Livingston, I Presume

Storyteller

We have this red leather photo album on the coffee table in our living room. Though I am not usually one for photo albums--requiring both organization and work as they do--I did put this one together because it was a gift and because I really like the look of the album. Besides, it was pathetic to have someone over who wanted to see pictures from our time abroad and have to bring them into my office to show them digital shots on my 14-inch laptop screen. Charming, even discounting the very real chance of injury when they walked into the place.

So anyway, it sits on our coffee table, but given that our social life is...how do the French say it?...pathetique, we mostly enjoy it as a family. Connery particularly likes the last third or so of the pictures, since most of them involve him looking unbelievably cute in some exotic locale. We've gone through it with him (and here's a picture of you sitting on the chair at a Starbucks in Vienna and here's a picture of you in your stroller in Edinburgh and here's a picture of you drooling in Nuremberg...) and he never gets tired of it.

Last week, however, he decided that our plotline was a little lacking. It was no longer enough to give the litany of places and people--there needed to be some characters and some action. Luckily, he was ready to provide it. Here's his take on our album:

This is the story of two sad people, Chip and Nicole, who lost their baby. They spent a long time wandering around Europe, looking for their baby. They went to Italy, to Crete, to Turkey, to London--all over Europe,as it happens--but were clearly miserable, despite the fact that in all available portraiture of the era, they are looking quite relaxed and extremely youthful and well rested. It wasn't until they finally found the perfect baby--right there in Prague!--that they were finally happy. The End.

Not a bad story, when you think of it.

That's what grown-up folk do

I was helping Connery get ready for bed last night when he revealed to me a small measure of how we are shaping his worldview. After much running about and shrieking--in a happy way--he finally achieved buck-nakedness. Thus unclad, he clambered onto his bed and lay there like some 16th-century model ready for a long session with his favorite Renassiance painter. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I'm being a grown-up."

Interesting.

Edited to add for clarification in case of reading by CPS-types: Nudity = Grownups because of the sleeping and the nakedness while in that state. Geez.

From the department of DUH

Via Salon's Machinist blog comes the not-so-startling news that "educational" DVDs for kids may not result in actual Baby Einsteins. Scientists at the University of Washington found, in the words of Farhad Manjoo, that:

Babies who watch the videos are less verbally proficient than those who do not; researchers found that for every hour that an infant between 8 to 16 months old spends watching a brain DVD, he understands, on average, 6 to 8 fewer words than a kid who didn't do Einstein.

As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to be any kind of scientist--rocket or otherwise--to figure out that these income-sucking DVDs are providing valuable time for parents to make dinner or...you know...blog. That's it. Dancing chickens do not a genius make, people. Of the available, expensive raft of "edutainment" offerings out there, we have found utility in only one: A Baby Einstein CD set of lullabies and other relaxing music. That set put Connery to sleep for at least the first two years of his life, while--undoubtedly--sowing the seeds for raw intellectual firepower due to the subliminal hypnotic suggestion of the magical Mozart.

Mozart is magical--music is magical--but not for any debunked effect on babies' brains. It's such a typically American thing, actually, to take something that the rest of the world enjoys on its merits--music, art, architecture--and try to turn it into a tool. We can't just have kids listening to and enjoying music, we have to use it to help them get into Harvard someday.

And now that parents have been told again and again that TV is verboten for young kids, it's easy to see why it would be comforting to think that your kids were actually learning something rather than having their brains rotted. It's all or nothing, baby. The American Way. If you let your kid watch television, you're a bad parent--or so we've been told. So instead of trying to come up with a common-sense approach--Gosh, maybe an hour of Sesame Street a couple of days a week isn't going to relegate her to a life of Gentlewoman's Cs--we try to circumvent the restrictions by creating "educational" children's programming. Now it's not just OK to let Baby tune in, it's actually neglectful not to, so you'd better get yourself to Costco to by that $179.99 Baby Einstein box set.

Maybe this study--common-sensical as it may seem--could be a start to breaking that cycle. But I wouldn't count on it. If there's one thing we Americans don't know how to do (besides take enough vacations) it's exhibit anything approaching moderation.

I could totally imagine Connery writing this

I stopped reading The Onion a couple of years ago, but I'm glad I restarted today and found "Adults Have Misclassified Me As A Handful":

Once you get a reputation for being a handful, everything you do is automatically cast in a negative light. Suspicious glances meet you every time you even think about touching the frame of your younger sister's playpen, and God forbid you come within five feet of a houseplant. You have, in effect, already been accused, tried, and sentenced for actions you have not even taken. From then on, anything you do is retroactively construed as "problem behavior."

I'm pretty sure that if Connery could type, he'd have a similar take on our labeling him as a drama king. I thought this was particularly  brilliant:

Not unlike the proverbial infant strapped into a bouncy-bouncy chair, I am at the mercy of the adult world's judgment, a world in which any protest on my part is met with the suggestion that maybe somebody needs a nap. As if a few minutes of lie-down sleepy-time could even begin to solve a problem this systemic and pervasive!

It reminds me that I have, more than once lately, used string of logic that I can still remember my parents using against me. And I remember hating it so, so much. It's only now that I see its brilliance. When Connery gets upset because he doesn't want to go to bed--even when he's clearly tired--sometimes it escalates into tears and tantrums. Much of the wailing will center on how he is not tired and should not, therefore, have to go to bed. But I have the ace up my sleeve: If you're not tired, my son, then why are you crying? If you're crying, you must be tired!

I can see the gears whirring in his head just like mine used to: No, Mom, I'm crying because I'm not tired and I don't want to go to bed and yet somehow you've tricked me into crying so that you can say it proves I'm tired. Curse you and your logic, woman!

Sometimes it's good to be the grownup.

TV Karts...just say NO F***IN' way!

I mentioned recently that we don't have access to the iPhone in Montana. In Livingston, we've been denied On Demand cable even though seemingly everywhere else in the whole United States gets it. But I’ve come to accept that we’re a small market, and small markets don’t get to be early-adopters with a lot of new technology. Sometimes I curse it, and other times—as happened when I started reading about new, “kid-friendly” shopping carts with televisions inside—I am thrilled to death to be out of the loop.

TV Karts™ —designed by a New Zealand firm—are described on the manufacturer’s site thusly:

Everyone knows parents of pre-school children have limited time and energy, let alone face what many have come to regard as a necessary evil—grocery shopping. Here is where Cabco comes to the rescue with TV Kart™, which helps parents and caregivers to have a relaxed shopping experience while their children enjoy the magic and fun of 'driving' their TV Kart™ and watching their favorite TV programs—without leaving their parents' side.

Even ignoring the truly awkward construction in that first sentence, there are already more things wrong with this idea than I care to count. And I haven’t even told you the most irritating part. The TV Kart™? It costs a dollar each time you want to use it. That means, in addition to dropping a hundred bucks at the checkout counter with the stuff in the basket, you also get to pay for the basket! But hey, it comes with free Child Zombification Unit, so maybe it’s worth it!

And about that TV… I’m not going to rail against parents who let their kids watch TV, since I am one. Granted, we're strict about it, but Connery is no stranger to “Johnny and the Sprites” and the “Backyardigans”. He likes to watch the occasional half hour, and I like to keep up on such luxurious forms of hygiene as showering. I don’t think it hurts him, but I also don’t delude myself that he’s “learning” anything beyond how to sit still for more than five minutes at a time. Besides, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for kids under two, and these carts are being marketed straight to that demographic.

Is there nowhere we can now escape television? It’s not that I relish going to the grocery store with a bored preschooler—it can be very stressful, in fact—but I wouldn’t want to have him zoned out and unwilling to interact with other kids, with adults, and most of all with me. How else is he going to learn about the proper way to behave in public, not to mention how to read labels to make good food choices, avoid slickly marketed junk food and make sure I don’t forget his favorite jam?

I can hear people out there sniffing that if I don’t like them, I shouldn’t use them. True enough. But have you ever tried to explain logically to a child in the grocery store that he just can’t get into that perfectly beautiful cart with its steering wheel, truck-like appearance and magical blue screen? Even without the lure of the tube, my son has to be convinced that grocery shopping is indeed possible without the assistance of one of those “kiddy” carts shaped like cars that are available locally.

According to A Little Pregnant, the shopping baskets are being test-marketed in discount retailers in major cities across the nation. It’s just another reason I’m not always sad that Old Montany is not yet one of those “major cities.” I’ll trade the iPhone for that.

Busted

In an effort to be solid nutritional role models, Chip and I very rarely indulge in sugary desserts. At least while Connery is awake.

So last night, we we were settling in for some ice cream and Grey's Anatomy (was it just me, or did other people feel as if they had been hogtied and forced to watch Addison's new pilot?) when all of a sudden we hear the pitter patter of toddler feet on the floor. Connery sticks his head out of his bedroom (which is right off the TV room) to find his parents in a panic.

Hide the ice cream! Behind the cat! He'll never see it behind the barely 10-pound cat! Why are we cursed with such a frackin' small cat?

"I heard a kind of clinky noise," he says. "Where's the ice cream?"

What the heck?

Is it Parent Blogger Children's Tooth Depreciation Week or what? OK, I have nothing remotely resembling The Dad's trauma, but I do have one chipped front tooth courtesy of the playground that time forgot. One minute you're sitting ten feet away from your child while he plays on the metal horses (who thought of that?) and you discuss your day with your spouse and behold the lovely mountains in the distance, and the next minute you're running up the street from the playground the time forgot holding a screaming three-year-old with part of his front tooth missing wondering why the quarter-mile to your house suddenly seems so damn long.

How does this happen?

In the past, I have expressed a sort of fondness for this playground. It is the kind of place that so should not be allowed in Today's Litigious Society (TM). The slide at this playground is easily 12 feet tall, metal, and completely lacking in the requisite wood chips that normally surround all playground equipment of this generation. It is not a gentle slope. It's high and fast and shoots its rider to the ragged edge of a ravine. The merry-go-round goes faster than some cars I've driven ('67 VW bug anyone?) and is of the style I remember falling off and being dragged around with my elbow trailing in the gravel. And of course there are the metal horses. These aren't the kind that swing on a chain--though those are indelibly etched in my brain from the time my brother took one in the teeth--but they're still far more dangerous than anything available in 90 percent of America. One slip and, well, someone loses a tooth. How cool is the playground the time forgot now? Not so cool. I'm beginning to appreciate the virtue of boring, modern playgrounds.

The good news (for now) is that it is a small chip and does not seem to have exposed any root or knocked the tooth loose. We will see what the dentist says, hopefully tomorrow. I pray fervently that I won't need to know the Montana word for pliers (though it's probably just pliers).

But really, here, it demonstrates yet again the unerring aim of karma. I knocked out my teeth not once but twice as a child doing such brainy things as jumping tooth-first off the back of a couch. How I ended up getting a Master's degree I'll never know. My parents were probably on a first-name basis with doctors in emergency rooms from Havre to Deer Lodge. If there was a way for me to damage my hurtling toddler body, I found it. (See grainy photo at left.) Not to mention the asthma thing.

So tell me, karma. How exactly do I atone for the 5 to 10 years I spent scaring my parents to death without having to be scared to death myself? Is there a chant I can say or naked homeless people I can clothe? Because I'm getting tired of this route.

And now for something completely different

NB: A version of this column appeared today in Business to Business.

Don’t tell Child Protective Services, but I occasionally let Connery watch Monty Python. We watch it on YouTube, the named-in-a-lawsuit site containing more digital video than you could watch in a lifetime, including important and historic events such as the Fish-Slapping Dance.

I shouldn’t be surprised that he likes it. The first song he ever learned to sing in harmony with us was the legendary British comedy troupe’s “Lumberjack Song” because, frankly, how many times can you sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” without getting bored? Besides, the word “larch” is funny without my having to do anything at all.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting to my main point: the delicate place where business meets age-appropriateness. We’ll call it Spamalot for short.

My parents—leading the charge of the multi-generational travel trend among Baby Boomers—have decided to take their kids and grandkids to Las Vegas to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Part of the reason we’re going this spring is that the musical Spamalot—which publicity describes as “a musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail”—is playing there starting next month. (Clearly, the desire to share British humor—or should I say humour--with my child didn’t occur in a vacuum.) We didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition when it came time to buy tickets, but as it turns out, the Spamalot box office won’t sell us any for the youngest generation, which includes my Monty Python-loving son.

In fact, they won’t sell tickets to be used by anyone under the age of 8. Not if you beg and plead. Not if you promise to run quickly and quietly for the exits in the case of child meltdown. Not if you explain patiently that you know the show and agree that there are parts that might be offensive but pledge that you will not sue them for recklessly exposing your child to fart jokes.

It was an interesting contrast for me, since I had only a few months ago called the box office of the Intermountain Opera Association to ask about taking my son to see their production of The Mikado. The man I talked with there was not only willing to give us a ticket for my son but was also actively encouraging about exposing children to live theater—as long as the other patrons and the performers were not disturbed. Fair enough, and certainly a rule we follow whether at The Mikado or Mackenzie River Pizza. We ended up going to a wonderful matinee performance, and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Connery still talks about going and loves to listen to the CD.

I guess you could argue that The Mikado—lacking as it is in fart jokes—is more suitable fare for a small child. That may be true, but shouldn’t I, as the parent of the small child in question, get to decide what is appropriate?

The show’s seemingly arbitrary restriction made us seriously consider calling off the entire trip, a decision that would represent a loss to Vegas businesses of the airfare, hotel rooms, show tickets, and meals planned for six adults and two children. I guess it’s nothing to the booming economy of Las Vegas, but it is a big deal for two retired teachers and their kids who wanted to celebrate a big milestone.

Given attempts to recast glitzy Las Vegas as a family vacation destination, the response we’ve gotten is odd. How much better would it be for them to take the Intermountain Opera approach? Recognize the inherent risks in having kids at a live show, discuss it with the parents up front and then work like crazy to get kids hooked on all theater when they’re young. The Baby Boomers might be the ones buying the tickets now, but that won’t last forever. And in a world in which almost any video can be found with a Google search and a high-speed connection, live performance is going to need all the audience loyalty it can muster.

Fishy, fishy, fishy...OH!

Who guessed I was on deadline last week? You're so smart. That and I was tired enough each night to fall asleep during whatever program we happened to be watching at 9:15. It's pathetic, really, but it's absolute proof of karma. I remember mercilessly mocking my own parents for falling asleep in front of the television. Silly, short-sighted girl. Given my overall tendency toward mild narcolepsy--I owe so many of my college and grad school professors apologies for catnapping in their classes that I'd have to start writing the apology notes right now to finish before I die--I should have known the Sleepytime TV Sandman would come to get me sooner or later. And I'm still trying to decide whether my falling asleep during 24 indicates that I will be toddling off to bed at 8:30 by the time I'm 40 or that Season 6 is just not living up to my expectations. Hard to say.

So we had some big fun at our house last night. Last week, when I was preparing our weekly grocery list, I happened to ask Connery if he would like anything specific for dinner. "It has been a while since we had any fish," he noted. So long a while in light of my irrational hatred of fish, I thought to myself, that the 12th of Never comes to mind. Still, I wanted to be a good nutritional role model, so I asked him what kind of fish he had in mind. "Fish sticks? Tuna fish?" I asked hopefully, imagining a skillful concealment of my own chicken strips with a rampart of for-show fish sticks.

"I was thinking of steelhead," he intoned.

What? All I know from Steelhead is that our lovely and talented friend Robin runs Steelhead Studios. You mean you can eat a steelhead? Can I fry it up and serve it with potato salad? Most importantly, who the hell is teaching him these things?

Turns out steelhead is a kind of salmon, available via overnight express for the low low price of just $74.99. Or, you know, it would be possible to sub in the Atlantic salmon at $3.99 per fillet at Albertson's. Unsurprisingly, we went for Albertson's (which is, by the way, the grocery store with the worst new slogan ever. Albertson's is now CRAZY ABOUT FOOD! What marketing genius thought that up?). Anyway, I bought the salmon fillets yesterday, and Chip prepared them masterfully with a fresh herb crust finished off with white wine. They looked delicious and tasted...well..a lot like fish. I told Chip that he had prepared the least bad fish I'd ever eaten, which he did not take as a great compliment, even though it was absolutely meant in that spirit.

And what of our budding gourmand, Monsieur Connery? He was cajoled into taking a single bite and then spit it out. So much for the sophisticated three-year-old palate. Next time he mentions how I am depriving him of his essential fatty acids and Omega 3s I'm pulling out the Mrs. Paul's. And I'll have some chicken strips.

Hey!

My last two post have been...well...ranty. And that's OK. That's my prerogative. But how about a little less bile and a little more smile? Oh, I've got plenty left to rant about. Hell, I could go on about Jore and school attendance--good God, did he just present an expert intimating that public education was responsible for the rise of Nazism? Find a happy place! Find a happy place!--until unpleasantly black plumes of smoke pour out of my ears. But I'll refrain. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. Instead, here's a little quote-of-the-day, courtesy of the three-year-old in my life:

Connery, upon hearing a particularly twangy and showily patriotic Country song on a report about the slow courtship between the right wing and Country & Western:

"Turn that off. That is not the kind of song that makes some kids say, 'I love it.'"

(Oh, and in a further display of my general trust and love for humanity, I'm no longer requiring registration for comments. Please play nice.)