AUGUST MOXIBLOGS

1. PUBLIC BATHROOMS WITH KIDS - AUGUST 12,2009
2. MOMS DRINKING AND THE NEW YORK TIMES- AUGUST 19,2009
3. DOG FOOD DOWN THE DRAIN - AUGUST 20, 2009

PUBLIC BATHROOMS WITH KIDS- AUGUST 12,2009

Traveling with children makes using public bathrooms a necessity, usually multiple times per day of travel. Personally, I try not to put my own naked butt cheeks on an unfamiliar toilet seat, so I’ve tried to teach my kids the same techniques that I sometimes use, with varied success.

The easiest way to protect your backside is of course to use the flimsy tissue paper toilet seat covers, but getting those suckers to stay put on a seat while you either help your child jump up onto the seat (more likely), or have your child scoot back onto the seat is almost impossible. The seat cover either always blows completely or partially into the toilet water, or more likely onto the disgusting public bathroom floor. By the time you restart the toilet seat papering process your child will have mostly likely peed his pants. It can be very frustrating.

The other method, which I prefer, is the squat method. Straddling the toilet I just hover a few inches above the john and let it rip. Not only do you get in a good quad workout, but there is no contact at all with the toilet seat in question. My daughter, however, is not a fan of the squat method OR the seat papering method, and this is where my troubles with public bathrooms get personal.

Do I really need to pass on my revulsion of public toilet seats on to my daughter? Do I want to predispose her to that particular neurosis? When we are using public bathrooms I gently remind her not to touch the seat, but once she’s in that stall it’s out of my hands. On the one hand I’m so relieved to finally have my own stall all to myself, and on the other I’m still thinking about what she is doing in her own stall!

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 MOMS DRINKING and THE NEW YORK TIMES- AUGUST 19,2009

I subscribe to the Sunday New York Times, and sometimes I actually get to read it. It is such a guilty pleasure to pretend like I don’t have five loads of dirty laundry to do, so I enjoy it all the more, knowing that the laundry will be there still when I decide not to read it any more. I would say when I finish, but I have yet to finish reading a Sunday New York Times. I leave it in the kitchen and read snipits all week long; some parts are still unread when it goes into the recycling bin the following Sunday.  

Last Sunday an article entitled ‘A Heroine of Cocktail Moms Sobers Up’ caught my eye. You can find it at this link if you’d like to read it for yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/fashion/16drunk.html.

In short, the article is about a California mom of three girls under the age 5 who was a drunk and wrote about it in her blog and in two books she’s published, entitled Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay and Naptime Is the New Happy Hour. The author, who made her fame and fortune chronicling her motherhood-induced alcohol abuse, has decided she drinks too much and has now declared that she is going sober. I was wondering, as did the author of the article, if her decision to give up the bottle had anything to do with the publicity surrounding the mom in New York, who while speeding the wrong way on a New York highway, killed four children, herself and three other adults. The police said that the New York mom had smoked pot and had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. That is a definite buzz-kill right there, and perhaps that California writer smelled some backlash. At any rate, now her readers can follow her tale into sobriety, and she’ll have fresh material.

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DOG FOOD DOWN the DRAIN - AUGUST 20,2009

Having three dogs affords us plenty of opportunities for assigning responsibilities related to the care of our dogs to our kids, who are now 8 and 10 years old. One of the most straightforward of these responsibilities is the daily feeding of our dogs, which my kids understand they must do in order for the dogs to survive, much like I must feed my kids.

This summer we have added the task of collecting the dogs’ bowls when they are finished eating, also seemingly straightforward. My son picked up a half-full bowl of food and asked me what he should do with it, and I told him to put it in the laundry room sink. My unstated intent was to save the uneaten portion of dog food for Paco, our one-eyed Chihuahua, to eat following day.

Well, I should have told my son that we would be saving the food, because he went straight into the laundry room and dumped the food into the sink and down into the tiny drain, and this was how I found it a few hours later when I went into the laundry room for something completely unrelated to dogs or cleaning out a tiny drain with tiny pieces of Chihuahua sized dog food in it.

Twenty minutes later the mess was cleaned up and I had forgotten all about whatever it was I had gone into the laundry room for in the first place. Don’t you love that? Distractible to a fault, when it comes to that kind of stuff. I’m pretty sure my husband, son, or even my daughter would have taken one look and walked right on out of there without even a thought about cleaning it. Next time I think I’ll remember to tell him exactly what I mean about why I want him to put something somewhere.

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