Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Parents, Patch wants to hear from you on the questions that get families talking. This week we're wondering: When is enough enough when it comes to grade-school homework?
Welcome to "Hey, Mom and Dad"—a weekly feature in which we ask our Facebook fans to share their views on parenting. We're starting off with a question we posed last week on the Patch Facebook pages: Class is well under way for students all over the area. What once seemed like a few minutes of simple spelling and math has turned into a couple of hours of complex equations and formulas. So, we want to know: Take a look at what people had to say and join the conversation in the Comments section. April N. I think 10 mins per grade level is acceptable. For a 2nd grader, I would expect 20 mins to be appropriate, 5th grade 50 mins etc... Sometimes it is going to be more, sometimes it is less, but that is a good ballpark, IMO. If there is WAY MORE…
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
How speeding up slowed me down—for a little while.
My husband knows that my version of Feng Shui includes moving impossibly large objects around the house like chess pieces. I always claim it’s to create more harmony in the house, but really I’m just bored and looking for something to do. The only thing I haven’t tried to move is our grand piano. Let me rephrase that: The only thing I did not succeed at moving by myself was the grand piano. As soon as I figure out how to flip it on its side without the lid opening, it’s gone. A few weeks ago I was up to my usual tricks when I found myself in an unusual situation. I was moving a small bookcase end-over-end up my stairs when mid-flight I got stuck. By stuck I mean I had the heavy object perched at a 45 degree angle, with no means of moving …
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
I thought years of child-rearing, cooking and cleaning meant I could catch a break—even from strangers. Nope, not a chance.
Aretha Franklin brought notoriety to respect. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” she sang, and a nation listened. On Sunday, Dr. Kevin Leman was on TV promoting his latest book about respect, "Have A New Kid By Friday", but I fear that unlike Aretha, he's a few decades too late. Are my kids driving me crazy? Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about some patently disrespectful adults. For me, it’s a generational thing. I grew up in a large Greek family where we were taught to respect our elders and their authority. They survived wars, childbirth and bra burnings. They patiently taught us how to do the right things, and how to right the wrong things. The elders were also great cooks, and at family gatherings, the kids were tasked with the…
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
How I learned the hard way to put a protective password on all of my electronic devices.
Chiot, puppy, murphy, Zhu Zhu, giochi preziosi, chien, dog. That’s what the eBay invoice said that appeared in my inbox from out of nowhere. I engage in quite of bit commerce on eBay, but almost exclusively as a seller of wares. I’m not used to getting invoiced. Must be a mistake, I thought. Until I opened the email, and then I knew exactly what had happened. My daughter had made a purchase on eBay. She’d gone and helped herself to a fluffy-eared little minx of a Zhu Zhu puppy named Murphy. From France. For 30 Euro. That’s like $10,000 right? As I’ve written about previously, I am the anti-hoarder. I have the constant urge to purge and, as such, always have something posted on both eBay and Craigslist at any given time. So naturally I am…
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The only people responsible for perpetuating “The Mommy Wars” are mommies themselves.
I’m sure by now that most of you have seen Time magazine’s latest cover story, with its provocative photo of a nubile young MILF breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son alongside the headline, “Are You Mom Enough?” The photo and accompanying article have bloggers and pundits everywhere lamenting over this re-ignition of The Mommy Wars, in which mommies are pitted against one another based on differing parenting philosophies, breastfeeding habits, working versus staying at home, etc. But in my experience, the only people responsible for perpetuating The Mommy Wars are mommies, themselves. One of the singularly most miserable experiences of my life was when I decided to join a new mothers’ group shortly after my daughter was born. I was …
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
We eventually have to pay the piper for questionable decisions of the past.
Jerry Seinfeld did a bit on his classic sitcom about “Night Guy” and “Morning Guy,” and how the former always screws the latter. Night Guy stays out late and gets drunk and doesn’t care about the hangover because that’s Morning Guy’s problem. You can extend this metaphor to lots of other examples where the Present You knowingly undermines Future You, with Teenage You probably being the worst culprit. I’m sure that there are plenty of people still paying for the sins of their youth with far more exciting stories than I have. For me, the only one that comes to mind is listening to my Walkman at full volume for hours on end, assuming that some kind of bionic ear would be invented to cure deafness by the time I reached old age. Then there was …
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
And, in times of crisis, our friends and family merely role players.
There’s nothing like a crisis to show you who your friends are and who amongst your family will support you unconditionally. If you’re like me, and by that I mean a hundred miles of bad road who was apparently born under the Italian curse of the malocchio, then you’ve had your share of rough patches to weather. And you’ve been through enough to know that the members of your support system tend to revert to prescribed roles when you need them most. Continuing my Autism Awareness Month theme for April, I’ll use as an example the period in my life when my daughter was getting her diagnosis to illustrate: The Doomsayer I will hope for your sake that this person is not your spouse. Unfortunately for me, it was. Our daughter wasn’t just …
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The happiest place on earth turned terrifying when I lost track of my kid.
My daughter likes to run around. Back and forth. Forth and back. In circles. Arms flailing. Hoppity hopping. She will impulsively run towards water in any form, with fountains being a favorite. You know that dog in the movie Up who completely loses track of his mission when anyone so much as says the word “squirrel”? That’s my daughter. Fountain! Pond! Waterfall! Sprinkler! You know where there are lots of fountains? Disneyworld. Where we just returned from after a mostly blissful week spent in their fine parks. You know what there is also a lot of at Disneyworld? People. Swarms and swarms of people that get in-between me and my kid when she darts off. Memo to the world: It does not count as “cutting” when I try to get around you and your …
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
But am I counting the days in anticipation or just marking time until my eventual demise?
When I first entered the workforce, back in ye olde 1980s, the Interwebs did not exist. There was no Facebook or Twitter, no online shopping or eBay, no TMZ or People.com. I’m not sure that we screwed around any less at work than people do today, so I won’t go off into one of those “in my day…” rants. We were just limited to killing time with actual, rather than virtual, people and activities. If I wanted to gossip about people behind their backs, I had to do it with co-workers. Or call my friends who were also in dead-end entry level jobs. You just had to keep your eye on the opening-to-your-cubicle-which-cannot-really-be-called-a-door in case the boss happened by so you could bust out some officious-sounding convo, which was the '80s …
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Explaining death to a child is never easy, but especially fraught for parents of children with autism.
Last fall I wrote about parenting advice columns and how foreign and inapplicable the content was for special needs parents. But even when advice is supposedly specifically tailored to parents of children with autism, it can be laughably off-base. Take this article about explaining the death of a loved one to a child with autism. This one hit close to home because my father died about a year and a half ago. Also just recently my daughter’s BFF Grace, who is also on the autism spectrum, experienced death for the first time. In her case, it was her elderly neighbor Harry whom she barely had any contact with except for when he chased her away from his bird bath. But that didn’t stop her from becoming completely obsessed with his sudden …
S
12:54 pm on Tuesday, September 25, 2012
I have no problem that grade school kids have a nominal amount of homework every night (20-45 min) including math practice and reading. What I take issue with is the "student projects" that become parent projects. My son got a barely passing grade on a fairytale castle in 2nd grade because I made him do it himself. The day before the castle was due, he pulled used boxes from the garbage and I … more ›