9to5to9 A working mom’s mad adventures in boy land.

Hey, where did all the posts go?

Well, they’ve moved for what I hope is the final time. Because I have to tell you, I’m tired of bubble wrapping everything and carting it to a new house. Something usually breaks in the process.

So 9to5to9, along with Kids and Allergies, will be living at debralegg.com for a good long while. It’s a much nicer home with a better view, plus it combines the content of all three blogs. It also offers improved RSS and email newsletter services.

I’ve left a few of the more popular posts hanging around here for those who find their way via search engines.

I hope everyone else will stop by the new site! And, please, if you see anything broken there, email me at debthered (at) charter (dot) net. I’m still not sure everything survived the hike across the cyber town.

Thanks for reading, and I apologize for being a pain in the butt four times since June. Continue reading

Posted under Uncategorized

Figuring it would be unfair to bring another living creature into this house when on bad days I can barely handle the two-legged occupants, I’ve managed to beat back requests for pets ranging from dogs to lions. And the occasional dog that looks like a lion.

I dodged a bullet back in the winter when Big Guy’s teenage First Love got a kitten named Bjorn — which Little Guy promptly mangled into Bee-lorn. We were lucky he didn’t mangle the cat as well. Tails look like great pull-strings to a 2-year-old.

Seeing how much Big Guy loved the cat, though, spurred his dad to threaten to get one. Until I reminded him of litter boxes. And hair. And hair balls.

Maybe a fish, he suggested.

Nope. They creep me out.

How about a hamster, he countered.

Looks like I’m off that hook, too, now that there’s a new report in Pediatrics citing the risks to children of exotic pets. Not that I consider a hamster particularly exotic — it’s never been part of my Caribbean beach fantasy, at least.

Same goes for hedgehogs and lizards. Duck, duck, goose — also on the list, along with chicks.

Yes! I’m officially excused on every animal I’d rather not have around the house.

According to an article by The Associated Press, in addition to carrying dangerous germs that inevitably end up in the mouths of the under-5 set, “exotic” pets are more likely to bite and scratch. Continue reading | 2 Comments

Posted under Health, Parenting in the news

Last August, I didn’t give Reticent Kid’s soccer career more than a week, two max.

He cried through the first practice. Second practice there weren’t as many tears, but he pretty much was epoxied to his mom for the hour.

He cried through the first game. Even when he was playing goalie, which is the favorite position of reticent young’uns, because they get what to do. That and the goal makes a great pretend tent/fort/castle if you’re tired of watching everyone run away from you.

The second game, he protested a bit before standing gamely in at goalie. His mom stayed near him, offering reassurance.

And by the end of the game, he had a huge smile.

How’d you do that? I asked his mom.

Told him he could have a Slurpee after the game if he’d give it a try, she smiled. I, of course, am morally opposed to bribes. Unless they work.

In this case, it did.

This year, Reticent Kid’s taking charge at goalie, played solid defense in … oh, whatever that position is called that stands near the goalie … and chasing the ball down field on offense. He clowns with Big Guy during warm-ups and sold me some of the most putrid flavors of candy canes imaginable when he wasn’t playing last week. I was relieved they weren’t real.

Thus completing a 180 that never would have happened had his mom not insisted. Continue reading

Posted under Philosopher Mom, School days, Youth sports

Arggghh, I groaned a few hours ago, my head in my hands.

“What’s the matter, Mommy,” Big Guy asked.

“I need an idea. I don’t have any ideas to write about tonight.”

“I’ll write you a story,” he said.

“Go for it.”

“Once upon a time there was a little kid named … what’s his name going to be?”

“How about Big Guy?”

“OK. Once upon a time there was a little kid named Big Guy. He wanted ice cream, but his mommy said he couldn’t have any until he ate his good food.

“The end.”

Arggghh. Do I really have to blog about that again? Because I’m as sick of writing about it as I am of dealing with it.

Yes, I know. Part of my problem is I make too big a deal out of it. But in the two weeks since my last bout of angst over the hunger strike, the situation hasn’t gotten any better. Continue reading

Posted under Big Guy's story, Picky eaters

Forget what I said last week about Little Guy serving as attorney general in Big Guy’s Manchurian presidency.

Little Guy’s destined for at least secretary of state. Or perhaps even a head of state in his own right, in an Anwar Sadat-sort of way.

Living in our house definitely has helped Little Guy refine inborn peace-making tendencies, partly out of self-preservation. Caught as he is at times between a stubborn mother and an intractably strong-willed brother, he’s learned to work things out.

Such as today, when he earned the Nobel Please Prize by settling the great drink debate.

Big Guy was in the mood to take hostages the second I told him, just after he’d gotten home from school, that we were going to have to take a trip to pick up some paperwork.

Can’t say I blame him. It was our second in as many days, and I really wasn’t in the mood either to pile two cranky kids in a car for a 40-minute round trip with a potentially long wait in an office in the middle. Especially since the jaunt would disrupt nap time, and Little Guy’s prone to go al-Qaeda on me when he misses his beauty rest.

I bribed Big Guy by suggesting he take the evil laptop with him, and he reluctantly agreed.

Fifteen minutes down the road, though, Big Guy remembered he hadn’t eaten and decided to have the crab and carp special for lunch. Continue reading | 2 Comments

Posted under Little Guy's story

I just joined the ranks of the uninsured, so health care has been on my mind a lot lately.

I didn’t mean to become a statistic. I’d planned to enroll in continuing coverage known as COBRA. That stands for Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act, if anyone’s interested. I still plan to, but futzing around with paperwork has resulted in a delay that will mean three more people will be among the millions of uninsured Americans tomorrow morning.

Some organizations put that number as low as 8 million but that figure has enough fudge to cover a mountain of sundaes.

“The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is a much smaller figure than the media report,” business and media.org claims.

A figure from Kaiser, hold the fudge: 45 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2007.

And for those insured, it comes at an ever-climbing cost. The average family premium is $12,800 this year, nearly double the cost in 2000, and that’s for less coverage, Kaiser says in a report released last week.

That’s causing folks to drop insurance and hope nothing happens. So much for the argument that people are uninsured by choice. A gamble is not a choice.

If you lose the gamble, you get thumped hard. My insurer always was kind enough to provide a breakdown as to how much I paid, how much they paid and how much full retail would have cost. Providers use that last figure to soak the uninsured, charging them significantly more than insured patients for the same treatment, according to familiesusa.org.

My current plan involves encasing the guys in bubble wrap for the next few weeks so no one breaks anything. With Big Guy, who’s severely allergic and asthmatic, that might not be enough. Yes, COBRA will be retroactive once the paperwork finally is pushed to all the right places, but I envision hours of frustrating phone-tree work trying to get providers to bill me at the insured rate.

At least the problem’s temporary for me. It’s not for 45 million other Americans.

How will you help, Sens. McCain and Obama? Continue reading

Posted under Girl gone wonk, Health

He’s waited, hoped and harangued for more than a month, but Little Guy’s day finally arrived.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” he exclaimed, his eyes bigger and bluer than usual as he spied the big display outside the grocery store. “The pumpkins are orangine!’

Why, yes they are, little love. I’ve known that for a week, ever since I snuck to the store without you last Sunday. But I wouldn’t have deprived you of this joyful discovery for the world. So every time you asked if the pumbkins still were green, I sadly said, “Yes, but they’ll be orange soon.”

Yes, they’re orange now, and it led to a pumpkin-carving project tonight, Sept. 29. That has to be a record for me. I’m usually a “wait until Oct. 24″ type of gal. In California, procrastination is practical — the heat turns jack-o-lanterns into withered, moldy, ant-filled lumps in about a week.

I knew we’d never make it to October, though, when you saw all the decorations that sprouted over the weekend. The scarecrows and foam-o-lanterns lining lawns along our path to school this morning whipped you into a frenzy — “Mommy, are the pumbkins still green” you asked every half block. I knew the after-school grocery store trip would send you over the cliff into a pit of jack-o-lanterns, candy corn and costumes.

I’m happy to dive with you. Continue reading | 2 Comments

Posted under Little Guy's story

America’s Least Wanted

The suspect: Vtech Learning Laptop

Description: Orange enough to be nauseate to a University of Kentucky basketball fan.

Offense: General uselessness and inciting riots. Violating 10th Amendment mom’s rights provisions that make it clear humans possess education powers to the exclusion of machines.

Welcome to the latest installment of “the toy that has to go.”

Admittedly, it’s not nearly as obnoxious as the police car from hell. I’m pleased to report that that toy lasted less than a month before the guys smashed it to smithereens. The sound still worked, though — the siren wailed all the way to the garbage can. I was afraid the guys would wake up and perform a rescue mission.

My conspiracy theory is becoming far stronger than a theory, though. The laptop, you see, came from the same person kind enough to send Ready Freddie, the “learning robot,” to tear asunder our happy home a few years ago. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Continue reading

Posted under School days, You just gotta laugh

There are two kinds of aggressive in life.

There’s the kind that’s hard-charging and relentless, but fair.

Then there’s the kind that plays dirty if someone gets in the way.

Big Guy and his teammates ran into the second kind today but responded with the first, in an amazing display of maturity that met my monthly quota of “the kid’s gonna be all right” moments.

You never know which way it’s going to go with 5-year-olds — or, at least, I never know which way it’s going to go with mine.

Big Guy’s a little intense on the soccer field, not to mention prone to angry outbursts when he’s frustrated. And he’s not opposed at all to roughing up his brother, particularly if Little Guy makes the egregious error of claiming a toy or occupying a space Big Guy wants. Continue reading

Posted under Youth sports

My greatest academic achievement isn’t on my resume, because it’s not a grade-point average or a major or even a minor. Unless you’re a political junky who attended West Virginia University, you won’t even realize its significance.

I never got a shovel from Robert DiClerico.

Dr. DiClerico was — and, I assume, still is — hell-on-wheels tough hidden behind a tweedy facade. He didn’t lecture — he led. He’d stroll in front of the class, reeling off facts without glancing at a single note. Then he’d pivot and pounce.

“What do you think, Dr. Legg?” Dr. Legg had to come up with a credible answer, quickly.

His tests were short-answer essay, designed not to gauge whether you’d memorized facts but formulated to reveal whether you could apply them. If you wrote a bunch of barn-yard excrement, he’d draw a shovel beside it.

I love that man.

And I love what his techniques could do to truly reform education if teachers could use them instead of focusing on getting kids to gray in the right bubbles with their No. 2 pencils.

Instead, we have No Child Left Behind and its emphasis on “high expectations” and “measurable goals.”

Problem is, “measurable goals” always involve target scores on standardized tests. And educators have known for 20 years that standardized tests are problematic at best. The manipulation is so blatant these days that in some parts of the country, superintendents are hiring testing companies to write curriculum.

Even worse: Two months into school, Big Guy already is being prepped for the diabolical DIBELs — Dynamic Indicators of Early Basic Literacy. His homework dovetails perfectly with three of the four test areas listed on the company’s Web site.

He’s 5 years old, for heaven’s sake.

It’s near impossible for any candidate to buck No Child Left Behind. Too many folks fall for the “high expectations” and “measurable goals” malarkey, and there’s no future in being against that.

Since we’re stuck with a world more DIBELs than DiClerico, the only thing to do is make the best of it.

Will either of you make No Child Left Behind better for children, Sen. McCain or Obama? Continue reading

Posted under Girl gone wonk, Parenting in the news, School days