Happy Dodgeball

If there is a minute or two left over after the end of karate class, the Sensei often lets the class play “Happy Dodgeball.” After Primo’s first taste of "Happy Dodgeball" he confessed that he really didn’t care for it. I told him that I didn’t either. In fact, no sane person I know does. The senseis must know this because they felt the need to give dodgeball a friendly face by prefacing it with a positive word.

But, lets face it, if you have to stick the word “Happy” before something, the thing probably sucks.

I mean, would you buy it if the dentist told you that you needed a “Happy Root Canal!”

Or you found out you had the “Happy Swine Flu!”

Or it was time to do your “Happy Taxes!”

Come on, man. If someone’s gonna throw a ball at you, they should pay you and not the other way around. Am I right?

Planet of the Helicopter Parents

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? If you were crazy for them, as I was, you will be excited to know that they're being re-issued. I don't know how they'll fare with today's cyber-saavy kids who are used to customizing everything on their computer screen but I'm hopeful they'll be a hit again. In a time and place where children are so over-scheduled and closely-directed, kids crave control -- who doesn't really? --and here is another way to give it to them AND encourage literacy.

But this particular Choose Your Own Adventure book is not for kids, but for you.

Planet of the Helicopter Planets

Warning: the sipping of beverages while reading this may result in leaking out your nose - that's how funny Marjorie Ingall's parody is. And I'm a self-avowed helicopter parent. What slays me is the names of the kids in the playground. Atticus! Spot on.

If I had a windfall of wishes

Do you ever catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and realize you are having a day where you look effortlessly good? I am not talking about a day where you spend an hour trying to look effortlessly good but one where it just, magically, happens, where the way that you hastily stick a bobby pin in your hair while madly scrubbing piss out of the carpet is the very best way you could possibly have inserted that bobby pin? It happens every once in a blue moon and yesterday was one of those times.

And after I realized I was having an effortlessly-good-looking episode, I then thought, how great would it be to ALWAYS look effortlessly good? (Yes, I am never content with anything I have).It occurred to me that if I had a bunch of wishes – not just three but a whole windfall of them, over five for sure, that I would probably wish to look amazing without the aid of lipstick or Great Lash. First, world peace. Second, long health and happiness for my family. Third, health reform. And then the effortlessly hot wish. At least I have my priorities straight.

Bedtime noises

Thanks to the incredibly small size of our home, I can hear everything that goes on in my kids’ room at bedtime. It doesn’t matter where I am – the living room, the kitchen or my bedroom -- it all comes through crystal-clear. And here is what I’ve learned:

You don’t want to hear the kids laughing at bedtime. Because laughing always leads to crying.

Crying, however, never leads to laughing

And the absolute worst thing to hear coming out of the bedroom is silence. Silence equals a big damn mess.

Lately when Seconda is silent, it means she is torturing the pets – two amiable goldfish names Goldy and Whitey (look, I didn’t name them that – it was Primo’s bright idea and how could I explain that calling creatures “Whitey" isn’t really done?). Goldy and Whitey reside in a tank with no lid, on a very high dresser next to the kids’ bed and lately Sec has made it a habit of climbing right on up and dropping crap like dirty socks, stray Legos and discarded foot items into the tank. Those poor creatures must shudder when they see Seconda’s big blue eyes approach.

So, the only thing I like to hear coming out of that bedroom is low-level bickering, the kind unlikely to spur the children to action, and babydolls being disciplined.

“Snow White, I told you a million times, you CAN’T put your face in the fishtank! You leave those fishes alone! You are driving me CRAZY!”

May not lead to sleep but it won’t lead to crying either. Perfect.

After the first Pilates class

Oh.
Oooh.
Ooooooh.
I don’t think I can move. Pain. So much pain, David. This level of pain does not seem normal. It seems deep, deep down in my organs. Is it possible to pull your small intestines?

No, I did not stretch first as a matter of fact. Does it look like I’ve just swimming in free time here?

David, I am positively parched. Damn workout dried up my esophageal lining. I need a glass of water. Of course I can’t get up and get it. I’m injured. I am injured from exercise. I am telling you, I’ve done something awful to my abdomen. No, I don’t think it’s SUPPOSED to ache like this. This seems extreme. Do women have groins? I think I pulled my groin. I probably can’t have sex for WEEKS. Just wouldn’t want to risk it. Next thing you know, I’ll pull my vajajay and then we’d really be in trouble.

Is it not a little ironic that in the pursuit of health I undertake an exercise which ends up injuring me so that I can’t get my fat ass off the couch to get a glass of water? I am NOT being histrionic. You pull YOUR groin and see how you feel.

I’m feeling so lousy I think I need a drink. To dull the pain. No pain, no gain they say. Get me a beer, won’t you?

Don’t know if I can muster the courage to face the mat next week. We’ll just have to see if my groin pulls through.

Be careful how you shake it

I am not a terribly savvy Iphone owner. I have never, for instance, gone so far as to plug my phone into my computer and synch all that shit up. I have only a single page of app icons, most of which were the default ones that came with the phone. But during our trip to TN my in-laws took it upon themselves to introduce me to the app store.

I found the array of choices somewhat mind-blowing. But my sister-in-law helped me get started by suggesting this photo app she had called "Shake It" which basically imitates the effects of a Poloroid on your Iphone camera, over-saturating the photo and making it square so it looks like the real deal. And the gimmick is, you shake your Iphone to develop the picture and it makes that delicious sound of the picture being ejected from the Polaroid camera.

So I went to the app store and did a little search for "ShakeIt," and without looking closely at what popped up, I selected "Buy Now." I ended up with an app on my phone which loads th following message when youclick on it:

"Warning: Using this application can cause pain in your arm and hand and can permanently damage your body, If you feel ANY kind of pain, stop using this app."

Hmmmn . . . that didn't seem quite right. I mean, I've never heard of anyone getting rushed to the ER for too vigrously shaking a Polaroid picture. Turns out what I had bought was a game where you literally try to shake your Iphone as hard as you possible can and the phone calculates how many times you have shaken it and shares that information with you.

What I would like to know is this:

Who the hell thinks this is a good time? Shaking an exceedingly expensive piece of electronics as hard as is humanly possible -- so hard in fact it will likely cause you physical harm -- for the sheer joy of it?

I may have low expectations when it comes to fun but even I have higher criteria than that.

I did manage to find the correct Shake it, an app aptly called "ShakeItPhoto" and Primo went to town taking pictures of me, most of which he intentionally framed so that my head would be out of the pictures. His headless collection. Some of them aren't half bad. Check it out:

Hey you guuuuuuys

My job is not glamorous or impressive or lucrative but occasionally it does allow me to wow my kid. This happened yesterday when I took Primo to a sneak peek screening of The Electric Company’s new season which starts Jan 25^th on PBS. We booked it over to Lincoln Plaza after school, and slipped in just as they were starting the screening of the episode.

Here’s what I have to say about the Electric Company. It will rock your socks off. I don’t remember watching the show when I was a kid but David was a devoted follower back in the day and he thinks the new one fully measures up, which is high praise, indeed. It is great for two reasons:

1. Its hilarious, clever, fast-paced and its format – one narrative with many different kids of skits threaded in – holds your interest the whole time

Thanks to this, the show is able to

2. Teach kids to read and love reading

Oh, and there’s a third reason too:

C. Celebrities! Jimmy Fallon, LL Cool J, John Leguizamo, Yclef and lot sof basketball stars whose names I don’t know but who’d be sure to impress the sports-minded among you.

The Electric Company is like Flintstones vitamins: good for kids’ health but they taste like candy. When you’re talking about educational children’s programming, that’s what you need to get the job done.

I was sort of surprised when Primo got into the Electric Company last month because he notoriously HATES programs featuring what he calls “real people” rather than cartoons, and also because the phonics and vocab lessons seemed slightly above his head. But just goes to show you about having modest expectations for your little one.

In the episode we saw last night, one of the things it focused on was punctuation –teaching kids about how you use periods, exclamation points, question marks and commas. Primo now knows ALL ABOUT COMMAS – how you put them in a sentence to help break it up and introduce pauses in the right places so the words make sense. That seems like a big lesson for a kindergartener, but the show brought the lesson to life in such a clear and dynamic way, you couldn’t help but get it.

His favorite part was an animated skit that featured two sets of mothers and daughters. The first mother said, “My daughter studies rocks and flies” (the sentence pops up on the screen so kids can see the words). And her daughter took out a magnifying glass and securitized some pebbles and buzzing insects. Then the second mom said, “My daughter studies, rocks, and flies.” And her little girl read a book, then played electric guitar and then put on a propeller hat and flew off. Then the first girls said, “Mommy, can I have a comma for my birthday?”

Ever read Eats Shoots and Leaves? It’s like THAT, for kids. Genius.

Primo thought this was so damn funny he has not stopped telling the joke to everyone he meets. He also liked LL Cool J’s rap which rhymed “comma” with “my mama.” About halfway through the show, he whipped out his pad and started drawing and writing letters furiously. When the screening was over, he told me he’d made a book to give to the actors who played the characters Shock and Jessica, who’d come to the event. So we went over and he nervously handed them his creation which was filled with Electric Company games and scenes from the episode. They were incredibly cool about it, really taking his work seriously and listening to him explain the contents for an impressively long time. One of Shock’s specialties, by the way, is that he uses the beatbox to help kids learn phonics. How flipping cool is that??

The Electric Company is produced by the same people who do Sesame Street which means that they have to conduct testing on everything they do and consult educational experts in order to create curricular goals to incorporate into the show. Which means the teaching moments are not incidental or casually stumbled upon but carefully put together to target the areas kids need the most help with and to do it in a way that delights children.

And one more thing – the Electric Company’s website is really fantastic – full of games and video clips and pages your child can personalize. I am really discerning when it comes to the computer games I’ll let Primo play but I love the Jack Bowser Great Escapes game, where kids have to fill in the blanks in sentences, selecting from a list of possible words on the screen. Last night while playing the game Primo differentiated “hug” from “huge.” Who could ask from anything more??