Parenting
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Ask Dream Momma: Smoke signals from the unconscious
Posted by Dream Momma on Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 12:30 PM
“Hi there! A good friend referred me to you ... Let me tell you about the recurring dream I keep having several times per week ... In the dream I can literally smell smoke, it seems so real that I actually jump out of bed and run to my children’s bedrooms to rescue them, but by the time I get to our bedroom door and swing it open I realize it was a dream. I will stand there and sniff and sniff the air for a few seconds to assure myself that I don't really smell smoke. My heart is racing and beating out of my chest at this point and I have a very hard time falling back to sleep after this. It is very disturbing. Please help if you can. Thank you!”
Friday, July 27, 2012
More summer reading — for the beach, the mountain cabin or even just your couch
Posted by William McKeen on Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 12:23 PM
Here are some more things to consider for room in your beach bag or your knapsack, depending on your destination.
Short story collections are a tough sell, but nothing is better for the short-bite approach to reading than a good book of stories. I've always been fond of the Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever collections, but Alix Ohlin's new book, Signs and Wonders (Vintage, $15) is one of the best story collections I've read in a decade. These are some cracking-good tales — deep and rich as any novel, with twists and turns you don't expect. We encounter fascinating characters at just the moment their will and mettle are tested. How many story collections fall into that can't-put-it-down category? This one does. These are tough, original, funny and tragic, all at once. Cannot recommend this book highly enough. By the way, Ohlin published Signs and Wonders the same day she published her novel, Inside (Knopf, $25). Can't recall anyone being so logo-audacious since that day in 1968 when Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump-House Gang. The New York Times raved: "The SAME Day: heeeeeewack!!!; Too Freakin' MUCH!!!" We might echo the Times' sentiment.
Honky Tonk (W.W. Norton, $50) is a glorious, big book of photographs, so it deserves its own beach towel. Henry Horenstein here collects 40 years of photographs of great country musicians — many of them while performing near his New England home, but many of them at the old Ryman Auditorium or Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. There are classic portraits of Mother Maybelle Carter, Speck Rhodes, Harmonica Frank Floyd, and other entertainers, but the book also turns the camera toward the audience for a loving and leering look at the Country Music Fan. Some of them have hair that defies all laws of nature. It's a fascinating look at that time and a celebration of the closeness between artist and audience in country music. Great to see some of those faces of the old, traditional country music and contrast them with today's bland, middle-of-the-road country singers. There are still great, authentic country singers today, but few of them reach the sort of audience that the manufactured ones do.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The Single Most Important Father's Day Gift
Dear Dad, we need to chat.
Posted by Christopher Dorsey on Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 12:00 AM
Two weeks ago, my dad called and said that my mom’s brother, uncle Jerry, had experienced a mild heart attack.
“Is he alive?” I asked. We’d been down this road before.
She lost one of her brothers to his umpteenth heart attack in 2008. She lost her father to Parkinson’s. She lost her mother and stepmother to cancer. And now, out of the four children, only the two females have avoided diabetes (so far).
“He’s alive and should make a full recovery. Your mother is at the hospital. You should call her.”
Immediately, I phoned and listened to the sterile details. She maintained composure but I knew it was a facade. I knew that familiar voice all too well—that “I’m holding myself together only because I’m the strongest pillar in the family” voice—as her nieces and nephews sat nearby, hoping for good news.
“Was that his first?” I asked. There is no such thing as a good heart attack, but chances of survival are greatest for the first. “Yeah.” “He needs to switch to a plant-based diet,” I responded before I could filter myself.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Why marriage equality is essential for healthy children
Posted by Mindy Stokes on Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:09 AM
The election cycle is gearing up and already I’m experiencing the inevitable: anti-homosexual rhetoric. Politicians are working on getting elected and one of their favorite galvanizing issues is marriage equality. The reason: This subject gets the party base out to vote. The result: LGBT communities are used as pawns — political footballs if you will. Let me explain why this is highly offensive and ultimately hurtful to me, a lesbian, my life partner, and our daughter, who happens to be five years old.
In the last few months, four different incidents, seemingly unrelated, have occurred in my life and the lives of those 3,000 miles away from me. What makes these situations/events mentionable is that they have a common theme: homophobia.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
How to survive FCAT: Tips for parents and kids
Posted by Catherine Robinson on Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:24 PM
The FCAT is here, that magical standardized test that spreads stress around like frat boys spread venereal warts. Educators, students, and parents have to deal with pressures that could make soldiers in Libya feel nervous. It’s everyone’s least favorite time of year, but like that man you all elected governor, FCAT isn’t going away anytime soon.
As a teacher for seven years, I helped students and parents prepare for FCAT with tips that benefit everyone both at home and at school. These should really be part of every family’s routine all year, but when I’d often suggest it, some parents complained that such work interfered with happy hour.
Moms and dads are the most important key to their children’s success. Here’s what you can do to make FCAT time less stressful and more productive.
• Make sure your kids get plenty of sleep. Children, preteens and teenagers need at least eight hours of uninterrupted rest each night, and some need more. So bang your drums or wife quietly. If your kids are cranky, crying or missing relatively easy homework questions, try putting them to bed earlier than normal. It works.
• Prepare a good breakfast each morning. No sugar-coated cereals or soda. Try eggs with toast or oatmeal with raisins and always include some fruit and orange juice. Coffee is unacceptable for anyone under the age of 18. Kids should discover their jittery, neurotic side like everyone else does – in college.
• Pack nutritious snacks, like granola bars, yogurt tubes and cheese sticks. Wholesome munchies help maintain energy throughout the school day. Get rid of anything with high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils and sodium benzoate. Yes, that includes Ding-Dongs.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Autism & parenting for the kinky-minded
Posted by Mistress Erisiana Cherie on Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 6:57 AM
April is autism awareness month. In recognition of this I want to say a few words about what it's like to live with autism.
You see, I'm not just a dominatrix, I'm also a soccer mom. (Literally - I wrote parts of this while sitting on the sidelines at my daughter's soccer practice.) And one of my children has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.
My son (aka aspie boy) will be eleven in a few months but once upon a time he was a wee lad of three or four years old. And at that tender age he was a dedicated artist, decorating any surface he could reach with any sort of writing or coloring implement he could find. With his determination (and monkey-like climbing skills) he even managed to extend his artworks all the way up to the ceiling in his bedroom.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Out in Left Field: Going nuts about peanut allergies in Edgewood, Florida
Posted by Catherine Robinson on Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 5:13 PM
Arcadia, a small, rural town in south Florida, had some trouble back in 1987. A group of concerned parents gathered together to protest the presence of the Ray children in their elementary school. Richard, Robert and Randy Ray were brothers, hemophiliacs and AIDS patients. By the mid-1980s, most of us knew that AIDS couldn’t be transmitted like the common cold, but folks in Arcadia didn’t care about all that fancy, scientific, book-learning nonsense. They didn’t want the Rays in their school. Period.
Locals harassed and terrorized the Ray family, up to and including the destruction of their home. Finally, the Rays left town and raised their sons, and daughter, in a more progressive community. Sarasota welcomed them with open arms.
And so here we are, over 25 years later, discussing Edgewood, Florida. Just a few hours north of Arcadia, this sleepy Central Florida town is in the news for a different kind of discrimination. Recently, parents gathered to protest the presence of a little girl. This child has a severe peanut allergy, and the parents want her out of their school. Period.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Oy, y'all: A clash of cultures at Cracker Country
Posted by Catherine Robinson on Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 7:49 AM
When I can’t talk my mother into the gig, I am sometimes called upon to chaperone my children’s field trips. Over the years, adventures have included Lowry Park Zoo, museums and Cracker Country.
For those outside the Sunshine State — and Godspeed, seriously — Cracker Country is a journey back to the late 1800s/early 1900s, where school groups learn about life in rural Florida, minus all the lynchings and racial slurs.
Walking through the general store, quaint schoolhouse and dignified homes in this old-fashioned village, I met charming volunteers who played different characters. These actors were ancient and weathered, with accents and clothes cracked with age; they didn’t have to convince me they were from 1898. I believed them.
When we stepped into the schoolhouse, I picked up a copy of the sample fourth-grade reader, circa 1902, and perused words like reticule, tallow and peruse. Fourth grade? I could almost hear the ghosts of crackers long gone, laughing at me between sips of moonshine.
For several hours, we toured the tiny community, tasting homemade butter and playing with toys that entertained children before electricity and PS3s came along.
It wasn’t all enlightenment and old-fashioned goodness. When you take kids from a Jewish day school circa 2010 to hang with a Cracker Country crew who fondly remember when they had to urinate outside, a non-violent clash of cultures is inevitable.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Theater Review: Stageworks' MOMologues long on honesty, short on insight
Posted by Mark E. Leib on Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:19 PM
Hearing the audience roar with laughter at The MOMologues on the evening I saw the performance, you might have thought that the play must be brilliantly witty. But you’d be wrong: What the (mostly) women watching this Stageworks show were clearly laughing at was the accuracy of its many descriptions of the motherhood experience, from the absurdity of fertility treatments to the shock of bearing twins.
Again and again, in this earnest, honest but not very inventive show, the four women on stage recall some typical mother-moment — say, judging strangers at playgrounds, or tricking a garrulous child into shutting its trap — and the grateful audience explodes, as if finally someone is admitting that the Hallmark card version of mothering isn’t the only story.
As the father of a small son, I too recognized maybe 20 relevant moments out of the 200 or so that The MOMologues presents, but I didn’t want to shout when I heard them; I just thought, well, how about that, so my experience is not so unique. But I seemed to be in the minority; the audience I saw the play with lustily cheered each recognizable milestone as if the cat were finally, blessedly out of the bag.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Florida State Fair: I thought I'd never go, but then…
Posted by Catherine Robinson on Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 12:39 PM
There are certain things I never thought I’d do, like forget to shave my legs on a regular basis or curse at my DVR when it stopped working properly. I also never thought I’d attend a fair, theme park, or carnival and actually enjoy it. But here I am, getting older, unable to understand modern technology, and who the hell has time to shave every day anyway?
The Florida State Fair has arrived, and I’ve come to accept the fact that I’m one of those people who attends with her kids and pretends not to be embarrassed when they sing along with Ramblin’ Man blasting from the loudspeakers. I tell myself that it’s not so bad; we don’t like fried butter or anything.
That should count for something.
