UnchartedParent.com

Today marked a new stage of parenting at Uncharted Parent.

My preschool days are over.  No more teaching colors, shapes and ABC’s.  No more potty-training (thank goodness, because I sucked at teaching that particular skill).  No more nesting blocks, board books, sippy cups or daily naps.  No more boo-boos that can be cured with a kiss.  No more nonsensical temper-tantrums or grunts and whines where words will do the job better.

Wait.  Strike that last sentence.

As of today, I’m the proud mom of two school-age children: one in third grade and one in kindergarten.  It’s a major milestone, a passage into a new phase of our life as a family.  We’ve moved from having “little kids” to just “kids.”  (And no, there will be no more children.  We are happy with two.  Stop asking.  Not gonna happen, no way, don’t even think it yes I will laugh at you if you ask again absolutely positively no freaking way.  Have I made myself clear on this point?)

I know that according to conventional wisdom, I’m supposed to be misty-eyed and wistful at this transformation, but the truth is: I’m not.  I’m delighted, and it’s not only for the selfish reason that having two kids in school nets me more writing time.  (My daughter is attending full-day kindergarten.  I’m no fool.)  I’m also thrilled to find myself at that point where my kids are really beginning to resemble the people I think they’re capable of becoming as adults.  As it turns out, they’re people I like spending time with and want to get to know better.  My son is smart, clear-headed and possesses a wry, ironic sense of humor, and if I don’t necessarily share some of his strong interests, his enthusiasm for those interests is infectious enough that I find myself more curious about dinosaurs and soccer than I ever imagined I’d be.  My daughter is intelligent, empathetic and sweet when she chooses to be.  She understands people to a degree I never will, even on my most insightful days, and her silly moods can cheer even the grumpiest soul. 

I see so much in my kids now that was scarcely visible in the preschoolers who preceded them.  Maybe it’s just me—it’s no secret that I’m not a baby person—but I prefer this stage of development.  I’m not a preschooler Scrooge; there was plenty to love through those early stages, too.  (Just read through my archived blog posts.)  But today I hugged my non-little kids when they got home from school and thought about how lucky I am that these two cool people are my children.

Besides, if I get nostalgic for the good old days, there’s still plenty of preschool behavior left over.  There’s the whining, and the temper-tantrums, and the unintended naps in the car, and the picky eating…

Oh, and as it turns out, Mommy’s kisses still work on boo-boos sometimes, too.

Where did the summer go?

I took the above photo of the trees in my yard just this afternoon.  Yup, the leaves have already begun to change in northern New England.  I wore long-sleeved pajamas to bed a couple of nights ago.  The apple orchards are calling my name; I can already taste that first bite of sweet, crisp McIntosh.

And parents, you know what that means:

I love my kids more than my own life, but holy headaches, I haven’t had a complete thought in a week and the notion that I’ve actually written anything more substantial than a grocery list is laughable.  My eight-year-old son will tell you how I’ve tortured (yes, tortured) him by making him shop for new pants due to the fact that he had outgrown all but two pair of the ones he owned and, as I keep repeating, he cannot go to school naked.  (And then he had to try on cleats for soccer.  Oh, the inhumanity.)  My five-year-old daughter will regale you with tales of how mean her brother has been all week because he keeps breathing in her space, and then when she tattles on him I have the audacity to scold them both for arguing over something so ridiculous as breathing, and why can’t she have three lollipops a day when everything is so borrrring anyway?  And then they both stand in front of their 1,247 toys and look at me with pitiful, droopy eyes and whine, “What can we do?”  And when I say, “clean the house,” they scoff at me, and …

Oh, sorry.

We’ve got one last weekend of summer fun.  Then it’s back to jeans and fleece (our state uniform), backpacks, routines, soccer, ballet and, for me, some beautiful, structured, regular writing time.

Oh, sure, it’ll be crazy.  I know I’ll have my complaints, especially when the white stuff starts to fall and doesn’t stop.  That’s when I’ll blog longingly about the long, warm, shapeless days of summer.

But for now, bring on the schedules, the red and gold leaves and the hot coffee at the cold soccer games. Welcome to the school buses, the morning chill in the air and the notebooks—the kids’ and mine. Autumn, here we go.

So, Reader, I don’t know your opinion of me, but I’d like to imagine that you believe me to be a moral person who does the right thing because it is the right thing.  I’m kind, I’m generous, I brake for small animals and if I ever came upon an old lady who required assistance to cross the street, of course I’d help her.  I’m just that kind of person.

Well, yes.  But also, the universe has a way of keeping me straight.  It’s like this: I was always the kid who might get away in the short term with stealing from the cookie jar, but somehow my mom would find out about the pilfering later and then I’d get punished in a big way.  The first time I got drunk on New Year’s Eve in high school?  I would have been okay if I hadn’t been so hungover that I couldn’t make it home until January 2. 

The truth is that it’s entirely possible that I live honestly because I know, deep down, that if I attempted a life of crime, I’d just end up in prison.  I never get away with anything in the end.

All of this brings me to an incident I wrote about last month right here on the blog, the one in which I tossed aside one of my principles in order to obtain rapid service on my car so that I wouldn’t have to listen to my kids whine and complain on a six-hour trip to visit their grandparents.  I, a feminist, used the sexism of the automotive industry to my advantage, and it worked. 

Last week, the universe reminded me that it was watching.

Here’s what happened: I pulled into a gas station to fill up my car’s nearly empty tank.  My kids were in the car, along with one of someone else’s.  I ran my credit card through the pump, inserted the nozzle, made my selection and started the flow of gas.  It ran for a few seconds, then stopped.  I restarted the pump, but it stopped again.  Puzzled, I investigated the pump, then jumped backward when gasoline suddenly sprayed from the nozzle all over the car and my legs. 

“Sh*t!”  

“Jesus, did the pump just spray you?” A Male Customer at a neighboring pump approached with sympathy.  (Both his gender and his sympathy are important later in the anecdote.)

“Yeah.” I shook my head and cursed some more. 

“That’s not working right,” he said.

At this point, I decided that I didn’t need gas in my car that badly and with three kids in my car, I just wanted to get out of there.  I would report the malfunctioning pump to the gas station manager, clean up a little, perhaps get a refund for the gas dripping from my legs and leave. 

But what I didn’t count on was that the gas station manager wouldn’t believe me.  “It’s been working fine,” he said.  His lips stretched thin into that false smile with his teeth clenched behind it, which, ladies, you’ve seen when a man is forced into patronizing a woman with whom he’d rather not be dealing. 

“Well, it’s not working now,” I replied.  “A properly working pump doesn’t spray back gasoline after refusing to fill the tank.”

He just stared at me, his pseudo-grin disappearing. 

“I know how to operate a gas pump,” I said, answering his unspoken insult.

We argued back and forth a bit, but the manager wouldn’t budge.  Eventually, he turned and walked outside and I followed, growing increasingly bitter that I not only reeked of gasoline but that I had to prove to this man that I wasn’t an idiot.  I reenacted the entire scene for him, this time pointing to the wet spots of gasoline on the ground.

He shook his head.  “The pump has been working fine.”

Male Customer suddenly reappeared next to me; I hadn’t even noticed that he was still around.  “It’s true,” he said the manager.  “I saw the whole thing.  The pump isn’t working, and it sprayed her and her car with gasoline.  You need to fix it.”

The manager’s facial features moved for the first time.  He shook his head, then turned in the direction of an underling.  “Ray! Bag this pump!”  He turned to me.  “Okay, young lady.  Sorry about this.  Let’s go inside.  You can clean up in the restroom, and we’ll get you a refund.”

Are you freaking kidding me?

No, of course not.  It’s the sexism in the automotive industry I wrote about last month, the very same sexism I took such careful advantage of when I was desperate to get my car fixed.  And now the universe has paid me back.

So if any of you who read my post last month were offended by my behavior, now you can chuckle at my expense.  And rest assured, it’s always like this.  I rarely get away with anything.  Sooner or later, the universe always gets me back.

(Photo credit: Jeremy Brooks via Flickr.com)

If you’re not freaking out, you’re either not the parent of a girl or you’re not paying attention.

A study released earlier this week in the Journal Pediatrics found that more girls are showing signs of puberty at the ages of seven or eight than ever before.

Seven or eight??

There are plenty of articles out there in which you can read about the study’s findings, which were broken down by race and compared to earlier studies.  (Here are two articles: “Early Puberty is Raising Health Concerns,” USA Today; “First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls,” The New York Times.)  Two primary factors are cited as causes for the increased early onset of breast development and other signs of puberty: the rise in obesity, because body fat produces estrogen; and the still-debated role of environmental chemicals like BPA, found in products we use every day that might mimic estrogen’s effects. 

As the parent of a five-year-old daughter, the idea that she might reach puberty in two years terrifies me.  I know my daughter’s cognitive and emotional development level, and I watch my eight-year-old son’s female classmates and consider their maturity levels, too.  Nowhere in that mix do I find children ready to cope with the swirling confusion that one generally associates with kids in middle school: trying to understand the changes in your own body while sorting through feelings you’ve never had before; looking at members of the opposite—or your own—sex in ways you hadn’t previously and wondering what that means; managing advances from boys and men who see you in ways they didn’t before; and dealing with anger, sadness, and other emotional highs and lows in spectrums that radiate in multiple dimensions and in rapid, dizzying succession. 

All of this is hard enough to go through at eleven, twelve or thirteen.  I know I wasn’t ready for it then and it kicked my ass.  But at seven?  Right now, my daughter deals with her world by filtering all of life’s events, large and small, through her stuffed unicorn.  “Unicorn had a bad day.  She broke her leg and had to go the hospital,” she told me last night.  “It hurt, and she cried, but the doctor put a band-aid on it and made it better.  Now she’s going to rest and she’ll be better tomorrow.  But don’t make noise because she needs a nap.”  This is how “Emmie” copes with her world at the age of five, and two years just aren’t enough to go from the Unicorn crutch to breasts and periods.  She won’t be ready in two years—and neither will I.

On an individual level, we parents can only do so much.  We can try to keep our daughters healthy and minimize chemical exposure.  Realistically, for most of us, participating in modern life means that some exposure is inevitable.  But maybe we can do one step better than we do now.  Look at your child’s diet and cut back on just one serving of fat or sweets per day.  Check into your household-product consumption until you find one thing that might expose your child to BPA or some other potentially harmful chemical, and get rid of it.  Maybe that will be the item that makes that keeps your kid an actual child for just a little bit longer.

(Photo credit: adwriter via Flickr.com)

It’s no secret to any reader of this blog that I’m on a mission to get kids to want to read—especially my kids.  And I’m guessing I’ve got lots of company amongst all the parents and teachers out there.

This job becomes easier if we can figure out ways to make reading fun.  While the definition of “fun” varies for each child—this explains why I am currently reading an encyclopedia of prehistoric life to eight-and-a-half year-old “Jack” at bedtime—some books have delighted kids over decades or engrossed so many children within months of publication that it’s clear they’re good ones to at least consider trying out with your own child. 

The problem is that we’re all so busy that even if we’d like to spend hours poring over the shelves of our local bookstore or library, most of us just don’t have that kind of time.  So I’m going to connect you with a few people who’ve done some of the winnowing for you.  If you look in the “Pages” box in the right margin of my blog, you’ll see a new page called “Resources: Great Books for Your Kids.”  Click on the page and you’ll find links to my own Shelfari page as well as several fabulous lists and sites put together by other books folks, all with an eye toward making it easier to connect kids with books they’ll love. 

I hope to add to this page in the future as I discover more resources.  Feel free to help me by sending me any info you think I should know about (contact info is on the Page).  I hope you find some of these resources useful and that you get as excited about about some of these books as I did.

GO TO THE NEW PAGE: GREAT BOOKS FOR YOUR KIDS

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Note: for the rest of the summer, I will continue to blog on this once-per-week schedule.  You know how it is: the kids are around a lot, I’ve got no air conditioning so I’m literally sweating onto my keyboard and I’m engaged in serious organization and planning so that I can work my butt off once the kids are back in school.  (Wouldn’t it be awesome if that idiom could be literal?)  So one blog post per week until September.  Unless, you know, I decide I have something extra to share that just can’t wait.

No matter how wonderful a parent you are, there are always going to be situations that trip you up.  Not long ago, a friend relayed to me one of these dilemmas, and I’d like to share it with you.

My friend—let’s call her “Jill”—drove her eleven-year-old son, “Tim,” to a marina for an overnight playdate on her son’s friend’s boat.  The playdate would be supervised at all times by her son’s friend’s father, and the boat would be docked at the marina overnight prior to a day of boating and fishing.  Fun, right?

But when Tim’s friend’s father dropped Tim off at home the next evening—an hour-and-a-half’s drive away from the marina—the man’s behavior led Jill to suspect that he was drunk.  When Jill later questioned her son to find out if his friend’s dad had been drinking, her son told her that yes, his friend’s father—a six-foot-four-inch, large-framed man who one might reasonably presume has a higher alcohol-tolerance level than an average-sized person, but who is also a known heavy social drinker—had been drinking beer throughout the day.

Obviously Jill doesn’t plan to permit her son onto a boat under this man’s supervision ever again.  But Tim and this man’s son still like each other; the kids are still friends.  This is where things get sticky.

How would you handle this friendship in the future?  Would you restrict the conditions under which the two kids can meet?  If so, how do you do it?  Are you honest with your child?  With your child’s friend?  With your child’s friend’s parent? 

I’ve never been in Jill’s exact situation, but I’ve had my own instances of not being comfortable with the occasional parent of my child’s friend.  And I’m not sure where to draw the line.  I don’t want to be the kind of parent who picks my children’s friends for them—that will backfire on me anyway, right?—but my kids are still young, and I wonder at what point does the line of my responsibility overrule the lines of their right and my desire to encourage them to decide for themselves who would make a good friend?  Sometimes all I’ve got to go on is a gut, maternal instinct that something is not right in a given situation.  I’ve learned to listen to my gut where my own interests are concerned, but can I forbid my kid to play at someone’s house based on nothing but a gut feeling?  And if I do decide that I don’t want a particular parent to supervise my kid, how do I handle that?  What do I tell my kid?  What do I tell my kid’s friend or his parent when that parent calls and asks if my kid can come over for a playdate?  What if I suddenly suspect something is amiss when I go to drop my kid off at a friend’s house; do I push my kid back into the car and cancel the playdate right then? 

What about you?  Have you handled your own dilemmas involving your kids’ friends’ parents?  If so, how did you resolve them?  And what did you tell your kids?

(Photo credit: John Shawler via Flickr.com)

Let’s talk about what happens when your child gets married.

Whoa, you say.  That’s years away.  Maybe even decades.  We just achieved potty training over here; I can’t think about Max or Maddy getting married, for crying out loud.  I’ll deal with that when we get there.

Not so fast.  I’m going to ask you to take a few minutes to think about an aspect of your child’s future marriage now.  Because it’s really not just about marriage, it’s about family: the kind of family you have now and the kind of family you foresee in your future.  And while I’m writing this post primarily with parents of transracial, transcultural adoption in mind, please read on even if you’re not such a parent, because you’ll see that a version of the questions here can apply to you, too.

Here’s the big one: If you are the parent of an internationally adopted child from another race and/or culture, how will you feel if your child marries someone from his or her own race and culture?

Before you give the quick and obvious answer—“I’d love it!”—take a few moments to think about this.

Yoon Seon is an adult Korean adoptee from Australia who wrote an insightful post on this topic on her blog.  She ultimately married a Caucasian man, but she ponders what it might have been like for her parents if she had married a Korean man instead:

Suddenly everything could have been flipped 180 degrees and suddenly they could have found themselves in the situation that I’ve been in my whole life: being the odd one out.

I think part of the reason why I used to want to marry someone of Korean background was to be part of a Korean family: the main thing that I missed out on in being adopted.

This is an aspect of marriage in transracial and transcultural adoption that I hadn’t considered before, and it made me think.  So often, I come across stories of adopted kids who are afraid to explore their heritage for fear of hurting their parents, and of parents who fear that steps by their kids into their birth cultures are actually rejections of their adoptive families.  I’d never thought of my daughter’s future, theoretical marriage in this context before, but Yoon Seon’s words made perfect sense.  If an adoptive parent harbors any latent insecurity about ties to her child, about the birth culture to which the parent can never truly belong, her child’s marriage into that culture could feel threatening.  It could feel like a loss, like a rejection.

Ouch.

I know it’s tempting to put off thinking about this, to say, “Oh, my kids are so young, I’m not even going to consider this until they’re older.”  But if you’re a parent, you already know how quickly time moves.  They were in diapers just yesterday.  Now they’re in school, they’ll be dating tomorrow, and you’ll need to have thought through these very complicated issues before you know it. 

All parents need to think about how they will react if their children decide to marry someone not of their parents’ race, religion, nationality, economic background or sexual orientation.  These issues of race and identity go to the core of who we are—all of us.  If you react with a jerk of the knee when your adult child comes to you, deeply in love, the result will be a flood of hurt feelings and resentment on all sides. 

When I was a younger adult, I watched several of my friends’ relationships dissolve under severe parental disapproval of the race, religion or nationality of their chosen partners.  The pain cut deep and ragged for everyone involved, and I couldn’t imagine that that is what my friends’ parents really wanted for themselves or for their children.  Think through these issues now, when the face of a beloved is a theoretical one instead of that of a real person to whom your child wants to promise the rest of his life.

Adoptive parents especially need to consider this.  So I leave you with this question from Yoon Seon: “Does it worry you: that your child may one day ‘reclaim’ that part of themselves that you can’t provide, from… someone else?”

(Photo credit: anyjazz65 via Flickr.com)

Five-year-old “Emmie” has begun to explore pieces of her racial identity lately.  In a seemingly unrelated development, both of my children have been ripping into each other this summer with the vigor of a couple of Kardiashian sisters, each having been told the other stands in the way of her admission to an A-list party.  These two trends came together yesterday to offer a less-than-constructive example of how a child might explore her racial identity.

My two darlings sat at the kitchen counter eating their breakfast.  They began to argue.

“That Rice Krispie looks like a sock,” said Emmie.

“No, it doesn’t,” replied eight-year-old “Jack.”  His tone implied that she was the stupidest child ever to exist on the planet, and his misfortune at being her brother was an affliction from which he would never recover.

“Yes, it does.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

(This exchange repeated for a while.  I’ll let you imagine it rather than continuing to write it out.)

Finally the dialogue changed.  “You just think it doesn’t look like a sock because your eyes are different,” said Emmie.

“What?” replied Jack. 

At this point, I began to listen more carefully.  On the one hand, I had absolutely no interest in inserting myself into a conversation about the shape of a Rice Krispie.  On the other hand, if my children—who, for the uninitiated, are not of the same race—were getting into a discussion about racial differences, I wanted to be on top of things.

“Your eyes are different from mine,” Emmie repeated.  “Mommy said that your eyes and her eyes are not the same shape as mine.  That’s why you don’t think the Rice Krispie looks like a sock.”

Jack sounded thoroughly exasperated.  “That’s got nothing to do with why I don’t think the Rice Krispie looks like a sock!” 

Poor Jack.  He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to shoot Emmie down completely when she was discussing the differences in our eyes.  Besides, I am forever trying to teach Jack the art of walking away from a ridiculous argument—obviously, I haven’t made much headway there—so any intervention by me would need to be balanced and measured.

I did the diplomatic, Mommy thing.  I walked into the kitchen and asked what was going on as if I had no idea.  I affirmed the notion of differently shaped eyes.  Then I told Emmie to eat the freaking Rice Krispie. 

Game over.  Class dismissed.

(Photo credit: Dale Miller via Flickr.com)

(Wordiness alert: this is a long post.  But you will you undoubtedly have your own words in mind by the time you’re done reading, so hang in there, and please consider adding your own story in the comments.)

Any writer worth his or her laptop will tell you that writing is about truth-telling.  In keeping with that axiom, I’m going to tell you a story about a mom who, last week, grasped her principles in her fist, rolled them into a ball and tossed them out a window. 

Here’s what I did.  I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth.

My husband and I had packed up the car (the one that works) and readied the kids for a six-hour drive to New Jersey to visit their grandparents.  One last step remained: hooking up the DVD player in the back seat, which family rules state is permitted for any drive that will take more than two hours.  An older model, the DVD player will only run off power emanating from the 12-volt sockets in the back of the car while the car is running.

Problem: the sockets were dead.  Whining by the children began the instant the problem was identified.

Further investigation revealed that a fuse was probably blown and would need to be replaced, and because of the way Volvo configures its cars in combination with some stripped screws, this wouldn’t be the simple matter we initially hoped.  The car would need to go to the dealer. 

We were faced with the following choices:

• Cancel the trip – Waves of disappointment would surge over us from grandparents and grandchildren alike.
• Drive without the DVD player – I had only to imagine my kids at hour four and I knew that I’d eventually end up at a state turnpike rest stop, curled up in the fetal position.  (In my defense, please keep in mind that it was only last year that my younger child became capable of enduring drives of longer than forty-five minutes without erupting into screaming temper-tantrums.)
• Somehow convince a dealer to fix the car on the spot – How in the name of overbearing car salesmen do you bring a car to a dealership in the middle of the day for service and instantly jump to the head of the line?

My husband and I decided to attempt option three.  “I’ll call the dealer,” he said.

“No,” I replied.  “You need to leave this to me.”

Here’s where it gets ugly.

I am a feminist.  If you somehow didn’t know this before, you do now.  I don’t just think feminist thoughts, but I also live much of my life by these principles. 

Show of hands, parents: has anyone else ever thrown a principle to the wind in the course of parenting?

The world of cars really is one of the last bastions of blatant sexism.  I’ve seen it when shopping for cars, when renting cars and when getting my car serviced.  If I’m with my husband, the guy—or even woman—on the other side of the desk talks to him, not to me.  They only turn to me when discussing kids or shopping.  Sometimes they talk to him even if I’ve asked the question to which they’re responding.  I hate that, but the truth is I’m complicit in this sexism because—sigh—my husband does handle the cars in our house.  In our household division of labor, that’s one of his duties, and I haven’t bothered to learn much about cars.  So I can only complain so much.

And now I can’t complain at all, because last week, I used the sexism of the car industry to achieve my goal: getting that fuse replaced so we could drive to my parents’ house with a DVD player.

First, once we made the decision, I did a mirror check: I was freshly showered, legs shaved and smooth and my make-up and hair were spot-on.  As it happened, I was wearing flattering shorts and my favorite tank-top: the one that makes my boobs look good.  (This is no small accomplishment for a woman who once gave birth to a nine-and-a-half pound baby who then nursed enough to maintain his weight in the 98^th percentile throughout his entire first year of life.)  Add the sandals that elongate my legs, and I looked good enough to achieve my goal—once I added a few accessories.

The children had to come with me.  In fact, I brought the whole family into the dealership.  I held my five-year-old daughter’s hand and kept her back far enough from the tall counter that the man with whom I pleaded my case could see her.  My eight-year-old son was clean and well-behaved and just a touch sullen underneath the brim of his T-rex baseball cap—obviously a good kid who just needed a bit of cheer.  After I delivered the facts and made my emotion-based pleas, complete with gestures to the kids and appropriate body language (head tilts, eyes—yes, you can get nauseous now), I let my husband fill in the “technical” information.

It turned out that a bit of disassembly was required to replace the fuse, and the dealership did the work on the spot.  We were out of there in half-an-hour.  The kids watched movies the whole way to New Jersey.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I’m not proud of my behavior.  (There’s a part of me that’s intrigued by it—the writer, the observer of human behavior, the unbelievably “late bloomer” who wasn’t even capable of doing this sort of thing until a few years ago—but back in my own skin—yeah, my face is red, and it’s not from last week’s sunburn.)  But the fact is that my kids starting whining and complaining the second they learned that the DVD player wasn’t going to work and I couldn’t face six certain hours of torture by whining and crying and complaining in the car.  I saw only one possible path to fixing the problem, and I took it.

So I’ve told you my truth of abandoning a principle in the course of parenting.  Care to share one of your own?

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s summer!

Okay, if you’re going to aim something at my head in response to my sarcasm, make it an ice-water filled spray bottle or the garden hose.  Please.  Because as we all know: crikey, it’s hot out there.

Because we’re so deeply into the summer heat, most of us are desperately searching for ways to cool off and to keep ourselves and our kids amused and happy without turning into simmering puddles of goo.  This completely understandable desperation can lead to a touch of carelessness here and there, as it did with me, yesterday, when I didn’t argue strongly enough with my son to get his eight-year-old butt OUT OF THE LAKE so I could reapply his sunscreen.  I was so hot, and he was happy, cool and having fun, and I gave in.  Today, my blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned boy is bright red.  Parenting fail.

With that incident and other summer activities in mind, here are a few areas where it’s important for parents to be aware of the facts and not let your guard down. 

• “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning”  – Please read this piece.  I had no idea that a person drowning exhibited the signs (or lack thereof) discussed in this article, despite the fact that last year, one town over from my own, a young child drowned in a city pool while lots of people were present, including lifeguards and at least one of the child’s parents.
• Reapply sunscreen every two hours; use a waterproof variety if your kids will be sweating or cavorting in water.  Why?  See paragraph above for what I failed to do yesterday.  Short-term discomfort and long-term skin health problems can be the consequences of failing to do this
• Use bug spray in the woods, and check for ticks.  I know that a variety of opinions exist about this, and if you despise deet, I respect that.  I’m not a big fan myself.  But we live in the woods, my son loves hiking in forests and with past years’ outbreaks of EEE and West Nile Virus in mind, we use bug spray.  And don’t forget to check for ticks after you’ve been under trees.  Check everywhere; ticks don’t necessarily settle on your body where they land.  Last year I had to take my son to urgent care to have an embedded tick removed from his, well, private area.  If that doesn’t teach you a lesson, nothing will.
• Don’t leave kids in the car unattended. At all.  Every summer, we read about kids who die because their parents left them in the car “for just a minute or two.”  This is so heart-wrenching because it doesn’t have to happen.  Remember that the interior of a parked car in the sun can reach 130 degrees or more in just ten minutes.  You can plug in all sorts of variables and play with that number, but the bottom line is that it’s just not safe to leave kids (or pets) in your car.  For some reason, when we’re going somewhere, my kids like to climb into the car in the garage and wait for me, and I have warned them that they are absolutely forbidden to do this during the summer.  They’ve disobeyed me twice and the scoldings have been severe.  (When safety is involved, Mean Mommy comes out—you betcha.)
• Speaking of pets, don’t forget about Fido and Fluffy, because they’re suffering from the heat, too.  (And they have to wear those dang fur coats.)  Here are some “Hot Weather Tips” for pets from our friends at the ASPCA.
• Food safety.  Summer has its own cuisine; it’s part of the magic of the season.  But food poisoning can put a damper on your celebrations, so spend a couple of minutes checking out this “quick summer food safety guide” from Svelte Gourmand.

Ugh.  What a lot of rules.  But like I tell the kids, learning and integrating these rules into our lives is important so that we can be safe and have a good time.  However, some rules can be tossed out the window and it’s SO much fun to be rebellious, especially if you’re a young kid.  When it’s 95 degrees outside, I say there’s nothing wrong with ice cream for dinner or ice cream twice a day.  (And parents, the calories don’t count, either.)  Turn the hose on each other in your clothes.  Stay up late to enjoy the cool(er) night air.  Do things backwards (dinner for breakfast, dessert before the meal, wear your shirt backwards, call your kids by each others’ names).  Sleep downstairs on the floor if that’s where the cooler air is.  Kids, spend an hour telling your parents what to do.  Parents, whine at your kids for an hour.  And just have fun!