Deadly Pistachios

We ended up in the ER last Thursday night after I made my son try pistachios for the first time. Apparently he is violently allergic. We now join other parents as the owners of no less than three Epi Pens and are now enrolled in Label Reading 101 and Remedial Foods That May Be Made With Or Contain Traces of Tree Nuts.

Most everyone I know is surprised that my son has made it to the age of 10 1/2 without us finding out about this allergy. I'm not at all. He's always been a VERY picky eater and, as he is the second child and life must go on, I am frequently the Bad Mom who just lets him get away with not eating something rather than sitting at the dinner table for another four hours (though, usually, not without first threatening to feed him whatever he is ignoring for breakfast). Also, I have never forgotten an incident from my childhood when my brother (who was - and still is - allergic to a LOT of stuff including pistachios how did I not know this?) was forced to eat fish - which he always avoided because he "didn't like it." My father and grandfather had fished all day and my mom and grandma had gutted and cooked all evening and the men insisted that my brother try the fish, which he tearfully did, and then I remember being woken up from my bed on the couch when my parents had to rush my wheezing, puking brother to the hospital.

I realize that some kids (mine) need to be coerced into trying new foods but I've also kept that story in the back of my head and if one of my kids really really doesn't want something I usually don't force it. I believe that kids (like animals in the wild) avoid foods that are naturally dangerous to them.

Now, in my defense, my son eats Nutella (made from hazelnuts) nearly every day, eats peanut butter, and occasionally eats almonds. So when I offered him the pistachios last week I had no idea that he would end up being so allergic. I had no idea that you could be allergic to some tree nuts and not others. I had no idea that I am such a bad mom.

Texts From The Future and Apparently I'm Not A "Normal" Parent

My daughter has a text from the future saved on her phone. It is from the year 2019 and the phone number has a semicolon in it ("There'll be so many phone numbers by then that they'll NEED semicolons!"). Today her friend also received a text from the future; the phone number didn't have a semi-colon and when he dialed it, it was a land-line. Of course, land-lines will probably be obsolete in 2019, but who am I to dispel beliefs?

Maybe a normal parent would point this out. I am apparently NOT a normal parent because I do things like A) contribute to an advice column on the U by Kotex website, B) take skating lessons, C) teach writer's workshops to 4th graders, and D) participate in dance competitions even though I "don't have a background in dance."

So, my question is: what do normal parents do? When I was growing up my mom was a painter and my dad played the clarinet, listened to opera on Sunday afternoons, and did magic tricks at the dinner table so I don't think I really have a reference point. And, is it bad that I'm not a normal parent? Am I raising children that have no concept of reality, or am I simply raising children who will be non-normal parents as well? And, really, if raising "non-normal parents" is the worst parenting I do then I will consider myself a success but now I have to stop typing because I am really sore from the dancing and the skating.

Good night.

How NOT To Raise A Future Mayor

This is certainly not intended to be a defense of Kwame Kilpatrick, but I'm wondering how a man who was raised by public servants (and those who work for them) ever got the idea that HE was the charitable cause that funds from a Civic Fund should support.

Sure, apples occasionally do end up a far distance from the tree. And if that's the case, I wouldn't mind seeing an honest quote from the tree. Why isn't his mother saying "I don't know why he is being accused of this behavior, this is NOT how we raised him and I find it difficult to believe that he would be capable of this."?

But I doubt we will ever hear anything like this from the woman who purportedly told her son he "was chosen" to be Mayor.

Yes, I'm being tough on her, but raising children is a big responsibility. Raising responsible citizens is tough enough but purposely letting your child believe that he is destined for public service and letting him believe that role is an entitlement and not a responsibility is just.....wrong.

Yes, I know. My children aren't out there in the world yet. I've yet to see if the lessons I think I'm teaching them stick. I'd like to think that they will. And I'd like to think that if they don't, I'll take responsibility for not doing my parental duty and come clean about it.

Feel free to check back with me in 10-15 years.

Is this mic on?

I can't tell you what the new Elmo doll does. Is he a stand-up comic, or is that just the theme of the commercial? All I know is I crack up every time the commercial comes on and I hear...

"Elmo just flew in from Sesame Street. Boy are Elmo's arms tired."

"Is this mic on?"

Where was all this witty advertising when my kids were small? When my son was in his Elmo phase we had the new Tickle Me Elmo with the secret new tickle spot that only kicked in after a specific date which seemed kind of questionably perverted and a little Orwellian.

When my daughter was 2 1/2 I taught her to throw her arm up and say "Thank you, I'll be here all week" whenever anyone complimented her and that a spit-take was the ultimate compliment. We would have totally dug a stand-up Elmo.

I wonder if he reminds the kids to tip their waitresses?

More bad parenting

Shouldn’t broken limbs be more obvious? These stories rarely make me feel better about my own bad parenting decisions but ever since yesterday – when I dragged my son to an audition (me, not him) then dumped him at my husband’s office so I could go run music at skating team practice all the while not recognizing that he HAD A BROKEN ARM I have heard tale after tale of parents telling their kids to “suck it up” only to find out later that the kid had a broken arm or leg or something.

My memory may be hazy or inaccurate but it seems that when I was a kid it was fairly obvious when someone had a broken appendage. “Jimmy fell off the monkey bars and his arm was twisted around and completely facing in the wrong direction, so of course I ran him right to the hospital.” It seems that broken limbs used to dangle helplessly at askew angles so it was obvious that they needed to be fixed. These days everything looks normal except your kid (who just might be trying to get some attention) claims that “something hurts.”

You’d think I would be smarter; this is not the first time this has happened to me. Same child, same arm. When he was 3 he and his sister were waiting for her school bus and playing their usual game of push-the-sibling-off-the-rock-into-the-pile-of-leaves. He came in crying and didn’t stop for a while but eventually calmed down, though he wouldn’t move the arm. I dragged the poor kid to a grocery store two towns away so I could buy dry ice for the 4th grade Halloween party before I realized that every time something even brushed his arm he turned deathly pale and looked like he was going to throw up. He ended up in a cast from shoulder to fingertips.

And yesterday, well, he let me gently squeeze the arm all the way up. I figured there was no WAY it could be broken; it was probably just very badly bruised. So I dumped him at his dad’s office and he walked around saying hi to everyone with his right arm bent and clutched against his torso.

Six hours later he came home from the hospital looking like this.

And I felt like this.

Pop culture points out my bad parenting

A few days ago I got home from meeting a friend for coffee and my 13-year old daughter, who had been babysitting, asked if she could go to a movie with some of her BFF’s. I said yes because, well, she had been babysitting and school starts next week and I was trying to score Good Mom points. (I believe this is the first time that Daughter has been dropped off at the theater to hang with some friends, but I’ll have to check the records.)

She runs upstairs to call her friends and say she can go and when she comes back down I ask “Which movie?” YES, I realize that this is the FIRST question a GOOD mother would have asked. Especially after Daughter informs me that they are going to see House Bunny.

Yikes. I haven’t done my parental research on House Bunny. It looks pretty harmless – smart girls learn how to wear lip gloss and dumb girl learns how to use a sentence with a noun AND a verb – but it does start out at the Playboy Mansion. My only consolation is that one of the attending BFF’s has a mother who is even stricter than I am and if her kid is going then I’m not going to backtrack and be the Movie Nazi.

I really haven’t thought too much about it until I was flipping through Entertainment Weekly this morning and came to a one-page story on the styling of the girls in House Bunny and saw that Katharine McPhee and Rumer Willis are two of the “stars” of the movie.

Dammit.

I have to be honest. We live in a fairly affluent area; my daughter has an iPod, and a cell phone, and a laptop. And because my husband works in the media our children have been exposed to some pretty decent perks – suites at sporting events, the occasional front row seat at a Disney musical. They are fairly spoiled. But I am NOT ready for the why-can’t-you-get-me-a-part-in-a-movie-or-let-me-audition-for-a-reality-show-so-I-can-have-a-career-in-Hollywood onslaught that movies like House Bunny are sure to elicit.

Why, oh why, do you have to do this, filmmakers? Are there not enough cute Midwestern girls who have quit school and moved to L.A. to work the second shift at Denny’s so they can audition all day to fill your casting requirements? And I can’t even imagine the tension when the actresses are all sitting around between takes, smoking their cigarettes to stay skinny, and one of them asks Rumer how many times SHE had to sleep with the producer to get the role and Rumer says “Uh, none.” At least she had to wear the back brace, which only seems fair.