It Takes a Village--To Ignore the Ice Cream Truck

One of the best things about our Brooklyn neighborhood is Underwood Playground--a full city-block of great play equipment, shady areas, a separate sprinkler area, and even an enclosed mini-'meadow' place where kids can play in the grass, dig, and romp in a way that has nothing to do with concrete.

I love that I can show up with any combination of children at any time and find friends/make friends...or just let the kids stretch their legs.

You find out a lot about other parents in the playground. I'm a major bench-sitter. People think I've chosen to give my children all sorts of independence, but really I'm lazy and I just like sitting. I admire the moms and dads who agree to play monster, or who invent elaborate and comical ways to push their kids in a swing. How energetic they are! I'm bored by the spotter-parents, the ones who are always underneath their kids, acting nervous and jittery whenever junior's up too high. How humorless they seem!

Another major test involves the ice cream truck and the icee man. At first I prided myself on being one of the moms who enjoyed these things. I grew up on a dead-end street and ice cream trucks were nonexistent. Part of me still finds it magical that a little bus full of ice cream rolls through Brooklyn. I mean, that's pretty great, right? Plus I decided that I'm annoyed by the kinds of people who make hay out of being annoyed by the ice cream truck. 'Can you believe some of our neighbors have tried to report the ice cream man for coming on our street late at night?' I'd hiss. How could someone admit to being such a Grinch? They'd totally be the villain in the movie about the neighborhood.

There were always a few hold-outs. The moms pushing baby carrots and granola bars on their children, while everyone else swarmed, lemming-like, to the curb at the sound of the Entertainer music or the bicycle-horn of the icee man's cart. Poor kids, I'd think...as I'd shell out more money for my brood.

One summer a soy ice cream truck rolled around, manned by a rastafarian guy. The granola folks got off their benches for that one, but there were rumors about drugs and we never ended up seeing the guy again.

It's important to mention that my two older children were always reasonable kids. While they enjoyed being kids who could get treats from those trucks, they also understood it when I said 'no,'--whether that no was based on my having no money with me, or a reminder that they'd had/or were going to have some other kind of treat that day. But my youngest? Not so easy this way. She's the queen of instant gratification--whatever suggestion passes through her mind becomes a desperate need within minutes--if it's not fulfilled within seconds of it occurring to her, she collapses noisily and dramatically. It can ruin everybody's afternoon. So when the weather started to turn towards summer about a month ago, now that she can't be distracted as easily as she could last summer, I started to get worried about the ice cream trucks-to-be.

Easy, my friend Ingrid said, when I said 'what are we going to do about the ice cream truck all summer?'--'just say 'only on Fridays.''

Only on Fridays? Okay. Let's do it only on Fridays.

Is today Friday Mommy? my youngest would ask as she biked to school in the morning.

Nope, I'd say. Friday's in two days.

Okay. So I get ice cream in two days, right Mommy?

Right.

Perfect! Keith, neighborhood dad suddenly visible in the playground those days to help with a brand new baby, pointed out that it was the same theory behind the rat experiment involving randomly assigned rewards versus predictable rewards. Apparently the rats who were given treats at random were anxiety-filled beasts, who spent their days frantically pressing buttons. The rats whose rewards were doled out in predictable chunks were calm and relaxed. He was dead right. By giving in every now and then, but never in a predictable way, I'd created an anxiety filled beast. Poor thing.

No more frantic anxiety-filled afternoons, but rather, four year olds at peace with the fact that the rewards would come, just only on Fridays. Dozing quietly in the corner of their cages, in their nests of shredded newspaper, I mean...playing happily on the swings, in the tunnel, playing bumper cars on the slide...

Now I should mention here that it rained for about four Fridays in a row, so our poor kids hung in there week after week with no Friday ice cream. Because the rule is designed to help with the temptation of having the ice cream jingle repeated a thousand times several yards away from us, there's no real hard and fast rule about having cold treats at other times during the week. Of course the Friday rule is open to interpretation and the decisions we make when we're not all clustered together in the park are up to us. On a recent Thursday, for example, we all decided to cave. The heat was excessive, and several of the children weren't going to be in town the following day. But it was a firm trade-off. Yes today, but no tomorrow. And the kids managed it well. But the best thing is that the tension that used to arise whenever the sick-honk of the icee cart approached, where some of us would give in immediately, and others would cringe and bristle as they prepared their defenses for their own soon-to-be disappointed children, is gone. We're all more relaxed now.

We're now approaching July and I'm ultra-impressed with this whole system. I spend a lot of time wishing I'd known about it eight years ago, but am mostly glad to know about it now. There was one Tuesday afternoon where she just about broke down, begging for it. But I held firm, stressed how much fun Friday would be, and we haven't had a repeat of that. I've always known that psycho-mumbo jumbo about giving kids limits, and how they thrive with boundaries and all that but all parenting advice seems to be preachy and mired in denying them things and I tire of it quickly. Something about those poor little rats really drives the whole thing home.

My Boyfriends

this post appeared on nycmomsblog on June 23, 2008

When I got the news that Tim Russert died I was crushed. I was in the car with my 9 year old son and I noticed that it was the 'top of the hour' as they say in the news world. I had some strange hunch that there might be some new news so I turned on 1010Wins just in time to hear Tim Brokaw say "...moderator of Meet the Press, Washington Bureau Chief..." and my heart sank. I knew what was going to follow, and I was right. Omigod Omigod I said, turning the dial up to hear. As the story unfolded my son said 'oh you loved that guy, right?'

Right.

We came home and told my husband. 'Oh your boyfriend!' he said. 'I'm so sorry.'

What a loss. Everyone's been agreeing all over 24-hour news land and I won't even go into the particulars about how wonderful he seemed to be. But suffice it to say it was Tim Russert, not even Jon Stewart, who got me through this whole Democratic Primary season. I'd learned how to catch him in the minutes past 7am on the Today Show, then switch to MSNBC just in time to see Tim walk on the set, be greeted with kisses and hugs, and then settle in to explain everything with a twinkle in his eye.

I've loved him from a distance for over a decade (and once, up kinda close, when I saw him at a Bob Dylan/Van Morrison concert at the Paramount Theater--the night before the Monica Lewinsky story broke). I love other people too. That's normal, right? Doesn't every married couple with three young children have lists of acceptable 'affairs'--like, if I came home one day and announced that I'd hooked up with Tim Russert, my husband would have had to say 'well, good for you...so proud honey, I know you've always really liked him.' And that would be that.

My list has two categories. I can be a sucker for the latest smokey Hollywood hunk--Robert Downey Jr, in Ironman, anyone? After Black Hawk Down Josh Hartnett was high on my list, now he's no where near it. Jake Gyllenhaal was on it until I discovered Peter Saarsgaard.....and there was the time I left the movie Serendipity with such a crush on Jon Cusack it occurred to me that the TRUE serendipitous event was that I'd gone to see the movie and realized that I was meant to spend the rest of my life with him. I fall hard and fast and then I move on.

And then there's the brainy clever-man part of my list. Tim Russert, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher (when he isn't bashing breastfeeding), David Sedaris. That list doesn't change too much--if any of these men ever found me fascinating it would be more flattering than anything else I could imagine, given how sharply observant they are.

My husband is much steadier in the celebrity crush department. If he were to confess to making out with Isabella Rossellini in an elevator somewhere, or if he decided to leave me for Jody Foster--I've already agreed to smile and be happy for him. Those have been his two faves ever since I've known him. In fact, those choices helped him win the 'best husband ever 'award at playgroup a few years ago (a fact I've never shared with him). The subject of who our husbands had crushes on came up (perhaps I'm the one who brought it up?) and I totally won. Seems everyone hears those two women's names and thinks 'oh, classy guy, good taste.' Sally's husband lusts after Pam Anderson? Gross! Marissa's guy digs Cindy Crawford? Bo-ring!

I'm so sorry to have lost Tim Russert; I was really looking forward to going through the elections with his enthusiasm and grace and generosity and curiosity. But he was on my clever-guy list, and that's proven to be a pretty permanent list. So in a way, I suppose, he'll be with me forever.

Barack Around the Block

this originally appeared on nycmomsblog on November 6, 2008

I'm not sure I'll ever forgive myself for staying in bed watching TV instead of joining the throngs outside, but to my credit, the throngs weren't celebrating on my own little block, but rather around the corner on the main avenue. I could hear them. Shouting, cheers, swells of pleasure wafting in through my open window.

It started when Ohio was called for Obama. A loud cheer went up. It was like watching a tense sporting event and hearing neighbors celebrating the highs and moaning through the lows to the rhythms of what the announcer on my little tv was saying. Just another reason to love New York--when you're like me and the thought of not having people around (within shouting distance, preferably) gives you the total heebie-jeebies, In Cold Blood style, if you know what I mean. I like to know they're out there, and I like the shared experience of having them shout out to the things on my tv.

All was right with the world. The swing states were swinging our way, the kids were all asleep. We let them watch until about 9:30 but past elections haven't been called (truly called, and I was feeling superstitious) until 3am, or the next morning, or sometime near Christmas, so I didn't want to keep them up. Plus, I have a special relationship with Murphy's Law and chances were that if I'd kept them up, Ohio and Florida and Iowa might have swung the other way, and so I figured we should all just play it safe and get to bed.

Plus they'd had the day off. If you ask me, NO ONE should have to do anything but vote on Election Day, but that's another post for another time. Or you could watch this excellent and chilling (but less chilling now that we know the outcome) Rachel Maddow piece on the new poll tax, and hear a great argument for that. So the kids had been off of school all day and had been at each other's throats. And they did have to wake up early the next day so keeping them up til midnight seemed careless (of course if I'd known...).

So all was right with the world and I decided to let myself doze off, just a little drifting, at about 10:30, to the ocean of noise from the people outside, but nothing distracting. Just great happy noises. At 11 my husband woke me up. He's done it! Obama won! They just called it! The crowd outside went nuts, I sat up and sat, glued, to the footage of the Spellman College kids dancing and singing to Signed, Sealed, Delivered. A perfect song for the moment.

The phone rang and my friend was on a street corner near her house a few blocks away. You should see this! she shouted into the phone. Everyone's out here, everyone's cheering, the streets are full, there are fireworks! I made great tearful happy noises into the phone and let her get back to the craziness.

I'm not sure Obama would have approved of the gunshots that punctuated the celebrating I could hear from my bed. Just a few enthusiastic shots, I'm sure. Not unlike what we hear sometimes at midnight on New Years. But when you want to make a loud fireworks like noise and all you have is a gun, I guess you use the gun, eh? What's a guy with a gun who didn't think to buy fireworks in advance to do?

This all made my husband want a beer, so he went down and got one, and went out and walked around a bit to get the feel of it. Part of me wanted to go, but part of me wanted to lie in bed, under my comforter, and watch the Spellman College students weep and sing and wait for McCain to concede and for Obama to speak. I didn't want to miss a minute.

Just before twelve we tried to wake up our oldest. Obama just won, my husband said to him.

He did? my son responded.

Yeah, and he's about to give his acceptance speech, do you want to come into our room and watch it with us?

That's okay, I'm all set. was the reassured reply. I learned later that my son has no memory of our attempt to rouse him, or of his own polite refusal. He felt a little bit left out when the kids in his class raised their hands to indicate they'd seen the whole thing, but in my husband's Obama shirt, worn down to his knees, he didn't feel that left out.

I did wonder if we should just go ahead and wake everyone up--forcefully, if they kept refusing our polite suggestions--to make them bear witness to this incredible, completely unmatchable moment. But decided against it as well.

The moment was the moment and I was in it. I wasn't out in it, I was in in it. I wasn't alone in it, but I wasn't making it anything other than it was. I didn't have to do anything to create a more perfect version of it. A perfect moment, a perfect speech, perfect children asleep in perfect beds, a perfect comforter and a perfect pillow, a perfectly wonderful feeling that nothing could ever do anything to take this moment away. Nothing could happen--not anything--that would make this moment not have happened.

At about 12:35 I decided that Obama must be on his way to bed. He'd been in like a zillion states in the last few days, giving speeches at rallies at all hours, and he must have been exhausted and now he could rest and he seems like a sensible guy and since he couldn't go smoke cigarettes he might have just chosen to go to sleep. I hadn't done much out of the ordinary in the last few days, 'cept some awesome trick-or-treating on Friday, and cheering on the NYC Marathoners who run up the avenue around the corner on Sunday, and teaching art to sixty little girls on Monday. Oh, and getting up at 5:30 to wait in line at 5:45 for the polls to open at 6am with my 8 year old daughter, and giving terrorist fist jabs to the neighbors (including our local councilwoman) in the polling place, and smiling at everyone, and feeling buckets of hopefulness laced with twinges of worry all day. And maybe that was enough.

So I figured if Obama was in bed, I might as well go to sleep too. And I dozed off again with a happy heart to the sound of a million neighbors celebrating the most wonderful moment that my children would never forget, even though they were sound asleep, and that I would never forget, even though I was still in bed.

Pick a Peck of Poplar Palin

this post originally appeared on nycmomsblog on October 16, 2008

I am not poking fun at Sarah Palin's family. That would be in poor taste. Rather, I'm going to spend a few moments publicly bemoaning the fact that one of my children shares the name of one of hers.

Quick! Name Obama's kids! Having trouble, right? Now try McCain's kids, or Biden's kids? Can't do it. There's Megan McCain who said "no one knows what war is like other than my family [p]eriod" and there's Bo Biden whose name I only know because of all the Fee Fie Fo Biden jokes, but I can't name the rest, and, probably, neither can you.

But Sarah Palin's kids' names are up there with Apple and Moses. Palin's kids' names are (of course) Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper, and Trig--which I think must be short for trigonometry. Everyone knows them, most people make fun of the outrageousness of them. There's even the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator where you enter your own name and watch it morph into something like 'Rifle Commando Palin' or 'Blaster Puck Palin.'

Writing here under a pseudonym, I feel compelled to preserve my young daughter's own anonymity, so I won't divulge which name is the same. But let's pretend Sarah had a daughter named Poplar. And let's pretend I had named my own daughter Poplar. Let's say the name Poplar was a departure from our older children's names, and that it was chosen because it was a combination of several family members we wanted to honor, as well as just being a damned cute-seeming name. And until Palin's Poplar came along, we'd only ever met maybe one or two other Poplars.

There's a strange thing in our neighborhood, and maybe in Wasila Alaska as well...there's this incredible baby naming freedom. In fact, most of the names in our neighborhood seem to indicate an intent to be original, to side step the more obviously common names like Ethan, Emily, Tiffany, Andrew... Of course the strange by-product of that is every boy in our neighborhood is named Hudson or Lucian, and every girl is Ella or Eden. We also have Arrow, Lion, Tiger and Boo.

So we've all had a bit of fun naming our children. And some of us have had the same exact kind of fun naming our children with the odd result that the original names have become common and the regular names rare. Surely the mom who chose the name Daisy never envisioned that her daughter would have to be Daisy R. for her entire elementary school career to distinguish her from Daisy L. and Daisy C. while the one girl named Lisa would get to be the only girl named Lisa.

My first two children have names mined from some of the older branches on my family tree. They are actual names (not types of fields or mathematics) but are more in the old-fashioned category, and we've never met another child with one of their names (older adults, yes, but no kids) which, I have to say, is kind of nice, though it can be frustrating that souvenirs never come pre-printed with their names. My third child is the one with the same name as one of the Palin crew. My fifth grader wrote an essay for school (he was able to choose the topic himself) that was a hilarious rant against Senator McCain, and in it he listed things that bothered him about the Republican ticket, and number one was that Sarah Palin's daughter has the same name as his little sister. I thought that was really cute, until a few weeks later when I found myself at a birthday party for a child I didn't know very well. I had to tell about a dozen different people that my daughter's name was 'Poplar' and I found myself cringing every time, since given the current political climate it kept seeming to link me to Sarah Palin, and that made me very unhappy.

It reminds me of when my son--at age four--had these delicious long blond locks and then he had his first haircut and ended up looking like all the other little bowl-cut towheads--with the platinum blond straight top and the little brown 'V' of hair close cut at the top of the neck. I was in a little hippie bread shop in a little hippie town upstate and he was calling me 'mommy' and I had this strange realization that I felt like his ultra-conservative 'do was somehow misrepresenting who he was, who I was, and what types of things we value (or don't put much value on). Strange, and probably not so great to admit, but true.

The way we dress or style (or don't style) our youngsters is a reflection of who we are. Likewise, the names we choose to give our children are also a way of advertising our own taste. Several dozen families naming their first child Michael doesn't necessarily join them at the hip politically, but two different moms choosing the name Poplar for their daughter? Those moms must have something in common, right? And that's precisely what made me cringe as I met new people at that birthday party and told them my daughter's name.

I am hoping that, come November 4th, Sarah Palin drops off the media radar. It might take a little bit of time, but I'd like to get back to the world where I can say my daughter's name out loud without thinking that I'm being subconsciously linked to a politician who really doesn't represent me, or speak to me, and who doesn't even seem to care about me--or my daughters, for that matter--at all.

The Conflicts of Their Interests

For years we've made travel plans with our children, despite whatever small obligations we/they might have at home. It was awfully convenient back when they didn't have the awareness to know what they were missing (back when a peek-a-boo-playing parent's face really did cease to exist when it wasn't in sight), and also nice when they'd know what they were missing but the obviousness of the greatness of the experience we were sailing off to have was so apparent that they didn't care about a class celebration or some kid's birthday party--it was hard for my seven year old to know that she was missing her second grade poetry celebration, but when we remembered about it on the beach in Waikiki we were able to laugh it off as not being reason enough to still be in dreary Brooklyn.

Of course all that lovely ignorance couldn't last forever, and just when we started to feel able to count on their indifference, it's all changed. We're in a new phase.

The phase of much-anticipated weekend plans bumping up against important family obligations and travel. And it's significant that they are still too young to be old enough to be excused from many of these adventures, but they are old enough to feel the agony of missing out on, say, a weekend full of baseball double-headers, a movie premier with a friend and his dad, a cherished friend's sleepover, and so on. And I'm just not feeling equipped to guide them through the emotions of having to be in two attractive places at once. It's just life, of course. But it's hard to reconcile in my own head, let alone walk them through navigating their own feelings about it.

Parenting was so much easier back when my children's problems were all things I felt that I'd mastered over my life time. I feel comfortable encouraging them to share (barely, since no one's asking me to share my most precious possessions with near-strangers or friends who are annoying to me), I feel comfortable asking them to take turns, not to hit, to brush their teeth, to avoid eating too many treats, to do things that all of us grownups know just make sense.

But now they're getting into things that are more difficult to resolve. My son complains that he did all the work on a group project and then had to watch the teacher praise all of the kids equally, my daughter is baffled about why she's losing good friends to some of the meaner girls in her grade. And I don't know how to parent this. Because they parallel the things in my life that keep me awake at night.

We have some of the most wonderful family-event-themed weekends coming up this spring--weekends for which we'll be doing a lot of flying, and in the 'old days' of them being just a few years younger these would have been single-minded pursuits. Nothing but plain old 'this is what we're doing this weekend' stuff going on. But now my kids know their sports schedules--my son can see that he's missing a total of four baseball games (out of only, like, ten) and two practices (which are just as much fun). My two girls are missing six soccer games and two practices between them. They're losing some momentum, as well as much of the bonding that goes on during these events. And they're sad about it.

We are clear in our priorities--no one has asked why we have to travel to these amazing (once in a lifetime) family functions--but we are all left feeling unsettled by all they're missing.

I know I know it's just life. We have many more sports seasons ahead of us, and we'll look back on this as having been an amazing spring for being with extended family, and we might even forget that there were tinges of heartache about missed games and other events.

Or we could go the schadenfreude route and pray for rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain. With plenty of makeup games waiting for us in June.