Posts Tagged ‘kids’

It’s Hard to Be Cool in a Minivan

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The other day I came across a song that pretty much sums it all up:   “It’s Hard to be Cool in a Minivan” by the Oakridge Boys.  In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that no one has told me about this song, as it came out in 2006 and all my friends know about my minivan hang-ups.  Here is the first stanza and chorus:

Sittin’ at a red light, down around Sunset
A girl pulled up beside me in a candy-apple red Corvette
She pulled down her shades, gave me a wink
I gave her a little smile back
Then she laughed as she hit the gas
I remembered where I was at

Chorus:
(‘Cause) It’s hard to be cool when you’re behind the wheel
Of an eight passenger automobile
In a big bubble, cruisin’ down the street
With Barney blarin’ and a baby seat
Hey it can be done, but I’m tellin’ you man
It’s hard to be cool in a minivan.

I couldn’t begin to count how many times I said, “I will never drive a minivan” back when I was hip and cool (or imagined that I was). Of course  it was said with absolute contempt for anyone who actually did.  And I really really believed that I never would.  When my friend Tara traded in her Ford Explorer for a Windstar I couldn’t believe it;  I was so disappointed.  Then her extremely hip mother did it too, for the grandkids, and I was just beside myself.  Two years later, I had a ten-month-old and was 4 months pregnant.  I was driving my husband’s Silverado extended cab (I had an F-150 single cab) and was having a hard time getting my daughter or myself into the truck.  So it was time to shop vehicles.  We didn’t even think to consider a minivan;  we were looking for used SUV’s and they were all just too hard to get into, hard to reach back to our daughter, more money than we had to spend. One freezing day in January we were standing in the lot at Carmax holding the baby carrier and shivering to death, and the salesman said, “I have a Windstar all heated up and running if you want to try that.”  We rolled our eyes at each other but we did, mostly because we were so cold.  We took a 20-minute ride and got out and got back in the truck, both too ashamed to say what we were thinking: “That was GREAT!”   Captain’s seats with armrests up front, seating for 5 more; when my daughter started crying I just got up and walked back there and sat next to her.  Then there was the automatic sliding door, I had never experienced anything like that.  And these are the features on an old minivan—imagine a new one—all 3 of the back doors open automatically, DVD systems with LCD’s in the second and third rows, stow-and-go seating.

Once we admitted our shame we started looking for a minivan, and ended up with our 1999 Toyota Sienna.  My friends gave me so much crap that I had an “I used to be cool” bumper sticker made up for it, which made me feel slightly better; at least people were laughing at the sticker and not me.  Well, they were probably laughing at me too.

That was 5 years ago and our van is now 10 years old and it has been pretty darn fantastic—no maintenance (knock on wood) at 128K.  It’s fun, and quite useful,  to configure the seats around in different ways.  Here is the very best part:  when I walk out of my house, I click ‘unlock’ and then I click ‘open door’ and my kids run into the van and are sitting in their car seats by the time I get there, loaded down with all of their junk.

So you might be thinking that this should be titled, “Ode to the minivan”.  Not true.  I have a love/hate relationship with my van.  The hate part is pretty much summed up by the song. The second that you buy that van, your coolness just washes away, potentially gone forever, because by the time that you get rid of it you’re probably going to be too old or worn out to be cool anymore anyway.   I can promise you this:  you will never feel sexy in that van, no matter how sexy you might feel prior to getting in.  Driving the van to the party (or wherever you’re going) puts a hex on your whole night, so drive the other vehicle if you can.  Also, nobody will ever look at you or flirt with you in your van.  Well, maybe except for some “MILF”s from teenage boys at stoplights, and you don’t feel that good about that anyway because you know that they are probably laughing about it as they blow past you.  (And, really, is MILF something to feel good about in the first place?)Bookmark and Share

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , ,
Posted in Minivan Shame | 2 Comments »

Ways to Stay Cool After You Have Kids – Part 2

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

1.  Drive anything but a minivan. It doesn’t matter how much Honda tries to get people to respect the van, no one will ever respect the van. And you can’t feel cool in one. Trust me on this–we have one. Put yourself in this scenario–you have a big night out, the kind for which you (or your wife) bought a new dress and had your nails and hair done and booked an overnight babysitter. It’s nice out and the windows are open. You take an hour to get ready, listening to your favorite music on 10 because the kids are gone. You look hot and you feel fantastic. You’re ready to get out there and knock ‘em dead. You open the front door, take your (also looking hot) spouse’s hand and head down the front path to your minivan. Poof! The carriage just turned into a pumpkin and your glass slippers just fell off. You get into the van, sit on some goldfish, turn it on and Preschool Classics blares from the CD player. All semblance of hotness has just washed away. Now you are just middle-aged parents driving to a party in the minivan.

2.  A really important thing for parents to do if they want to stay cool is to have Date Night. This is because if you don’t plan to have a date night, and budget for it, you might never go out without your kids again. For those of you who are pregnant for the first time, or just thinking about being parents, Date Night is harder than it seems. First it requires hiring a babysitter. No problem? Yeah, well, 15-year-olds charge between $8 and $10 per hour now. Bet you didn’t know that. Plus, some people find that they have major issues leaving their babies with random people. That’s what grandparents and nanny cams are for. Nanny cams are not a violation of privacy, they are smart. Plus if you casually mention to the kid that there are nanny cams all over the house, I guarantee that she’s not going to neglect your baby. So you got that part down, now there’s the fun part–going out. Believe it or not, this might not be so much fun. When we started trying this (when our daughter was 7 months old)it was actually awkward. We were scheduling to try to get in as much as we could; sitter comes at 6:30, out the door at 6:45, dinner reservations at 7:00, movie starts at 9:30, movie is 2 hours 10 minutes, be home by midnight. Thing is, before kids we never knew where we were going to eat (much less at what time) and we had never been to a movie at all-we had always just waited for the DVD. So we were having these extremely orchestrated dates that were more stressful than fun. And they were costing us between $100 and $150 depending on where we ate. After several months of this, we decided to have a “No Plans Date Night” and the sitter came and we said we’d be back before whatever time and we got on our bikes and rode off and did whatever. That’s when we started having fun again.

3. This one is from my experience as an elementary teacher. Don’t be the parent who is at school everyday. Don’t get me wrong, every school loves volunteers, and they love good parents. It’s nice to have parents come in once every week or once a month to help with filing and copying and, especially, one-on-one help for the kids who need it. It’s nice to have great relationships with parents and to have parents who are comfortable talking to you about their kid’s situation; after all, teachers are there for the kids. What isn’t cool is the parent who is in the school every single day, worried about every thing that’s going on, gossiping about the staff, going over the teacher’s head and demanding special treatment. The teachers will think that you have no life, that you are a weirdo. They will dread the prospect of having your child in their class because they don’t want you in their face all of the time. They will talk about you in the teacher’s lounge. You don’t want to be that parent.

4. Remember the people that don’t have kids. Whether they are childless by choice, are waiting awhile, are having trouble conceiving, or you don’t know what in the heck their deal is, the bottom line is that they don’t have kids. They probably don’t want to hear you talk about your kids all of the time. Their interests and intentions might not lie in child-rearing at all, in which case it would be a good idea to give an “all’s great with the kids” and move on to subjects that everyone is interested in. This is especially hard when you are in a group of, say, 3 mommies and a non-mommy; conversation just keeps going back to the kids. Not everyone is as straightforward as my sister, “Okay, STOP talking about kids, no one can talk about their kids for the rest of the night!” Think back to when you didn’t have kids, did you really want to sit around at dinner and hear about spit up and speech development? Save the all-kids-all-the-time talk for your mommy group.Bookmark and Share

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in kids | 3 Comments »

Mommy Wars – Working vs. Stay at Home Moms– How is this an issue?

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

I made the mistake recently of looking at parenting.com. Not for fun, mind you, as I try to avoid anything that is aimed at making me feel like a crappy mom or person in general, but some of my ads run on there and I wanted to see what the space looks like. So I came across a bunch of articles on the so-called Mommy wars, or the debate about being a stay-at-home mom or a working mom. You may, particularly if you are a man, be thinking, Why is there a debate about that? It’s not like there’s a vote and it’s going to be one or the other for all women.

For some reason, be it societal norms or just the way that we females are wired, women worry way too much about what other women are doing and love to look down on those that aren’t meeting their expectation of correctness. The hardcore breastfeeders act as though a woman who gives her baby formula is a criminal, prompting all women who didn’t breast feed to explain themselves, “I didn’t have enough milk”, “He wouldn’t take it”, etc. Seriously, have you ever once heard a woman say “I just didn’t want to”? No, because they’re scared to. TV Nazis looove to go around explaining the evils of TV to the less-informed/intelligent of us. Don’t even get me started on organic food superiority. Where I’m going with this is that you might think that it would take a very insecure woman to listen to, or even care about, what other women think about their choice to work or not work, but it has become so commonplace to make and to accept judgments that we do.

It is my opinion that there is no right answer here.  What is right is what works for you and your situation, though I will say that it has been my observation that my friends who work part-time seem to be the happiest overall. In my five years as a mom I have covered the spectrum. I had always just assumed that I would work, and I went right back to teaching when my daughter was four months old. The thing that I could not have predicted was that I couldn’t handle childcare. In fact, in the course of a ten-month school year, I went through three day care situations. Every day of that year was absolute torture for me, imagining my little girl lying unattended with a dirty diaper on the floor, crying in a crib, being tolerated but not loved. I was also pregnant with my son that year, and the hormones no doubt fueled my paranoia. Needless to say, that was my last year teaching. My son was born and I was officially a stay-at-home mom. This was a necessity for me;  I literally could not deal with daycare (and god do I envy those who can). About a year into my stay-at-home stint, I realized a definite loss of identity. Just about any stay-at-home mom will tell you that they experience this; there is pretty much no societal value put on staying home with your kids. It’s mentally draining and there’s no transition-it’s the same job all day, until the kids go to bed, including weekends. That said, it’s not the worst situation in the world-if you use your time wisely, you can keep the house clean, keep up with laundry and go to the grocery (albeit, with kids) during the day, which leaves your nights and weekends much more open to enjoying family time and time with your husband. About a year and a half ago, I started my business and work part-time from home. This would be ideal except that I haven’t yet contributed to our family’s income because I have this thing about paying off my business before I take a paycheck. So I basically work for free, but it has done wonders for restoring my identity.

I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to judge me for my choices, to have said, “She’s neglecting her child” when I worked, to have said, “She’s wasting her career potential”  when I wasn’t working. But I’m sure that they did, and I’m sure that they still do. Whatever. They aren’t me and they aren’t in my situation, and they aren’t in your situation either. I’ll do what’s right for my family and sanity and you should do what’s right for your family and your sanity. And for god’s sake, we’re not in the 8th grade, let’s all stop worrying about what other women are doing.

Bookmark and Share

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »