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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.

(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.

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: 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.

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!

(Photo credit: seanmcgrath via Flickr.com)

Today’s blog post is called on account of outrageous heat.  Take your kids out for ice cream and don’t worry if it spoils anyone’s dinner.  In fact, let your ice cream be your dinner.  When the temperature hits triple digits in northern New England, anything goes.

For the slightly more culinarily adventurous (and if you are over the age of twenty-one), try cooling off with a cold beer and kimchi.  The spicy Korean delicacy contrasted with an icy beer is a great way to beat the heat.  Sadly, I’m all out of kimchi right now, which might explain why my eyeballs are sweating as I write this post.

Seriously, stay cool, stay safe—“No, kids, you may not wait for me in the car”—and I’ll be back later this week with a longer post when the temperature dips to a more reasonable level; you know, like 92 or 93 degrees.

(Photo credit: Ozyman via Flickr.com)

By now you’ve figured out that I’m on a mission to get kids to love reading.  Okay, I’m on a mission to get my kids to love reading, and I’ll take as many other kids with them as I can.  Aside from all of the obvious educational benefits, the lifetime advantages of being able to teach yourself anything you want, etc., a child who likes to read owns a perpetual cure to the problem of being bored.

Don’t tell me you haven’t heard it by now.  Your kid, age five to, I don’t know, twenty, has approached you at some point since school let out and whined (or muttered with an accompanying eye-roll) “I’m borrred.”  This might have occurred in your house, surrounded by must-have, expensive toys; or in the car, attached to iPod earbuds and heaped with DVD cases and other amusements purchased for a road trip.  It could have been anywhere.  You can assign some chores to your complaining child in this situation—I have done this more than once—but then what?

Read, kid.  Read.

One practical problem for parents today is that you might not be sure what books to recommend to your child.  You can, of course, approach your local librarian or independent bookseller (and I’d advise doing this; in my house, my personal advocacy of a book to my kid is that volume’s seal of doom, a near-guarantee that my child will never want to read it).  These folks always have great ideas for your kids, and they often run attractive, incentive-based summer reading programs, too.

If you’re looking for some ideas without leaving your computer, check out this post from writer Kathy Crowley at one of my favorite writing blogs, Beyond the Margins.  Kathy introduces us to books she’d forgotten about from childhood, and “new books that I would never have even tried if I didn’t have children.”  Most of these titles are best suited to the eight-and-up crowd, but one or two might appeal to slightly younger audiences.

I do have one caveat to offer with regard to reading as a salve for summer boredom.  If you’re going to encourage your children to read in the car on road trips, then make sure you take care of their other needs, too.  If you, say, forget to feed them for a few hours, don’t ensure that they are adequately hydrated and just keep letting them read in the backseat of a moving vehicle—especially when it’s hot out—things will eventually get ugly.  Trust me on this one; I know.

Do you have any titles for kids—of any ages—you would like to recommend for summer reading?  Check out my Shelfari bookcase in the right margin for some of my family’s favorites, and please feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments.

(Photo credit: Attitash. This is not my family; I have no clue who these people are.)

Our vacation is over, but I’ve got one final story to share.

My husband is usually the member of our family who insists on engaging in physical activities with the kids and only later, after several doses of ibuprofen and days of suffering with a wrenched back, will he acknowledge that he can’t quite play soccer or thrash about in the water for hours at a time the way an eight-year-old boy can. 

“He’s eight.  You’re not,” I usually say as I laugh and shake my head.

Last week, it was my husband’s turn to laugh.

In my own defense, the activity in which I chose to participate with my son is billed as a family activity for all ages.  We decided to take in the summer fun at Attitash, a ski resort that operates water slides and other child-magnets in the warmer months.  “Jack” and I took the ski lift up to the top of the Alpine slide, which is basically twin, mile-long sled tracks that descend the mountain at “rider-controlled speeds.”  Think luge for the untrained and ungraceful, but slower and without snow or ice.  Do you see the happy dad and daughter in Attitash’s publicity photo at the top this post?  That was us, except because Jack is older than the girl in the photo, he and I each operated our own sled on opposite tracks.

Now take the image in your head and think “wipe out.”  Yup, that was me.  Sliding down the track, my sled sliding next to me like it just wanted to hang out and be friends, and me thinking as I slid, “Wow, my skin is rubbing raw right now.  I wonder when I’m going to stop.  My clothes will be torn.  I wonder how bad I’ll look.  I wonder how much of an idiot I look like right now.  I wonder what the people on the ski lift above me are thinking as they watch me.  This kind of hurts.  Hmm, I just keep sliding.”  And so on.

Eventually, I stopped.  I got back on my sled and finished the run, more skin intact than I’d imagined, but with my first double-skinned knees since I was about ten years old.  I sported respectable welts on my shoulder and wrist, too.  Now, a week later, everything has scabbed over, and I look, ironically, like an eight-year-old boy. 

Here’s the funny part: I kind of get my husband’s proclivity for playing these silly games for which he’s too old a little better now.  Because while ripping up my knees, shoulder and wrist sucked, going down the Alpine slide next to my son was kind of fun.  And if Jack asks me to do it again next year, I will.

Uncharted Parent is still on vacation, so here is a repeat of a post from several months ago for your enjoyment.  Why?  Because I said so–that’s why!

Why?

Every parent of a child who is at least two years old knows about the dreaded “why” phase.  It’s adorable for a few weeks.  Then it leaves you banging your head against the car window at traffic lights as you try to come up with reasons why “they” decided green should be the color for Go and red should be the color for Stop.

Well, as a parent, I’ve got my own set of “Why” questions.  If you know any of the answers, please fill me in.

• Why does it take a seven-year-old ten minutes to get out of a car?  What the heck is he doing in there?
• Why does a four-year-old possess the ability to turn an activity as simple as removing laundry from the dryer into a twenty-point interrogation?
• Why is an otherwise almost fearless seven-year-old boy terrified of drinking out of a pink cup?  Just what does he think will happen to him?
• Why is waking up from a nap a traumatic event for small children?  Why are they always so damn upset?
• My daughter repeats everything I say back to me in the form of a question.  Why does my daughter repeat everything I say back to me in the form of a question?
• Why can’t I convince my daughter that I am not picking her up late from preschool?  Ever since the clocks changed, she’s accused me of picking her up late.  It doesn’t matter how many times I explain that it’s getting darker earlier now because we’re getting closer to winter and that she even explains to me that our part of the Earth is tilting away from the sun.  She still lobs the same accusation at me every time.
• Why does Child One, upon overhearing half of an inane answer to a trivial question posed by Child Two, insist upon a full briefing of the conversation that led up to the question and full participation in everything that ensues afterward so that I constantly find myself having two ridiculous conversations at once regarding the fastest setting for the windshield wipers and whether it is fast, very fast or really, really fast?
• Why is the raging debate in my household right now the question of whether “magenta” is a shade of pink, purple or red?
• Why can’t my incredibly smart seven-and-a-half-year-old son remember a single thing he did at school when he gets off the bus?
• Why does every parent-teacher conference I’ve ever attended for my four-and-a-half year old daughter begin with the teachers stating that “Emmie” is at all times the most cooperative, helpful, well-behaved and pleasant child they’ve ever seen, then me and my husband exploding with laughter and, once one of us has recovered, asking the teachers to check to make sure they’ve got the correct file in front of them?
• Why does my daughter like to pull “The Helpless Female” routine in the presence of men, including her father?  The latest example: during a museum visit, she suddenly developed a “fear” of stairs.  “Oh, I can’t go on the stairs.  I’m afraid of the stairs.  You have to carry me.”  (Imagine this plea offered in meek, baby doll voice, with head cocked to one side and eyelashes fluttering.  Seriously.)  Get your own damn mint juleps, Miss Scarlett.
• Why is it that every time I begin speaking into the phone on a writing-related phone call, my cat thinks that I’m talking to her?  (No, this one’s not about kids, but it’s no less grating.)

I’m sure I could come up with more questions, but you get the idea.  I’m even willing to bet you’ve got a few of your own.