Raising Kids is Not Combat: Military Wisdom for Summer

Do you ever find notes you jotted on bits of paper that make you question your sanity? No? In our house, they hide in neglected bill piles that jolt you awake at 5:23 a.m., dripping in late fee sweat.

There I was, on a caffeine fueled quest for order, unaware of a small, folded scrap of paper covered with pencil scribblings. It sat quietly a few layers down, under a coveted Webkinz log-on code (save that), the dreaded orthodontist’s card (call them) and the, ugh, school medical forms (fill out).

It didn’t stop me at first. Trash or file? On one side, it listed my daughter’s height, weight, BMI and related percentiles. Geez, she’s a skinny wonder. On the other, what did I write here?

“Reg prac of stillness. Relax thru muscle rlxtn. Stress – What r your choices? Stay calm? Lets get help without being critical. Ok to disagree. How to solve + have time. Mnge emotions. Awareness abt others feeling. Leadership:  Case study. Raising Kids is Not Combat. But we can learn from the military.”

Lordy, where did I get this gibberish from? I don’t remember going to a seminar on Zen Wisdom for Wacked Parents.  I don’t do motivational boot camp exercise classes, either.

Finding this on Day 2 of summer vacation was kismet, it turns out. Day 1 of summer at home with our kids and their friends left me so exhausted that I passed out in my unfolded laundry of pile after dinner.

Did I just write “laundry of pile”? See. I am losing it. On Day 2. And I love having our kids home for summer. I just need a plan of attack. Plan of attack? Wait! That paper said:

“Raising Kids is Not Combat. But we can learn from the military.”

That’s where I’ll find our summer mojo – from the military! Great! We’ll start each day with calisthenics. The children will push toys up the stairs, do 25 jumping jacks and survival roll down the stairs with dirty dish bombs.  Then we’ll form platoons and attack the laundry of pile in waves.

What else does the military do? Having exhausted my Quaker supply of pacifist military knowledge from childhood, I turned to the mother of all military information sources, the Internet.

“There is no problem that cannot be solved by the use of high explosives.”

That’s how we’ll handle the toy room!  And their bedrooms! And the kitchen! And….boredom, the real summer enemy!  The boy platoon will love this.

Military wisdom does help! It even has pointers on sibling rivalry:

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. “

Thanks, Winston Churchill.  He must have been thinking about moms when he said that.

Here’s another goodie: “I have not yet begun to fight.”  John Paul Jones was a middle child, I just know it. 

What do we do in the aftermath of battle, though? Let’s check with the ancient Chinese guru of military strategy, Sun Tzu, for guidance:

“Do not interfere with an army that is returning home. “

I didn’t know that Sun Tzu's wife drove an eight seater chariot with automatic sliding doors home from the pool. Wow.  Maybe I can use tranquilizer darts to quell an uprising. Ice cream melts too quickly.

Last thoughts? Here’s one from that brilliant, military satirist, Oscar Wilde:

“Always forgive your enemies--nothing annoys them so much.”

That’s a perfect moral lesson for lunchtime banter. Surely, this will lead to the “reg prac of stillness” and help me “mnge emotions."

"What r your choices?”

Marge Ponders

© 2010

Photo Credit:

Rather Fly with Icarus?

Have you flown lately?  We did.  They had us do everything ourselves except sprout wings. 

Let's face it, flying is confusing when it isn’t terrifying or uncomfortable.  Airlines now offer more choices than Billy Bob's Buffalo Buffet.  Talk about six sigma-ing your business model to optimize strategic product modalities.

It starts with ticket buying. Tickets cost one price, unless you want a seat that fits or to take off and land one time each way. Try to stay Saturday, don’t fly Friday and, above all, don’t talk to a human ticket agent -- airfares double.

Prices also soar if you fly “legs” to and from different airports.  Ick.  Listen up, airline people: we who fly don’t want to think about body parts unless we are trying to fit our legs under a seat. Then, we want to hear about empty exit rows.

Fat chance. Airlines won’t “release” exit row seats until flight time when someone tall, large or ahead of you in line shows up.

News flash, flight folk:  we non-troll sized people don’t fit in the cattle car seats either.  I know that first hand after being startled by a brown thing squished in the side of my seat.  It was my leg.  In brown pants.  It didn’t seem that fat when I boarded.  In that sausage maker seat, it looked detached.  People who fly don’t want to think about detached things, folks.

Which brings me to the First-Class-Business-Human seats we herd past when boarding.  Who are those guys reading too intently?  Oh.  They’re working guys. They fly so many “legs” that they get seats that fit.  Of course.  If Firsters drop dead from deep vein thrombosis, airline profits will plummet.  Firster seats cost four to six times more than our girdle specials.

You don’t just pack and go to the airport anymore. You check in on-line, print boarding passes at home and leave them on the counter when you rush out.  Don’t worry!  The automated airport kiosk will spit out new ones if you survive Russian parking roulette.

Do you park in Timbuktu or “on site” nearer the far away departure gate?  It doesn’t matter.  Your car will hide from you as soon as you leave.  By the way, Level 2 does not have 243 spaces open.  Thanks to resurfacing on Level 3, Level 2 has none. 

Congratulations, you’re in the terminal!  Please pay $25 to check your suitcase. Oh.  It is a carry-on when you sit on it and hold the sides.  That purse and lap top are two carry-ons, though.  No?  Your purse sure is an, ugh, grunt, lap top case.

Onto security -- no problem unless you wear clothes and shoes.  Next time, try beach attire.  Pull the towel off, toss your flip flops in the bucket and run through singing Beach Boys tunes!  We’d like some sand for our bare feet, though.  A little volley ball would pass the waiting time, too.

To the gate! Walk/run, ride the sidewalk or roller blade both miles there – just hurry!  Ok.  Sit down long enough to panic about not eating for four airborne hours.  Grab something soggy from a real cafeteria and run back, they’re boarding!

Boarding should go smoothly after everyone shoves their fat carry-on bags in the overhead. Sit, buckle up and…pay $6 to watch a movie and $5 to drink your way through turbulence.  No cash?  Visit the ATM machine in the rear.  It’s next to the tuna fish sandwich vending machine which does not dispense martinis.

No martinis? That’s it. Get the wax and feathers. We're flying with Icarus.

Marge Ponders

© 2010

Photo credit:  sfPhotocraft

Wake Up! The Dog Just Bit You!

Ok, who invented modern alarm clocks? Please stand up. I am talking to you. You are going into time out. Right now. 

Thanks to you, I’m exhausted. Our horrid alarm clock woke me up 147 times in the past twelve days. Why? Because my husband is travelling and the clock knows it.

In our house, the alarm clock works for my husband. It won a work to rule order against me after I yanked it out of the wall plug last year.

I had my reasons. First, this clock is dumber than an anaerobic one-celled amoeba. It doesn’t tick or tock. It whirs. It doesn’t know “off” from “on” from “go to h-e-double toothpicks.” All of its buttons are pictures and the pictures make no sense.

One picture button is a circle with half a line sticking out of the top. When I’m awake, it resembles a caramel apple. But I usually look at it when I’m horizontal, blind and frantic to stop a pulsating buzzer sound. Upside down and blurry, that button looks like a plumber’s crack, something I don’t want to see in the morning and smack with my hand.

There’s also a bar with a line through it and buttons with “1” and “2” in circles on them. I don’t know what they do. I think you hit the bar if your heart flat lines in response to sudden machine gun speed beep sounds. If it’s my husband flat lining, the clock calls 911. For me, well…

Every house has its wake up mojo. In ours, we need an anticipatory alarm at sunrise and a “real” alarm hours later. The anticipatory alarm wakes us up so we can prepare to really wake up later by falling back to sleep. The real alarm wakes us up next. If both fail, we rely on the old-reliable shrill wife yelling alarm. That always works.

I guess other people like self-inflicted audio torture which is why all clocks have broken sleep buttons. On ours, I think it’s the (1) or (2). It isn’t the plumber’s crack. That one turns on AM radio fuzz sometimes. Ew.

These picture symbols are on every gizmo nowadays. What happened to words?

The International Electrotechnical Commission didn’t like them. Ohhh. That omnipotent group of geeks convinced gizmo makers to use the “binary system” for labeling “toggle switches.” Evidently, pictures made from ones and zeros are a universal language that everyone, even primitive tribes that speak in tongue clicks, can understand.

That’s it. If the geeks can take over, so can the sleep deprived.

I’m starting a new movement: “Take Back the Clocks.” I want naming rights on my buttons. We demand clocks that come with make-your-own button stickers!  Mine will say: “OMG” and “PUHleeze!” and “Don’t You Dare.” How about yours?

While we’re at it, we want clocks that don’t just wait all night to jolt us out of REM sleep. Make a clock that shoots out sharp, electronic zaps every time the person next to it snores. Now that is a useful invention!

Maybe the next generation of inventors will devise better ways to awaken humans. My swim team carpool kids already have ideas. They would train the dog to bite us awake, dump a cold bucket of ice water on our heads or squirt toothpaste up the nose of anyone who sleeps through the first alarm.

Now, those inventors won’t end up in time out. Just don’t let them wake me up.

Marge Ponders

© 2010
Photo Credit:  Experimetal

Yes, Where the Heck IS Waldo?

The school year is starting to end which means one thing:

Where the heck is Waldo?

You know Waldo -- that little cartoon guy who hides inside spectacularly cluttered scenes drawn by someone who clearly used my kids’ rooms for inspiration. Children love to find him in a book cleverly titled Where's Waldo?  That book has hidden itself in my house more effectively than Waldo himself. The school library wants Waldo back because he has to get lost in someone else’s house next year.

We also filed a missing persons report for Peter Pan. Maybe he flew to Never Land with the pirate that my children trained by reading How to Train a Pirate.  We think they went to practice plank walking and took the book along.

Don’t even start me on Sam I Am. Sam I Am isn’t here or there. Sam I Am isn’t anywhere. We couldn’t find him in the house. We couldn’t find him with a mouse. Not in the car, not on a train. Finding you, Sam I Am, is a great big pain!

Hey, this is kind of fun. What else is missing?

The T.V. remote, of course. We lost the hamster too, but we’re not talking about that.

Why is it that stuff enters the average American household and gets lost immediately, unless it is a bill or poisonous bug spray? Someone should research this problem. I bet they did. Let me check.

They didn’t. Evidently, NIH isn’t funding studies that preserve the sanity of frazzled people who can't remember why they are standing in the pantry. They are studying Brain Activation in Response to Motivational and Affective Stimuli, however. That’s close, I guess. They can scan my brain after I search for Waldo in response to book replacement charge stimuli of $47.53.

By the way, did you know that some books are "library bound"?  These are not recovered lost books headed for the library. Library bound books are sealed with nuclear holocaust resistant material that survives assault by jam-sticky kid fingers. It's not cheap, I guess, otherwise I'd get some for the kitchen cabinets.

So much for getting help from government funded double blind research.

But, look! Plenty of Internet self-talkers like me have advice on how to avoid losing stuff. Listen to this. We won’t lose stuff if we:

- are systematic,

- don’t hide stuff from ourselves,

- are intuitively aware of the presence or absence of stuff, and

- don’t buy or wear trousers with no pockets, multiple jackets or purses with differing internal compositions.

Huh?  Either these people don’t have children or should have to give theirs back. I mean, really, “be systematic?” Thanks. I’ll do that after I chant my standard “This [Book/Car Key/Bathing Suit] Won’t Get Lost” incantation over an incoming household item.  That tactic has worked so well over the years.

Another self-talker encourages us to unleash our inner zen when encountering a lost item panic situation. I love this person. Here’s their advice:

- Don’t panic,

- Ground yourself like an electric plug,

- Hope for a reality shift,

- Meditate, and

- Feel your love for what is lost.

Ok, let’s say that a kid, we’ll call him my son, is missing one shoe 10 minutes before school starts, again. Yah, man, time to release my inner jnana, align my ying with my yang, sip a nice cup of chi before I feng my last shui and yell at the top of my lungs:

“I AM GOING TO GLUE THESE SHOES ONTO THE BOTTOM OF YOUR FEET ONCE I FIND THEM!”

Then, I will join a double-blind study on the care and feeding of library books.  But first, I have to find that what's-it in the pantry. 

Marge Ponders

© 2010
Photo Credit:  Candid

Fabulous Flab and the Cool Parents

No, this is not the name of a new, middle aged rock band.  It’s the dawn of a new era! 

Flab is healthy and parents are cool! My newspapers said so. I love my newspapers, note the use of the plural. Yes, I read more than one paper, delivered to my driveway and carried in by me wearing a flab concealing bathrobe. Reading newspapers can start your day with such a happy spark.

Some brilliant scientists have concluded that flab is fab, according to yesterday's paper. Medical people call it “subcutaneous surface fat.”  Turns out, it’s fine in the gluteous region, near the innominate bone or stacked on your pleuron.  If you have corpulescent viscera in the abdominal section, however, that’s not so good.

Isn’t that happy news?  What?  You don’t get it? 

Let me translate:  The safety padding we keep on our rumps in case we fall out of the minivan door when rolling through pick-up is a-ok.  No problem with hip and thigh ballast either.  It keeps us upright during gale force shopping sprees.  Upper arm flab is fine too, unless it creates excessive wind resistance in tennis. 

Belly fat is still a no-no, sorry.  Liposuction works I’m told, but this medical talk is making me queasy.  Back to the news.

Flab makes you younger too!  Well, it won't actually make you younger (unlike chuckling at my blog), but flab makes you look younger which, let’s face it, is all we care about.  A little flab poofs out wrinkles.  That sure beats collagen injections.  

Now we can carb up guilt free!  Those diets were unbearable.  How much lettuce wrapped air can a person eat?  I was turning into a yogurt covered alfalfa sprout while not getting skinny last month.  What?  Yogurt has carbs in it?  So that’s why I couldn't shed my subcutaneous gluteal layer.  I’m so informed now.

This isn’t the only great news in my paper newspaper.  Check this out:  Teenagers think parents are cool!  Yes, 75% of 12 to 17 year olds like their parents.  This astonished even the reporter, who seemed to be thinking about his teen when he wrote the following headline:  “TV Finds Teens Actually Like Parents.” 

Evidently, teens who act on TV act like they like their fake TV parents.  Real parents with real teens really watch these shows which, according to scientists, means parents and teens like each other too. 

This is revolutionary!

I’m sure the scientists excluded any bias that might come from things like unfettered access to parental credit cards or car keys.  Newspapers don’t report biased studies.  Let’s see.  

Oh, maybe not.  Kids like us because we parents “cherish the child” while dropping gifts on them from our helicopters.  There is some technical language too:  we are “Yes Parents” raising “millennials” by avoiding any “exertion of parental control” due to a “societal realignment” less conducive to rebellion than prior generational shifts.

I don’t think that’s a compliment.  Let's not translate it. 

The good news is the core of this newspaper article, anyway.  Real kids like real parents, even teens.  As a parent of future teens, I’m going travel through today with a happy skip in my step.

Except that my flab may flutter.  Ugh, queasy again.   

Well, I am going to return to over-eating and under-exercising, at least, because flab’s fab and my paper newspaper said so right here.  Wait.  Oh dear.  It says that I have to keep exercising an hour a day.  And eat healthy too. 

What happened to cutting the bottom of an article off for lack of space?  Paper newspapers are supposed to be shrinking, even though my mid-driff isn’t.  They could have cut off the downer conclusion at least in homage to loyal bathrobe readers like me. 

That’s it.  I’m making my own news.  I’m starting a middle aged rock band.  We'll  be the The Flab Fabs and Their Fat Flat Screens.  You can find us in the Entertainment section.  

Marge Ponders

P.S.  Great news! Chocolate is a vegetable!  See page B9.  

© 2010

They Lived in Social Media Harmony Ever After

Social media rocks.  It is the trendy, edgy techno rage of our time.  This can’t miss phenomenon has transformed marketing, fueled tectonic change, toppled empires and turned the word “viral” into something good.

Not that I noticed.  Until last weekend, I thought social media was a pseudonym for gossip columnists.  As in, she’s in social media and I’m a domestic engineer. 

This shouldn't surprise me.  I’m still trying to figure out what happened to bell bottom jeans.  My purple bell bottoms and red knit hat were the cutting edge, bees-knees look for at least a decade.  Yes, I used to be trendy. 

The reality of how non-trendy I am socked me in the solar plexus at the Erma Bombeck humor writer’s conference last weekend.  I went hoping to learn secret joke theory and survive my first stand-up comedy performance. 

I did learn things like pain through laughter is…plaughter.  Ba-dump bump.  The letter K is funny.  K K K K.  Seventeen is funnier than 20.  Forty is not funny at all, but I knew that.   

The conference was great, even if I smacked into a paradigm shifting web revolution.  No one minded that I was a techno loser Brady Bunch throwback.  Sure, I have my blog in a box, but, puh, that’s like riding a tricycle on the social media playground.

Turns out, my platform is invisible.  My brand is not congruent.  My content is listless and I attract fewer page views than stares generated by my red knit hat in the olden days.  

Social media will change this!   

I rushed home and signed up to tweet like a bird, link like a caboose and friend more desperately than a seventies geek in purple jeans.   

Now, I can not talk to so many more people.  I’ll be packing my voice in the box with my bell bottoms later today.    

I am a little nostalgic about talking, though.  Speaking was fun and it led to so many great movies.  Remember The Little Mermaid?   Disney will have to rewrite that cartoon classic if it wants to capture today’s generation of non-voice communicators.

Hey!  I can help them!  I went to a writer’s conference and groove on social media now!  Here goes:

The story begins with our beauteous young mermaid, Ariel, swimming under the sea with her lobster guardian, Sebastian.  “I want more,” she sings with a bell-like voice, combing her hair with a fork.  Suddenly, dashingly human prince Eric plunges into the ocean in a viscious storm.  Ariel rescues Eric, falling instantly in love. 

She texts her BFF:   “Hottie on shore.  Need legs.  Asking Ursula.  WML. ”  [Wish me luck]

BFF texts back:  “DGTG.”  [Don’t go there girlfriend.]

Gravelly voiced Ursula the Sea Witch pines for the golden days of movie musicals like Singing in the Rain, but can’t break out of evil roles in cartoon features.  If only she had a younger voice, maybe she could be in Glee or High School Musical 17. 

Ariel swims to Ursula’s lair and texts Sebastian:  “FYSBGTBABN”  [Fasten your seat belts it’s going to be a bumpy night.] 

Trembling fearfully, Ariel asks Ursula for legs then cowers behind Sebastian.  Ursula cackles:  “It won’t cost much, just your voice.   If you don’t get Eric to fall in love with you by tomorrow night, your voice is MINE!  MINE!  MINE!  MWA-HA-HA-HA!!”  

Ariel gives Ursula her voice.  Ursula swims off in depraved glory among smirking electric eels.   Ariel sprouts legs and struggles to surface with Sebastian’s help.  Despondent, Sebastian deposits Ariel semi-conscious at the foot of Eric’s beach-side castle. 

Ariel recovers sputtering, wiggles her new toes and reaches for her cell phone .  She texts: “RUT?  ILU.  WBS.  XOXO.  Ariel.”  [Are you there?  I love u.  Write back soon.]

Eric texts back:  “BRT.  TTK?”  [Be Right There.  Tie the knot?].

Ariel:  “SLAP.”  [Sounds like a plan].

Eric, who won princehood by founding a social media empire, tweets the kingdom:  “Wedding tonight.  Main square.  Ariel, the Mermaid.  TTFN.”  [Ta ta for now]

Ursula misses the wedding.  She is performing stand-up live at a writer’s conference.

Eric and Ariel lived happily ever after in social media harmony twittering, texting, linking and blogging...with trendy me. J

Marge Ponders

©  2010

Photo Credit Matt Hamm

iPad? iPlod!

The iPad came out last week! iAm so excited! iCan’t wait to try the swish and tap page turning and the iNcredible apps! Thousands of apps will iMprove my quality of life. iWill do everything faster! iWant one!

i’M lying!

iJust added the iPad to the list of 10,000 gadgets that iAm afraid of. They stop working the moment iTouch them. (iTouch! Hey, that’s another iCan't operate!)

iDon’t know when this iNcredible age of gizmos started, but iT’s safer for me to trek through WalMart without my defensive shopping cart than to operate an iThing.

Yes, iAm gadet iMpaired. iJust got a Blackberry recently, because it has buttons, then learned that no one emails anymore! Turns out that people Facebook, Tweet, twitch or splat each other willy-nilly without regard to my fragile nervous system.

iWas splatted the other night by a long lost friend who re-friended me. Evidently, iT’s not enough to face the shock of our aging at reunions every five years.

iWas enjoying the calm, sweetness of a quiet night with my Paleolithic desk-top computer when, suddently, a box popped up on my screen.

“Hi Marge!” it said.

“Aaaaahhh!” iYelled, causing my husband to come running with a baseball bat.  iThrew my body over the computer and hollered, “Stop! It’s ok! It’s a refriend who splatted me!”

“What?” my husband replied, looking over my shoulder. “It’s called chatting, Marge. Someone wants to chat with you. Just type back to…Pete. Who’s Pete?”

“Gosh, you speak gizmo fluently,” iSaid, deploying my charm deflection skills.

“Mmmph,” he replied and walked back to his chair.

“See?” I said, watching him pick up his paperback book.

That’s iT, I thought! My husband needs an iPad! He has a nasty zero birthday coming. The iPad is cheaper and safer than a mid-life sports car or flying lessons.

iCan buy one of these.  iBought an iPod after sending my child on a disastrous field trip armed with a book and a brand new highlighter pen.  i’M hip.

i’M going to the Apple store right now.  iT’s next to a shoe store so this could be a two-fer. See you later…

i’M back and let me just say, holy Gizmo Batman!

iWalked into the store and there sat eight demo iPads purring like turbo-charged Porshes. Each was about the size of a People magazine double-issue, but with a mini-white screen cover that can show infinite Justin Bieber photos.  Not bad.

i’M cool, iThought, taking a spot between a teenage girl and 30-something guy. I smirk-smiled at my iPad, picked it up confidently and…

…the main screen picture with all of its iCons flipped upside down iMmediately.

“iBroke iT!” iThought. iTilted it left, right, up, down and looked underneath for a button. Nothing iShook it hoping that iNstructions, or at least my fortune (You are gizmo iMpaired), would float up like that magic eight ball game. Nada.

An Apple genius dude saw me blanch. “Just press the home button,” he said and swooped in with his highly trained pointer finger. WHOOSH! The picture magically flipped back.

What button? iSearched futilely.

iAm not picking that up again.  Let’s try an application.  I lowered a shaky pointer finger to my iPad and SHAZAM! NFL Football by Madden launched with the Beastie Boys in full scream.  (You gotta hear this, go to: http://www.ea.com/music/the-official-madden-nfl-10-soundtrack#)

Aaaaahhh! How do iStop this cacophony?? Swoop! Swish! Tap! Nothing! Where is the “x”? Maaaw. iSplayed all five of my fingers out on the touch screen.

“Just pinch,” the genius said, reappearing to magically stop the noise. SHLOOP! “Pinch two fingers in to close. Pinch out, open.”

“That’s great,” I laughed. “Can iDo that with my kids?” He gave me the “huh?” face and handed the iPad back.

Swoosh, zing, flip! Dave Madden was standing on his head again. Stuck again, iMoped like a kid in a dud bumper car. 
Just observe, iThought, turning my attention to the adjacent teen. She hit mega-super-jackpot on some cartoon game. “What are you playing?” iAsked admiringly.

“I don’t know,” she said, swishing deftly to another app.

iLooked around, sheepishly.

Two 70-somethings were tilting their iPads happily while speaking fluent computerese. Words like gigs, bytes and Gs bounced between them like tennis balls. Sheesh.

A wife physically dragged her husband out of the store. Ahhh, something familiar.

Happier, iSmiled at the thirty-something guy next door who was drawing Scooby Doo on his iPad. I leaned in to see. His iPad blurted: “Have you ever been so frustrated that you wanted to kick someone’s a--, like this girl?”

I looked around.  Who me? “Aaaahhh!” iYelled, causing the genius-dude to come running.

“Oh. Sorry. My husband will love this, but he better try iT himself, ” iBlathered.

i’M such an iPlod.

Marge Ponders

© 2010
Photo credit:  Maeve