Rah Rah School!

I woke up in cheerleader mode this morning for my kids first day of school. In my mind, it was my first day of school as well and I had a stomach ache and sleep deprivation to battle in addition to my own guilty feelings for having my kids start at yet another school. On our drive over, my palms were sweaty and I was glad I took a swig of Mylanta before we left the house.

Silence in our mini van comes around only once in a blue moon. If the stars align and they all take a nap on a long car trip, Paul and I will experience a quiet so rare that it makes us uneasy. I could sense that Max and Natalie’s nerves were getting the best of them but couldn’t think of anything that would not solicit any eye roll so I stayed quiet. Paul reminded them it was only a half-day and that he would see them at noon. The tension lifted.

It was a flurry of kids and cameras, backpacks, strollers and lunch boxes when we arrived in front of the school. The parents seemed to outnumber the children and they all knew each other; handshakes, pats on the back, hugs and conversations about yoga classes buzzed in my ears. Our newbie status was confirmed when several teachers walked up to me with that look of pity, you know the one that people give you when one looks like a fish out of water.

As I watched Maxwell march up the steps to his new school, he looked over his shoulder with a half-smile, the one he gives me when he is trying to reassure me, rather than the other way around. He wasn’t in cheerleader mode but he was clearly more ready than I was for the first day of school.

We Could Have Lost Our House

I recently sent a note to the CEO and COO of my employer, thanking them for providing a great health care plan for their employees. It sounds like a total kiss ass thing to do, but I swear it came out of a very pure place. A few months ago, Aidan got walking pneumonia and was so severely dehydrated they admitted him into the hospital and he spent two days on IV.

That wasn’t the first time that Aidan had spent an extended period of time in the hospital. When he was less than a minute old, they rushed him to the neonatal ICU and treated him for wet lungs and what they thought was a heart murmur. Paul and I were scared out of our minds, but also had to take care of his twin sister, Paulina. Eight days later, when Aidan was finally discharged, we had to bring him to a pediatric cardiologist for more tests and more follow-up care. Between my one-month hospitalization for going into preterm labor, the C-Section for the birth of twins, Aidan’s time in the ICU and with specialists, I flinched at the thought of our deductible. Had we not had good health insurance then, we probably would have lost our house.

In a year when health care reform is a bullet or update on every 24-hours news service, not a day passes that I don’t think about what this proposed bill could mean for my children and for my children’s children. Being the daughter of immigrant parents that lived in a country where only the wealthy can afford any type of health care, I have never taken health insurance for granted.

It is truly staggering to think that nearly 50 million Americans do not have health coverage. It takes only one freak accident, one genetic anomaly, one bad cell to turn into the C word for the livelihood of a family to be turned upside down. In the dire moments of a catastrophic prognosis, when all one wants is for those they love to be well, billing can become an even greater nightmare. As Congress returns after their August recess, I can only hope that progress can be made on a sensible health care bill.

She ate what?

I just read an article about the trend of women eating their own placentas after childbirth. I don’t know if it was the combination of my preternaturally strong gag reflex and the mildly strong rocking of the ferry this morning but I nearly threw up all over my neighbor’s Wall Street Journal. The article went on to detail how after the subject had her baby, her husband brought the placenta home in a Tupperware and gave it to a woman who specialized in cooking women’s placentas and turning them into super hormone pills. The placenta lady said business is booming. Who knew that creating placenta pills was a recession resistant business?

For me, this goes against the rules of nature and sanity. I’m no doctor but I thought the placenta is meant to dislodge and be expelled from the body after birth, having done its job of providing oxygen and food to the fetus while still in the womb. Nobody can convince me that saving it and ingesting it is somehow so beneficial for the body that I should fry it up in an iron skillet, dehydrate it and then ingest it in pill form (the article also said that some women drink it in shake format which is just so nasty I could hurl). So, go ahead earth mamas of the world! Get your placental freak on. This mom is definitely going to pass.

Deathgrips and Older Sibling Syndrome

Being the oldest sibling in a large family can really blow sometimes. Yes, you are the oldest, so you get that fleeting few years (or months in some cases) of getting the undivided attention from your parents. But, then the circus comes to town and nothing is ever quite the same. Since I’m not an oldest child, but the middle kid from a family of four siblings, I was always on the receiving end of, “Hold your sisters hand. Keep an eye on your brothers and sisters while I run to the store. Grab a diaper for me. Hold your sisters jacket. Take your sister to the bathroom.” No wonder my brother used to put the death grip on my hand when he walked me across the street.

Yesterday, I saw another oldest sibling caught in the middle of childhood and family duty. I was in an airport bathroom in St. Louis waiting in line for a stall when I noticed a little girl, not more than 6 years-old, carrying what looked like about an 18 month-old toddler. She was holding her like I would my own kids, shushing her and rocking back and forth in the mommy-rock trying to get the baby to calm down. A few minutes later, her mother and three other young children emerged from the handicap stall. Classic oldest sibling scenario.

It did not dawn on me how much we relied on my son Maxwell to help us with the other children until yesterday. I told him I was going downstairs to grab my briefcase and asked him to keep an eye on the twins. He looked at me and said, “You just asked me to practice guitar and now I have to watch the twins, again. It’s not fair. I’m always watching the twins.” There was no rebuttal, no witty remark mixed with Jedi-mind trick flair that I could come up with. I only looked at him and said, “I’ll just be a couple of minutes and then you can show me what you learned at your lesson.”

Yes, Maxwell does get the short end of the stick in many situations but he also gets to go on the big boy rides at Disneyland, stay up later, swim in the deep end of the pool, play videogames, see Marvel comic movies and sometimes even spend the night at his cousins’ house. So yes, I acknowledge that sometimes he’s forced to be the third parent but like all other older siblings, he just has to deal with it, and sometimes, hopefully not often, enjoy giving one of his siblings the death grip when he walks them across the street.

Seen and Not Heard?

My mother often reinforces how loquacious I was as a child by retelling a story about me at the age of three going into a retail store with her and pointing to a woman and yelling, “Mommy, why is that lady so fat?” I’m sure you’re cringing, I’m certain my mother still is, though she seems to get a modest amount of glee from telling the story.

My husband and I have grown up seeing too many painfully shy kids become so clingy, that we’re convinced that their social skills never quite catch up. You know them (come on, you know you do!), they’re the people you get stuck sitting next to on public transport and who immediately strike up an awkward conversation about their bunions.

We’ve made it a point to expose the kids to social interaction of many forms. Paul, surprisingly, is very committed to making sure that we have children that not only know how to talk to people, but that are fearless in social situations. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, if a stranger so much as makes eye contact with my two older children they’ll start telling charming stories about the color of their baby sibling’s bowel movement or start prattling on and on about the scab that they are picking and how they got it.

Now the twins are getting into the act. Imagine a night out having some pizza when my sideshow enters the restaurant. Try to eat a meal while a two-year old boy yells, “Hey! Heyyyyyy! Hiiiiiiiiiii! Hiiiiiiiii!” across the restaurant until you make eye contact with him and wave. Then, there’s Natalie, honest to a fault. We were once in Loews price comparing porch furniture when a salesperson walked up to us. “Can I help you?” she asked. “No, mommy only shops at Home Depot cause dad used to work there.” Maxwell is getting better at knowing when to speak in hushed tones. The other day we were at Target and a little boy was having a melt down in the toy aisle. Max waved me down to his level and said the following in my ear, “What a nightmare, right mom?”

Things sure have changed since the days of children being seen and not heard. I suppose I’ll take all of the awkward and slightly mortifying moments over my children never speaking up.

The Season of Germaphobia

For those of us who are a bit germaphobic, traveling in the summer is a super-deluxe icky experience. First, there is the indignity of de-shoeing in the TSA line that requires us to put our bare feet on the nasty floor. Then, there’s the funky people you have to sit next to on airplanes that for some inexplicable reason have not deemed it necessary to wear deodorant or antiperspirant, even though they’re traveling to a place that they know will be 100 degrees (don’t even get me started on the wingnuts who think it is OK to take off their shoes after their feet have been sweating all day). Finally, there’s the horror of the airplane bathroom.

Whether due to budget cuts or criminal insanity, some airlines have stopped providing toilet seat covers. Isn’t it enough that we live in a world of bed bugs, flu strains named after animals and a seemingly endless barrage of investigative reports (all utilizing black light technology) to uncover the nastiness left behind in hotel rooms? I mean do the airlines really expect us to just plop our bare ass on that flimsy little toilet and not concern ourselves with the thousands of other asses that have been there before? My mom says do the hover method. She has clearly never been in an airplane bathroom in turbulence.

If a surcharge must be assessed for a toilet seat cover, I’m happy to pay. Hell, I would even be OK with a toilet seat cover gumball machine. I beg you airlines to re-install the toilet seat cover holder and provide us with a little bit of the piece of mind we flyers deserve.

Curse Free Zone

After hearing my two-year old daughter say, “Who left this crap on the table?” I approached my husband to see if we could make the house curse free, just for a month. Paul’s response? “No fuckin’ way!” Of course, he said this with a great deal of charm and his tongue firmly implanted in cheek but the truth is, asking my husband to stop cursing is like asking Rush Limbaugh to stop being divisive.

Cursing has been a subject that we’ve battled about since Maxwell was born eight years ago. I’ve argued that you can’t ask the kids to not use curse words when you curse in front of them. As progressive as my husband believes he is, he counters with the oldest disciplinary line in the book, “I tell them do as I say, not as I do.” He tells me that he only uses the F-Bomb once in a blue moon and that crap, shit and ass don’t count because they’re in the dictionary.

So, it turns out, cursing is good for you! According to a study in the journal NeuroReport, “…the F word can do more than vent frustration: it can actually reduce physical pain.” The study went on to say that “…cursing reduced the perception of pain more strongly in women than in men.” For the record, I’m not advocating that anyone start cursing away in front of their kids (I have already hidden this issue of Time Magazine away from my husband). But, in the broad spectrum of things, there are worse things we could do.