Annals of Successful Parenting: Modeling

Oh, hello, Readers. It's kind of grim out there, don't you think? Shootings and bombings and bombast and rain. Well, I don't want to be grim. Or deep. One commenter on the blog said my blog was the deepest she'd seen in a long time. I suspect it wasn't actually a compliment - although I took it as such for an hour or so. It might actually have been code for, "Wow, this blog is a slog."

So let's talk about this photograph of the big glass and the little glass. Also, yes, of the speck of something on my counter, and the slats of my appliance garage. I have an appliance garage. Isn't that funny? Just forget the slats and the speck. Look at the big and little glasses. Mamma and baby. This is a snapshot of something that cut the grimness for me. It's cute. Not because it's objectively cute, but because it reminds me of something cute.

See the big glass? It's mine. I keep a big glass, usually with water, good old H20, next to the fridge every day. Lately, little glasses have started to appear next to my big glass. Someone in the family, one of the offspring, has picked up my habit. That's cute, don't you think?

Or maybe it's not so cute. It's certainly illustrative of the corollary to the maxim, "Do what I say, not what I do." The corollary is something like, "Kids learn from what you do, not from what you say."
In this case, no harm done. I'm demonstrating that you don't need to take a clean glass from the cupboard every time you need a drink of water, as well as the importance of regular hydration.

Now if you're peering closely at my glass, you are correct, that is not water in there. It's kombucha. This weekend I had coffee with someone who didn't know what kombucha is. My explanation wasn't very enticing: fermented tea and something about The Mother, which is the starter for the kombucha. Just as sourdough bread has a starter, kombucha has one, too. The bread starter is fermented yeast. The kombucha starter is fermented tea that turns into really a very disgusting, mushroomy-looking thing. You can make kombucha. After every batch, just like sourdough bread, you have to save a little bit of starter - The Mother - to make your next batch. I know this because once we had a hipster twenty-something stay with us. She was perambulating around the country with a jar of kombucha and a camera. When she left, she left me the recipe for kombucha, as well as a jar of starter in the fridge. It was not pretty. It looked like a giant fungus, which I believe it indeed was.

The husband took one look at it and said, "What is THAT?"
"It's The Mother," I said. "I don't know what to do with it."
"Throw it out," he said.

If that wasn't a deeply symbolic conversation, I don't know what would be.

So I buy my kombucha bottled. It's kind of fizzy. I like it mixed with seltzer. I drink it and I feel like I'm being productive. It has lots of probiotics, which are very in, hip, and now - and also very 1970.

This weekend I also had coffee with someone who didn't know what absinthe was. Okay, it was the same person who hadn't heard of kombucha. I was like, you know absinthe: the green poison - wormwood? Toulouse-Lautrec? French Impressionists? Paris, 1880s? Oscar Wilde?

This was during a conversation in which my companion told me she was pretty naive and always had been. By the time we got to the question of absinthe, I believed her. But then I thought about why I know what absinthe is, and I thought about how, in high school, I used to say - rather, I used to pronounce - "I may be innocent, but I am NOT naive."

I'm sure I was extremely irritating when I said that. I know I was not entirely correct in that self-assessment.

Pondering what I've modeled for the offspring besides saving glassware and remembering to hydrate. Scary.

Annals of Successful Parenting, Volume: I Forget

I think we’ve visited our last college. Vassar. A gorgeous day, a gorgeous campus. By now, I could run an information session for any liberal arts college on the Eastern Seaboard. Not that Vassar is on the Eastern Seaboard - at least not technically. In spirit, though, it is definitely a fine little ship docked on the Eastern shores of our great nation. 

My she was yar

Vassar: My she was yar. That’s a reference to Katharine Hepburn in one of the best movies ever, The Philadelphia Story, which pretty much sums up the Eastern Seaboard experience. Or at least the WASP version. (And is there a more important version?)

Anyhoo, as I was saying, I could run an information session, but I wouldn’t trust myself to run a tour, because walking backwards is not recommended if you don’t know the campus. Although now that I think about them all, on one of our tours, the tour guide announced that at that particular institution (Small Liberal Arts College in the East - SLACE) the guides do NOT walk backwards, but walk forwards - yes, for safety reasons, but also to emphasize the forward-facing attitude of that SLACE. 

Gag me. 

No, really, do, because I’m about to spew a generic information session, from the diversity of the student body to the “holistic application process” to financial aid "meeting one hundred percent of demonstrated need" and believe me, if I hear it one more time, I may actually die of boredom. 

However, I have enjoyed hanging out in the student center of whatever SLACE we visit. It’s always fun to observe the clothing and footwear on the students. Yesterday netted some white platform sandals over black tights on one, a pair of floral combat boots on another, and a totally nondescript looking boy accessorized with black cat ears, a little black nose, and whiskers. “Possibly a furry?” the Senior suggested. Hard to say. I'm not even sure what that is. He wasn’t wearing anything furry. All he reminded me of was the phase that the 8th grader went through when she was in pre-K of wanting a little black nose and whiskers on her face every morning before school. I complied. Sometimes you need a little mask to get through the day, I guess. 

Better than a drink, right? 

Speaking of which, we dodged a bullet regarding teen drinking this past weekend. The husband and I left the Senior at home alone while we went off to visit friends in Boston. The 8th grader went to a friend’s house. So it was a ripe set-up for a "Risky Business" teen blowout party. I felt obligated to leave my child alone at least once before she goes away to some SLACE. 

Before we left, we brought the her to tears with stories about how you can die from alcohol poisoning, and Roofies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flunitrazepam), and not letting drunken teenagers into our house because we could be held liable for anything that happened to them. When we returned, the house was in excellent order. In fact, in better order than we left it, thanks to some of the Senior’s friends, who know how to, say, fold blankets and comforters - something the Senior seems to have avoided learning. (She is so busy, after all. Not my fault at all, at all..) She told us she had nothing to drink at all, at all. And we believed her. 

As a fellow mom recently told me, she has been so overwhelmed of late that she has decided to consider everything a success. And so it is, Readers.