Matt stayed home from work on Monday because of a stomach virus.
Lily and Damian kept him company on his sick day.
(Dave, from Matt’s work, said “Lily is morphing into a superhero.”)
19 March 2007

I just watched the Frontline special on marketing to teenagers, titled “Merchants of Cool.”  You can view the entire episode here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/view/.

After watching this show, it reaffirms my decision not to have television in our house.  Our kids are going to be bombarded enough with this crap just by being a part of this society; we can lessen the impact by not having cable television.

And “rage rock” is awful.  The lyrics are awful.  Geez, what does it say about our society that our kids listen to such soulless, tuneless, violent non-music?

(By the way, there is another Frontline episode, by the same fellow Douglas Rushkoff, about marketing and advertising in general, not just to teens: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/.)

Lily being uber-cute.
(This is not a staged photograph.
This is just Lily being Lily.
She is, of course, my hero now.
She wears what she wants when she wants
without any regard to what others may think of her.)
17 February 2007

I was living a life of frustration. I would wake up in the morning, full of hope and plans, and by the evening, I was frustrated, annoyed, irritable, and not much fun to be around.

How did I manage this, you ask?  By being inflexible with two small children.  By trying to force them into an adult schedule.  By having a rigid plan.

I would wake up with an idea in my head of what I would get done that day.  “Today, I’m catching up on my emails, balancing the check register, cleaning the bathrooms, and making a gourmet dinner.”

So, appropriately, I would sit down at my desk to answer emails.  Then Lily would start crawling all over the desk because she wanted attention.  I would endure her presence, annoyed the whole time, for a little while until she did some final thing, like pressing the sleep button on my computer and crashing the computer, that would send me over the edge and I would yell at her and send her out of the room.

At this point I would be feeling guilty as well as annoyed, but I would push on, trying to finish the emails.  Then the baby would start crying.  Instead of spending time with my baby, I would run in the other room, try to shush him with the pacifier, and then run back to my computer to work.

This is how the entire day would go.  The day would end with nothing on the to-do list completed, and Matt would come home to a really grumpy wife.  It wasn’t working for anyone.

Then two days ago, I realized that I was shushing my baby to finish emails and that my baby was much more precious and something to be enjoyed now.  So I gave up.  I decided to flow with the chaos.

So now, nothing gets done just like before — the house is still messy, dinners are still not being made, the emails are going unanswered.  But I’m a lot happier about it.  And so are the children and Matt.

Zen and the art of raising children.