My husband’s mother and his aunt recently came to visit us for a long weekend. My mother-in-law has been a fairly regular guest over the years but this was the first time she brought along her sister.

I’m very interested in family history and encouraged the two sisters to share stories about their childhoods. My husband, like many men, has no particular interest in family lore so much of the information was new to me.

I learned that one family member had a baby out of wedlock before that was an accepted practice. I learned that their grandmother was a big, square English woman with a formidable personality. I learned where my husband’s, umm, shall we say, hair challenges (or lack of) came from. Of particular interest was how breast cancer has been sprinkled over the women in their family. Especially since I have three daughters.

Seeing the two sisters together helped me to not only understand my husband and his family more but also to see him and our children as parts of a much larger whole. So many mannerisms, habits, inside jokes, and familial resemblances are shared. Much of who my children are come from their father and his gene pool. One daughter’s artistic ability, another’s goofy sense of humor, their freckles, and largish feet. All things I adore about my girls. All from Daddy.

Listening to my mother-in-law and her sister reminisce about their childhood and their relatives was bittersweet. Stories about failed marriages, deaths, and disappointments mixed in with births, joyful events, and loving relationships. Basically, life.

After they left, I jotted down some of the stories and names in a family history book that my husband bought me shortly after we were married 15 years ago. Regrettably, this was the very first time that I’d ever entered any information. The book records not just factual stuff like birthdays but also anecdotal stories, like how on my wedding night, our reserved hotel room had been accidentally given away. My husband and I had to stand around for an hour in the lobby while our fancy hotel whose name I won’t mention (okay, it was The Sheraton) found us a room at a not so fancy hotel in the area. Stories like that will be lost in a generation, if not recorded.

Here are some suggestions to hold onto those stories.

• Buy a family history book, similar to mine. It helps organize material and gives suggestions. Find one that focuses on heritage as well as genealogy.

• Hold family reunions periodically. It doesn’t necessarily have to be every year. Encourage relatives to share their family history and then write it down ASAP. Include favorite recipes and other memorabilia.

• Take lots of family photos at gatherings. Encourage others to share their photos with you. Label!

• If you start getting really involved in your ancestry, there are tons of websites to help you in recording and obtaining family history. They also give tips and guides in how to write, edit, and even publish your family history.

• Make audio and video recordings of older relatives recounting their history ( click here for interview questions). Distribute copies to other family members.

As my mother-in-law and her sister spoke, one person was mentioned again and again. Their mother, who died before my husband was even born, was central to so many of their stories and beliefs. They’d chat as if they’d seen her last week.

“Do you have Mom’s potato pancake recipe?”

“Remember how Mom used to paint Ukrainian eggs every Easter?”

It reminded me of how important mothers are to their children. Forever. As I watched the sisters talk of their Mom it was evident that she is still, almost 50 years after her death, a powerful influence on their lives.

Imagine how much they would treasure photos and personal information from her life.

-Kay

This week, 20 years ago, people were praying and meditating and pulling for me as I prepared for labor, then gave birth to my first child, a sweet boy who has grown into a sweet young man I couldn’t be prouder of.

Twenty years he’s been alive. Two decades I’ve been a mother.

And now people are praying and meditating and pulling for me again, this time as I prepare to have a uterine biopsy, four days before my 20th anniversary of giving birth.

If she had to guess, my gynecologist, the woman who delivered my third child 11 years ago, would say the one-inch mass she saw via Ultrasound is a benign polyp; I have a polyp in my cervix, which is a good indicator that what is inside the uterus is a polyp, too.

Still, she can’t be sure, especially since my mother had uterine cancer when she was 49, and my father died of colon cancer when he was 57, and my grandfather died of lung cancer, and my sister had pre-cancerous cells in her cervix when she was in her 20s.

And so she has to go in with something Google describes as a curette, take a few snips and send them off to the laboratory.

I’ve asked all the questions I could ask, done all the mental preparing I can do, as I prepare for this new development.

I’ve gathered in a surprisingly wide community of support, to include a Buddhist scholar, who is going to chant for me at the exact time of my procedure. Another friend will play African drums. One of my sisters is setting her alarm to pray.

I’ve also spoken with my two older childen, who have noticed that I’m suddenly going to the doctor a lot. I told them only as much as I thought they needed to know as without scaring them, I hope. They patted me on the back, even as I patted them on theirs, even as my 16-year-old daughter asked three times, “So the doctor is hopeful, right?”

I feel the love, support and hope all around me. I also can’t help but see the irony.

Born into a family with immature and narcissistic parents, I never learned that I was of value until I became a mother myself.

In learning how to care for my three children, I learned to care for myself.

And now, the vessel that carried the four of us to life is called into the glare of dread.

I am fully aware of the many possibilities that will present themselves after the biopsy and the subsequent laboratory analysis, which won’t come back until the second week of October.

These possibilities run the gamut — from nothing to a hysterectomy. A hysterectomy is how they fixed my mother’s cancer, which never showed itself again in the remaining 20 years of her life.

So maybe the worst case scenario is that I have to have all my female organs removed.

And poof.

The cancer, should there be any, will be gone.

As will the origins of my saving grace.

It’s just ironic timing, that’s all.

- Debra-Lynn

Yesterday, I found a note in my son’s folder that he needs another box of crayons for kindergarten. He’s been in school for 3 ½ weeks. Needless to say, I was confused that he used his brand-spanking-new box already. So, of course, I asked him. Here is how the conversation went:
Me: Honey, there is a note in your folder that you need new crayons. Have you used all of your crayons already?
Son: Everyone needs them because the paper is in the way.
Me: Do you mean the top of the crayon is worn down?
Son: Yes.
Me: What do you do with the crayons when the paper is worn down?
Son: We put them in the lost and found.
Me: Why don’t you tear the paper so you can use the rest of the crayon?
Son: We’re not allowed.

Not allowed! What the heck? I’m not buying a whole new box of crayons because the TIP is worn down – that is only, what, 10% of the crayon used??? Something isn’t right here.

So, I say to my son, “honey, you don’t need new crayons, you just need to tear the paper down a little bit.” Well, he FREAKS out, starts crying and then I can’t understand a single word he is saying (despite my efforts to translate the babble!). I go into the craft cabinet and find a brand new box of Cars crayons, which are way cool. He did not respond exactly as I had expected….he started crying even harder!

After I calmed him down, I realized he isn’t crying about getting new crayons. He is crying about getting new crayons THE WAY EVERYONE ELSE IS. He wants to “fit in.”

Don’t we all? Seriously, it doesn’t matter if we’re five or 50, we all want to fit in somewhere.

I gave him the money. Hopefully this won’t backfire when he wants “the” new bike that everyone else has…..

- Lisa

Every serious relationship has one. Certainly, my parents did. I’ve observed it in the marriages of my friends and family. The…ominous drum roll here…bad guy.

Unfortunately, in my marriage, it’s me, especially when it comes to parenting. Basically, I’m a killjoy (find out about your parenting style here).

I’m the one who nixes the dinner out plans because the kids simply have way too much homework. Impulse purchases? Nope, no room in the budget. Sleepover at a friend’s house? Not until I meet the parents. 

My husband loves to glance at me when the kids ask a question. “Well, if Mom says it’s okay” is his standard response. I want to snarl at him, “Do you really think it’s okay for our five-year-old to have ice cream for dinner?”

He also loves to word things so that even when he’s giving the direction, I’m still the responsible meanie. For example, he’ll yell out to the backyard, “It’s 8:00. Mom wants you guys to come inside for bed.”

How about dropping the Mom part. 

Most of the time I enjoy being the parent who is most involved. After all, years ago we decided that I would stop working so that I could be involved with our children full time.  It only makes sense that I would be the one making lots of the mundane decisions. Often, I really do have more of a sense of what to say or do simply because I’m with the kids all of the time. It’s my job and I like it.

I wouldn’t really want my husband to come home from work and change all of my ground rules. It’s natural that he would follow my lead. However, we need to be united when it comes to rules and discipline. Our kids are too savvy for us to stand alone.

My parents were very similar in their parenting dynamics. My father always deferred to my mother when it came to parenting.

True story. My wise guy sister wanted to see if she could get my father to say no to her, so she fabricated an outrageous request. When she was 16-years-old, she asked him if she could go to Florida for spring break with some friends and sleep on the beach. He looked at her doubtfully, but responded, “Well, if your mother says it’s okay.” 

Upon hearing this, my mother was appalled. She asked my father, “Do you really think it’s safe for a 16-year-old teenage girl to travel hundreds of miles away with her friends and sleep on a beach?”

He replied, “Of course not. But you know more about raising kids”.

Now both my father and my husband are stand up guys. My mother was lucky and I’m lucky. Hard working, wonderful, loving men. So what’s story here?

Here’s what I think. They don’t want to be the bad guy. They want all of the glory and kudos that goes along with being the good guy. And they just love their kids so stinkin’ much. 

However, I have no doubt that if something had happened to my mother, my father would have changed his tune.

And I have no doubt that if something happened to me, my husband would transform himself overnight into “the bad guy.” My kids would hear things come out of his mouth that they’d never heard him say before.

“Time to do your homework…

“Those shorts are too short…

“You can’t wear makeup to school…

“… because Daddy said so.”

-Kay

My husband and I are the soccer parents from hell.

This isn’t because of anything we do. You will NEVER, but NEVER see me running up and down the sidelines like a crazy woman: “Mark up! Get the ball outa there! Offsides! What is wrong with you?”

Nor do we harass the coach like I see other parents do: “Benjie should be playing midfield. Benjie shouldn’t be playing midfield. Our son would be a better soccer player if you were a better coach.” (See soccer-mom-club-.com for a link to a real-life story about soccer parents gone wild, which is different than soccer parents from hell.) We certainly don’t sit on the sidelines, boasting about our 11-year-old Soccer Stud: “See little Benjie there? I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t the next Ronaldo.”

No, our status isn’t because of action.

It’s because of inaction. It’s because we forget to take our son to practice, then leave him there 15 minutes past quitting time because one parent thinks the other is picking him up.

It’s because we forget when the games are, and when we do remember, we are almost always the last ones there. The other day, we had not only our son in the car, but also the STARTING GOALIE for a VERY IMPORTANT GAME, and we were 20 minutes late because we couldn’t find the field, even though the coach e-mailed directions five times and everybody else managed to get there on time.

We are the parents who make the coach think really hard about retiring, the ones who always forget to pay our fees, who can never figure out how to download the applications, whose son’s shirt is the only one with chocolate ice cream stains on game day.

When the soccer coach’s son had a birthday party two weeks ago, we forgot to take our son. The next week there was a team bowling party. Guess who showed up late, in the middle of the first game?

What is wrong with us, I don’t know, and I keep waiting for the coach to fire us, which he doesn’t and probably never will because – thank God – our son is a valuable contributor to the team.

The parents are not the team. We must all remember that.

Still, because I like to consider myself a pretty good citizen of the world, because I am not being a good citizen of this team, not to mention role model, because I can’t seem to keep myself from being the soccer parent from hell, no matter how many calendars, including my online calendar and even on my hand, that I write “Soccer game today!!” I search for the silver lining.

And here it is: With me and my husband on the team, all the other parents get to feel pretty good about themselves.

With us dragging up the rear, they get to feel downright perfect.

Even if they’re a little later than usual to the game, they know they can always look over their shoulders from their little portable chairs and say, “Here come those Hook slackers.”

Ah. I feel better now.

- Debra-Lynn

P.S. Read this article on the Top Ten Things Soccer Parents Should Do

A few years ago, I realized how much food was NOT being consumed in my home. This big “A-HA” made me rethink dinner.

Aside from the annoying job of having to plan, purchase, cook and clean up dinner EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, it is even harder to make dinner one tiny notch above…well…boring.

One thing I do (which I suspect my friends admire, but most certainly razz me about) involves planning each meal BEFORE I go shopping. I found it saves me a LOT of money each week (because it prevents wasted food and it minimizes the number of times I need to drive to the grocery store).

So, here’s what I do. First, I have an overall plan. For example, Mondays are always chicken; Tuesdays are always some sort of beef roast; Wednesdays are always pasta….get the picture? OK. So then I take a moment to figure out what the heck I want to DO with the chicken on Monday and what side dishes I want with them.

To come up with ideas (and by all means, I do not follow these recipes step by step), I go to the  Food Network website, type in “chicken,” and then, of course, I click the “easy” button. Neat ideas pop-up and so I click through them.

This week, I found a great recipe for Garlic-Lime Chicken with Olives. Granted, it was a really nice recipe and it looked delicious. However, Monday came and we got home late. So, the creative plans I had for making a great meal had to be modified a tad [like most things when you’re a full-time working mom of two kids. You gotta adjust and manage].

So, the Garlic-Lime Chicken with Olives, turned into Garlic Chicken with Italian spices. Faster to figure out and it was gooooood. I think it was good because it was different. We tend to make the things we know, ya’ know? It’s easy to make baked chicken with lemon sauce because you’ve done it a million times. But it is worth venturing out and trying new combinations without making it a “task.”

Just add a twist (or delete one) from a recipe you’d like to try. Not only is it fun, it FEELS more organized and less wasteful for me. I like that.

Try it! Seek out new tastes. Introduce your kids to new tastes….it is worth a try for a week or two.

Tonight, I’m trying Panko Parmesan Crusted Chicken with Wasabi Tomato Sauce….doesn’t that sound great!! Wish me luck!

- Lisa

Even when I was a young girl, I knew that someday I wanted to get married and have children. I pictured going to my mother’s for Sunday pizza and my kids having sleepovers with cousins. I assumed my children would have close relationships with extended family. Just like I did.

Life is funny though.

I married a local boy. So far, so good as far as my plan went. Then we decided to move from New York to California so that my husband could attend Cal Arts and further his career. It would only be for two years. What an exciting adventure for a couple of newlyweds, and we’d still have plenty of time to move back East and start a family.

We rented a moving van, loaded up all of the wedding gifts, and drove West confident (as only young, childless people can be) that once we arrived in California, we’d find a job for me and a place for us to live.

Well, California was good to us. I found a great teaching job and the two years flew by. Then my husband was offered an artist position at Disney Animation Studios. This was a great opportunity and a lifetime dream for him, but definitely not part of my plan. After much thought, we decided to accept the job offer and stretch our adventure out for a few more years.

Ten years and three beautiful daughters later, we felt like it was “now or never” so we finally moved closer to all of those relatives. Not quite NY but much, much closer. We landed near Cleveland and my husband replaced Winnie The Pooh at Disney with The Care Bears at American Greetings.

So, what about my hopes for my children having close relationships with extended family? Remarkably, that part of my childhood plan did happen as I’d hoped. Despite the lack of physical proximity, my kids have wonderful, loving relationships with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Here are my parenting tips for creating those bonds whether you live 3,000 miles away or up the street from your extended family.

• Display lots of framed pictures of your family or even snapshots on your refrigerator. Make sure that everyone is represented. Photo calendars made with family pictures (easy to do with Photoworks) are also great. When my oldest wasn’t yet two-years-old, she could accurately point to each of her numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents when I said the corresponding name.

• Put pictures in a Who Loves Baby? Photo Book or even in the free album you receive when you get photos developed. Let your child carry it around and “own it.”

• Put family photos on your screensaver as a slide show. My almost two-year-old niece, Sofia, has this at her house and calls it “her movie.” I love that she is forming an attachment to me even though I don’t see her as often as I’d like.

• My sister sings a made up “Love You” song with Sofia each night before bed. The words are “Grammy loves Sofia, Aunt Amy loves Sofia” and on and on. Sofia never leaves anyone out.

• Call about the big stuff and the little stuff. If my daughter wants to call Aunt Katie to tell her she lost a tooth, I encourage it. We also all call anyone celebrating a birthday. It’s a treat to be the center of attention for a whole day. It makes kids and grown-ups alike feel loved.

• Older nieces and nephews keep in touch through e-mail. They enjoy having their own addresses and send each other messages and eCards.

• Be creative. I ordered a subscription to Wild Animal Baby for Sofia so that each month when she receives it my sister can say, “Oh, look what Aunt Kay sent you! She must really love you.”

And I really do.

-Kay

It was Old Home Night at the high school, also known as Open House, when parents of high schoolers get to see who among us is aging quicker and graying faster; who’s lost pounds and who’s been sneaking Rice Krispie treats; whose husband is not at the Open House but rather is a lout sitting at home watching football highlights; and which couples are collective outcasts because neither the mom, nor the dad, showed up at Open House.

There is another reason for Open House, of course, that is to meet the teachers my 11th-grade daughter will be spending the next nine months with. This is one meet-and-greet that almost always ends up being a good experience, as this particular high school usually hires mature, top-notch teachers who place a strong emphasis on critical thinking.

Usually.

“The name of our course is Rational Thinkers, Critical Thinking,” my daughter’s sociology teacher said.

Excellent!

“I tell my kids that 90 to 95 percent of what we do in pre-calc they will never, ever use in their daily lives,” said the math teacher. “But 100 percent of what I teach them about how to think, they will use.”

Yes!

“We use naked Barbies on bungee cords,” said the male physics teacher.

At that very moment, Mr. Gravity and Dynamics flashed a Power Point picture of a blonde Barbie from the breastline up, her big blonde hair poufed out around her like a brothel boarder.

“We used to use eggs to teach the theories of dynamics and gravity. But yuk, that was a mess! So a few years back, we found this box of naked Barbies at a garage sale and we said, ‘We’ll take ‘em! We don’t even need clothes! Clothes mess with the flow of air as the doll is being dropped.’ ”

Let me just say right here and now that I am not, and never have been, one of those power parents who marches into the public school, demanding a particular philosophical approach, and it had better be mine. I am no book-burning Sarah Palin. Nor am I a mom who ever banned Barbie from her daughter’s toybox. (For true Barbie-hating moms, check out antibarbie.com, also a funny post by Strollerderby blogger/mom Karen Murphy who grew up feeling overlooked by Barbie, then tried to hide Barbie from her younger daughter.)

The way I look at it, Barbie is part of our culture. If a 5-year-old child really wants a Barbie, I say get the Barbie and then spend as much time as possible talking about the fact that about 99.999999 percent of the female population does not look like that.

But naked Barbies in school? With teenaged boys and girls handling them?

Consider the prurient obsession at this age. Consider the jokes the boys will have to make to hide their embarrassment. Consider the idea of dropping the Barbie to the ground and what that suggests about domination and power. Consider the girls and their embarrassment about a facsimile of their bodies being handled in such a way.

“Yeah, and so where are the naked Kens?” I asked as I was leaving.

That was all I could eke out at the moment. But the more I think about it, the more I think I need to e-mail that teacher a long and respectful note about getting those Barbies out of there. He could use, say, Tonka trucks instead, or rocks.

What do you think?

- Debra-Lynn

My 11-year-old is my youngest child, which means he gets way too much leeway – at least according to my middle child, who keeps a scorecard in her head.

“See how you don’t make him clean his room, Mom?” my daughter says, shaking her head. “It’s always the youngest who gets special consideration.”

True enough, Benjie does get “special consideration” — if that’s how you want to characterize Mama Burnout or Mama Realizing, only after she raises a couple of kids, that a clean room does not necessarily make the child.

What my daughter doesn’t see her brother also get is short shrift.

Whereas she and her older brother had a Strawberry Shortcake childhood, complete with actual strawberry-picking at the local patch, actual blueberry-picking at the local farm, actual pumpkin-picking at the local farm, countless trips to the zoo and the woods, annual trips to the county fair, not to mention regular church attendance on Sunday, this child gets none of this.

As I said earlier, my youngest is just 11.

He still likes doing these things with me (except for church, which is another blog).

I often consider these things with him (except for church, which is also another blog).

But then, because I’m the busy “momanager” of three children, because I’ve increased my work load as the kids have gotten older, because I’m tired, because I’m old, because I’ve been doing kid stuff for 20 years and I’ve been there, done that, I often don’t deliver.

This summer, I told Benjie I was going to try my hardest to devote the last two weeks of school to the two of us doing fun end-of-summer things.

I gave him a list of five things – the zoo, the centennial farm, the nature museum, the water park, and biking on the trail. I told him to choose two. He chose the zoo and the nature museum. He was particularly excited about the zoo.

Guess how many we did?

Zero.

On the day before school started, with my guilty conscience working double-time despite the fact that I had work deadlines and was in the middle of a bathroom renovation, I took him putt-putting about six minutes from our house.

The whole thing, from the drive in the car, to the 18 holes, to the ice cream, lasted 49 minutes.

It nonetheless appeased him, particularly when placed in context with the monologue I delivered about how I really wanted to devote all this time to him at the end of the summer, but how my schedule got upturned and got the best of me.

But it didn’t appease me.

My words rang hollow in my own ears and continue to ring hollow two weeks after the start of school, which is why I decided just yesterday to drop a couple of big things from my schedule.

These schedule hogs include a writing class that I thought I really wanted to take, that I really thought I could make time for, that was instead taking up all my extra head space and ruining my list of priorities, to include being the mother of a young child who still likes doing things with me.

I dropped the class, then made a little note on my Thursday calendar.

On that day, I will drive to the school to pick up my son.

And together, we will go to the zoo.

- Debra-Lynn

Today I met a young man at my local grocery store. He was the cashier and since I had an overflowing basket of food, we had a few minutes to chat.

I’ve noticed an annoying trend in teen employees recently. Many seem to have a bored, borderline surly attitude. Almost as if I’m bothering them when I get in their checkout line.

As if! Whatever.

Anyways, I noticed from his nametag that his name was Sam. He made eye contact, smiled, and asked how my day was going. Sam asked if my kids were back to school. Is it that obvious that I’m a Mom? Perhaps the juice boxes and fruit snacks gave it away. We talked briefly about my three daughters and what grades they were entering and then I turned the conversation to Sam.

I asked Sam what grade he was in. After all, we had become buddies. He told me that he’d graduated in June and was taking a year off to figure out his future. I wanted to shake him and yell, “That’s what college is for!!!”

Does Sam really think that all of those freshman college students are solely intent on their studies and have their futures all mapped out? College is all about growing up, gaining independence, and figuring out your future (okay, and parties). Sam confided that his Mom is upset about his decision and thinks he is making a big mistake.

Sam’s Mom is right.

I don’t believe I’ve ever known anyone who went back to school fulltime after “taking some time to think.” I’ve known lots of people who go back part-time, squeezing in a night class between raising kids and trying to pay a mortgage. Not easy.

Sam is a good looking boy; lots of confidence, wide shoulders, and a handsome face. I’m sure most teen girls would love to spend some time with him. However, those same girls, four years from now, will not be quite so impressed. They’ll be comparing Sam to young men graduating from college who have impressive plans for their futures.

I hope Sam’s Mom mentioned all of that. Especially the girl part because, well, Sam is an 18-year-old boy. The kid and mortgage stuff probably seem like such distant issues to Sam that it is almost meaningless.

If Sam is working full-time, he’s bringing home about $300 a week. It probably feels like that’s a ton of cash, at this point. I hope his Mom is charging him for rent, food, and utilities, leaving him next to nothing in his pocket. He might as well get used to being broke unless he attends college or trade school.

If I had talked to Sam’s Mom five years ago, this is the advice I would have given her.

• Don’t discuss college as a choice. When talking about college, word it as “when you go,” instead of “if you go.” For my daughters, it’s already a foregone conclusion that they will attend college.

• If you attended college, drive by your alma mater. We’ve done this just to give our kids a bit of our history and also to help them become a bit familiar with colleges. We want to take the mystery out of the whole experience.

• Help your kids to appreciate their strengths. Saying things like, “you are excellent with children” or “ you are very good at fixing things” will help them when choosing a career path.

• Be involved with your child’s school. Go to events, meet the principal, e-mail teachers, become a room mom, check grades online, look over homework, etc. It will pay off in the long run.

• Steer him toward friends who have solid goals for their futures. It’s catchy.

I would also tell Sam’s Mom that she did a lot of things right because he seems like such a great kid. Hopefully, he’ll find his way.

-Kay