One of my all time favorite movies growing up. It was broadcast on TV annually around Halloween.
Remember when we used to watch broadcast TV as a family? We didn’t have cable and there were three main stations, ABC, NBC and CBS. We had a local channel and PBS. That was it.
During holidays, we’d gather as a family in front of the TV and watch the holiday-themed movies. Mom would make popcorn in a big pot on the stove. If we were really lucky, we’d get to help shake the foil covered Jiffy Pop over a burner. For Halloween we’d watch Wizard of Oz and The Great Pumpkin.
Christmas included movies that my parents liked including It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas. I liked Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas and Frosty the Snowman. My parents had us watch A Christmas Carol, but it was way to scary for me with the ghosts of Christmas past. When I had kids, I introduced my kids to my childhood favorites plus Meet Me in St. Louis.
Now that it’s Lent and Easter Season there are more movies to watch together as a family. I admit as soon as cable and streaming came into our lives, we don’t watch movies together very often. We watch TV together more for football games than any movies. My husband and I end up in separate rooms watching TV, reading or listening to podcasts on our laptops.
Palm Springs annual Easter Egg Hunt in Ruth Hardy Park. My kids are standing on the right with their friends.
When my kids were young, they’d mispronounce a few words. Sometimes, we’d continue to say words the way they did. Eventually those “words” were adopted into our family’s lexicon.
Take the color “lallow.” That’s how my daughter said yellow.
I pushed my son in his stroller downtown Laguna Beach before little sister was born. He said “high gone” or “Hai Gòn.” I was confused at what he was saying. We stopped in our favorite bakery/deli and I bought him a chicken drumstick. He raised it high in the air and said “high gone!” To him, it looked like a helicopter. Chicken drumsticks became “high gones” in our family.
My daughter kept asking me for chicken when she was a toddler. I’d cook baked chicken, chicken and dumplings and every type of chicken I knew how to cook. She was always upset because it was the wrong chicken.
One day I made pan fried sole. My daughter said, “That is the chicken I like.” So we called sole “that chicken.” We still do.
What words did you or your children use that were unusual?
I’m thrilled when cardinals come to visit. I took this photo with my camera through the window.
I’m getting ready for Christmas and was thinking about the games we used to play when I was a kid. Our family was big on games and I found them mostly boring. When I was young, I went along and played. When I hit my teens, I no longer wanted to and said no thanks.
We played board games like Monopoly, Life and Clue. My brother and I played a military strategy game called Stratego.
My parents were into cards. They hosted Pinochle and Bridge nights. I’ll never forget the card table that would come out of the closet, legs unfolded and stood in the center of our small living room in our first house.
We played Gin Rummy, Knock Rummy, Demon and Poker as a family. When we moved to our new home in the countryside, the game table, a round one that was permanent, was placed next to a window seat in the corner of the living room with huge windows. I soon realized that I could peak at people’s cards in the reflection of the windows at night.
With my kids and DIL coming for Christmas, I’d like to play a few games. I’ve got Catch Phrase, the electronic hand held game where two teams try to guess phrases through clues and gestures. It’s very much like Charades, but the electronic device gives players a choice of categories and then the word or phrase. The kids played Catch Phrase for hours at swim meets.
I also bought a few decks of cards. My daughter and I like to play Demon which is a fast-paced double solitaire type of fun.
Our family played Poker when the kids were still living at home. Our favorite game was Texas Hold’em. Before kids, my husband and I played two board games — Pente and Trivial Pursuit. Those are tucked away in the closet and may need to be dusted off. My son said he’s not sure our Trivial Suit cards from the 1980s or 1990s will be fair. I say why not?
Do you enjoy playing games with family and friends? What games did you play growing up? What games do you play now?
The cardinal visited my AI bird feeder, Bird Buddy, after I took my own photos.
My beautiful boy in his Nutcracker bunny suit at age three.
I’ll never forget being in a community production of Nutcracker with my son. He was the infamous bunny (it’s a Balanchine thing.) I had two roles: party guest and rodent.
I would take my son to my ballet class and he would play with another three-year-old named Katherine Bottoms. Her father is actor Joseph Bottoms and her mother was an amazing dancer who had danced with New York City Ballet.
While we moms took class, the children played together.
One day, I spotted my son lying on the floor in the dance studio. Katherine had tackled him and was on top of him.
“Promise that you’ll marry me!” she told him. It sounded more like a threat! Finally, he agreed and she got off his chest. I’m not sure if she kissed him. Of course, he ended up marrying another Catherine, who goes by Buff.
I remember having a young love. I was also three. My neighbor Victor was four and my brother was five. (Photo is me with my brother.)
One day the doorbell rang. My mom answered and Victor was standing on the steps.
“I’m sorry, Victor, Bobby is at school,” My mom explained. My brother had started kindergarten that week.
“I’m here to ask if Elizabeth can come out to play.”
“Oh!” my mom answered surprised. I do remember this happening, but I also remember my mom’s retelling it to the neighborhood coffee klatch with lots of laughter.
Victor and I played together most days. Victor ended up moving. When I was in the third or fourth grade, he came back for a visit. We were at an event with music and dancing. Maybe it was a wedding or a church social?
Without a word, he immediately grabbed my hands and twirled me around the dance floor until it was time to leave.
What memories do you have of young love or early friendships?
There was an article in the Lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal that captured my interest. It was written by Rich Cohen and called:
We Never Really Escape the Gym-Class Draft
Does the childhood fear of being picked last explain our insecurities later in life?
For some reason, I was always picked last or second to last in PE — whether it was Red Rover, dodgeball, volleyball or anything. How depressing is that? I am somewhat athletic. I started skiing at age two. I could swim. I took ballet. Yet, my school chums saw me as someone they didn’t want on their team. I think it was my thick glasses. I was terribly near-sighted from birth.
From the article:
It’s the sort of alienation you experience in junior high school but feel forever. Being just another number among a pool of available picks, you see yourself, maybe for the first time, through the cold eyes of an appraiser. You are no more than a body in the mind of this person, an object with too many deficiencies to catalog: chubby, knock-kneed, weak-armed, timid, poorly coordinated, scared of the ball, slow.
You will also feel yourself, for the first time, trapped in a body, isolated from even your closest friends, of whom you might think: Oh, dear lord, as bad as it gets, as long as it takes, let me be taken before him.
What’s worse, you know that you’re being judged on all the wrong qualities, in all the wrong ways. Yeah, I’m slow, you think as round three gives way to round four. I can’t throw very hard, and I don’t move too quick. But there’s one thing I know how to do well: kick ass at dodgeball.
Apparently, this picking by your peers is no longer allowed. Of course most things that make kids uncomfortable is no longer allowed.
When were you picked? Do you think they should still allowing choosing teams by peers? Why or why not?
My daughter shared an article with me that she thought I’d find interesting for my blog. It’s from Teen Vogue — which she said is not behind a paywall — and has more interesting articles than fashion like “What’s hot for summer.”
In “Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content” by FORTESA LATIFI, I learned about parents who cashed in on their kids on social media.
Here’s an excerpt:
Claire, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, has never known a life that doesn’t include a camera being pointed in her direction. The first time she went viral, she was a toddler. When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”
When the family is together, the YouTube channel is what they talk about. Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. “It’s a lot of pressure,” she said. When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents. Once she doesn’t live with them anymore, she plans to speak out publicly about being the star of a YouTube channel. She’ll even use her real name. Claire wants people to know how her childhood was overshadowed by social media stardom that she didn’t choose. And she wants her parents to know: “nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in.”
It would be easy to judge these parents as monsters. But, I am thankful Instagram and TikTok did NOT exist when my kids were young. Wait, I’ll retract my statement and call it exploitation of children. I guess that’s being judgmental, right?
I had Facebook when my kids were growing up and my pages were an embarrassing brag-site of my amazing, marvelous kids! It’s nauseating to look back on.
As my daughter got older, her friends would bully or tease her about awkward tween years’ photos I posted. She asked me to NOT post anything about her without permission. I mostly followed her wishes. Maybe slipping up a few times.
Although I look negatively at parents who use their children as cash cows, like I said, I’m glad it wasn’t something I had an option to do. Unlike TV and movie parents, there are no protections for kids who are content on their parents’ social media sites. The article goes into detail about how contracts with TV and movies have protections for children and they get money put into a trust.
By the way, I also didn’t think it was right for swim parents to put pressure on their swim kids to earn college scholarships. I had a weekly column about swim parenting HERE. Too much pressure, period. However, if a scholarship did happen, that’s icing on the cake of all the valuable lessons and friendships gained through sports.
I look at the harm social media has done to our kids who grew up with it. Suicide, depression, anxiety and eating disorders are running rampant. I wonder how these teens are doing who were used as influencers since toddlerhood?
I have a weekly zoom call where we talk about all sorts of current subjects. We are a variety of ages, religions and a spectrum of political persuasions. One of the topics we’ll talk about next week is social media and our youth. Here’s A LINK to a Surgeon General’s Advisory from the Department of Health and Human Services that I received from the group yesterday. In the article is a pdf from the Surgeon General.
What thoughts do you have about parents using kids as influencers on social media? What thoughts do you have about the affects of social media on our youth?
My toddler daughter at Aliso Beach in Laguna, California.
My daughter called and asked me about a letter from her best friend that I never gave her. I had forgotten all about it. But wouldn’t you know, my husband on a separate phone call with her, brought it up.
“Why would your dad say anything about the letter?” I asked instantly upset.
“Mom, I’m 27 years old. I can handle it.”
At the time of the letter, my daughter was 13 years old. My daughter and her best friend had been together since birth. We (my friend and I) helped each other out with our second children by taking turns having them together several times a week. That gave one of us time to clean, shop or sleep! The older siblings were in half-day preschool.
I homeschooled our daughter sixth through eighth grade when our son began high school. Our daughter’s best friend was at a public middle school and we agreed to pick her up once a week while her mom was at work.
The plan was to have a craft or art project each Wednesday. Sometimes my daughter wanted to hang out with her best friend and not have a designated project. I thought everything was peachy when my friend said she had a letter to drop off from her daughter to mine.
She told me to read the letter before I gave it to my daughter. I was shocked. My daughter’s best friend was ending their friendship and said she was promised an art project on Wednesdays. She hoped my daughter would understand if they saw each other that she wouldn’t speak to her. She was never speaking to her again. I can’t remember exactly what else was in the letter, but it was mean and there was no way I’d let my daughter read that letter and be hurt.
I threw the letter away.
Of course my daughter wanted to know why Wednesdays were off and why she wasn’t going to her best friend’s house on Saturday, or having her over to our house.
I explained as best I could that her friend was going through some troubling times and to be patient and things would go back to normal. There were three major upheavals in the girl’s life that she was struggling through that I won’t share. But they were major and beyond what I thought my daughter needed to learn about at the time. I do think this rejection from her best friend without explanation has affected my daughter’s relationships today.
Their friendship was never the same again, although later in life they became civil.
Question. Would you have given the letter to your daughter or thrown it away like I did? Why or why not?
