Just wondering

A few things I'm wondering about tonight:

• Have the tourists who are setting up lawn chairs and portable barbecues and settling in for a good close viewing of the potential eruption of Mount St. Helens ever seen a disaster movie in their lives? Isn't it always those foolish or curious enough to get just a little tooclose who are the first to, I don't know, fall through a crack in the earth or get scorched by an unexpected burst of steam or buried by flying stones? Not to mention molten lava, people. How 'bout moving a little farther back, like, say, Oregon?

• I was helping out with a small-group discussion at our Catholic church's junior high religious education classes tonight, and out of a group of eight kids, not one admitted to going to weekly Mass. Or even monthly Mass. One remembered going most recently at Christmas, another at his sister's First Communion. Why, exactly, are these parents going to the expense and bother of giving their children religious training if they're not going to enable them to do anything with it? It's like hiring a coach to teach your kid how to hit a baseball but then never signing him up for a team. Or do they just figure, this way it's only the kids who have to be bored?

• Now that Billy Joel has married a woman who's 23, is there some way to prevent him, either legally or through, you know, some sort of public shaming, from ever singing the song "Just the Way You Are" again? 'Cause it was bad enough when he was married to Christie Brinkley, but now it's really just embarrassing.

No shows

Have you watched any of the new TV offerings that have been debuting over the past month? I always start out with good intentions, reading reviews of the fledgling shows in Entertainment Weekly and the local newspaper and picking out the ones that sound like something I'd like, but then ... well, I can't watch much of anything before the kids go to bed, and after the kids go to bed, I tend to fall asleep where I sit. So here's what I've managed to watch of the new season: The debut of "Jack and Bobby" (but only because a free DVD of the first episode was glued into my copy of EW, and I could watch it on a Sunday afternoon while folding laundry), and about 20 minutes of "Clubhouse" (that's how long it took for my daughter and I to decide it was boring, despite the appeal to her of a couple of young actresses from the Disney channel, and the appeal to me of Mare Winningham, who I remember from back way before she was playing the mother of teens to when she was playing teenagers herself). My husband has watched a couple of episodes of "Lost," and was interested enough to watch more than one but not so interested that he'd admit to actually liking it. So here we are, not exactly your ideal TV family. But we sure are looking forward to the debut of "Postcards from Buster" on PBS next Monday, in which Arthur's best friend travels the country, video camera in hand. It may not have the flair of "Desperate Housewives" or "CSI:NY," but it's kid-friendly and on way, way before bedtime.

I'll have the low-fat mystery meat

National School Lunch Week is coming up, October 11-15, and it sure does seem as though school lunches are much in the news these days. Hardly a day goes by that I don't see a news story on how nutritious those institutionalized meals are getting. Down with deep fat frying! Up with salads and fruit trays! Pizzas have whole-wheat crusts and ham is made with turkey and cheese is low-fat. Of course, if they really wanted to keep kids from eating too much and curb all that pesky childhood obesity, they might think about doing what the school cafeterias did when I was growing up: Make all the food taste really, really bad. Gray meat and limp veggies and lumpy potatoes seemed to do a pretty good job of keeping my classmates and I from over-indulging. My son mentioned today that he really likes his school lunches, and that's nothing you heard very often in my day. On the other hand, at this year's back-to-school night, the father of one of my son's classmates asked if it would be possible for his daughter to order two school lunches every day, because the servings were so small that she came home starving for snacks. So maybe today's school nutritionists do know a thing or two: Give the kids good food and not enough of it, so they'll do all their overeating when their parents can be blamed for it.

Escaping the exam

My daughter received kind of a hopeful assignment from her language arts class today. It gave the students an option for their quarterly exam grade -- they could either take the big, hairy test on "The Giver," or do a project instead. The projects were the sort of things I would have loved to do as a kid: write a three-page sequel to "The Giver," which ends in such an uncertain, unsatisfying way that most readers will have to make a sequel in their mind anyway; do a diorama depicting a scene from the book and write three paragraphs describing it; write a newsletter for the futuristic community described in the book; or do some sort of thing about bicycles that I couldn't quite figure out from looking over the paper. The chances of my daughter doing well on a test on this very low-plot, high-concept book are pretty slim, so I was excited that there were other options. She, of course, was so overwhelmed by the thought of all the writing and creating called for by the projects that she figured she'd maybe just take her chances with the test. I think I've got her talked into writing a sequel now; there are three weeks to do it, and lots of people to help her, and really no wrong answers. The biggest challenge will be not just writing the darn thing myself and dictating it to her. Bet I could get an A, too.

Send money

We're just about a month into the school year now, and already we're on our fourth fund-raiser. The first was a quickie, selling books filled with coupons. Then came the two gift-wrap catalogs, one from each school (how much gift wrap can one family use? We're about to find out) and now, today, material for selling pies to benefit my daughter's 7th-8th grade band. This is the first step into the world of band fund-raising for my daughter, and I'm already a bit put-off because she was pulled out of class for a whole period to sit in the auditorium and hear about the wonderfulness of selling these pies. They better be pretty wonderful, too, because man, are they expensive. Eighteen dollars for a cheesecake? We'll buy a few, of course, because that's what parents do, but it kind of dampens my enthusiasm for rounding up other people to raise funds from. Perhaps we could sell them by the slice. ... Speaking of raising funds, the Web site VOTE or NOT, in an apparent attempt to bribe people to register to vote, is hosting a sweepstakes with a prize of $100,000. If you follow my link to register for the contest (which you can do whether or not you've registered to vote) and wind up winning, I'll get $100,000, too. That'll buy a lot of pie.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner must be reading my mind, or at least my blog. Like my entry from a couple of days ago, his latest Family Man column is about being overprotective of children. When, he wonders, do we stop fighting our kids' battles? At what age is the child too old for the parent to, say, go running onto the soccer field and berate the kids who are pushing him around? I would guess it's the age at which the child says, "Dad, don't ever embarrass me like that again!" But it probably wouldn't stop me, either.

Tanning the old-fashioned way

Pity the poor children of California. Their mean old governor has forbade them from using tanning booths until they're 14, and then they have to have a note from their parents. What a drag! Now if they want to court skin cancer and compete with the coolest golden-brown kids in class, they'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, in the back yard with a lawn chair and a bottle of baby oil. That's how I did it, anyway, when I was a California kid and tanning booths were either nonexistent or unknown to me. I remember the long, grueling hours lying in the sun, trying to look like the bronzed babes who ruled my school but winding up looking like a lobster instead. It's so hard to modulate these things, when you have nothing but Mother Nature at your disposal. If state officials really want to protect their young people from skin cancer, can't they do something a little more merciful, like legislate that only palefaces can be homecoming queens, cheerleaders, and members of the most popular cliques? As long as tan = popular, you're going to have kids sneaking into tanning booths with fake IDs and forged notes. Hang in there, kids -- when you're a grown-up, you can do all the unsafe tanning you like. Or you can do what I did: Move to the east coast, where pale, poorly tanning skin is not particularly a social liability.

Mama's boy

I noticed something unsettling while watching my son play with a group of other kids at a family get-together the other night: I am some kind of ridiculously overprotective mother. The kids were running all around a big yard, front to back to front, riding bikes in the driveway, throwing balls, pushing scooters, carrying on until well after dark. None of the other moms or dads felt a need to do more than listen for screams while they sat and chatted; even my husband seemed content to let our son roam with the pack. But not me: I could barely keep my seat for 10 minutes before I was drawn to where he was, to watch, hawk-like. Poor kid can't even go out to play without his mommy hovering around.

And really, I'm okay with that. FASD means never having to say you're overprotective. I'm a believer in the theory that fetal alcohol exposed kids need an "external brain," and it's hard for me to be his when he's outside and I'm in. He'd probably be fine without the constant supervision a fairly large part of the time, but it only takes one ill-timed dart into traffic or ill-judged push of a peer to turn a fun evening into a tragic one. You don't have to read very much about FASD to notice that things like ill-timed darts into traffic are a major cause of death for these kiddos, or that hawk-eyed mamas are a major protective factor. Independence is not a major goal for an 11-year-old with fetal alcohol effects. Staying safe is. So I trail along, prompting and redirecting, advising and preventing, hovering and smothering, doing my job. But yes, sometimes I do feel a little silly.

Putting the trick in "trick or treat"

Here's another reason to be glad my kids aren't into dressing up for Halloween anymore: Apparently, one of the big trends in kiddie costumes this year is to dress the younguns up as pimps and "hos." Unlike the wholesome good old days when kids wanted to be ax murderers and witches, these days sex has supplanted violence and supernatural evil as the scare factor of choice. So girls as young as age 4 can wear fishnets and short skirts instead of princess dresses, and boys can wear fur bedecked hats and coats instead of pirate gear, and pundits such as myself can moan about how America's going to heck in a handbasket. Defenders of the racy costumes suggest that kids see pimps being glorified in rap videos and so naturally want to dress like those cool cats when costume time rolls around. I'd personally suggest that this sounds like an excellent reason to keep your kids from ever watching MTV, but then, as someone who once threw her kid into his father's supermarket uniform and said, "Hey! You're trick-or-treating as Mr. Produce Guy!" I have to admit I'm not really a costume-intensive mom. Judging by what some parents let their kids wear to school, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they let their kids trick-or-treat as workers in the sex trade. What I want to know is: How do you explain to that 4-year-old girl what exactly it is she's going as? If sending your kid out for candy necessitates that you first have "the talk," maybe it's time to rethink.

On memory lane

We went this evening to a get-together for a few families who adopted from the same Russian orphanage as we did. A few of the boys there had been in my daughter's group at the orphanage 10 years ago, and they claimed to remember each other, although what they may really remember is seeing each other at the last get-together. Both my kids played nice with all the other kids, and the parents all discussed those days so long ago when we started our journeys to familyhood. It seems like a lifetime ago that my husband and I traveled to Petrozavodsk to claim our two little ones. As my daughter does with so many of the details of her life, I remember it more from the telling than from the living. But seeing all these kids together, growing tall and strong and healthy, it does all seem like a miracle. And one that keeps getting better.

Weighing in

Here's a somewhat mind-blowing little factoid my son brought home from school today: The nurse weighed him and his classmates, and within his self-contained special-ed class of seven students, there is a more than 120-pound weight spread. At the top of the scale is a very tall, very large boy who weighs in at 172 pounds -- and is, I think, also the youngest kid in class at 10 years old. At the smaller end is a little peanut of a guy who tips the scales at just 50 pounds. My son's probably about in the middle, at 82 pounds. He's still growing -- he's popping the snap on the pants I bought him just a couple of months ago -- but he's got a ways to go before he'll be throwing any weight around with this group.

Speak up!

We switched my daughter's speech therapy from school to private this year -- fewer classroom pull-outs, more control -- and her sessions are revolving much less around academic speech and articulation and more on social speech and expressiveness. That's a direction I'm happy with. Although her language delays still cause her trouble in school, she's making good solid progress and probably learns more from reading and doing than drilling. But all the little niceties of social speech -- expressions, tone of voice, body language -- don't often find their way into an IEP, and can make a big difference in how a child is perceived by her peers and teachers. Any increase in spontaneity and emotion in her language, whether it's to use a common cliche, give a wave, react visibly, or speak informally, will increase her comfort level with talking and other people's comfort level with her. That's the theory, anyway, and although she admits to being uncomfortable with some of the expressiveness we're impressing on her, she's agreed to try to find her way through it. It's interesting to note, though, that the one emotion she has no problem expressing, with full range of vocal tone, slang and gestures, is teenage frustration. "You just don't get it!" she'll huff with flung arms, stomping feet, rolled eyes, tossed head, and all manner of adolescent attitude. If she could be half that expressive in any other area of her life, we'd be on to something.

Volunteer stress

You know you're spending too much time and energy volunteering at your children's school when you come home and have no time and energy to spend with your actual children. I was pretty wiped today after a two-school library marathon, bopping back and forth, training people at the elementary school, running up to the middle school to put in a little time before the next trainees arrived. One volunteer never did arrive, forcing me to stay and check out books at library #1 while neglecting my duties at library #2. I couldn't believe someone would just not show up -- but then, the prospect of going to a Home and School Meeting tonight after racing around so much during the day was too much for me, so apparently I'm the kind of person who just doesn't show up too. I justified staying home by telling myself I needed to spend some time with my kids, but I was so tired and grouchy from a day of volunteer service that maybe they would have preferred me out of the house. I probably need to start taking all this stuff less seriously.

The perils of doing your homework on time

Now, here's the kind of thing that drives me crazy. When my daughter started 7th grade this year, she brought home an assignment from her language arts class for a reading log. The instructions firmly stated that students would be required to read 12 books in addition to whatever they were reading in class. For each book, they had to write a one page summary and turn it in with a cover page, for which there were specific instructions. And on the one hand, since neither reading comprehension nor composition are my girl's strong suits, it sounded like an awfully tall order. But on the other hand, since we have a routine of reading every night, 12 books was not out of the question; and since graphic organizers are plentiful on the Web, finding something to help her make a coherent summary was not out of the question, either. At Back to School Night, the teacher again went through the assignment, stated unequivocally that all the 7th grades were doing this, gave us a handout with the dates each book report was due, and announced that each one would be worth a test grade. And now you've got my attention, because although writing's not the easiest thing for her, something she can write at home with calm deliberation and assistance is indeed easier than taking a test in the classroom. Twelve test grades under those circumstances sounded pretty good to me. The first report was to be due tomorrow. She finished her first book last week and wrote the report over the weekend. I was so proud of her -- she did a great job on it. I suggested that since she was done early, she should show it to her inclusion teacher so if there was anything that wasn't right, she'd have time to fix it.

So when she came home yesterday, I asked if she'd shown the teacher her report. And her response dumbfounded me: She hadn't showed it because they were changing the reading log, nothing was due on Wednesday anymore, there was a whole different format, they only had to read eight books, and the first one was due on November 15.

And again -- on the one hand, the new format might be a little easier, and writing fewer and shorter reports will be easier ... and on the other hand, I want those four extra test grades, and I absolutely want her to get recognition and credit for the report she did as assigned, on time, and in good faith. How dare they make such sweeping changes in a project two days before it's due? Talk about penalizing kids for being conscientious and organized. I fired off a very grumpy note expressing astonishment and demanding extra credit for the now-uneeded report. I huffed and puffed around the house for a while. Then I threw that note away and wrote another one, kinder and gentler, asking for them to please consider giving her extra credit for it. Maybe it still wasn't kind and gentle enough, because my daughter reports that her inclusion teacher looked a little annoyed when she read it. Probably because she'd spent a week fielding complaints from parents who were astonished and upset about the original 12-book format of the project.

That's the only reason I can come up with for this sudden change in plans -- massive parental complaint. It ticks me off that they would make such a firm, "they're in 7th grade now, suck it up" presentation at Back to School night and then all of a sudden waffle. Just like it ticks me off that the summer reading journal that was supposed to be due the first week of school, and that my daughter did well in advance of that date and turned in promptly, is now suddenly due October 1 instead. If my child's particular learning problems caused her to be unable to do work in a timely fashion, I suppose I would be storming the gates demanding changes in policy, too. But as it happens, doing work in a timely fashion is my child's greatest strength. Coddle the others if you will, but give her credit when it's due.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Apparently I'm not the only one who's been annoyed and amazed by the bold ads for erectile dysfunction drugs on TV. April Cain has a funny essay in her "Thinking It Over" column this month on just that subject. It's called "He's Back ... but you might want to run for cover." Is a Viagra-stoked hubby really every middle-aged woman's dream? ... Meanwhile, in his "Family Man" column, Ken Swarner reveals that what his wife is afraid of is heights -- and when you have boys in the family, that's a weakness that's bound to be exploited. ... And keep checking our home page for a new quote of the day and site of the day, well, daily.

Ahoy there, matey!

So, did you celebrate "Talk Like a Pirate Day" today? My son and I did, but then, for us, every day is "Talk Like a Pirate Day." Playing "pirate" is one of my son's favorite games, although usually I'm the only one who's a pirate and he's my hapless captive. Sometimes he orders me to be the Tickling Pirate. Sometimes I'm the Singing Pirate (who sings a song about tickling, as it happens). Sometimes I'm the Sleeping Pirate (my personal favorite.) Sometimes I'm a nasty pirate who makes him walk the plank, until he's saved by his heroic dog companion, Invisible Scooby (also played by me, wouldn't you know). And sometimes I'm the pirate who steals his nose, ear or other body parts and won't give them back until he does his nightly reading, writes in his journal, answers questions about school, or some other such dastardly torture. Whatever the role, I be talking like a pirate on a daily basis, arrr. On a day like today, it was nice to be having me laddy talking like one too.

Good connections

I'm so excited. Yesterday, for maybe the first time in my children's academic careers, I got an e-mail from a teacher. Oh, sure, I'd had some correspondence a while back with the man who gave my daughter trombone lessons at my kids' elementary school, and with the behavioral therapist who observed my son, but correspondence with a teacher in an academic subject that actually tells me what my child should be studying and offers the possibility of asking for advice from time to time? It's a first. This teacher also told me she has a Web site on which she posts information, although she's yet to give me the url, and two other teachers have given me their e-mail addresses and asked for mine. It's a brave new educational world, I'll tell you, and a long way from the days when I couldn't even write a note to my daughter's teacher without the principal having to read it and sign off. On the other hand, I'm bumping into the limits of computer awareness in my job as coordinator of library volunteers at my son's school. I had big plans going into this that I could conduct all library business by e-mail, maybe setting up a Yahoo! group or giving a little bit of my Web site over to schedules and guidelines and other need-to-know information that often got lost in the bottom of bookbags when sent home via children. I eagerly asked for everyone's e-mail address when they volunteered ... and found out that less than a third even had one. No e-mail! How do they live?

Flying nonstop

I just had one of those days when I feel like YoYo Mom. I slept a little late and so only got about half my breakfast eaten before it was time to take Child #1 to middle school. Dropped her, came back home, ate the other half of my breakfast and dropped off Child #2 at elementary school. Parked the car, went back into the elementary school for my library volunteers meeting. After that, stayed to put bar codes on books so we can start the year with computerized checkouts. Was about to leave to go to work (finally) when Child #2 came bounding into the library with his aide and papier mache paste all over his shirt, elbows and hair. He asked me to bring him a new shirt, so instead of heading to the office I headed home, got the shirt, brought it to the school office, went back to the library so I could stick my head out the window and inform my son's classroom aide, on recess duty, that the shirt was delivered. Then another detour to a store to pick up a scrunchy pillow for my son just like the scrunchy pillow my daughter bought the day before and her brother just had to have. Picked up a taco for lunch and headed finally into the office, where I discovered that I'd left the disk with the work I'd done the night before in my computer at home. Busied myself with some alternate work for the hour or so until it was time to leave to pick up Child #1, stopping first in the library of her school to make the book fair purchases I'd intended to make on Wednesday before the bomb scare shooed us out of the building. Took Child #1 home, waited for my husband to get home with Child #2, then headed back to the office to do an hour or so of actual work. Then back home for a peaceful evening that included my son spilling sparkling apple cider all over his dinner plate, the dinner table, the kitchen floor and my shoes. The kids are in bed now, and although I have lots of work to make up and stacks of library volunteer applications to wrestle into a workable schedule and e-mail to answer and books to read, I think I'm just going to shut everything on down and get a good night's sleep. It will be nice to spend a few hours immobile.

I'm a book person, not a people person

Tomorrow is my first meeting as chairperson of the library committee at my son's school. Tomorrow I make my speech to the volunteers and walk them through their duties and break it to the Luddite stalwarts that we are now completely computerized, or close to it. Tomorrow is also the day I have to hand down the librarian's edicts against eating, drinking, chatting, conferencing or reading on the job. The actual work that needs to be done in the library -- and there's a lot of it, making the transition from cards and due date stamps to bar codes and databases -- doesn't scare me, but having to be a leader of people does. When I was first approached about taking the committee over a year ago, the start of this school year seemed a long way away. Even in June, when the former chairperson turned over all her papers to me, it seemed a long way away. It's not so far away now. Couldn't I just hide out somewhere in the stacks and let someone bolder handle the politics?

Life on the street

Tuesday night, I got to see how my daughter made it through her middle school day. Wednesday morning, I got a live demonstration of how her school does fire drills. I was volunteering in the library when the alarm went off, and dutifully filed out with the kids and teachers and staff, expecting to return in a moment. Except we didn't return in a moment. They kept directing us further and further from the building, with one group of kids eventually walking all the way down to my son's elementary school, where they took up residence on the playground; one group walking up the street to a parking lot where they could spread out; and another taking a third route that I couldn't see. We were, at any rate, to be out of sight of the building, which didn't seem like a good sign, nor was the endless stream of police and fire and bomb squad vehicles turning into the school parking lots. At about the 30 minute mark, I bailed; since I had had the foresight to bring my purse, and our position at that point was right next to my car, I took my prerogative as a non-employee and split to the pizza place across the street -- where a steady stream of teachers and staff members running in to use the bathroom kept me apprised of the progress of the exodus. When I'd finished my lunch, the kids were still outside. When I got to my son's school for my afternoon library duty, the kids were still there. It turned out to be a 90 minute bomb scare instead of a three minute drill, but all was well that ended well and my daughter said she had a great time hanging out in the parking lot. They don't include 90 minutes on the street in the back-to-school-night presentation. But isn't that just why we volunteer?

Back to school

Tonight was back-to-school night at my daughter's middle school. I've now met all her teachers and inclusion teachers, found her classrooms and the pathways thereto, checked out her locker location. I made it through most of the questions she asked me to ask her teachers, so she didn't have to -- where to pick up homework when she's pulled out for band, how to find out what she missed in class, when to go to remedial. I've introduced myself all around, and probably left the impression of a pushy, overinvolved mom (and why not? it's what I am). I love these little moments of interaction I get with my kids' teachers -- the back-to-school nights, the conferences, the opportunities to run into them while volunteering in the school library or in the parking lot picking up kids. It gives me the illusion that I can actually have an impact on my child's school experience, when in fact on a day to day basis I know so very little. So far, anyway, she seems to be doing well.

A friend in need

My son, at age 11, still has an invisible friend, in this case a large dog named Scooby. Many people probably do not realize that Scooby is a big invisible dog, because my guy speaks of him as though he were a real canine. So when his therapeutic riding therapist today asked, while brushing a horse with him, whether he has a dog at home that sheds, my son replied firmly that oh yes, his dog Scooby sheds all the time. Thank goodness it's only invisible fur.

Probably there's some developmental timeline somewhere that tells me I should worry if my child is still talking to invisible dogs in his preteens. But developmental timelines have never meant much in our house. And you know, Scooby just comes in so handy sometimes. Like today, I had to go out with my daughter while my son was still finishing his homework. My husband was trying to nap after a very early morning at work, so I told my son I needed to talk to Scooby. "Scooby," I said, "I'm putting you in charge of making sure your boy does his homework. He needs to write his spelling words five times each, and color his math worksheet. Can you help him do that?" Scooby was up for the challenge. And sure enough, when I got back, the homework was done. There have been nights when he wouldn't even finish up that promptly for me. The invisible dog's got skills.

Still, I'm holding out against my son's suggestion that Invisible Scooby would make a good babysitter, and really, we don't have to have his grandma watch him when we got to his sister's Back to School Night this week. Certainly, we know how responsible Scooby is, but since my son also tends to blame the dog whenever something goes wrong, he's got a bit of a bad rep. Nor can I agree when my guy insists that his invisible pal would be a great one-on-one aide for him at school. I'm pretty sure the teacher would rather see his assistant, though frankly, we've had some aides who would probably be better if they had been invisible. Maybe Scooby should give the district a call just in case.

The kindness of strangers

I hate when this happens: I took my kids to breakfast at McDonald's this morning, and after I'd ordered and the behind-the-counter droids were already busily assembling our food, I realized that I didn't have enough money to cover the bill. I asked if we could take something off, but it was too late; of all the days for them to be prompt in order-gathering, it would be this one. The cash-register jockey asked how short I was, and when I said a quarter the line behind me exploded with offers of change. I was going to send my daughter out of the car to dig into our supply of toll quarters, but the man manning the cash register declared that he would put it in for me because he had to keep his line moving. Let's go, let's go!

When my order was complete, I noticed we were short a drink; apparently, instead of tallying in the extra coffee I'd ordered, he'd given me just enough drinks to go with our combo meals -- including the coffee, but excluding my son's drink. I started to complain, but remembered about moving the line along and sort of fled to our table. A check of the receipt showed that we indeed had not paid for the extra drink, so I headed for the car to get enough quarters to pay the clerk back and buy a small drink. But the counter man started waving a small cup to me as I walked by, and although I protested that we hadn't paid for it, he insisted I take it. Nor would he take the money I eventually brought back in from the car -- not $1 for the extra drink, and not the original quarter. "It's fine, it's fine," he said. "Don't worry about it, honey."

And probably I shouldn't. If I'd been standing in line behind someone like me, I'd have offered a quarter without thinking about it; and since we're regular customers at this McDonald's, it's likely they've left something off our order somewhere along the line to make up for the $1.25 they floated me this time. But it's weird feeling like a charity case. It's not like I don't have enough money to feed my kids -- just not enough brains to put sufficient funds in my wallet before leaving the house. I'll think twice next time; and maybe leave a quarter in the cash register's change dish, just to pass the charity along.

Projects projected

My daughter's been in 7th grade for a week-and-a-half, and she's just finishing her third project. I'm thinking that projects must be a big thing in the 7th grade. There was a project for language arts to write several paragraphs about your favorite things, find pictures to represent them and combine them into a collage. There was a project for science to write two paragraphs about some sort of science you observed during the summer and how it affected your life, and then combine them with photo illustrations to form a collage. And there was a project for math to list 25 everyday items that had some sort of connection to math, and then either make up a booklet with 10 pictures and 10 paragraph descriptions, or make a collage of the pictures and write a couple of paragraphs about it. I'm thinking collages must be a big thing in 7th grade, too. It's all okay with me, because take-home projects are something she can take her time on and get help with and tally up a decent grade, which is more than you can sometimes say for in-class assignments and tests, inclusion teacher or no. But if this pace keeps up, we're looking at about 30 projects per quarter, and even moms have their limits. At any rate, I invested in a big package of glue sticks today, so bring on the collages!

Just say no?

Putting a child on psychiatric medications is one of those topics it's dangerous to bring up in some parenting circles. I've seen flame wars erupt on e-mail lists within a couple of posts of someone tsking about overmedicating and someone else compare withholding Ritalin to withholding insulin. I've generally tried to steer away from too much preaching on the subject here, because although I have strong opinions, I also acknowledge that they may apply only to my particular kids and family and everyone's mileage may vary. But what, now, do we think about this: In the name of scientific research and building a better ADHD cure, a "pediatrics ethics subcommittee" of the FDA has given the thumbs-up to the idea of giving stimulants to healthy children with no particular need for them, just to compare their reaction to children who are suffering from hyperactivity. The upside is that the kids will be paid handsomely for the temporary use of their nervous systems -- $570 for 11 hours; the downside, the possibility that that nervous system might not be quite as healthy upon its return. Certainly, it's distressing that children are being prescribed medications for which no research has been done in terms of safety and effectiveness for little ones, and maybe that research needs an unaffected control group to work. But it's also distressing to use healthy kids as human guinea pigs. Would you sign your kid up for this? Would you ask other people to, if it would benefit your child? And is there any way in which this can be considered ethical?

Endless night

Tonight was one of those nights where everything just seems hard. My son has been sailing through his homework this week, zipping through problems and completing pages without protest, but tonight he dawdled and whined his way through his work, stretching it out endlessly and needing constant prompting. My daughter has been working in an organized way on a project that's due on Monday, but tonight she suddenly decided she needed to finish it right now, to get it over with. As this would involve the writing of 10 paragraphs, with much effort from the girl and from the mom who must guide her through them, I said it was ridiculous to try and finish so quickly and we'd darn well take the whole weekend since we had it. I guess I said it loudly enough to rattle my son, who responds to stress like a tuning fork. That escalated his behavior, which escalated my stress so that when my husband nonchalantly suggested that our daughter do half her paragraphs tonight to get them out of the way, I snapped at him loudly enough to again panic tuning-fork boy, who started getting hysterical about his sister's assignment and completely abandoning his own. And all this was before my husband tried to help our daughter with her math homework, with increasingly loud exclamations each time she proved clueless. Oh, it was a long night. My son was more wired up at bedtime than I've seen him in a long while, my daughter more long-suffering. And I just wanted to curl up on my bed and cry; even moms need stress release, though not in front of easily rattled boys if they know what's good for them. But I sat down to write this blog entry instead, glad that it doesn't require 10 paragraphs. Tomorrow will be better. No homework for my son on Fridays, anyway.

Does size matter?

So maybe Randy Newman was wrong, and short people do have a reason to live. A research study appearing in this month's Pediatrics suggests that, contrary to the opinions of satirical songwriters and those who dispense growth hormones to too-little kids, there's nothing particularly wrong with being shorter than average. The report found that shorter students' peers were no more or less likely to describe their wee schoolmates as class clowns, bullies or bossy-boots based on their height. "Knowing a person's height by itself tells us virtually nothing about how well they're going to get along with their friends, how well they are accepted by their peer group," said the study's co-author, David E. Sandburg. And I could have told them that, having been the shortest kid in class from kindergarten right through high school. No one could miss that I was a shortie, and I got my fair share of teasing; but I had my fair share of success and popularity and peer acceptance, too.

The researchers hope that their findings will make doctors less quick to give growth hormones to kids who are just short, with no other medical problems, and I'm for that. But it's interesting that the study only measured how short kids' peers felt about them, and not how those kids felt about themselves. Whether their classmates perceive them as having a chip on their shoulder or a need to cut-up may not necessarily reflect their own level of self-confidence and coping skills. I personally think that being short added to my self-confidence and drive -- I knew I could measure up, and wanted everybody else to know it too. But I'm sure other shorties have taken a self-esteem blow from walking so low. I think there are ways to deal with that other than negating the height difference with hormones. But I don't think this kind of study is really going to convince much of anyone.

Science for the public good

Now, here's what I like to see: Medical science hard at work finding new and innovative ways to conquer one of the great scourges of humanity. I'm speaking, of course, of head lice, and in praise of a California dermatologist who's bumped the strategy of suffocating lice up a notch by creating a lotion that can be applied to hair to effectively "shrink-wrap" the head and choke the tiny vermin. The last time I tried to suffocate head lice, it involved great quantities of either petroleum jelly or salad oil slathered on the head, covered with a shower cap, and endured for many slimy hours, followed by endless degreasing shampoos. A lotion that would dry unslick and undetectable -- so much so that kids could go to school with the buggers trapped and no one would be the wiser -- sounds like an incredible boon to moms who have known the joy of picking nits. Dare we dream of a day when our hearts won't skip when we see a child scratching her skull? Keep that research coming.

Empty out that medicine cabinet

If you already have recycling bins in your home for paper, plastic, glass and aluminum, it may be time to add one more -- for unused pills. We've long been advised never to share prescriptions with other family members, and to safely dispose of unused medications when they've outlasted our need. But now, given the high cost of those little capsules and tablets, more thought is being given to the ones we flush away. According to a Reuters report, the FDA is recommending returning unneeded pills to your pharmacist; states are setting up swapping programs; and patients are surfing the 'net hoping to find someone with the needed meds rattling around somewhere in the back of their medicine cabinet. I guess it makes sense from a cost- and resource-effectiveness point of view, especially for those who need large quantities of costly cures. But somehow, the knowledge that I may someday pop open a pill bottle and not know how long ago or for whom my prescription was originally prescribed doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. Will prescription drug plans eventually require retreads? Will fresh pills be at a premium? Pretty soon you'll be able to get recycled pills in a recycled plastic bottle with instructions printed on recycled paper. Only your illness will be original to you -- and that's only if you didn't catch it from somebody else.

Maybe she's watching me right now

My daughter has some sort of Stealth Teen thing going on lately. I'll be sitting around minding my own business, maybe working on the computer or reading a book or grabbing a few extra minutes sleep, and all of sudden she'll just be there, her presence betrayed by only a quiet footfall or a hovering aura. She doesn't want anything except, apparently, to be in my presence, and I know it's because she's feeling needy and insecure with the start of school and gets some reassurance from seeing me, and it's great I guess from a bonding point of view, but man, it spooks me sometimes. I'd be happy to talk with her or answer questions or help with something, but just bearing a silent presence seems to be more than I can handle right now. By the time I get used to it, of course, she will have settled into her school routine and will be back in Teen Attitude Land, motto: "Mom? Who needs her?" And then I'll be the one silently hovering.

Where's censorship when you need it?

There's always much to-do about how violent or sexual programs on TV ought not to be viewed by children; and how musicians playing at sporting events must be required to keep their wardrobes from malfunctioning; and how offensive radio shows like Howard Stern's should be banned from the airwaves; and how pornographic magazines need to be kept out of the reach of minors; and whether you feel these restrictions are essential or essentially unconstitutional, it's certainly undeniable that there's a great deal of thought and debate and passion going into the examination of those issues. But there's a whole other level of potentially damaging media content sneaking through without anybody giving it a second glance, and I'm starting to think that it might be even worse for kids than the stuff everybody's always arguing over.

I've written here before about the difficulty of explaining those omnipresent ads for Viagra and Cialis and the like to curious kids who'll ask, "Mommy, what's erectile disfunction?" Lately I've also been noticing lots of really scary ads for horror films, both on TV and on the radio. If my kids are too young to see these films in theaters, do they really need to see clips that make their hearts skip? The radio ad for the new "Exorcist" film upset me when I was sitting at my desk in my office in the middle of the day; does my daughter really need to be hearing it at night when she's listening to the radio in bed? Guess that's not going to help her sleep. And even that old family friend, the local newspaper, isn't free of trauma. Like many people I was following the story of the school hostage situation in Russia with increasing dread, and certainly wanted to read about the tragic ending in this morning's news. But the large color photo that accompanied the story gave me pause -- it showed a Russian police officer carrying a young girl out of the building. The girl, maybe 8 or 9, had blood all over her face and was dressed only in underpants. The image was disturbing for any number of reasons, but what I found myself wondering most of all was, if my kids see this sitting on the coffee table, how on earth am I going to explain what happened to this girl, and why isn't she wearing any clothes? I tried to make sure that page was face down, with lots of glossy Saturday store ads on top.

The thing about all this is -- it's easy to keep our kids from watching specific shows, or listening to specific radio stations, or seeing specific magazines. But it's really hard to avoid commercials that can come on any time of the day or night, or news photos that turn a local paper -- which yesterday, for example, featured a picture of a particularly large zucchini grown by a local man -- into something terrifying. How's the FCC going to protect us from that?

The return of hot lunch

One of the nicest parts of sending the kids back to school after their various summertime programs is this: I don't have to make lunches for them anymore. Brown-bagging it at day camp has been a challenge for my son, who is generally a very good eater but doesn't seem to want to eat anything he can tote. Sandwiches would come home uneaten, apples browning with but a bite removed. Toward the end of the summer I gave up and started investing in those pricey but easily packed Lunchables, but even there we got leftovers: One day he took tacos and came back with the pouch of taco "meat" rattling around in his lunchbox.

I was at the end of my rope by the end of August, but now school's back and with it hot lunches. I sat with him last night as he went through the monthly offerings and made his picks. Most meals feature a protein and a fruit or vegetable, and the food service folks have given us some sort of folderol about the healthy way in which the meals are prepared, but really, it's not their nutritional soundness that most endears cafeteria food to me. It's the fact that they don't send leftovers home. Even if most of his balanced meal winds up in the trash, I can rest in blissful ignorance, believing he ate every bite. That's a good deal right there.

From jawbreaker to budget-buster

Somewhere, P.T. Barnum is laughing: According to an Associated Press report, people are paying as much as $14,000 on eBay for gum prechewed by Britney Spears. It's hard to know what's more disturbing about this: that there are people who would pay good money for something you'd otherwise scrape off your shoe, or that there are people who follow Spears around with little baggies to pluck up the soggy wads. How exactly do you display this, the pride of your collection -- on a lighted shelf? under glass? or perhaps just stuck to your bedpost? Is an autograph just not personal enough anymore? For now, enterprising gum-scoopers are leading the way in these chaw auctions, but I don't know. That Britney's a pretty enterprising gal; how long before she cuts out the middleman and starts chewing gum to order? You could specify flavor or hue, and duration of chew. And if you throw in a little extra, she'll add some belly button lint and a few clipped toenails for good measure. (Although, come to think of it, if your navel's always bared, do you even get belly button lint?)

More P.E.? Not for me!

I read this and hear clumsy, sports-impaired boys and girls all over the country screaming "Nooooooo!": A recent study proposes that childhood obesity could be dramatically decreased by increasing the amount of time elementary school children spend in gym class. And sure, I guess there is some sense in figuring that more exercise leads to leaner kids. But I wonder if the researchers are taking into account the extreme self-esteem blows that can come to the uncoordinated with extra chances each week to demonstrate their lack of physical prowess. Double the amount of phys-ed time, and you double the amount of taunts and failures. And isn't that just going to lead to an increase in overeating, teen depression, and really unpleasant rock and roll? I have to believe that a lot of researchers were not themselves football player material; can't we have a study that proves that putting kids of mixed skills together in a gymnasium with a variety of projectiles and insufficient supervision can be more damaging than a supersized Big Mac meal? Krispy Kreme might want to offer a grant for that.

Sick of summer

So here we are on the home stretch of summer, tantalizingly close to the start of school. The kids have been healthy and active through the day-camp months, suffering nothing much more than a bad sunburn. And now, on this very week when illness will be of a maximum inconvenience, of course they're sick. My son was diagnosed with strep throat on Monday after a long whining weekend of high fever and careful swallowing. He's dosed with antibiotics and cold medicine now, and feeling pretty perky. As for me, I'm still recovering from the frustration and annoyance of waiting an hour and 45 minutes in the pediatrician's office for a two-second throat swab.

My daughter, meanwhile, has one of those strangely mutating colds that sometimes seem to have dire respiratory repercussions and sometimes fade away entirely, usually when there's something she wants to do. She now does pretty much want to go to school on Thursday -- or rather, she doesn't want to miss the first day and all the important instructions that will be given out -- and so with luck that means the cold will scram by then. My deepest fear is that she'll catch her brother's strep just past the point in which I can give her 24 hours worth of antibiotics and still send her to school. Worse still, I'll have to go back to the pediatrician. Do you suppose the nurses have forgotten yet the way I stuck my head out of the examining room door at about the hour and 15 minute mark and made a bit of a scene? They wouldn't just stick us somewhere and forget us for good this time, would they? Should I bring flowers?

More new stuff

On Mothers with Attitude: New to our Contributor's Corner is an excerpt from The Post-Adoption Blues: Overcoming the Unforeseen Challenges of Adoption by Karen J. Foli, Ph.D., and John R. Thompson, M.D. The excerpt is entitled "Your Expectations About the Emotional Needs of Your Child," an area in which it seems lots of new parents have problems. From my experience, I'd say it's best to have no expectations at all, and just sort of make it up as you go along.

On Parenting Isn't Pretty: See that little envelope down at the end of this post? That's a new doohickie Blogger has introduced so that you can e-mail one of my blog entries to a friend and comment on how funny/smart/ridiculous/absurdly overreactive I am. Spread the word.

Quotes to enjoy, sites to see

I'm trying something new on the Mothers with Attitude home page: a Quote of the Day and Site of the Day. They'll both feature things that strike me as interesting in some way, whether parenting-related, general interest, or humorous. After their featured day, the quotes and sites will go live on another page on MWA for future reference. Whether I'll really be able to keep this going on a daily basis remains to be seen; but then, I managed to blog every single day in August, weekends included, and who knew I could be that consistent?

What would Danny do?

My daughter has always had trouble understanding that the people in the TV aren't real -- that is, that they are actors and actresses playing parts, and the houses and schools are just sets, and the characters have no life outside the particular scenes we see. As her language skills have grown, her ability to appreciate abstractions has increased as well, but it's still not what you'd call strong. She doesn't ask anymore what Lizzie Maguire is doing to amuse herself during the commercials, but she does sometimes check just to make sure that a character's injury isn't really suffered by the actor. I try my best to explain, again and again, the disconnect between the appearance of reality and reality itself, but since piling more language onto a language problem often results in more confusion, I'm never sure how well I'm getting through. So this exchange earlier this week heartened me greatly:

I was talking with her about the hostilities that had broken out at camp between her and her brother, and after floundering around for a while, I made a reference to one of her current favorite shows, re-runs of "Full House" on ABC Family. "I wish I could say the words Danny Tanner would say in a situation like this. I know it would end with a hug, but I don't know what his advice would be. He always knows the right thing to say."

My daughter agreed, adding: "He's much better than you."

"Well," I countered, "I'd do much better if I had someone writing a script for me."

And to my surprise, she said, "Yeah! He has a script! Bob Saget is a cheater! Cheater, cheater!"

So at some level, she understands that superwise dad Danny Tanner is Bob Saget with a script. She still thinks he's a better mom than me, but hey, I grasp for encouragement wherever I can get it.

Get an A, eat an artichoke

The nutrition police have been coming down pretty hard on America's schoolchildren lately. It seems as though every day there's a news report on school lunches being brought into nutritional line, or fruit replacing chips in school vending machines, or sodas being forbidden from cafeterias. And now, this: school officials in Florida are fretting over a perfectly nice offer made by Krispy Kreme to give students a doughnut for each "A" they earn. Now here a kid works hard all quarter, earns those As, wouldn't you think he or she could just have a nice cruller or two or six? But no; with childhood obesity allegedly at epidemic proportions, nutritionists would prefer they have an apple, or maybe some Brussels sprouts. So now parents will have to go back to paying their kids to get good grades instead of bribing them with a trip to the nearest Krispy Kreme franchise. I've got an idea for the spurned doughnut-makers, though -- as a parent, I know I work hard with my kids to do their homework and write good reports and study hard. How about free doughnuts for the parents of those A students? I'm guessing their teachers probably wouldn't mind a few, either.

Put down the Ajax and back slowly away

Well, glory be. Here's another study that indicates keeping a clean house can put your child's health at risk. Australian researchers found that fumes from cleaning products and other industrial-strength household chemicals could be contributing factors in children's asthma. Houses that reek of Lysol and air freshener may in fact be making the kids inside of them sick. And isn't that just what I'm longing to hear, as I look around at my dusty dressers and grimy countertops and moldy shower stall and industrial-strength dustbunnies. Now, instead of feeling guilty about the grubbiness, I can rest peacefully in the knowledge that, due to my lack of housekeeping skills, my kids' immune systems are getting a good workout battling such a fine variety of microscopic predators, while their respiratory systems are clean of cleaner residue. Could messiness be next to godliness? I'd sure be willing to participate in any study that proves that theory.

Gotta get the gear

My 9-year-old niece was over playing with my kids the other day when she went into my daughter's room demanding to see her school supplies. "Do you have all your school supplies? I have all my school supplies," she said, and proceeded to list every back-to-school goodie she'd gotten. When my daughter had nothing to show, her cousin was incredulous. "You don't have any school supplies? Where's your backpack? Don't you have a notebook?" It went on for so long that I had to go in and say, "Hey, we haven't gone shopping yet. Lay off."

So today we went shopping. We got the backpack, the notebook, the new sneakers (two pair -- laced for gym and laceless for the rest of the time), the subject dividers. My girl's all excited about school now that she's got her gear, so it was worth the trouble just to stop hearing "I hate school, I don't want to go back" for the next seven days. My son's got a new Scooby Doo backpack, and we'll get his notebook this weekend, and then -- well, bring it on, teachers, we're ready to rumble.

Of course, the first thing the teachers send home, their return volley so to speak, is a long list of all the school supplies they want the kids to have, some of which require the discarding or replacement of pre-purchased supplies that don't make the list. That's why I tend to drag my feet and try to get the kids wait until after Day 1 before making all our purchases. But I guess this year, a 9-year-old guilted me into getting school stuff while there was still time to get excited about school. Maybe it'll at least make my first-day after-school equipment-buying scramble a little shorter.

Unhappy campers

My kids are both at the same day camp for this last few weeks of summer, and each of them is having trouble with a particular peer. My daughter is complaining about a boy who keeps bugging her, sitting too close, hitting her, pulling her hair, and generally making her uncomfortable. My son came home all upset today because a girl called him stupid; it made him feel sad, and he had to go sit off by himself for a while to get over it. Normally, this sort of harrassment would send me running to the camp counselor and demanding some sort of consequences for the perpetrator. But maybe you can see my problem coming about a mile down the road here: The boy who is bugging my daughter is my son. And the girl who called my son stupid is my daughter.

And I'm playing Mom in the Middle.

On the one hand, I know that the reason my son is all over his sister is because he's excited she's there, and wants to be with her. So my normal advice that she should try to stay as far away as possible from somebody who's bugging her is a little painful, because I can only think about how her brother would feel to be so avoided by his own sis. On the other hand, for a teen who's trying to fit in and appear as normal as possible, having a brother who jumps and flaps and rocks and makes noises and doesn't behave like all the other kids is a heavy burden to bear. I can talk and talk and talk to her about compassion and selflessness and acceptance, but give me a break; this is a 14-year-old girl we're talking about, and one with some challenges of her own. Is it fair to ask her to openly embrace weirdness, even if it's weirdness that's related to her?

Not even fair, maybe, to expect any big sister to openly embrace any little brother, special needs or no. But fair to expect no name-calling, so that's where I've left it. And I've instructed my son to think about how Arthur would feel if D.W. was in the same camp, and maybe give his sibling a little space. How much he can understand that, and how much he can control himself even if he does understand it, is questionable. But the one good thing to come out of this is that he actually allowed himself to feel bad about something; handled the bad feeling in an appropriate way; and talked about it afterward. That's huge, huge stuff for him. I guess that's what family's for.

What a Mom Wants

I'll admit I'm getting inordinate enjoyment lately from the rather inconsequential teen movie "What a Girl Wants," starring Amanda Bynes (who we practically watched grow up on a variety of Nickelodeon shows) as an American teen who goes to London to meet her long-lost father, and Colin Firth as the aforementioned pop. The film seems to be on heavy HBO rotation lately, and as is my way with cable movies, I've seen the first hour maybe once, and maybe not in its entirety, and the second hour eight or nine times. It's something I'm happy to leave on whenever I channel surf past it, partly because Amanda Bynes is fairly adorable, but mostly because Colin Firth is, oh, considerably more adorable still. The guy can say more with a soulful look than with a page of dialog -- which, given the level of repartee in this particular script, is a very good thing indeed. There ought to be some sort of special Academy Award for Better Performance Than Was Really Necessary by a Star in a Movie for Children. Until there is, those actors who step up and give us moms something to swoon over will just have our grateful thanks.

New on Mothers with Attitude

Ken Swarner's latest Family Man column examines the ways in which a so-called "day off" with the kids can be more stressful than a day at the office. ... Also new on our contributor's pages: Maura Conlon-McIvor tells what she learned from having a brother with Down syndrome in "The Power of a Clumsy Hello," an excerpt from her memoir, FBI Girl.

Punched in the mouth

Took my kids to the dentist this morning, which I know you'll agree is about the most fun you can have on a Saturday. The dental hygeinist chewed me out for not making my daughter brush her teeth better, and more frequently. Gingivitis! More plaque in a 14-year-old's mouth than an adult's mouth would have! Scandalous, scandalous. And all my fault. I promised to make sure she brushes in the morning as well as the evening, and does so in an appropriately gum-strengthening fashion, and for two minutes minimum. Since my daughter's a super-organized morning person, adding brushing to her a.m. routine won't be a problem (though my supervision thereof almost certainly will be, since a super-organized morning person I am not).

When it came time for my son to take the chair, I confessed that he was also not a morning brusher, but that he brushed faithfully every night. I hoped she wouldn't ask how many minutes he brushed, because while the 10 seconds of enforced brushing I wrestle him into every night seems looooooong to the two of us, it probably wouldn' t impress her much. I tried to soften her up with tales of his sensory integration problems, and how he therefore couldn't tolerate me brushing his teeth for him. Then, of course, he sat down in the chair, laid back and remained blissfully still while she poked, prodded, scraped, and scrubbed his teeth. Clearly, his only problem is a lazy mom.

Why is it that just about any contact with a medical professional can leave me feeling so judged? I'm normally pretty secure in the way I'm parenting my kids. One of the central rules of our parenting strategy is not to sweat the small stuff, and so, yeah, maybe we don't attack tooth care with the kind of zealousness we would if there was nothing else to attack. I think we're doing a good job with the big stuff, and if the kind of micromanaging that requires leaves us too exhausted to legislate flossing, I'm not going to lose any sleep. Most of the time, I'm cool with it. But boy, put me in a room with a disappointed dental hygeinist, and I'm suddenly all, "Lady, after four hours of doing homework with my learning disabled daughter, endless struggles to get my attention-challenged son to finish his homework, meltdowns at the dinner table, battles to get PJs on, I just want those kids in BED, thank you very much. The last thing I have energy for is gum-rubbing." And don't talk to me about mornings -- if my son makes it through breakfast without spilling something on his shirt, I'm not eager to go double-or-nothing and hope he doesn't get toothpaste on it.

I thought that stuff, but of course I didn't say it. Professionals don't understand. I just nodded and said I'd get right on that brushing. And made a mental note to make sure we got a different hygeinist next time.

That'll teach you to talk to teens

Watching 16-year-old Carly Patterson do her round of interviews last night after winning the all-around gold in women's gymnastics, I had a twinge of sympathy for Bob Costas and the other question-askers. The whole thing reminded me so much of exchanges with my own kids, in which queries that involve any sort of detailed reply are answered with a few awkward sentence fragments, maybe a roll of the eyes, and a general impression that this whole conversation thing is just stupid grown-up stuff. Now, you don't have to be a youngster to find those post-victory questions eye-roll-worthy. Over and over again, winners are asked what they were thinking and feeling while in the heat of competition, and I have to believe that if they were taking the time to think and feel when they were supposed to be focused on pure physical exertion, they probably wouldn't have won in the first place. Nevertheless, most Olympians gamely attempt to come up with some sort of response to keep the interviewer from having egg on his or her face. Not our sweet 16 gymnastics queen, though -- she sounded like she was thisclose to saying "Whatever" and pulling a GameBoy from her pocket. Her interviews gave me that same feeling of annoyance I get from chats with my own inarticulate offspring; but I guess it's nice to know that under all that acrobatic prowess lurks an actual kid and not some sort of tumbling robot.

Back-to-school blues

We're at two weeks and counting down to the first day of school, and my daughter's in full whine. She's not as flat-out panicked about starting seventh grade as she was about starting sixth -- she has a year of middle school under her belt, and at least has an idea now of what it's going to be like. But this year she'll have to be changing classrooms after each class, and classes up and downstairs, and band for homeroom, and all manner of uncertainties. And so she doesn't waaaaaaaant to go back to school. She haaaaaaaates school. It's all very sad and pitable, and almost enough to make me forget how badly she whined back in June when school was coming to an end, and she didn't waaaaaaaant to leave school and all her friends, and she haaaaaated summer. What she loves, of course, is routine, and what she hates is any change of track. Give her a couple of weeks to get her wheels planted back on the academic rails, and she'll start complaining about leaving school for the weekend.

The ball is in her court

One of the things I liked best about Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence, a chipper account of living with Asperger's syndrome by 13-year-old Luke Jackson, was a little glossary at the end on common idioms and what on earth they mean. Expressions have always been a matter of puzzlement to my daughter, who is not on the autism spectrum but does have a great deal of trouble with language. For many years she took words at face value, and would give up when she got to a phrase that made no logical sense. Now that she's learned a little more about the confusing ways in which people speak and write, she'll ask right out: "Is that an expression?" And then the speaker will be in the sometimes tricky position of having to explain what some well-worn metaphor means, and why it does.

Jackson's glossary was a nice piece of work, and I made a copy for my girl to have on hand when confronted with confusingly colorful speech. It's sitting on her dresser now, in about the exact place she put it weeks ago, and I think that although it could be immensely helpful to her, it's also somewhat intimidating -- lots of words, for someone to whom words are not friends. So I was excited to find today, during a quick scan of a bookstore's special-needs shelves, a book called What Did You Say? What Did You Mean? by Jude Welton and Jane Telford, which not only explains expressions and their origins but provides illustrations to make the whole enterprise more language-phobe friendly. I think we'll sit down and look at one page per day, and then keep the book handy for look-ups later. I hope it will help her, but who knows; you can lead a horse to water ...

In the mood

Is bad jewelry a teen rite of passage? My daughter, like her mother before her, is now the proud owner of a mood ring. I remember my first mood ring; I bought it in a store on Olivera Street in Los Angeles during a school field trip somewhere in the early '70s. It was big and fake-gold and ugly, but it changed color, and more importantly, everyone was getting them. I don't know what ever happened to that awful bauble -- whether it turned my finger green, or just fell out of style -- but I will say that mood rings are a lot nicer looking nowadays. The one my daughter begged me to buy her in the gift shop at Bushkill Falls in the Poconos (perhaps there's a law that mood rings may only be purchased in touristy gift shops?) is a nice silver-ish band with the mood-substance running all the way 'round. Hers is holding pretty steadily in the blue range, which either means that she's a serene and happy kid or that her body temperature is remarkably consistent. She's been switching it around from finger to finger, which decreases the chance that it will turn her finger green but increases the chance that she'll lose it. Either way, given her past track record with jewelry and the faddish nature of mood rings, it seems unlikely that she'll still be wearing the thing a month from now. In the meantime, though, I'm kinda enjoying this blast from the past.

Beware of children's books

Boy, you just can't trust children's books. I'm reading a book with my son that his teacher gave him for Christmas -- Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner, a nice looking adventure story about a boy who needs to win a dog race to save his grandfather's farm, and here we come to the last chapter and I peek ahead to see that the dog dies at the end. And he dies before the race is won, so I can't even try to trick my son into thinking that the book's really over before that. How can you end a book with the dog dying? I'm trying to motivate this kid to read, and I wouldn't blame him if he's afraid to start the next book. We loved that dog.

Meanwhile, I'm reading another "7th Heaven" book with my daughter -- you know, a written version of an episode of the nice TV series about a minister and his family -- and it turns out that this particular episode was all about sex. Rivals has a picture of Camden sisters Lucy and Mary on the cover, and may look like a simple sibling rivalry tale, but really it's about Lucy wondering whether she should sleep with her boyfriend, and Matt making a video for his Human Sexuality class, and their parents counseling a couple of pregnant teens. And really, I know, my daughter's 14, I should be talking about this stuff with her, and a book about characters she likes is a good inroad to that. All I'm looking for, though, is a little light summer reading here, and I'm knee-deep in sex and death. The kids are always complaining about my read-every-night regime, and I'm starting to feel a little reluctant to sit down to each night's chapter myself.

On the subject of books: If like me you have an insatiable need to buy parenting books, I want to pass the word that BarnesandNoble.com is having a big sale that includes some books on parenting and families. Offerings include "The Myth of Laziness: America's Top Learning Expert Shows How Kids -- and Parents -- Can Become More Productive" by Mel Levine for $6.98; "Should I Medicate My Child? Solutions for Troubled Kids With -- or Without -- Psychiatric Drugs" by Lawrence H. Diller for $6.98; "Touchpoints: Your Child's Emotional and Behavioral Development" by T. Berry Brazelton for $4.98; and "The Parent's Guide to Childhood Eating Disorders: A Nutritional Approach to Solving Eating Disorders" by Marcia Herrin for $3.98. Happy shopping!

New on Mothers with Attitude

In his Family Man column, Ken Swarner tells a tale of temptation, betrayal and ... children's soccer. Stories like this make me glad my kids don't participate in organized sports. I don't think I could take all the drama, the complaints of irate parents, the burden of being an irate parent myself. Our special ed department usually gives me enough to be irate about without need for extracurricular outrages.

Live-ish from Greece

Here we go again with the Olympics. Every two years I try to get my kids interested in watching the Summer or Winter Olympics -- always pointing out the excellence the Russian team, of course, to instill a little pride in the land of their birth -- and every year they watch a little and go "Eh." My mom used to make a big deal of watching the Olympics, rooting desperately for Americans to win and falling into a funk if victory was snatched from them, and I can still get fairly obsessed by the whole spectacle, tuning in at odd times of day to catch vital events like, oh, synchronized diving. My daughter seems a little more interested this year than she has in the past, but that's a mixed blessing: watching the opening ceremonies with her, and trying to explain what was going on -- or just that these things never actually make any sense, and you simply have to let them wash over you -- was a challenge that Katie Couric and Bob Costas were spectacularly unhelpful in getting me through. Way easier are her questions about the actual events: "Is that hard?" and "Do they practice?" Pretty soon another question will probably come around: "Do I really have to watch this?" And that's okay, really; it's easiest to let all this sport wash over me while I'm viewing alone.

Playground peril

I used to hate recess when I was a kid. Just hated it with a passion. I was bad at playground games, both the athletic kind and the social kind. All I wanted to do was sit off to the side somewhere, out of everyone's way, and read a book. Sometimes I could get away with it, and sometimes teachers would insist that I go out, run around and be healthy. Back then, I couldn't do much but stumble around and feel doltish. It makes me wish that reports like this one had been around when I was a kid -- proclaiming that, while running around and being healthy is still a good idea for kids, playgrounds themselves are a regular menace, full of undependable hardware and accidents just waiting to happen. That's sure the way I felt as a schoolkid, and if there was documentation around I could have, I don't know, filed a formal protest or sued or something. Of course, all these playgrounds that are falling apart now are probably doing so because they were new when I was a schoolkid. But they were hazardous then, too, I'm telling you. We jungle-gym wimps just didn't have the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons around to stick up for us.

Something nondepressing about FAS

Here's something you don't see very often in the news, or just about anywhere, for that matter: a good news story about fetal alcohol syndrome. The report, from scientists at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, doesn't say anything I haven't heard and embraced before -- early detection is good, stable upbringing is crucial, positive outcomes are possible -- but I've certainly corresponded and argued with people who haven't heard it, and so seeing it on AP and other outlets is awfully reassuring. After so many desperate and depressing stories and books about my son's diagnosis, it's nice to read something that doesn't make me feel stupid for feeling hopeful. Now if the word will just get out.

My new motto

I'm taking a few minutes out from our family vacation, after playing Bingo with my son and before watching the movie "13 Going on 30" with my daughter, to share what I think is going to be my new motto. It's from Calvin Trillin's book Family Man, and it goes like this: "Sometimes, I find myself drawn to the simplest possible way of explaining what may count in rearing children: your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary."

I like to think my husband would agree that this is what counts in our family, too; I'd ask him, but he's busy giving our son a bath, while I'm in the living room of our timeshare listening to my daughter's new favorite CD, which is rather louder than I'd like but not blatantly eardrum-busting or lyrically offensive. And, of course, I'm tapping away on the computer, which my husband would probably point out is not exactly putting our kids at the center of my life. Neither is reading bunches of books. I'd argue that putting our kids at the center of my blog should count for something, and that most of those books I read have something to do, at least tangentially, with children in general or children with special needs in particular. And that part of the reason he was so eager to supervise bathtime was to avoid having to listen to the CD and watch the movie. Maybe our children are really just the center of our excuses. But they're pretty vital at that.

Dressed to kill

We did a little back-to-school shopping today at an outlet mall near our vacation spot, and my daughter about scared me to death. Bad enough she kept picking out shirts in the $40-$50 range (not much of a discount outlet was this, as I discovered belatedly), but she then selected a pair of jersey knit pants that left very little anatomical detail to the imagination. She's always been a baggy-pants kind of girl -- preferring loose sweatpants and long shirts to the tight hip-huggers and cut-off tops her peers seem to like -- so seeing her prancing about in front of the three-way mirror at J. Crew, thrusting her hips and singing about how cool she looked in her clingy knits, was rather a lot for my motherly heart to bear. I was able to talk her into looking around some more, and we finally found some non-hip-hugging jeans at the Gap that really were on sale, and that were both comfortable and cool enough (and modest enough, but we won't talk about that) to get her vote. The tops she finally settled on were mostly too expensive but not too too expensive, and nicely oversized. For the moment, then, I've dodged the teen bombshell bullet. But it was awfully close for comfort.

Where can I buy a little sensory overload?

I had an experience yesterday that gave me a better understanding of what it might feel like to be inside my son's head. I was already on edge because of my ingrained Check-In Anxiety (see yesterday's post), and although our check-in had gone fine, I was mistrustful of any apparent well-being -- maybe the way my son feels about any transitions, however small. We went to gather some groceries at a Wal-Mart Supercenter, and from the moment I set foot in the place I had an almost visceral need to get the heck out of there. It was crowded and noisy. The aisles were too narrow. There were incredible amounts of stuff laid out in patterns that were indecipherable to me. They say that kids like my son experience the world as frightening and fragmented and aggressively disorderly, and they have to build elaborate structures around and inside themselves to cope. For 40 minutes or so, I knew how they felt. Perhaps Wal-Mart should provide sensory challenge courses for parents of kids with special needs. They seem willing to sell just about anything else; how about a little understanding on aisle 4?

Vacation stress

I have a bad track record with the administrative part of traveling. It's the check-ins and check-outs that get me. Probably my worst behavior in this area involved screaming at the top of my lungs one early morning in a London hotel when the slugs at the check-out desk kept holding us up until it appeared we would miss our cab to the airport. It was the end of a much-too-long trip to Europe following my sophomore year in college, and I wanted nothing more than to leave foreign soil and go home, and everything I had tried to do to expedite our exit was now being blocked by people who would ... not ... hurry ... up. I behaved badly, although probably in a way they expected from Americans.

Other times it has seemed very clear to me that the bad behavior was on the other side of the counter, and yet I got the blame. Like the time the car-rental agency did a blatant bait-and-switch, delivering a car so much smaller than the one we'd contracted for that our entire party wouldn't even fit in it, but the sarcastic remark an employee made to my husband on the way out indicated that standing up for one's rights as a consumer is the sort of thing that nice people don't do. Two years ago, the time share we visited in Virginia bopped us around from one unit (with a broken bed) to another unit (too far from our co-travelers); when we finally got settled, I realized that we'd left my son's stuffed animals in one of the rejected rooms, and I tried so hard to retrieve them so he wouldn't have a meltdown that I wound up having a meltdown myself. On the one hand, it was clearly a mess-up by the management to have given us so many rooms in the first place; but on the other hand, a friend who accompanied us on that trip hasn't spoken to me since, so my reputation for bad travel behavior has apparently grown.

All of which explains why I sometimes dread going on trips, and my dread increases with each level of bureaucracy: airports and limos and rental cars and hotels and activities. This year, we've kept it about as simple as can be, driving our own car to a resort a couple of hours away. If I can keep my cool through one check-in and one check-out, I should be pretty much home free. I'm certainly dreading it less than I do the trip to Orlando we have planned for next year; but you never know, I may find an opportunity to tick somebody off yet. We leave today. I hope the time-share folk don't already have a picture of me behind the desk, with a circle and a line over my face.

Dinner as defense

Want to look out for your teen's emotional well-being and guard him or her from the temptations of substance abuse? All you have to do is make that young person sit down for a meal with you. That's the advice from researchers at the University of Minnesota, who surveyed more than 4,500 adolescents to glean their family-dinner and risk-taking habits. Among their findings:

"Frequency of family meals was inversely associated with tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use; low grade-point average; depressive symptoms, and suicide involvement," the study authors wrote. "We found family mealtimes to be a potentially protective factor in the lives of adolescents for nearly all of these variables, particularly among adolescent girls."

Now for our particular adolescent girl, family meals seem to be an especially fertile venue for eye-rolling, attitude-throwing, and pained tolerance for the aggressively uncool behavior of parental and brotherly units. More often than not, our cozy family dinners are interrupted by time-outs, by silent treatments, by sarcastic comments or by heavy, heavy sighs.

But who knows. Maybe having a nightly opportunity to express contempt for so much of what her family does releases that particular need to distance herself from us, and so she won't have to find more dangerous ways to do that. I don't know, though. As an adult, I've observed that having meals with my own extended family generally makes me more inclined to drink or to contemplate violent acts. Maybe the University of Minnesota needs to do a follow-up study of folks in their 40s.

Penny projects

We've started a new incentive plan here at home -- like buying a new datebook or a new purse, starting a new motivational strategy with the kids is something I have to do periodically to keep myself organized and interested. This time, instead of tokens or checkmarks or stars, I'm giving my children pennies when I catch them doing something good, whether an assigned chore or a random bit of cooperation. It's a sign of my kids' emotional immaturity that they're at all motivated by pennies, I guess, but we've made little banks from old tennis-ball containers, and that along with a promise to take the pennies to the cash-in machine at the supermarket when the containers are full seems to be enough for them. If they ever do need an extra little boost, I'll have to show them this site so they can see what a few pennies can do. Well, more than a few: the site uses pennies to provide concrete examples of enormous numbers. Hey, kids, why bother with the cash-in machine? Let's collect enough pennies to fill the Empire State Building! Now that's some good behavior.

School pride

I think there needs to be some sort of etiquette guide printed for people who move from one school district to another, to guide them in sharing their enthusiasm for their new educational set-up without trashing the old one in the presence of those who still attend. My daughter's friend moved, mid-school-year, to another town about 15 minutes away, with smaller schools that his parents have been very happy with. Very, very happy. So happy that, every time we see them, they have to tell us that the schools are so much better than the schools in our town, they're so glad they got their kids out of our terrible overcrowded bad-programmed schools. And that's fine -- I'm happy for them, really -- except my kids are still going to those schools, and we're actually pretty happy with those programs, and would sort of rather not have them dissed so resoundingly. It seems like bad etiquette on my part to say, "Hey, I don't know what's wrong with your kids, but my kids are doing just fine in our schools!" -- but at the same time, isn't it bad etiquette for someone to run down the schools my kids are attending without at least first ascertaining that I hate them, too? I can carp about special-ed glitches and short-sighted policies and imperfections with the best of them, but I gripe because I love, you know?

Moving on up

Well, I guess this is something of a milestone: I took my daughter to the bookstore today, and the books she wanted turned out to be in the "Teen" section instead of the children's. Now, of course, she is a teen, so that shouldn't be any big deal; but her reading level has never been up to her chronological speed. She's still into the "Magic Treehouse" series, which is about a second-grade level, and the most recent standardized tests they gave her (and we all know how reliable those are, right?) showed her reading level hovering around fourth grade. She's two years behind in school, and had mixed success with sixth-grade reading materials last year -- good comprehension of stories with strong plots and characterizations, poor comprehension of mood pieces with lots of figurative language. The times we've plucked promising novels with teen themes from her school's Scholastic Book Fairs, they've proven to be way over her head. Yet there we were today, in the Barnes and Noble, being directed back out of the children's room and into the teen shelves. Yee-haw, we're age-appropriate.

Or maybe not. The books she was looking for were "7th Heaven" books, novelizations of the TV series, re-runs of which she watches obsessively on ABC Family. We found one at the library (yes, in the children's room) and she liked it enough that I thought I'd pounce on any small sign of reading enthusiasm by buying her a few more. According to amazon.com, the reading level of these books is in the 9-12-year-old range, which is about right for her. Maybe they're filed in the teen section because the show's first-run episodes are on the WB, and someone thinks that means teens? Maybe the themes are considered too mature for kiddies (although they're certainly less traumatic than the death-themed books my daughter keeps getting assigned, and they're in the children's room)? Whatever the reason, I'm glad for the little morale boost that comes from picking out big-kid books. Now if I can just get her to read the books instead of watching the TV series, we'll be getting somewhere.

The titles she picked today will eventually make their way onto my Summer Reading 2004 page, but for now, for other parents who may want to be taking advantage of TV tie-ins, they are: Sisters Through the Seasons, Secrets, and Nobody's Perfect.

Contact sports

Yesterday was a rough day at camp for my kiddos, with both coming home from their respective programs with injuries. My son ran to show me his wound as soon as I came to pick him up -- "My friend Luke scratched me!" he said, all excited, and apparently none the worse for wear. His teacher came up solemnly and handed me an "Ouch Report," in which the injury received an official write-up:

"Your child received the following injury at day care today: scratched on the left arm by peer. The first aid administered was: soap and water."

I guess this level of reportage is necessary nowadays, and his teacher was clearly concerned that I would be concerned, but here's one of those terrible secrets of being a mom of a kid with impulse-control and personal-space-respecting problems: barring really serious injury, you're always a little relieved to hear that your child was the recipient of aggression and not the perpetrator. I assured the teacher that these things happen when kids play and I wasn't planning on pursuing litigation of any sort, and home we went to show off the scratched arm to Dad.

Although a written report seemed a little over-the-top for a playground scratch, how I would have loved to have one for my daughter's camp injury, since it would have shown that someone in charge was paying attention. She reports that she was playing ball with some kids, and she and one boy went after the ball, and the boy pushed her out of the way. The place he pushed her was her chest, and there may or may not have been some intentional chest-groping. It happened fast and when my daughter realized in what body part the pain was, she mentioned to a girl she'd been friendly with that day that the boy had touched her "private part." The friend then ran off to tell a counselor this juicy piece of news, and the counselor promised to talk to the boy. At about that time my husband came to pick our camper up, and so we won't know until this afternoon whether there are any repercussions. She's pretty much made up her mind that it was just an innocent push, and I've tried to reassure her that she was right to speak up while simultaneously pointing out that sometimes when you're playing with boys stuff is going to happen that isn't deliberately private-part touching. These days, with so much training in schools about good touch and bad touch, kids are drilled to be so hypervigilant, I wonder if things don't sometimes get blown out of proportion. On the other hand, with some of the contact between boys and girls I've read about going on in middle school and high school, I wonder if we've taught girls to be vigilant enough.

It's a narrow line to walk, isn't it? As the mother of a daughter, I want my girl to respect herself and not feel she has to let boys take advantage of her to be popular or loved or just a member of the mainstream. On the other hand, as the mother of a boy, and especially as the mother of a boy with impulse-control and personal-space-respecting problems, I hate to think that we'll get to a place of such zero tolerance that a brush in the hallway or a push on the playing field will automatically become grounds for charges of sexual harrassment. The years ahead in middle school and high school are going to be full of these sorts of quandaries with my daughter, I know. But after this week and our vacation next week, she's going to finish the summer at my son's camp, where they give "Ouch Reports" for minor skirmishes and the teachers have eagle eyes. Allowing me to save up some Mama Bear energy for September.

In the swim

Planning on going swimming in a public pool this summer? Here's a story you don't want to read. Just like those "you're not as clean as you think" commercials, the things that other people's children are putting into those pools may make you want to stay ashore. (And I say "other people's children" here with all due disapproval, because of course I've never put a baby in a pool in a Pamper, nooooooooooo, of course not, never happened, nope, not me.)

Of course, this news comes just as we're preparing to go on vacation next week, and the item on the top of my son's "to do" list is swim, swim, swim. Hotel pools are particularly notorious for contamination; according to a spokesman for the Florida Swimming Pool Association, "We're dealing with a population who are enjoying themselves on vacation; they're not as worried about things as they might be if they're in their own back yard." Tourists aren't used to being around pools, the spokesman said -- and certainly, if you've not been around swimming pools much, you couldn't be expected to know that you shouldn't pee in it, right? Or anything else: one health department in Kansas has had to put out an advisory stating: "Don't swim if you have diarrhea." Glad we're not going to Kansas on vacation.

It's a little worrisome to think that my kids might pick up a bug in the pool, but that's not my biggest concern. Certainly fear of sunburn is bigger, since if my daughter's face gets much redder it's going to explode. And then there's the constant nagging fear that my son, Mr. Impulsive, Mr. No Cause-and-Effect-Thinking, will splash the wrong person or steal somebody's pool toy or spit water at a stranger. He knows not to pee in the pool, but does he know not to jump in the deep end without adult supervision? Not so much.

Bank on it

Here's a fairly horrifying concept that turned up on a postcard from my bank the other day: checking accounts for teenagers. "Has your teenager turned you into a human ATM?" the come-on blares, and then proposes a solution: giving your teen his or her very own debit card. You transfer funds from your checking account to theirs, and they can charge, write checks or pay bills online (what bills, exactly, do teens have to pay online? Maybe for all those cell phones parents seem to be buying them.) Do kids really have so much disposable income now that they need plastic to handle it all? Do we want them to spend that much money without Mom or Dad looking over their shoulders? Could be, I guess. Certainly if a teen has a job, it makes sense to give them a way to manage their funds. And if a teen refuses to be seen with a parent in public, giving them their own account is probably safer than loaning them your credit cards.

Yet it seems to me that a major rite of passage is being lost here. I remember getting my first checking account when I went away to college, and it was a Big Deal -- a tangible sign that I was moving up and out and on my own. Does it pack the same punch when you're still in high school, living at home, and your folks just don't want to have to keep passing you $20s? The bank would say that it's a good way to teach kids how to manage their money and operate in a grown-up financial world ... but then, the bank would think this is a good idea, since it's charging a fee if your kid makes more than five transactions a month, and you can't tell me you can give a teen a debit card and a bunch of checks and they're only going to buy five things. Learning how to manage a checking account may be a good life skill, but so is learning how to pay cash, and I wonder if we're not raising a generation of kids who won't know how to make change. My daughter has huge problems figuring money out -- we have to give her exact change to buy her lunch every day, or she has a panic attack -- and I'm sure she would love to just have an electronic account somewhere and never have to handle actual paper and metal money again. Sadly, however, she does not have parents who believe in checking accounts for teenagers, no matter how much our bank prods us. I'd rather be a human ATM than a human Direct Deposit.