Right after this, he *almost* let me kiss him. Almost.

My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation.

Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom kept my hair cut in an early-70s pixie, the better to suit my superfine strands), stick him in Dr. Brown’s Delorean set for 2010, and he’d be me. First, in looks. Here’s a pic of me and my sister, when I was around 4:

That's me on the left, with the mini dress (cute, right?) and the Mr. Spock hairdo.

And then here’s James at more or less the same age as I am in the photo above. Also, you’ll note, he’s with his brother. I have more photos of him alone than my parents did, thanks in large part to easier photo technology, but still it’s harder to find photos of him than of his big brother, or without his big brother:

That's James on the left. It occurs to me that he hams it up in photos, with Daniel as straight man. Just like me and my sister.

Here’s how he’s like me in other than looks:

1. He’s gregarious, entertaining, smart and funny (what, you don’t think I am, too?!). That is, when he feels safe. Otherwise, he appears either painfully shy or snootily standoffish.
2. He’s got a dramatic streak 14 miles wide. Direct quotes: “Oh, now we’ll never get there!” (said on a normal-length trip to Grandma’s house marred solely by a short spate of traffic buildup); or “You never make macaroni and cheese” (which I do make pretty darned often, thankyouverymuch); or “I bumped my head and it really, really, really hurts,” when it quite obviously was the lightest possible bump in the history of kids’ bumped heads.
3. He’s a loyal friend, and even at the tender age of 5 1/2, he sees straight through cliquey-ness and cattiness and he instinctively avoids it. It’s cute to watch, because he has no idea that he’s steering clear of the knot of “in” boys because their interactions appear shallow or showy. He’ll say it’s because they’re too loud.
4. He’s not interested, at all, in pleasing grownups who attempt in good-hearted but exaggerated ways to be friends with him. So, teasing and tickling are out, out, out. This of course leads to some bewilderment and temporarily hurt feelings among relatives who don’t see him much, but he’s not giving it away for free, and he sees through a ruse from a mile away, so just don’t try.

I’m musing on this topic for two reasons today. One  is that, on this second week of summer camp after school ended, James is only just now easing into that transition. He finished kindergarten, which was a very big deal to him. The other day, when we were in the car and no one else was talking, I heard him say, softly to himself, “why couldn’t I just stay in kindergarten forever?” So my baby is at a turning point, and he’s not sure who he’s supposed to be, the big first grader, or the baby clinging to kindergarten. So while Daniel leaped eagerly from second grade to a return to the summer camp he loves, James has been more needy, so of course he’s on my mind (and keeping me up at night worrying) more than usual.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m mulling my little one’s resemblance to myself, physically and psychically: I’m trying to figure out the most effective way to deal with a child who is, you know, like me. My grandmother, rest her glorious, tart, sweet soul, used to say that you have to parent each kid the way he or she needs to be parented. Which sounds simple and makes sense, until you get to the part where you have to figure out what those needs are.

With James, I have to pull back from saying breezy, distracting things like, “Oh, but you want to go to first grade!” when he misses his happy, collegial kindergarten. Because of course he does want to go to first grade; of course he does know he’s a big boy; he knows that kind of response is a sop to his ego, which he’s not interested in.

He’s not looking to be distracted; he needs to be heard. You can’t play subterfuge with this kid. You just have to say, “yep, of course you miss kindergarten. Of course you do” and leave it at that.

I have to gloss over the dramatics and praise his good-friend status.

And I have to kiss him while he sleeps, because otherwise I’m not allowed. Come to think of it, was I like that, too? Paging my mom…

How do you shift your parenting styles to suit your kids’ needs?

James at his daycare "graduation"

I’m a big fan of daycare. Not just childcare (as in, having someone other than a parent taking care of a baby or child), but daycare.

My journey, as a working mother, to daycare, took me a year and a half and five nannies. Our first nanny, Maggie, was found only after I let go my new-mom fantasies about finding The Perfect Situation (a persistent fantasy, as I walked my newborn around the ‘hood during the snowy winter months I was on leave, was of running into a seasoned-yet-spry grandmother who had room and an empty crib just waiting for my boy).

Maggie was not that. She was a troubled divorcee from a depressed Northern English city who’d fled an abusive husband back home and landed in New York, eventually finding love with a local guy, but still horribly conflicted about having left her own children behind. She may have chased away her demons by working out too much and eating too little, but her babycare instincts were pure, and her love immediate and deep. Thinking back on it, Mags mothered us both, even though she was only a year or two younger than I. “Little Dan,” she called my son, wistfully, while telling me stories of her Daniel, back in the U.K.

I needed the mothering. Because I was clueless.

Sample phone conversation:

Me: “How’s he doing?”

Mags, whispering: “He’s napping in his crib.”

Me: “Really? How’d you get him to do that?”

Mags: “He looked sleepy, so I put him down, and he fell asleep.”

He looked sleepy, and she put him down. Genius, that woman.

A year later, though, we’d bought a house and were moving too far to keep Maggie. When the enormity of that fact hit me, I nearly backed out of the deal. I was dying to leave our cramped apartment, but on our last day, I clung to Mags, and we both cried.

Once in the suburbs, we blew through four nannies in a year. Gillian went back to school; Olga went back to Lithuania (which was too bad–I have a feeling she’d have had my boy toilet trained and speaking Russian at 18 months, and she might also have re-tiled our crooked kitchen floor in her spare time); Danielle quit, via email, with one day’s notice; and Christine? Gosh, I have no idea what happened to Christine. (If you’re out there, hon, can we have our key back? Thanks. Not.)

And that’s when I washed up, exhausted, defeated by nannies–and pregnant with my second son–at a local daycare. Where we stayed for the next four years. Louise, who ran the place (a licensed daycare facility, but run out of a small house that had been cleverly converted–a garage became a sweet infant room, with a blue-sky-and-white-cloud ceiling) could be mercurial, but she loved my kids and had a knack for hiring that meant  many of the same employees who were there when we started were still there when we left.

Whenever I think of daycare’s detractors, I think of a nose-wrinkling response I got from a woman I know a bit, whose young daughter is cared for by her (aging) mother in law (who is also, it must be added, caring for her even more aged mother. I leave you to figure out what’s better — a daycare staffed by energetic twenty-year-olds, or… well, you see my point). What she said about daycare matched a common reaction:

“Oh, I could never have strangers taking care of my child.”

Um. Yeah, strangers. How long were Louise and her staff strangers to my children? Five minutes? Ten? I left my second boy, James, in their care at 4 months or so. He grew up there, with Miss Allison, Miss Cathy, Miss Kaisha. Strangers?

Next argument: “They get sick more often.” They do? Mind didn’t. Next?

What about the possibility of abuse?

Err…. I’m not 100% clear on the stats, but I’m pretty sure it’s been researched and confirmed that most abused children are abused by people in their own families. One revelation I had about daycare shortly after Daniel started there was this: If a nanny, home alone with my nonverbal toddler all day long, was having a bad day and was lonely/frustrated/angry/tired/hungover, she had no backup. If one of the women at the daycare was in a similar situation? She could go make the lunches in the other room while the other workers picked up the slack and cuddled the babies. Right? Can I get an amen?

There’s this one: They’re more comfy in their own homes. Yeah? Doing what? There are a couple of nannies/sitters in my neighborhood now. I see them occasionally, pushing a listless-looking three-year-old on a park swing. Do either of them have anyone to socialize with? It’s true that nannying in the suburbs is harder, lonelier, but even still. I see those three-year-olds walking silently with a babysitter down the street, then I think of my own when they were that age, sitting at a diminutive table making a mother’s day gift or eating chicken soup for lunch, finding out which kids were good to be friends with and which had a problem sharing the trains, and I think, which is better?

Here’s one of my best memories of our little daycare. One day, I called to say I was picking James up early, just after naptime, because he had a pediatric appointment. We were in the midst of toilet training. I got there to see all the kids dozing on their cots. Miss Kaisha gently roused James and asked if he wanted to use the potty before he left. He willingly sat. And sat, and sat. (Obstinate little bugger; he knew, in his little lizard brain, that Mommy had things to do, an appointment to make, another kid to pick up at school). As my blood pressure rose (sure as I was that the kid would pee his pants either in the car or at the doctor’s), Kaisha crouched down next to him in the tiny bathroom, took his hands in hers, and gently stroked them while singing the ABCs.

I felt for a moment as I had way back when with Maggie. Like we were both being taken care of.

James didn’t pee on the potty then, nor did he have an accident (bladders the size of Kansas, my sons), but I give Kaisha total credit for maintaining the patience necessary to train him (and his brother before him; who was way more obstinate. In fact, Kaisha once confided to me that she enlisted the help of her own Grandma Gloria for ideas on coaxing stubborn boys to let it go already).

They made friends that we still see now and again, they felt love–and gave it back (Daniel, I”m sure, still has kind of a crush on a young woman named Miss Deirdre, a schoolteacher who worked at the daycare during summers, and I hope he remembers that, as a young man himself, and blushes happily when he does). They did the crafts, endless, endless crafts, things that I will not do at home with my craft-and-mess-averse personality.

They had a graduation that made me weep.

So yes, with kisses and apologies to Maggie, daycare was the best decision I made in their little lives. We all grew up there, really.

Like any parent, I get my dander up when I suspect even a hint of a school not taking bullying seriously. But seriously? Most schools so, even if they are, sometimes, out of their depth (for lots of reasons: because so-called “mean girls” can be really mean; because boys and girls can be stealthy in their torment; because victims often don’t speak up; and because the whole arena of online bullying offers so many options for abuse that linger much longer than a hallway taunt has the power to do).

I suspect that many schools, if not most, deal competently with bullies, in this age of so much anti-bullying awareness. A local friend of mine, a trustee of her school board, told me a terrible story about a group of middle school kids who set up a Facebook page to torment a particular kid. To the school’s credit, once the story came to light, all the students involved got the heat. Not just the kids who created the page and spearheaded the abuse, but even any student who simply signed on as a “fan” of the page. And good for those administrators.

But here’s the elephant in the room: where are the parents?

Now, I don’t believe that parents of middle- and high-school kids can be as savvy about what their kids are doing as, say, I can. But I do believe that we all, as parents, should start as we mean to go on. I’m constantly walking a fine line between wanting to know what’s going on in my sons’ lives, the part that exists outside the boundaries of our home, and letting them be free to make friendships and deal with the sometime fallout of those friendships. And I plan to continue that, as best I can. I don’t plan to give up, and I think a lot of parents do.

I wrote about this last summer, when it began to occur to me that too many parents toss up their hands with a, “well, they’ll do what they’re going to do anyway, so why try?” attitude that drives me right around the bend. I know the counterargument: Sure, Denise, you smug parent-of-grade-schoolers. Just you wait until they are in middle school and it’s all slipping out of your grasp. But is it, really? Plenty does elude parents, I know. But what about being the voice they hear in their heads? What if you make it crystal clear, from babyhood onwards, what behavior is okay and what is absolutely not okay, consistently and constantly, firmly and clearly, so that by the time they are 13 and 14 and 15, and someone’s handing them a bottle of vodka at a party, or someone’s inviting them to join a Facebook group whose sole purpose is to bully another student, they hear you, or something like you (hopefully, it’s their own voice, but your words, your values), in their heads saying, “I just know there’s something wrong about this,” and having the wits and the cojones to stick to their moral and ethical guns.

I know it’s not perfect, and I realize that even good kids with tough, involved parents do the wrong things. But what’s the alternative? Giving in? Washing your hands of the whole thing? Leaving bullying education up to the school?

Or worse, blaming the schools or TV shows or the ubiquity and often poisonous anonymity of the internet for your own children’s misbehavior? I could go on, but Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said it all so much better than I could have in today’s paper. He notes, accurately, that the Phoebe Prince story, like similar ones, arouses familiar emotions in a TV viewing, paper-reading audience because:

…it is about cruelty, which we do not understand; lack of empathy, which we find frightening; and conformity and coercion. But mostly it is about how little we know our kids, the little beasts who live among us and can sleep with a teddy bear by night and text-message a 15-year-old colleen to her death by day. Who are these kids?

Indeed: Who are they? But, he goes on to say, why aren’t fingers pointed at the parents?

The so-called South Hadley Nine, the bullies who have recently been indicted in the Prince case, says Cohen:

…clearly needed some parenting — some intercession or maybe, even probably, a parent to do what their child all the time wanted: force them to stop.

Yep. They needed parents. Parents who had not given up, on them, on the ongoing shaping of their moral sense, on their behavior.

It starts in the playground. And it does. Not. Stop.

The shoes at the side door (and the kid in them) just get bigger

Over at Mommasaid.net, my friend and colleague Jen Singer lists some of the reasons parenting teens is harder now than it used to be (exhibit A: sexting. Shudder).

Jen actually has a newly-minted, real-life teenage son. I do not, yet (though I do sometimes stare at the welter of kid-size sneakers, boots, and soccer cleats near the door and imagine them three times the size, and my heart aches for a mudroom and a shoeless infant in equal measure).

So no, I have no actual teens yet — but geez, oh, man is my older boy acting like one lately! Recent utterances:

I want my privacy!

Why can’t I have a lock on my door?!

When do I get to make the rules around here?

and our current favorite:

When I have kids, they’ll be able to [eat two desserts if they want; stay up all night if they want; have as much computer time as they want]!

He gets himself quite heated up, in a scarily teen-like manner, over things like having to go upstairs now to brush teeth and get dressed, and not five minutes from now, because five minutes from now is when the bus comes (and no, we can’t go to school late; Mama does not want to break her perfect record of never having had to drive him to school in almost three years. I take my moments of pride where I can get them, lately).

I get why my Daniel is erupting in anger at some inopportune moments; he’s jonesing for more independence. I’d love to give him more, but not necessarily the kind he wants. And that’s the dance I’m trying to learn the steps of right now.

• Not going to happen: He gets to decide what time bedtime is. Uh, uh. Though seriously, and don’t tell him this, I probably could let him “stay up” in his bed as long as he likes; because he’s always been the best sleeper in the house, hands down, he’d probably keel over not to far from the Mom-sanctioned bedtime anyway.

• Will happen: He’s going to start making his own lunch, at least on weekends when I’m not so pressed for time, and pretty soon on school mornings, too (he’s already responsible for packing up his backpack, though that takes two or six reminders).

• Not going to happen: Having two desserts. His sweet tooth is way too sharp and shiny (just like his mother’s!) to allow that. I have already made the decision, and communicated as such to my kids, that for now, I know more about what’s good for them to eat than they so, and I’m in control of the shopping list and the pantry doors.

• Will absolutely happen: He’ll be heading home from the bus stop on his own starting in third grade, when he and his brother will be in different schools, with an hour lag between their comings and goings. No way am I making four trips a day up the block, and it’ll make him feel good to be the guy marching down the hill on his own, as it should (I’d do it this year, but school rules say that kindergarteners have to be met at the bus stop by parent, guardian, or sanctioned-by-written-note substitute guardian, and the little guy is in K. Sigh.)

The good (for now) news about Daniel is that his naturally, deeply sensitive nature usually causes him to turn around and throw himself on me in abject despair once he realizes he’s turned the whole house upside down for the want of 5 more minutes to watch SpongeBob before school, and apologizes in a patently un-teen-like manner. “I still need you Mommy! I do!”

I figure I have a few more years of that. Right? Right?

Me, in fifth grade. Back when you got a free comb on picture day.

The other day, both boys came home with the familiar order form and info sheet in their backpacks: Gear up, mom and dad, it’s almost Picture Day!

I hate picture day.

To be precise, I don’t hate the day itself, since I’m not, literally or otherwise,  in the picture. True to my meanness and aversion to being a Joiner, I don’t even volunteer to herd kids to the all-purpose room or comb hair and fix bows.

What I hate is the form itself (murky, impenetrable); the packages offered (many choices, none of which make sense); and even the modifications you can make to the packages offered (again, none of which make sense, because none of them modify the packages to the point where they make sense, at least to me). The packages all cost too much for what they include. In the last year or two, the company’s started offering what seems like a great advantage: a photo CD of your kid, so you can (gasp!) download and print or have printed your own shots. But guess what? You can only buy the CD as part of a package. The most expensive package, the one that includes something like three 8X10′s (I’m sorry, does anyone aside from a few grandparents, my own parents not included, even want an 8X10 anymore?).

Those packages also include weird sizes. You know how a standard photo size these days is the nice, desk-top-frame friendly 4X6? No such thing here! You can get 5X7s, of course, and those anachronistic 8X10s, but no 4X6′s.

But hey, how about eighteen inch-and-a-half by two-and-a-half inches? Really — 18 of them?

Gah. I won’t go on. And in case you were wondering if I was protecting the innocence of the company in question, I’m quite happy to name names. It’s LifeTouch. And they come back in the spring!

My question is this: Why do we fall for the pitch?

These reasons not to fall for it are obvious, but bear repeating:

We all have cameras now. Many of us have very good cameras. Even our cheaper cameras take good pictures. That was not always the case, of course. On my desk right now is a 5X7 black and white photo of my grandmother with my dad, when he was two. A photographer came to the house and persuaded my normally quite frugal grandmother to spring for some photos. He must have plied her with that age-old effective strategy: “But Madam, you look so lovely in this photo! So youthful! And your son! How adorable!” All of which is true, but you know. My point, though, is that these old-time traveling shutterbugs had one major ace in the hole: that set of photos of my dad at 2 are probably the only extant photos of my dad at two. Want to know how many photos I have of Daniel at two? So do I.

Here’s that pic of my grandma and dad:

Brooklyn, circa 1938. And this was probably an outtake of the day's photo session!

Everyone we know takes pictures of our kids. Lots and lots of them. I challenge you, right now, to compare a stunning unposed shot you probably have tucked in an album, with one you had taken at Sears Portrait Studio, or its equivalent. I took Daniel to Sears exactly one time for photos, at 18 months. I felt like I should — other moms shlepped to the photo studio on a monthly basis! The shots are cute, of course, with my baby’s wispy curls that are no more, his chubby feet and sweet baby face. But I don’t even have that in a frame. What I do have framed? A shot we took of him at 9 months, on a park bench near where we used to live. It’s so… perfectly Daniel:

This is exactly how Daniel still looks, minus the chub.

Whereas the Sears shots? They’re Sears shots. No more, no less. And certainly no essense of Daniel.

And yet I’m writing the checks to Life Touch. This is the last time, though. I’m doing it because it’s James’ kindergarten year, and because as the second son he’s gotten short shrift photographically, even given our shutter-happiness. And because the grandparents do still like them.

Next year, all LifeTouch is getting from me,I promise, is just enough for the class photo. Then I’m going to spend some time sifting through the four gazillion shots either I or my relatives take of my sons, find the best, and make copies (for cheap! Online!) for the grandparents. There. Done.

School photos are an anchronism. And as my friend Sandra pointed out, unlike when we were kids, you don’t even get a free comb anymore.

How many times have you been to your kids' Kindy classroom?

My mom recently told me a funny (well, not funny-ha-ha, more like funny-hmmmmm) story about the time she got a peek into my younger brother’s kindergarten classroom. Seems that one day, my brother missed the bus, so my mom drove him.

After leaving him inside the school to be walked to his class by the secretary, she was about to hop in our 1974 Caprice Classic station wagon (with the fake-wood-grain panel outside and green shag rug in the way back) and head home, when she had an idea. What if she snuck around the building and just sorta peeked in the window to see what it all looked like?

See what it looked like?! Snuck around the building?!

These days, not only would she not have to crawl through bushes to peer through glass at her son, she’d probably be in the classroom, distributing snack, reading a book, or helping the kids glue ears on the lion art projects they hadn’t had time to finish yesterday. These days, at least where I live, kindergarten parents are nearly as involved in the day-to-day of their children’s classrooms as, well, their kids are.

Anyway, mom peeked in and what do you think she saw? Kids at their tables, tracing the letter “T” or coloring? Kids in the block corner, stacking and learning math at the same time? Kids on the cheerful carpet, discussing the day’s weather? Nope. She saw a teacher — who just happened to be our across-the-street neighbor — sitting behind her desk and screaming her head off at the unruly gaggle of 5-year-olds running around unfettered. Nice.

Of course, bad teachers (or teachers having a bad day, to be fair) are everywhere, just as good teachers are everywhere. But I can guarantee you that there’s No. Way. On. Earth that this teacher’s classroom style would not be known, down to the last detail, by every parent who’d ever had a child go through that school.

We all know. Some parents know more than others — in fact, there are some parents these days who keep Excel spreadsheets of teachers to track the endless who-had-whom and who was in who’s class and who is best for Their Little Darlings.

We’ve come a looong way from a time when moms like  mine had virtually no idea about their kids’ school days, to now, when parents are partners from day one. I remember remarking to a dad in my son’s first grade class last year — it was either at the butter-making Thanksgiving party, or perhaps the reception after the winter concert — that I’d already been inside this classroom more times than my parents had set foot in my elementary school, ever.

Don’t even get me started on the last-day-of school hoopla. Oh, okay — get me started! In our primary schools, kids find out on their final report card who their next year’s teacher will be. Immediately — like, within the hour — phones and emails are buzzing all over town. One mom in my son’s class (who was both the class mom and the PTA president) emailed asking everyone who their child got. Once she had all the responses she was going to get, she sent out another message with a spreadsheet detailing which kids were in which second-grade classrooms. So you could see who your child’s classroom buddies would be the following year.

As it happens, Daniel was the only kid on that list from his first grade class who didn’t know who else would be in his second-grade class.  I said, “well, you’ll make new friends, and see all your old friends in the cafeteria, right?” Right.

I actually have my own, foxes-in-charge-of-the-hen-house  kindergarten story. When I was in my half-day K, back when what kids did in kindergarten was roughly equivalent to what my boys did in daycare when they were two years old (you know, coloring, playing, eating snacks, napping), I endured the Tommy Smith and the Milk incident. In our school, you had a little container of milk to go with your from-home snack. I was 10 seconds late to the snack table one day, and arrived at my seat to find Tommy Smith sitting there, drinking my milk! I alerted the teacher, who told Tommy to go to his own seat. Which he did. And where he proceeded to start drinking his milk.

Suffice to say I didn’t drink my milk that day.

And my parents never knew. No incident report sent home, no note in the backpack (in fact, no backpack).

I’m not advocating a return to those (dark? more independent? more separation-between-kids-and-parents?) days. If someone takes my kid’s milk today, you can bet I want to hear about it. If one of them gets hurt on the playground or in the cafeteria, I want a call from the nurse (which I got, last year, when Daniel got a “suspicious bruise” when he fell onto a cafeteria bench. Not only did I get a call from the nurse, but she explained how the principal — the principal! — had walked him back to the offending bench to describe how it happened, just to be sure no one had pushed him. No one had. He’s just clumsy).

But do I want to pore over spreadsheets? Spend my summer agonizing over Who They Got  next year? Or if Mrs. So-and-so is a good fit?

As a friend of mine, who is actually an educator in our district and as such has the privilege of actually choosing her daughter’s teachers (she declines), said on this subject: “If she gets a teacher she clashes with, it’s an opportunity for us to teach her how to get along and deal with it.”

Exactly!

And for all the apparent chaos of my brother’s K classroom, he’s turned out okay. But I wonder what ever happened to Tommy Smith?

[photo: everystockphoto.com]

The bag with (at least) nine lives.

“Mom, what should I do with my applesauce cup?”

I sigh. I’ve explained this before–the applesauce and yogurt cups are recyclable, so bring them home. The plastic utensils? They’re dishwasher safe, my son, so tote ‘em on home. What I say is, “You know what, Daniel? Just put everything in your lunchbox and bring it home — we’ll sort it out later.”

Annoyingly, though the schools talk a good game about saving the earth (or, as James says cutely, “we have to save the Earf”), they don’t have recycling bins in the cafeteria. So in the giant garbage bucket go the water bottles, the juice boxes, and the yogurt and applesauce cups, along with the sandwich baggies, straws, napkins, and mountains of uneaten food (though, I have to say, not from my son’s lunch!).

I’m hardly perfect when it comes to environmentally-ideal lunch packing, otherwise I’d use cloth napkins and make my own granola bars. But at the very least, I pack re-usable drink containers (juice boxes, though I use them for camp and picnics, go against my natural frugality as well as my environmental efforts), and I continually, if not perfectly patiently, instruct my sons to bring the stuff home.

Ziploc bags are where I straddle the line between being green and being a typically profligate consumer-and-tosser of packaging. Because I do use them–for snacks and sandwiches–but I also reuse them. Over. And over. And over.

Right now, in fact, there’s a mini mountain range on my drainboard, made entirely of inside-out, just-washed Ziploc bags. Objectively, it’s kind of pretty – the diminutive snack-size bags are the foothills, the sandwich bags rise into higher mountains, and the large freezer bags, which once held frozen chicken breasts or rings of Italian sausages, are the range’s Everest and K2. They’re sprinkled with water droplets, and sparkle in the light from the kitchen window, their blue-and-green zippers anchoring them to the dishtowel.

I’ve just done the pain-in-the-butt job of turning a week’s worth of bags inside out, sticking one hand inside them, and soaping them up with a sponge. Then the rinse, and the slow-drying mountain range. Once dry, I turn them back right-side-out, fold them, and stack them back in the drawer that holds the boxes of their pristine cousins, Ziplocs I try my best not to use, at least not until my motley collection has seen its last days.

I know there are other earth-friendly options for the task of packing my sons’ lunches and snacks every day, such as reusable containers that can be popped in the dishwasher, and I do fill reusable bottles with milk or apple juice rather than buy juice boxes, but I like my Ziplocs. I enjoy the mental game I play: how long can I make the bargain box of 50 snack-sized bags last? The whole school year? Until winter break? And I don’t like the other option: succumbing to the siren song of single-serving bags of pretzels, popcorn, Goldfish crackers.

My wash-and-reuse system of sandwich- and snack-packing may seem modern, but really I come by it genetically. My grandmother tore Brillo pads in half (really, a half does just as good a job, and goes rusty and unusable just as quickly as a whole), and actually washed what little aluminum foil she used. I remember the one hearty laugh my sister and I got on the otherwise sad day more than a decade ago, when we were clearing out our grandmother’s apartment before she entered the nursing home. “Oh my God!” my sister exclaimed, rummaging in a pantry shelf. “This box of foil is from Hill’s!” Which was a five-and-dime store in our old neighborhood in Queens—where Grandma hadn’t lived since 1978.

As a schoolchild, I was admonished daily to bring home my brown paper lunch bags. Sometimes I did, but many days I forgot and felt bad, especially when I’d see my dad, who brown-bagged lunch for work, with a stack of five on a Friday, neatly folded as though hardly used.

It was a chore for me—but it seems to be sinking in to become second-nature for my boys. Such as the time not long ago, when Daniel handed me his lunch box full of cups to be rinsed and Ziplocs to be washed, and said, “Mom! Ally, who sits next to me? She said her mom told her to throw out her bags! Why would she say that?!”

Meanwhile, our Ziploc mountain range gleams in the sun.

How do you teach your kids about recycling?

Do You Let Your Kids Go Solo?

Last fall, a new family moved into our neighborhood, and on the first day of school, there was a new girl at our little bus stop. They’d arrived at their house literally the day before school started. From Israel.

That first day, the father took his little girl, Hadar, 6, to the stop. She wanted to take the bus (even though her English wasn’t very strong), and he was planning to follow in his car to complete her registration at the school. There were two other children in the family besides Hadar: an 11-year-old girl named Tevel, and Albel, a baby boy.

I’ll be getting to my point here — which is about how today’s parents do roughly 100% more hovering over their kids than my parents did when I was my children’s age — in a moment, I promise.

But first a wee bit of geography. I live on a longish, curvy suburban street, with no sidewalks. Our bus stop is about a 20-second walk away, at a stop sign where a small cul-de-sac intersects my street. From my front windows, I can’t quite see the stop sign on the corner, thanks to a curve in the road.

Here’s Daniel, at the bus stop on his first day of Kindergarten, in 2007:

At the stop, with both parents and our camera.

The Israeli family moved into a house in the cul-de-sac; from their front porch, it’s a straight shot to the bus stop, with no need to cross the street. On the second day of school, and nearly every day thereafter, little Hadar left her house on her own (though sometimes her big sister Tevel walked out with her). And when the bus returned the kids in the afternoon, she walked back home on her own.

I tried to picture the scene from Hadar’s mom’s point of view (she was usually just inside her door, with baby Albel): Why, she must have thought, were those other three moms standing there? But from our perspective, she was the one who looked off to us. (This, a woman who’d served in the Israeli army).

When I started first grade, I walked with my sister down the street and around the corner to our stop, well out of sight range of our house. My mom, who had not served in any country’s army, but who had grown up in Brooklyn and walked to school every day, watched as long as she could see us, then went back inside.

These days, bus stops are coffee klatches and meeting spots for moms, dads, grandparents sometimes, and of course the kids. Our bus drivers are not allowed to let kindergartners off the bus for anyone but their parent or guardian, and even my neighbor and I can’t get each other’s kids off the bus without clearing it with the school first. Back when I was a kid, bus stops were lawless places. Anything could happen there, any many things did (none of which our parents were told). Like the time, for the space of an entire winter, an older boy made it his mission to steal my hat and hold it up just out of my reach. I fought that battle (not well, I have to admit; I still get hot tears just thinking about it) on my own.

One of my mom’s often-repeated stories from my first school year is how she would watch for me to round the corner in the afternoon, with my plaid jumper skirt (this was Catholic school) just grazing my knobby, bony knees, my green knee socks clinging to my stick legs (I was kinda on the scrawny side). “Your book bag seemed bigger than you! I wondered how you could manage it.”

But did it occur to her to run out there and meet me at the corner, grab my book bag for me, make sure I walked carefully on the sidewalk, protect me from the big boy hat stealer?

No. Nor did it ever occur to me to want her to.

A wonderful writer I know named Lenore Skenazy started a blog a year or two ago, called Free-Range Kids (she’s since written a book by the same name), after she let her young son take the New York City subway home by himself one day, at his request. She got a lot of flack — but plenty of kudos, too. I’ve talked about this before — that kids can’t just roam free anymore, because the world’s not set up for them to. My kids play on that cul-de-sac as much as they can, just as I played on my dead-end street for hours on end. The difference? I walk them there and stay with them, whereas we just went outside by ourselves (hearing, as the door slammed behind us, “Don’t come back until you see your dad’s car in the driveway!”).

I have no solution to the free-range-or-not conundrum. Lenore’s blog’s tagline is “Giving our kids the free reign we had without going nuts with worry,” and that is the tall order today’s parents face. Some, in fact most, of the moms I know don’t even bother worrying about the “range” they give their kids; they just don’t give them much at all, beyond the PVC-fenced confines of their yards or the carpeted expanses of their playrooms, and consider themselves to be doing the right thing.

But that doesn’t feel right to me, and I’m struggling with what does feel right.

I am not naturally fearful on my children’s behalf (I refuse to cower to scare-tactic news stories about danger at every turn, from pedophiles in white vans to head trauma from improper biking). Yet I still can’t just let my sons wander up the street on their own. For one thing, who’s home to watch them out the window? (Not the same number of semi-watchful parents who, village-like, kept an eye on all us kids). And for another, cars are bigger and, I swear, go faster down the street than they did when I was growing up in a similar suburban area. And back then no one was distracted by their cellphones.

My children are still too young for solo subway riding, but I’m looking forward to the day I can lengthen the distance between myself and them, and let them try things on their own. Like walking to a bus stop. Or going to a party: Just last Saturday, I dropped Daniel off at a birthday bash and left. Felt weird — but felt good, too.

I took a lesson from little Hadar, who was the only guest at my boys’ party last fall who showed up parent-free. Her sister walked her up the road, and seemed mightily puzzled (or probably just amused) at all the parents huddled in the rain on my deck. “I’ll come back for you later,” said Tevel.

How free-range are your chickens?

"No more pencils?" Boo.

The sign at the entrance to my son’s primary school reads, under the school’s name, “A First-Class Experience.” And it is, truly. So much so, that I wish he could stay there all year. And why not?

I love school, and my son does, too — he just finished first grade, and this year we hit the sick-day jackpot, with a total of… wait for it… none. The only time Daniel missed school was the day I took him out to go to his cousin Tara’s graduation ceremony. Just recently, he actually did get sick, but returned to school the next day (bless you, Amoxycillin). Just so you don’t think I’m so draconian a mom that I forced my child back to school the day after a clinic visit, (a) he didn’t have a fever; (b) he was medically cleared to go; and (c) he wailed that he wanted to go back. Gee, either he loves school as much as I think (he said, “Mommy, I can still learn things!”), or the prospect of a day home with me is not so enticing.

So yeah, he’s a bit of a geek.

School’s over this Friday. And though my boy is as much of an “I love school” nerd as his dear old mom was, he’s as thrilled as any of his classmates to embark on summer break, with the prospect of pools and beaches, bikes and ice cream, and, later in the summer, six straight weeks at the local YMCA camp (bliss for us both). It may seem contradictory to say that my child both loves school and leaps for joy at half-days, vacations, and holidays, but I don’t think it is.

I think the love of school is deep and real, and the joy over vacations, while also genuine, is also goaded into being by some social mirroring. All kids pick it up — that “no more pencils, no more books…” feeling — from each other. And if we moms are pushing the “thank goodness  school’s over” vibe, well, that can’t do much long-term good, can it?

Am I alone here in wishing my kids were in school longer? The whole overlong summer vacation is anachronistic, based as it is on agrarian calendars. We don’t need the boys home in the summer to put in the crops (or take them out or whatever you do on farms in the summer. See! There’s something my kids could learn about in a summer school program — where our food comes from!) It’s also out of sync with the lives of working parents. There are plenty of parents — and some professional organizations — seeking to bring back more of a year-long schedule, both for convenience and for continuity. I just today stumbled on this piece in The Washington Post, by a writer named Brigid Schulte, extolling the virtues of her kids’ year round program.

She makes many great points. While we all say we looooove summer break, it’s just not the same animal it was when (cue dreamy back-in-time music) I was a child. Back then, summer was an endless idyll. We had a backyard, a quiet dead-end street, and other kids’ backyards, pools, playhouses, and sprinklers. We had the local beach, and the town rec department’s swimming lessons. I recently asked my mom if she’d ever considered sending us to summer camp. “Listen,” she said, “when we moved out of the city, we figured that was summer camp.”

But times have changed. As much as I long for this to be true, it’s not going to be the case that my kids will get together with the neighborhood kids to play flashlight tag all over the street and the neighbors’ yards, or catch fireflies in jars, or eat PB&J sandwiches and Strawberry Quick-flavored milk on the roof of Pattiann’s playhouse in the “woods” (a.k.a. the stand of scrubby trees at the back of her property).

These days, even stay-at-home moms have to invent activities and work the calendar to beat boredom and keep the kids occupied. And working moms? If you’re like me, you’re booking camp back in February to ensure a spot. Thank heaven for the YMCA, which is relatively inexpensive, close by, and a fabulous experience for the boys. They went last year, and I judged how well Daniel loved it by how dirt-, sweat-, sunscreen-, and S’more-smeared he was by the end of the day.

Shulte’s article describes her children’s extended-year school, and it sounds ideal to me. It’s not all sitting at your desk, drilling the multiplication tables all summer. Instead, the year is broken up by “intercessions,” when kids get to do fun projects that only incidentally sneak in the learning. (Hmmm. Sounds like camp).

Yesterday I brought my younger son, James, to the busstop with me to pick up Daniel. James’ preschool ended last week. When another mom asked why James was there, he said, “My school’s over.” I laughed and added, “Yes, but he was all set to go this morning — I had to remind him several times that he was staying home.”

To which my neighbor replied, “I can’t wait for school to end! My kids are over it, too.”

Over it? They are? Or is it just you?

There are some things I’m glad to be rid of, such as sifting through endless papers and projects in backpacks, and prepping endless lunches and snacks. But I’d never let that on to my sons. School? It’s a joy!

What’s your take on summer break?

[photo credit: Everystockphoto.com]