual pediatrician visit Thursday night, and a birthday party tomorrow involving taking a dozen kids to a science museum. Plus, have I mentioned I work for a Catholic newspaper, and there's this little story you may have heard about that's going to be making our deadline schedule very tight for the next few days? I'm keeping up with my article-a-day duties on my About.com site, but here, not so much. I'll have more on all this stuff next week. But maybe not until the paper goes out on Tuesday.