This is not on

A friend told me that he had managed to get 5 hours sleep on a recent cross Atlantic flight despite screaming baby and a year old who watched Dora the Explorer in flight entertainment with volume up and no headphones.
I do a lot to keep my kids happy on a long flight, but Dora??? no headphones!!!
She's the most annoying excuse for kids TV I know.
Why didn't anyone complain to the flight attendant???

Helicopter parenting

Back in the days when Kate was a toddler, and Leo not even thought off, and we lived in London, I marveled over the amount of organized activities some SAHM's would schedule for their children. There was singing, music group, toddler tumble, baby swim, story telling and pottery class in abundance. Every day, another thing they needed to get to in time, and that always seemed to clash with nap times and feeding routines.

I would bump in to a mother friend on my way to the play ground and she would be busy maneuvering her stroller on to the bus, rushing to get from playgroup to baby ballet, "I don't have time to chat right now, let's meet for coffee next week." We'd never make it to coffee.

As I was studying for my MA and Kate was at nursery 2 full days a week, the days we had at home together, I simply didn't have the energy to have to be somewhere at a certain time. I needed to take the day as it came. We would hang out with friends in the play ground for hours, go for long walks and find pine cones in the park, weather permitting, or just have a four hour long play date which consisted of Kate and her friends turning the apartment up side down while me and the other mothers would drink endless pots of tea, read gossip magazines and talk about how sleep deprived we were. And I admit, we would scoff at the poor mother's who had signed up to a life with screaming kids on the public transport, constantly going somewhere, never ever standing still long enough to take a deep breath.

Then I moved to California. Kate started Pre-K. And if I thought mother's over-subscribed their kids in London, I was in for a huge reality check. Suddenly, baby swim and toddler music seemed like free play compared to Mandarin lessons, yoga classes, Violin and Arithmetic for pre school Einsteins which were all norm rather than exception. And that's not counting the weekend activities which were all out doors, and sports based. Soccer practice twice a week, and two games on Saturday. And then off for some light mountain hiking. By the way, this is 4-year old's we're talking about.

I have always felt that we are doing our children a disservice by over-scheduling organized activities. Along with activities comes and enormous amount of pressure to perform and become better (well, best) of your peers. The activities are not for fun - they are competitive and strenuous and will leave children feeling that if they are not the best, they are simple not good enough. But apart from physically exhausting our kids and turning them in to self conscious wrecks , we are also taking away the ability to figure out who they are, and what the world is all about. And most of all: we are not letting them be bored.
All kids needs to be bored. They need to learn to become creative with play and time. They need to develop their imagination. And they don't need a mother who drives them from swimming to hockey in five minutes flat, they need a mother who sits next to them on a sofa and talks about dragons, and dolphins and why the earth might be flat after all.

According to a new book by American therapist David Code, To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First, this problem is now recognized as "helicopter parenting", which "creates anxious, exhausted parents and demanding, entitled children." He has a simple formula for happier kids: take the focus away from your children and move it on to your marriage instead. Because another side-effect of helicopter parenting are less time to spend with our spouse leads to empty and unhappy marriages. This could be one reason why divorce rates in the US are sky rocketing right now.

So cut down on the activities! Start to actually spend time with your little one's. Listen to what they have to say. Get down on their level and see how they experience the world, and still have time over to give your husband a hug.

Battlefield

I talk to a mother-friend of mine and we compare notes on how we have changed throughout the years, going from caring for one to two or more children. I admit that my tactics have changed with Leo, compared to how they were with Kate.
- I have become more relaxed, I say. I allow him to do more and get away with more stuff.
My friend nods her head in agreement.
- But it is also harder, I continue. This time around it takes more diplomacy, more sly tactics and clever negotiating. I need to use more force and be focused.
The look on my friends face has changed.
- It's not battle, she says. You're not strategizing a war.
- I might as well be, I say with a deep sigh. It's me against him and I need to be on top.

Twitter!

I have just entered a new phase, and you can now follow me on twitter: www.twitter.com/angrymotherca

I need this: (some things we argue about)

I am in desperate need for a holiday. Not one of those holidays where you leave your home for two weeks in order to rush around to visit friends and family all over the place and end up in more need of a holiday when you get back than you were before. No, I mean, a real holiday, sunshine, swimming pool, coconut smelling sunscreen, Margarita in hand, just the four of us, no one else.
Have talked to the husband about this, and he agrees. I'll book something, he says.
A week later nothing is booked. I gently poke him, but nothing happens.
Finally, he says:
- Well, I'm stuck at work, you're at home all day, why don't you book something.
This is where the argument explodes.
Let's not go down the: I'm working and you're at home doing nothing all day - road, shall we, instead, let's look at this objectively.
I mean, I think we all know that being a SAHM equals paid work away from home (not measured in money paid in to account every month, but rather the sheer exhaustion you feel by the end of the day), so it would be futile to start arguing about that.
No, I am carefully picking this apart and looking at it objectively:
I organize play-dates.
I research, and sign up to after school activities.
I am responsible for summer camps.
I book medical, dental and hair cut appointments - heck, I'm the only one who has these numbers in my phone.
I did the pre-school thing, with researching, filling in applications, going on tours and doing the follow-up's.
The rabbit, the vet appointments, becoming bona fide rabbit expert on food, molting, spaying etc, is my thing.
Library books, new clothes, old shoes, that's me.
Scheduling anything that has to do with up-keep of the house, chasing work-men, staying at home for hours waiting for them and then having to endure their work which always takes longer than they first say - oh, that would be me.
If my husband suggest we go out to dinner or a movie, he will always say: I'll book something, which he never does, and it falls on my in the end.
I am also room-parent for Kate's class this year, and I am not going to tell you how heavy that email-load is sometimes....

So, would it be nice to have something that didn't become my responsibility, just because I happen to stay at home all day?
Yes, is the answer.
I have no idea why all of this became my territory in the first place. So he's working? Big fucking deal. I seem to remember being able to schedule my own optometry appointments when I was still working, for my husband it is a miracle if he can call his dentist once a year, it's more likely to be every other year.

OK, so my husband is not a total looser, far from it. He's a great, loving, fantastic husband, who is never expecting any of this to be "my job". He never expects dinner on the table or the kids to be in bed when he gets home.
But if I don't do it, it just doesn't get done.
It doesn't matter if you live in the most equal marriage in the world, if one of you stay at home while the other one is working, the one at home will be the one who all the menial tasks fall upon, there is no way around it. The only way to change it is for both of you to go to work.

So, I have become one of those women.
And I don't like it.
I should just stop doing it, and wait for someone else to realize that it needs to get done.
But I do want that holiday, desperately.

I'm a real housewife, but I am not getting paid

I am a sucker for Reality TV and right now I am completely hooked on Real Housewives of Orange County. But whereas I thought that the ladies in Atlanta were pure quality entertainment with their over the top cattiness and constant one-up-manship, the Socal women are just sad. My heart goes out to any woman who feels the need to undergo such extensive and rigorous beauty regimes every day, because if they don't look their best their men will, apparently rightfully so, be unfaithful.... and while the Atlanta-sister had each other by the throat because of an inevitable clash of monumental egos, in OC the bickering and bitchiness boils down to two sad common denominators: insecurity and jealousy.

In Thursdays episode, the women and their spouses gather round for an alcohol infused housewarming dinner at one of the housewives (who gets served with eviction papers the very next morning - don't tell me this isn't pure, gut-wrenching comedy!) and end up laying in to one of the women for one reason only: the fact that she holds down a full-time job and can't go along to the luncheons, tupperware parties and pilates classes that they keep inviting her to.
- I work, the owner of a successful insurance company says. I don't have time to take 12-2 off on a weekday to go to the gym.
- And we don't work? one of the other women lashes out.

Cut to the same woman talking to the camera:
- I take care of three children (she has two nannies), and also keep my husband in a very satisfied manner (she works out five days a week, has botox injections, manicures, massages, facials and throws the odd frozen pizza in the oven), if that's not work, I don't know what is.

Well, honey, I do agree that it must be very, very time consuming and exhausting for you, but if you ain't getting a paycheck at the end of the month, it's not work. Call it what every you like, but work it's not.
I feel for the true working gal, she's as big a b*** as the others, but she was undeservedly pounded on.

We never stop judging

It seems that the media is out to criticize the Obama administration no matter what, and if it is a quiet day for the President, let's turn on the First Lady instead.
The latest "scandal" is that Michelle Obama has talked about the rising obesity problem by using a personal anecdote concerning her own daughters, Sasha and Malia. The girls' pediatrician had warned the mother about their weight and she admitted to putting them on a diet. It seems that the diet in it self is less up for criticism than the fact that Michelle deliberately put her daughter's lives out in the open when they are at such vulnerable age.

Whether this was a clever move on behalf of the First Lady, I'll refrain from commenting on. But fact remains: obesity in America is rising and especially amongst young children. The best thing a parent can do is nip it in the bud by teaching their children healthy eating habits, the importance of exercise and how to take care of the body that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. Positive encouragement, plenty of it, and as soon as you suspect the need for it is the only way forward. Far too many parents choose to neglect this part of their children's lives and the horrible effects that poor eating habits will have on them.
The First Lady has done the right thing in rising awareness on this subject and by showing that the way of stopping this increasing problem starts at home, with the parents.