Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Just Shoot Me

My daughter had her spring ballet recital this weekend.  Since no such event is complete without the paparazzi -- and mamarazzi -- covering it, my husband and I made sure we arrived with all our paraphernalia in tow.  Camcorder, camera, extra batteries and telephoto lens, you name it. I know it's awkward to be lugging around all that clunky gear, and sometimes people look at us like we're tacky Asian tourists.  But we get to enjoy our daughter's 2-minute performance forever, and our relatives (who all live abroad) get to watch her.  That makes it all worthwhile, right?

That day, at least, my husband didn't think so.  After struggling with camera settings and changing lenses throughout those 2 minutes, I heard him mutter under his breath, For once, I wish we could just watch the show.

Huh?

This is what happens when you add Maria Shriver to your busy day

Every Tuesday is Super Tuesday for me.  On Tuesdays I pick my daughter up from school at 2:20, head over to pick my sons up from preschool at 3:00, take my sons to tap dance class from 3:45 till 4:30, then take my daughter to hiphop class from 4:40 till 5:25.  We use more gas on Tuesdays than any other day.  Tuesdays are the days when we have pizza or pasta or PBJ sandwiches for dinner because we make it home just before 6:00 (working moms who cook from scratch, you rock!). 

Tuesdays are busy.  There's really not much room to squeeze in any other activity on Tuesdays. But when the extra activity happens to be a 6:00 PM Silicon Valley Moms Blog event featuring Maria Shriver signing her latest book, how could I refuse?

How green is my (Silicon) Valley?

As a child, I was not environmentally aware.  We lived in one of the most polluted cities on earth.  There were no recycling programs to speak of.  It wasn't uncommon to see trash lining the city streets.  I don't think my parents ever uttered the words "earth friendly"; greenhouse gases was certainly never a topic of conversation at our dinner table.   In fact, I can only recall one instance when I did anything related to the environment:  in 5th-grade, when my class won a schoolwide competition to collect newspapers for recycling.   

Yet when I look back, I realize our carbon footprint was... well, small. We grew up in cloth diapers. All our laundry was washed in cold water and dried on clotheslines.  We used electric fans instead of airconditioning to cool off.  Imported goods like apples and grapes and frozen foods were hard to find (and expensive to boot), so we mostly ate fresh, local foods -- and any leftover food appeared at the next meal.  We reused plastic bags,  donated old appliances, handed down old clothes and found new uses for tubs of margarine and jelly jars.  There was no such thing as bottled water.  We used dishcloths, plastic plates and instead of the paper versions.  And just like everyone we knew, we always returned our glass Coke and Sprite bottles to the grocery store to get the deposit back.

Line drying is NOT a breeze!

Our dryer is no more; it died last week.  For a couple of months now, the dryer had been emitting a strange whine, as though a little bird had been caught amongst the tumbling clothes, getting louder and more desperate as the weeks passed. 

Last weekend, my husband finally had enough.  He marched upstairs to the drying room with an oil can.  Five minutes later, I saw him go down to the garage and reenter the laundry room with his toolkit.  After an hour or so of banging and swearing, he emerged.  He told me he had tried to take the dryer apart and couldn't put it back together, so we had to buy a new one.  I figured there was no point in calling a repairman to fix the noise and undo whatever damage he had done to the dryer, since it was almost 10 years old anyway.

School Uniforms

When the time came for us to decide between public and private education for our kids, the decision was easy.  We knew that parents pay big bucks to live in postage-stamp sized houses in order to get their kids into Palo Alto public schools, so we figured they must have decent schools.  And the other benefits of private schools, such as smaller class sizes and better music/arts/p.e. programs?  We figured we could compensate by helping her out with schoolwork, signing her up for afterschool activities and fostering a love of learning at home. Besides, there is the diversity of ethnicity and culture and origins and experience in public schools that money cannot buy.  We made our decision and never looked back.

Except for one silly thing.  I do wish my daughter wore school uniforms like most private schools do.  Call me shallow; I just think a group of schoolgirls and schoolboys in uniform looks neat, orderly and cute.  And call me nostalgic; school uniforms remind me of my own schooldays, when things were simple and carefree.  With images of kids going to school looking like mini gang members or mini streetwalkers, I wonder if my daughter's schooldays will ever be as simple and carefree.

A taste of Sonoma (with kids)

Whenever my husband's parents fly over from England, we like to spend the weekends taking them to places within a day's drive from Palo Alto, like Carmel, Monterey, Muir Woods, Ano Nuevo and so on.  One place that none of us had never been to was Sonoma County, so this year we decided that Sonoma was a must.  The one small problem -- actually, three -- my kids.  Like red wine and fish, the wine country and kids aren't generally known to go well together.   As I saw it, we had three options:

Option 1:  Leave the kids with the grandparents and spend a couples-only weekend in Sonoma, and deal with the nagging (and morbid) feeling that this may be the only chance that my 75-year-old in-laws will ever get to see Sonoma;

Option 2:  Take the whole kit and caboodle (parents, grandparents, kids) to Sonoma, and avoid the issue of whiny, nagging kids by spending the day at guaranteed kid-friendly Sonoma attractions like Traintown and Safari West;

Option 3:  Take the whole kit and caboodle to Sonoma, and find places to visit that cater to adults but welcome young children -- not sure if that's possible but let's get on the internet and find out.

We decided to save Options 1 and 2 for another time, and go for Option 3.  And God Bless the Internet;

The Laws of Guilt

The Laws of Guilt

Guilt (from Wikipedia):  a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes - whether justified or not - that he or she has violated a moral standard and is responsible for that violation.

Parenting Guilt, also known as mommy guilt or daddy guilt (my definition):  feeling like crap because you think you're not doing well enough as a parent.

After much scientific observation and research, after drawing from my own extensive experience with guilt, here are Three Universal Laws that I have developed to help parents understand and cope with this complex emotion:

I.  Murphy's Law of Guilt:  If there is anything out there that a parent can feel remotely guilty about, he/she will.  Funny or sad, trivial or serious, there is always something.  Here are some of mine:

The kindness of strangers

My dad has a story that he likes to tell as proof that God exists.  He was late for a flight and arrived at the gate just as his flight, the last one of the day from Chicago to LA, was just leaving.  With my mother waiting to join him in LA so they could board their flight to Manila together, and with no way to reach her, he pleaded with the gate attendants to let him through, but apparently the airplane door was already closed and it was already beginning to pull away.  Desperate, he turned and looked out the window at the airplane and waved his arms wildly.  He swears that he caught the eye of the pilot --  the pilot nodded at him and actually stopped the plane.  They reopened the plane doors and let him in. 

You can image that I have a hard time believing his story -- c'mon! But hey, this happened in the 60's, when planes were smaller and security was looser, so what do I know? And dads don't lie, right? Anyway, whether he embellished his story or not, I still enjoy hearing him tell it. Not only because it shows that God does work in mysterious ways, but because it reaffirms my belief in the basic goodness of mankind. In a world where thugs beat up old ladies, isn't it nice that stories like these exist?

Just Buy It

I'm what you would call a late adopter.   You won't find me standing in line for hours to be the first one to get my hands on the latest gadget. I just got my first iPod this Christmas, and bought our first digital SLR camera after a year of deciding whether the time was right.  My husband still makes fun of me for an incident 10 years ago, when I agonized over buying a DVD player because I wasn't sure it would catch on. 

When I read about the latest and greatest cool stuff, I can't help asking myself, Will it get any cheaper?  Are there bugs or glitches that will get ironed out in later models?  It usually has to be popular enough to be sold at Costco and Walmart before I take the plunge.  But it's not just practicality that holds me back.  I think I overanalyze things and end up paralyzed by indecision.

Take, for instance, a simple little thing like rainboots.  It has been raining almost nonstop here in Silicon Valley since the beginning of the year, with only a week or two of sunshine and "I'm glad we live in California" conditions.  And I have yet to buy my children rainboots.  Their feet haven't been dry since January.

How do you explain politics to a six-year-old?

My daughter and I have many interesting conversations during our ten-minute walk to school in the mornings.  She's been following the primaries on a high-level, six-year-old kind of way, so I was surprised at the passion she showed during a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago:

Pea:  Why are there so many Obama signs on people's lawns?  Doesn't anyone want to vote for Hillary Clinton?

Me:  Oh, lots of people want to vote for Hillary, honey, maybe they just don't want to put signs out on their lawn.