So Move Already!

So, I was putting my son on the school bus this morning and his bus driver starts complaining about how she had heard that the rains were supposed to start up again in the next day or so and she was going to really miss the sun. I limited my reply to simply commenting that I like the rain, but I wanted to say so much more!

This is one of my pet peeves. I live in  Western Washington State near the Southern most point of Puget Sound and anyone who knows anything about the region can tell you that it rains a lot here. In fact even people who really don't know anything about the region know that Seattle, WA (which is the largest city in the state and technically in the same region as me though it's located a few hours drive North of my town) is known for coffee, grunge music, LOTS OF RAIN. Knowing this, why is it that every time I turn around someone is complaining about the rain here.  Seriously?

If you don't like the rain, why do you live in a state where rain is the norm? This is the birth place of the term "sun break" which was specifically coined because the sun coming out happens so rarely. We have rain or at least unbroken cloud cover almost continuously throughout the year- More than 2/3 of the year we get no more than a diffuse, dull sunlight that barely filters through the clouds, and, quite frankly, I like it that way! The constant rain is the reason that we have a temperate rain forest here and the reason that we have so much green in our landscapes- it makes this area the beautiful place that it is! It helps to keep our climate mild, reduces the opportunities for the  folks around here to gets the sunburns that increase the chances of skin cancer and allow us to maintain a wide range of plant and animal life here.

Sure sometimes the constant grey can be a bit depressing, but that's what vacations are for! And whenever I go visit my cousin in Southern California or my sister in Nevada, it never takes long for me to soak up more sun and heat than I want and to realize how awesome this area really is. Occasional sunshine is a nice change, but I wouldn't want it to be the norm. Let it Rain! and if you don't like it, please don't complain to me- try looking for somewhere less rainy to move to instead- then we can both be happy!

Am I Doing Something Wrong?

When I was a kid and I used to get in trouble and complain about my punishments, like any kid is apt to do, my mother would tell me that she was sorry, but if all of her children where happy with her at once then she wouldn't be doing her job right.

Fast forward to today...

I have 4 kids, one less than my mother, and I'm not going to waste my breath claiming that they are never in trouble, but some days reading through the daily posts on CafeMom, especially the Moms of Teens group, I get the impression that MY kids don't get in trouble enough and when they do it's never as serious as many of the posts that I see. But what really gets my worried is that my kids all seem so... HAPPY. I even had one of them tell me that their friends have asked her if we would be will to adopt them if something were to happen to their parents. Does this mean I am obliviously over-looking stuff that they should be in trouble for? Or have my husband and I actually found a way to keep them happy AND well- behaved? I mean they are all doing well in school, none of them have gotten in trouble with the law, neither of my girls is pregnant, neither of my boys has a pregnant girlfriend, we haven't had any major arguments around here in months, everyone does their chores with minimal nagging required and somehow our kids still seem to enjoy spending time with me and hubby, even our almost 16 yr old (Are't they supposed to start hating us once they hit puberty?).  As much as I would love to just take credit for being THAT AWESOME, there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps recalling what my mom used to say about how she wasn't doing her job if we were all happy and I worry that somehow I'm missing something... 

The Pink Cadillac Cafe

I got an e-mail from my mother last night about my uncle. Apparently last month he had brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor that was had grown there and they are asking for people to pray for him.

I have very mixed feelings about this news. On the one hand he is family and I do care about him and his kids, but on the other hand, this is a man who for reasons that apparently are only known to him has avoided contact with most of the family for as long as I can remember. I can in fact only remember seeing him on 3 occasions during my entire life and the last time was over 2 decades ago when I was in high school.

I was visiting my grandparents who only lived about 10 min. from his house, and I had called them because I wanted to see them while I was there. It took 3 days for me to get any response and when I did, it was my older cousin who responded. He was 18 at the time and was thrilled to get a chance to see me like me, he considers family to be important but since his parents tended to change the subject whenever the extended family was mentioned, he had had no way to contact us, but he had accidentally intercepted my message on the answering machine and decided to take it upon himself to come see me.

He and I spent most of that day together. He took me to his parent's house where I got to briefly see my aunt and uncle, neither of which said more than 3 words to me before leaving the house on an "errand", but I also got to see my other cousin and he joined his brother and I for the rest of the day.

We went to the mall for a while and about mid-afternoon, we decided that were hungry and they took me to one of their favorite hang-outs, The Pink Cadillac Cafe. Situated right in the middle of downtown, it was 50's style diner with the largest booth in the place being a bright pink colored Cadillac convertible who's front seats had been reversed to face the back and a table was embedded in the center. (Kind of like the car booths at the restaurant in the movie Pulp Fiction when John Travolta's character takes his boss's wife to dinner) A few of my cousins' friends met us there and we had a great time just visiting  and joking around while we ate. And after we ate they all took me to a nearby video arcade where we goofed around for a few more hours before they gave me a ride home.

That is my most vivid memory of any of them. I never saw any of them again and though I did send my cousin a letter about a month later, and again a few months after that,  he never responded and I am not even sure if he ever got them. It's always been one of my greatest frustrations that I didn't get to know them better, but after more than 20 years without any of them even acknowledging my existence, there is a small pouting child in the back corner of my mind that is still angry at my uncle for basically rejecting his little sister and all of her children, though I know that she tried repeatedly to establish a relationship with him and that kid thinks he has a lot of nerve expecting us to offer any kind of support now that something is going wrong in his little world that he never wanted us to be a part of.

How Do You Know You Have A Healthy Marriage?

I see posts on CafeMom or articles in magazines or on-line all the time talking about how important it is to keep up an active sex life in your marriage and it just makes me laugh. Sure it's important to keep that spark going, but you don't have to measure success by how many times a day/week you have sex.

In my opinion, one of the biggest things that my hubby and I  have going in our marriage is not the sex (though that is definitely important- LOL). It's the fact that we can spend time together for hours on end talking about things other than our family and not run out of things to talk about that we both care about. We share some of the same hobbies and like a lot of the same music and have the same basic beliefs when it comes to religion/faith and politics. It's very important to make sure that you married couples out there are spending some time together just being a couple and talking about these things that you have in common as well as your family. I don't think that my husband and I could have lasted the nearly 20 yrs as a couple that we have under our belts if we didn't keep those communication lines open and find time to just enjoy being the friends that we were even before we got romantically involved.

So, how do you know if you have a healthy marriage? I guess to some extent that depends on what a "healthy marriage" means to you. For me, it means that your spouse is someone that you want to spend time with doing things both with your kids AND on your own; someone you still enjoy sex with, but who understands if you just don't feel like it tonight so that you don't feel like you have to do it; and most importantly, it means that when something upsetting or really awesome happens, you can't wait to tell them about it and when you do tell them, they actually CARE and RECIPROCATE! In my opinion, if you are forcing yourself to have sex with your partner some arbitrary number of times a week out of a feeling of obligation or from some misguided notion that somehow doing so will fix your marriage, but you never do anything else together without the kids and you have nothing else in common, it's time for some serious couples counseling and soul-searching.

Mommy's Me Time

I'm sure a lot of moms can relate to this- sometimes I get so busy with my kids' projects and activities and appointments and whatnot that I just don't seem to be able to find time for me. This is one of those issues that I have been making a conscious effort to change for myself. Being a parent, whether you work outside the home or not, is a busy, challenging and often thankless job and there is no shame in just saying "TIME OUT! I need a break!" The tricky part is that because kids aren't nearly as understanding about this as they expect us to be, we have to really work on just planning in time for this into our days.

For me that means that when I walk my youngest out to his bus in the morning, I make a point of taking a walk around the block on my own before I go home to make sure my cyber-schoolers are up and eating breakfast so they can start their schoolwork. And when their dad gets home he gets to spend an hour with the kids so that I can take a shower or read or play on the computer for a while after spending all day with them. And then he gets his cool down time too, because being Daddy is hard work, too!

A lot of time it seems like people forget just how important it is to take some time for yourself, especially if you have one or more kid(s) with special needs, who typically need exceptional levels of supervision and assistance. I have some friends who seem to think that "me time" has to be treating yourself to something exceptional, e.g. getting your hair or nails done or getting a massage or going shopping, but that kind of mind-set seems like it causes more stress than anything else because it gets so damn pricey! I have a dear friend that drives me crazy with that mind-set. She works like 60hrs a week, barely gets to spend any time with her kids, never seems to have money for anything, but insists on constantly getting her nails done or buying herself another pair of shoes that she doesn't need and that costs way too much for what she got, all of which goes on her credit card and all in the name of treating herself and having me-time. Why?!? What is the point of reducing your stress in ways that cause you more stress when the credit card bill comes? "Me time" doesn't have to cost money, people.  It can be as simple as going for a walk or taking a shower uninterrupted so long as you do it on your own and enjoy it!

Please Think Of The Children- Learning By Doing

This is a subject that has been a thorn in my paw for a long time. Every where you look there are examples of institutions, especially schools, trying to accommodate individuals that are screaming "PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" Unfortunately, this is usually manifesting in more and more examples of ways that kids are being prevented from being kids. Schools today have ridiculous rules preventing kids from doing totally normal things like running on the play ground or jumping off of swings, or, my personal favorite, the increasingly popular "Hands off" policies that even punish kids for helping other kids up when they fall down.

I totally understand the schools' positions. They have limited operational funds already. They can't afford to have those funds cut because they are defending themselves against law suits from angry parents whose kids are injured on school grounds. So I want to say outright that I do not want to criticize the schools who are only trying to protect themselves as well as they can.

My anger is directed at the people that make these policies necessary. It is not the school's responsibility to wrap your kids in bubble wrap and protect them from every possible bump and scrape. Kids do dumb things and sometimes it gets them hurt, but it is an essential part of the learning process to have the freedom to try some of those things.

Learning to make good decisions requires that you have the freedom to make bad ones. Maybe it's just me, but it makes far more sense to me to let them do that when they are kids and the choices that they make have more controllable consequences. Let them run on the playground- if they run into something and get hurt, maybe they will learn to watch where they are going.

And another thing, let them fight back when someone hurts them- there isn't always going to be a teacher/parent/adult to protect them- sooner or later they have to learn how to fight for themselves. I have just about had it up to here with the stupid rules that punish kids who are being bullied and decide to fight back just as much as the kids doing the bullying. I know a kid who was constantly being bullied before his mom decided to home-school him and the final straw in her decision was when her son was jumped by a group of 4 older kids as he was coming out of the gym. The older kids jumping him was bad enough, but what really pissed her off was that because during the ensuing struggle her son threw one of the other boys off his back and into a wall, her son was suspended for just as long as the other kids. Since when was self-defense not ok?  I'm sorry for all you parents of bullies out there who don't want your kid to get hurt, but if your 13 yr old hits my 11 yr old, I would applaud my kid for turning around and returning the favor.   In my opinion, any person that thinks that it would be better for that same 11yr old to curl up and take the beating needs to be brought up on child abuse charges.

Obesity and the Healthcare Industry

I recently saw a report from the World Health Organization regarding obesity in Europe and the US which claimed that by 2030 about 1/2 of the populations of those regions will be "obese".  They urged the governments of those countries to take action to help curb this trend.

I understand the concerns regarding the correlation between obesity and other health problems such as diabetes, however I think that the WHO is barking up the wrong tree asking the governments to try to regulate this. Most of these governments are having trouble  balancing their budgets- what makes anyone think that they can balance our diets?

Aside from that, what in the world can the government do about it with out simply making people angry? I suppose that they could try to regulate the fast food chains more, but that's just going to piss off the fast food industry and their customers and encourage people to buy more junk food at the grocery stores. I suppose they could then extend the regulations to include many of the junk food items we currently have available to us in the stores, but you start mess with many of those items and you're gonna have some really angry people demanding the heads of the officials that are reducing their access to their Twinkies, potato chips and sodas.

WHO says that their numbers prove that we can't depend on people self-regulating this anymore, but I don't see any way that the government can regulate it for their citizens without instigating a lot of civil unrest and anger. If they really want to make a difference, maybe they need to invest some effort in teaching people how to regulate themselves. OR try regulating the prices of more healthy foods so that people can afford to buy more veggies and fruits, because I know that more often than not I end up choosing less healthy, more fattening foods because buying the equivalent in healthy foods is priced 50% or more higher for the same amount.