My children are revolting maggot newts.

While were in London, I had the great joy of seeing Matilda with my mother and my girls.

My mother always gets the hottest tickets in town.

For instance, she also took me to see Peter & Alice, starring Judi Dench. Unfortunately, Peter & Alice sucked, which is odd, as:

a) I believe that Judi Dench is a god among us and

b) it was about the fortuitous meeting of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the model for Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Llewellyn Davies, as in Peter Pan, and I have a ridiculous soft-spot for anything about Peter Pan.

There are two reasons for my Peter Pan obsession.

This is one:

Me, age 5. Role of a lifetime. Really never got better except for when I was Petra in A Little Night Music in college. That was SLIGHTLY better.

This is the other:

Peter Pan was the first musical I ever saw, on Broadway no less. With Sandy Duncan and her glass eye. (Yes, I am old enough that Cathy Rigby was still in the gymnastics game back then.) I was taken to see it with my grandmothers.

Both grandmothers. Who normally didn’t hang out much. So that was a BIG. EFFING. DEAL.

And I have NEVER forgotten it.

So forgive me for getting a little misty-eyed about the fact that WHEN I WAS IN LONDON LAST WEEK MY GIRLS SAW THEIR FIRST MUSICAL!

IN THE WEST END!

IN THE COMPANY OF THEIR GRANDMOTHER!

AND I GOT TO BE THERE TOO!

Oh and:

It was really, really, REALLY good.

I cried the whole time.

Joyous, happy, nostalgic, heart-wrenching tears.

Especially at this part. If you don’t cry at this part then you have no soul. (Fast forward to 0:50):

ANYWAY:

I have been so obsessed with Matilda since I got back that I tracked down that You Tube video, and I read a New Yorker piece about the composer / lyricist, Tim Minchin, and I bought an ACTUAL CD of the London cast recording.

Yep. A CD, PEOPLE.

Because I JUST HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE TO  listen to it in the car, and I have no effing ipods anymore, apparently — though I do have, oddly, about eight ipod speaker sets — and my phone no longer effing works for anything so mp3 transmission would be a stretch.

SO YES. I BOUGHT THE CD.

And I drove around laughing and crying to it ALL DAY YESTERDAY.

And it was awesome.

I haven’t loved a musical so much since a billion years ago when I was young and single and living in the West Village and John Cameron Mitchell was doing Hedwig and I went and saw it over and over and over again.

Six times.

You may not understand this compulsion if you’ve only ever seen the MOVIE of Hedwig, which just isn’t good.

It’s just not.

The musical, however, is THE BEST THING EVER.

Go buy the actual cast recording and see if I’m wrong.

IT IS THE BEST.

Except now there is also Matilda.

And I intend to listen to it ALL THE TIME until my kids can sing every word and we can all sing to the CD together in the car like we used to sing every word of Les Mis and Miss Saigon and Evita and Chess and A Little Night Music and Into The Woods with my mom when I was growing up.

Like crazy people.

Crazy happy musical theater geek people.

This summer Diddy is doing two weeks of musical theater camp – Guys and Dolls! –and I could die of joy.

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Baby Gaga phone home …

A new reader pinged me on Facebook last week to remind me that back when I wrote about organizing a nursery, I promised to blog about kids sharing a room with baby, and then never did it.

Totally busted. So here goes.

First off, stop worrying about how Big Kid is going to adjust to having to share her PERFECT ROOM with the new baby.

Seriously. Put that out of your head right now.

Your kids will LOVE sharing a room, at least while they’re still small.

The biggest complaint my girls had when we finally moved back into the house we’d been renovating for A BILLION YEARS to accomodate our growing family – don’t get me started on how having TWINS forced us to re-frame the ENTIRE downstairs THREE YEARS IN to this project – was that now they had their own rooms …. and they didn’t want to.

You hear that? MY GIRLS, having spent 2+ years sharing a room, BITCHED AND WHINED and CRIED THEIR EYES OUT when I gave them their own discrete spaces.

How did this happen? How did I make my Big Kid WANT to live with her Baby?

The key was GETTING MY BIG KID involved with the plan BEFORE Baby got there.

1. ENLIST BIG SIB in the planning for her new, shared, space. Rearrange the room to accommodate a crib, make space in the closets. Then try to decorate in away that stakes out BIG SIB’S space as special from Baby’s.

• Separate bookshelves.
• A closet system that is easy to divide into separate spaces for each kid (I love ELFA).
• Separate dressers, or dedicated dresser drawers.
• Wall decals or wall art that differentiate different parts of the room for each kid.
• Bed linens that are UNIQUE to each kid, from each other, but coordinate in some way with the larger room.
• Common space on the floor for play.

2. Despite all this preparation, START BABY IN YOUR ROOM, or a third space, if you’ve got one.

• A Pack ‘N Play will suffice as the perfect spot for baby – near your bed if you’re nursing.
• Don’t bother with a “co-sleeper.” Co-sleepers are small. They are pricey. You can’t haul them around on vacation with the ease of a pack-n-play, and they won’t last your growing child as long, either.

3. SLEEP TRAIN BABY before you move her into the room with her big sibling.

• Believe it or not, you can sleep train ala The Sleepeasy Solution with your baby in your room – we did. When Gaga woke, and cried, we played dead. It wasn’t easy – Gaga was WAY harder to sleep train than her sister – but it was doable.
• Better yet: put your baby down AWAKE and without bouncing / singing / rocking FROM DAY ONE and avoid sleep training altogether!

4. ONCE BABY CAN SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT and you are past the point of responding to every waking and whimper – move Baby into her crib in Big Sib’s room.

Finally:

Don’t worry that baby’s night noises will bother Big Sib – you’d be shocked at how quickly both kids will learn to sleep through each other’s noise.

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Photo by Marcia Levy

I’m just back from London, where my daughters were flower girls in my cousin’s wedding, so this will be a short and fairly jetlagged post …

(Quick aside on that traveling-with-kids tip, though: You know all those miles you’ve been saving and banking, waiting for that perfect occasion to fly somewhere free? Use them to upgrade your seats when flying long-haul with your kids. We managed to swing BA Club Class upgrades both ways thanks to YEARS of saving our miles, and it was HOLY MOLY WORTH IT for my sanity. End of lecture.)

Anyway, the point of this post is to remind everybody that the GIVEAWAY of Bruce Feiler’s genius book, The Secrets of Happy Families, ends tomorrow.

So get your entries in!

Meanwhile:

Let me regale you with a little list of things this book has made me do / get serious about doing with my crazy brood in the near future:

• Morning Checklists for my kids which allow me to (who knew?!) drink a quiet cup of coffee in the morning instead of losing all sense of control and volume as I try to hussle everybody out the door fed, dressed, brushed … you get the picture. THIS TOTALLY WORKS, by the way.

• No Shouting Contests, which we score all week long. The family member who shouts LEAST over the week gets to pick the movie for our weekly FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT. (We were already doing movie night BEFORE Feiler, so rah rah us). The family member who shouts MOST puts $1 in the SHOUTING JAR, to be used for who knows what at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out.

• Bedtime Breakfast Orders, which the kids are all excited about, are the next project. We are going to brainstorm our favorite, easiest, weekday breakfasts at our FAMILY MEETING (this is a Feiler innovation, too, my friends); create menu cards, like at hotels; and have the kids place their orders at bedtime, because we are just about OVER the constant morning “What do you want for breakfast?” battles we’re having over here. (And yes, I am counting the minutes ’till the kids can make their own breakfasts.)

• Take A Page From MrBigIDeas and tell MY STORIES at bedtime.

1. I normally sing to the kids at bedtime. I do this partially out of nostalgia, because my mother used to sing to me …
2. … and partially because I love musical theater, and I want my kids to love musical theater, which is why I sing “Distant Melody” from Peter Pan, and “Where Is Love?” from Oliver.  (Traveling-with-kids note #2: Get to London or NY and see MATILDA. It’s awesome. Truly.)  It’s ALSO AWESOME that even my boys now know all the words to my chosen lullabies, and can sing along with me when I sing them.
3. But if we’re being COMPLETELY honest here, I will admit that the lullabies are really the quickest and cleanest way to get me out of my kids’ rooms at bedtime. Zip through the songs and I am gone … generally back up to my office.
4. MrBigIdeas, on the other hand, always uses bedtime as an opportunity to tell the kids “stories from when I was a little boy,” and my kids, Gaga especially, are always begging me for “stories when you were a little girl.”
5. Turns out, according to Feiler, kids who know their family histories feel a stronger sense of control over their own lives, have higher self-esteem, and are more resilient and able to deal with stress. So there you go, my love. I JUST PUBLICLY OUTED YOU FOR BETTER-PARENTING THAN ME!

• Attempt to Fight Smarter … we fight like crap. We really do. We have never, no matter how much therapy or forgiveness we have attempted, learned to fight fair. He’s hyperbolic and I’m weepy and it’s a hot mess over here when we get pissed off. The good news is, we not only fight in front of the kids, we make up in front of them, too. Supposedly that’s a good thing. But I’d prefer to up our game and model FAIR FIGHTING while we’re at it. Feiler does a great job distilling Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Languages, and lessons from the The Harvard Negotiation Project, and a host of other sources for fighting better. I am tempted to make notecards of this stuff, and laminate them, and pull them out the next time we’re arguing over here … and yeah, if you really want to know, I DID JUST BUYS A LAMINATOR!

Anyway: that’s if for now. I’m still in a bit of a travel haze. I’ll be back to business Monday.

Till then: check out the handy GIVEAWAY widget below, and get your game on!

Best of luck to everybody – results post tomorrow!

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So here’s the first piece of absolute magic I took away from Bruce Feiler’s new book “The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More.”

CHECKLISTS ARE MAGIC.

Yeah, I know.

ChecklistMommy needed A BOOK to tell her that checklists were magic?

Like, isn’t that what this whole silly blog is all about?

Well, yeah.

It is.

It’s about checklists for diaper bags, checklists for medicine cabinets, checklists for traveling …

So how is it that it never occurred to me to write checklists for my kids?

Here’s how:

I’m married to a man who never ever ever reads my checklists.

He calls me and asks me how to do the things I’ve written checklists for instead.

So I figured my kids were an equally lost cause.

I mean, only one of them even reads …

But then I read “The Secrets of Happy Families” and was particularly struck by the chapter about “agile development,” an organizational technique popular in Silcon Valley, and how the Starr family put it to work in their own home.

Basically, David Starr and his wife Eileen started holding family meetings (more about that next week). Then they and their four kids tried using checklists at home. During the morning rush.

If that ain’t a true test of a system, throwing it at your four kids at the most stressful, rush-and-push-and-pull part of the day, then I don’t know what is.

And you know what happened?

According to Feiler, he witnessed Eileen Starr actually sit down in a reclining chair and enjoy a cup of coffee.

During the morning rush.

I DESPERATELY WANT TO BE EILEEN STARR.

So I wrote a checklist, including clip art pictures in the margin for Gaga, who doesn’t read yet. I showed it to the girls at dinner on Sunday, to make sure they understood what it said, and what it was for.

The next day, I handed them each a copy of the list while they were eating breakfast at 645 am.

They were dressed and standing by the door at 711.

And they had NOTES.

Apparently, I had forgotten to itemize “Put Your Laundry in the Hamper.”

So I added “Put Your Laundry in the Hamper.”

And now every morning at breakfast, I direct them towards the clock at 7 am, they carry their plates toward the sink, they go downstairs, they get dressed, they make their beds …

And I drink a cup of coffee and eat a healthy breakfast and read a bit of the paper even until it’s time to go do “inspection” at 7:25.

Can it really be that easy?

Well:

Diddy, being that kind of kid, races through hers, trying to be perfect and fast and right on point.

Gaga, being that kind of kid, needs a well-timed “What does it say you’re supposed to be doing on your checklist?” every five minutes or so.

But still:

This is way better than it used to be.

The way it used to be was LOUD.

And this is just the FIRST of the changes we’ve instituted around here since I read SECRETS OF HAPPY FAMILIES.

Really, the whole book is this good.

I could kiss Bruce Feiler.

WIN THIS BOOK and you’ll want to kiss him, too.

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Because I have a billion kids, and I write about family, and I work in the family space, and basically I eat-drink-breathe-sleep (ha! If only I slept!) kids/partnership/family life …

I also tend to read A LOT about kids/partnership/family life, too.

And I have favorites.

I’m a fan of Harvey Karp.

I love The Sleepy Planet ladies.

Wendy Mogel is my personal hero.

Well, folks – I’m adding Bruce Feiler to that list.

Some of you may know him from his columns in the NY Times.

Some of you may know him as the Dad who founded The Council of Dads.

Well, now he’s gone and written The Secrets of Happy Families, a book about how to manage family life that is SO EFFING GREAT it almost makes me want to pack up this blog because he’s basically gone and said it all.

I mean seriously. He has taken family management to an easy, fun, cooperative level that is so unbelievably awesome that –

Let’s put it this way:

For the last two weeks my girls, now aged 4 and 6, have been making their own beds every morning before school without help and without complaint.

They have also been getting themselves dressed – to shoes and coats, no less! – and putting their laundry in the hamper and actually standing ready at the front door without us having to scream, shout, or resort to ridiculous threats to get them to move their little … arses.

(I am going to London tomorrow. I get to say arse.)

How on earth did all of this happen?

A few weeks ago I did myself a massive favor and read Feiler’s book.

Here’s the quick pitch:

A dad of twin girls, Fieler had come to the end of his parenting rope. He’d read everything we’ve all read – all the magazines, all the parenting books – and none of it worked for him and his family.  (Sound familiar, folks?)

So he went and sought out management advice from Silicon Valley, the Marines, and Harvard Business School, among many others, operating on the basic assumption that successful corporate and army organizations might have tools or tips or organizational methods in place that might be useful in the most basic organization there is: the contemporary family.

Wonder of wonders: they did.

And he took all he learned, brought it home, unleashed it on his family – and VOILA.

Happiness reigned.

Does this sound too simple?

Try it.

Read this book.

Better yet:

WIN THIS BOOK AND READ IT FOR FREE.

The awesome folks at Fielor’s publisher have offered me FOUR BOOKS to giveaway to ChecklistMommy readers. (Full disclosure: I get one, too. But I’d already read the book. I went to them. This really isn’t a sponsored situation so much as MAN DO I WANT EVERY PARENT ON EARTH TO READ THIS BOOK I LOVE IT SO MUCH.)

Here’s how the giveaway will work:

Over the next few posts, running up to Mother’s Day, I will be blogging about our family’s experiments with the Best Practices outlined in Feilor’s book. (You know you want to know how the hell I got my kids to make their beds!)

Each post will feature this fabulous GIVEAWAY WIDGET you see at the bottom of this post, which will keep reminding you to enter the giveaway.

It’s super-easy. The GIVEAWAY WIDGET gives you TONS of options – like ChecklistMommy on Facebook, follow ChecklistMommy on Twitter and/or tweet about the giveaway, follow ChecklistMommy on Pinterest …

So do one of those things.

Do more, for more entries.

Most importantly, WIN THIS BOOK!

It’ll change your life. In a good way.

Just think of all those made beds …

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What on earth has death got to do with home organizing?

I give you Lisa Whited, a professional organizer in the NYT piece who entered the profession when her kids were young and she thought she was going to die:

… one of her first worries was about her husband and three small children: “How is Pete going to know where everything is?”

And so:

She … began labeling the clear plastic bins she stored everything in. Children’s medicine. Adult medicine. Bread. Waffles (In a plastic bin in the freezer). Candy. Cat treats. All the stuff in the cellar: Caulking. Paint thinner. Linseed Oil.

This rang very true for me.

It is very likely, should I ever have to tell my children I was going to die before they were very very very old, that I would probably make them each a personalized, tabulated, color-coded binder with labeled instructions for everything I could imagine they would possibly need to survive day-to-day without me.

I would probably fixate on these binders so deeply that I’d miss out on other, incredibly important, conversations we could have.

I’m not good at big, messy feelings.

So I went and made a neat little list on this topic, instead.

Next week, I ought to start examining my less-examined life.

This week, I give you:

Photo by Marcia Levy.

A quick recap:

This post is the third in a series of posts about Talking to Kids About Death & Dying. It follows Driving Around with My 4 Year-Old, Talking about Death, and How & Why To Talk About  A Loved One’s Serious Illness. 

I am not a psychiatrist. I do not have a child development degree. But I have friends who are, and do. When I speak about subjects like these, I speak to them. In this case, most of what follows is verbatim from a large packet of information my friend Barbara Benoualid, LMFT, put together for me. (You can learn more about her practice here.)

1. TELL YOUR KIDS THE TRUTH, THE PLAIN TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

• Not long ago, I spoke to a great rabbi at my kids’ school when a dear friend needed guidance about how to talk to his kids about their mother’s imminent death. This rabbi said, “Now is not the time for euphemism.” She advised against using any language, religious or otherwise, that could be remotely unclear, when talking to kids about death. She said that “Passed away,” or even “gone to Heaven,” were things she would not say to a child, for fear that child would believe the dying person might be somehow, someday, coming back.
• My friend Barbara Benoualid agrees that transparency is of the utmost importance in this instance. She says direct conversation is necessary, because trying to shield children from the true scope of a death in the family can deprive them of grieving to their capacity, and even healing.

2. BE PREPARED TO HAVE TO REPEAT THAT TRUTH A LOT, DEPENDING ON THE AGE OF YOUR CHILD

• A child between the ages of 3 and 5 may repeatedly ask where the deceased parent or loved one has gone. Kids at this stage see things in terms of fantasy and magic, and may have difficulty understanding that a parent is truly never coming back.
• Elementary school children have a better understanding of the permanency of death, but may be confused about whom death can happen to, or whether their own actions or behavior led to their loved one’s death. You may need to reassure them. Repeatedly.

2. ALLOW CHILDREN TO GRIEVE AT THEIR OWN PACE

• Children – or even teenagers — should not be forced to attend a funeral, or take part in other grieving rituals, if they show signs of anxiety or fear about them.

Instead:

 3. OFFER KIDS PERSONALIZED SUPPORT, RITUALS, AND OUTLETS FOR  GRIEF

• In Barbara’s practice, she waits for children to express their feelings of grief through play, drawings, or verbal communication rather than pressing them to communicate about their loss before they’re ready.
• Once they are ready to talk, she offers tools for memorializing their loved one, such as speaking about happy times, or remembering regular things the child used to do with deceased.
• Helpful outlets for children and teens in grief include:
  • lighting candles
  • saying a prayer
  • writing letters to the deceased and leaving them in a box
  • scrapbooking
  • reviewing photos
  • sharing special mementos
  • creating memory books
  • listening to music that reminds survivors of the deceased
  • drawing pictures of treasured memories

4. REMEMBER, GRIEF LOOKS DIFFERENT STAGE-BY-STAGE …

• Grief is a process, and manifests differently for all mourners. Being present and open about your own grief can help the child – or teen – to find the strength and confidence to do the same.
• Denial: A child may refuse to believe a death has happened. Don’t push this child to accept the death. She will do so when she is ready.
• Anger / resentment: Do not reprimand a child for harsh words, or venting of negative feelings about the deceased person, or the deceased person’s death. Allow children to speak freely, and uninterrupted, and validate their feelings, letting them know you understand, and that they are being heard. Keep the lines of communication open.
• Sadness / loneliness: Often, when a child is in grief, so are her closest caregivers. If you are too emotionally weak to offer full support to a grieving child, seek help.
• Guilt: While children at many stages may have feelings of guilt around their loved one’s death, be aware that preschoolers especially may feel that their loss is some sort of punishment (at this age, punishment is a typical consequence of bad behavior). They may feel they are somehow “in trouble,” without understanding what they have done.
• Fear: A child suffering a loss may begin to experience separation anxiety and fear of being left alone.

5. … AND AGE-BY-AGE

• Children between the ages of 5-9 need the help of someone who can clarify what they are thinking and feeling, can reframe events to make them more understandable, and can reassure them by praising them accomplishments and emphasizing their importance. Children this age may need to be reassured that nothing they may have done, or ways they behaved, had anything to do with the loved one’s death.
• Middle school children may be impaired in their grieving process by feelings of injustice, and the thought that their loss “isn’t fair.” They may feel bitterness at having been “abandoned,” or anger and regret about past events with their loved one. Children this age may begin to have behavior problems in the wake of their loved one’s death. They will need help and space to vent their negative emotions.
• High schoolers especially may react to a death by isolating themselves, acting out, or behaving in violent and even suicidal ways. It should NEVER be assumed that because a teen this age understands the finality of death that he or she possesses the right coping mechanisms for handling grief on their own.

FINALLY:

• Accepting that life goes on and not feeling guilty about being happy or joyful or celebratory even after a loved one has died is paramount to a family’s healing in the wake of a loss.  Making room for love and fun and laughter in the newly-framed family unit is an important and positive thing you can do to help children rebuild and re-imagine their shape of their future lives.

Again, I am not a therapist.

But I would emphasize that this last thought — that there is love and joy ahead, despite great sadness — is THE MOST important gift I would want to leave my children, that I would want those I left behind to teach my children, and that I would hope my children learn as deeply as they’ve learned every syllable of every lullaby (Mom! You said “stars” instead of “skies,” it’s supposed to be “skies”!) I’ve ever sung to them at night.

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One of my parents took this photo. I dare not guess whom, as it will inevitably begin a credit-fight.

This is the second part of a three-part series I’m running about Talking to To Kids about Death and Dying. 

You can read the first post, Driving Around With My 4 Year-Old, Talking About Death, by clicking here.

*

When my mother was my age, her friends started getting sick. Cancer and MS and lupus descended upon her social circle.  At the time, I assumed this was happening so much among her friends because they were old.

Now I’m old, and it’s happening to mine.

My mother was lucky – she made it through our childhoods healthy, our family remained unscathed. So far, my young family remains similarly lucky, though even typing that tempts fate and flips me out beyond belief.

It’s scary, imagining all the terrible things that might happen, to imagine an illness so terrible it would take me from my kids. (The thought of an unexpected tragedy like Boston, or some terrible accident, is equally horrible – but there is so little we can do to protect ourselves or our families from that. While we’re on the subject though, teach your kids their phone number!)

What we can do, though, we must.

That includes, should the worst happen, leveling with our children about serious, life-changing illness, about terminal diagnoses, and about death.

This isn’t just me talking.

Again: I have no early childhood / psychiatric cred.

But my friend Barbara Benoulid does. She’s an LMFT working in Los Angeles, a mother of three, and an incredibly smart, funny, and tapped in friend. You can find out more about her practice here.

So I went and talked to Barb and she put together a HUGE dossier of info for me. Much of what follows are her EXACT WORDS, simply edited down and re-organized a little bit by me for easy, bullet-point consumption.

THIS IS JUST A STARTING POINT for what may be the most difficult conversations any of us will ever have to have with our kids.

May you NEVER EVER EVER NEED IT.

Artwork by Diddy (October 2012)

First:

If you are a family that has openly discussed health and body issues in the past, broaching a conversation about serious illness will be less confusing and frightening to your kids than it might otherwise be.

But:

All kids are different. How you talk to them depends on their personalities and their age. You know your kids best, you know how best to talk to them.

That said:

1. The only hard and fast rule is TO TALK TO KIDS AT ALL COSTS.

• Kids know when something is not right at home. A child who can absolutely feel but does not understand the cause of the change in their family dynamic will experience undue stress, anxiety and fear. Explain that you are there for your child anytime, should they have questions, and that it is safe and acceptable for them to express any emotion they are feeling, even the uncomfortable ones.

2. DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST.

• When you show your child that you are knowledgeable, that translates into a sense of security for them. Know the answers to the questions your kids may ask, such as:
  • What is the diagnosis?
  • What is the prognosis?
  • What type of treatment is involved?
  • What physical changes in the sick person may be expected?
  • How will this affect the family’s routines? Who will step in to take care of the kids if a parent can’t? (There’s a great checklist for this over on Unclutter.com)

THEN:

3. TELL THEM THE TRUTH

• If you don’t know the answer to a question your kids ask, DON’T LIE.  Tell them you will ask your doctor, or look into it.
• If you are terminally ill or the prognosis is not good, do not lie to your kids that you will get better. Making a promise like that, that you know you can’t keep, may lead your children to become distrustful in the future, and lead to feelings of confusion, anger, and deception when what they were promised doesn’t come to pass.

4. BUT TELL THEM THEIR TRUTH.

• Go at your child’s own speed – no need to offer an answer geared to a teenager to your four year-old – but be prepared to answer simply, and in age-appropriate scope, any question they may have.
• Be sure that younger kids especially know that the diagnosis is not contagious, and not their fault, and that they will still be safe and cared for even if their loved one can not provide primary care.

5. OFFER A SENSE OF CONTROL AND SECURITY BY INVOLVING YOUR KIDS IN ANY DECISIONS THAT YOU CAN

• Be sure they understand the care plans you put in place – kids need to know that their safety and security will not be compromised even if their regular routines change.
• Let them contribute to decisions about who will take care of them – who will pick them up from school, who will watch them when you are at doctor’s appointments or in the hospital.
• A tour of the hospital – especially for younger kids, who can’t visit loved ones – that involves walking around the departments where a loved one will receive care helps kids better understand where their loved one is, and how he or she spends her days.

Vaya con dios.

Assalamu alaiukum.  

Shalom Aleichem.

Live long and prosper.

And every other thing I can think of that means Peace and health be on our heads.

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Last night just as we were about to power down, MrBigIdeas saw a Tweet come across his Facebook feed about an #MITshooting.

He doesn’t have Twitter, but I do – so I headed over there to track the story.

Quickly, #MITshooting became #Watertown.

Then time stopped. Or sped up. Or something.

I opened up my Twitter feed at 9:45 or so, midway through Parks & Recreation.

I didn’t power down my iPad until 1:15 am.

Over those four hours, I watched as #Watertown “reporting” went into a frenzy-feed online. Traditional news outlets were near silent, and wheel-spinning, while Twitter and Reddit congratulated themselves on the speed at which they were reporting developments.

Following a huge gun battle, a suspect was in custody.

A second man was on the loose.

Then the second man was in custody.

Then he wasn’t.

Then the guy in custody was dead.

Then he was wasn’t.

The #MITshooting was related to #Watertown.

Then it wasn’t.

Then it was.

Then #Watertown was related to the #BostonMarathonBombing.

Twitter kept crowing about how this was the night traditional media ended, how pathetic it was that CNN was reporting all the news on Twitter 45-60 minutes behind “the facts.”

Let me remind you: these “facts” were all being reported on Twitter.

Also Reddit. We’ll get to Reddit.

Oh, and there was a naked guy, too. CNN was excited about the naked guy.

Twitter wanted to know if the naked guy was the dead guy.  Because he hadn’t looked all that close to death standing there in the buff on national TV.

Oh wait, that guy was an innocent bystander.

Meanwhile:

There were footsteps at a house on Hazel.

There was a “code black” at Auburn Hospital.

No one seemed to know what “code black” meant.

There were detonations that may or may not have been controlled by the police.

Then there were names.

This is when it got really bad.

80k+ people were listening to the Boston PD scanner when Boston PD put out two names.

One of them was Sunil Tripathi.

Google turned up the fact that Mr. Tripathi had gone missing from Brown University two weeks ago. I know because we Googled him.

And we saw the photo.

And we indicted him along with 80+k other people.

On Twitter. On Reddit. On Facebook. Everyone with an ear on the Boston PD scanner feeds.

There was a Facebook page his family had put up, to help find him.

There was a YouTube video, too.

And it quickly became huge news on Twitter that Reddit had already connected this poor kid to the #BostonMarathonbombers – six hours before we all got his name broadcasted over the scanner and spread all over social media.

Meanwhile, I tweeted:

I have never been so glad of auto-correct.

At least that’s one tweet that won’t come up in the stream that smeared this poor kid’s name.

And his family’s name.

Some of us started to suspect it was getting a little witch-hunty.

Tweets like this one started appearing:

I retweeted that one.

Still, no one was saying this kid WASN’T involved.

But when I woke up this morning, the #BostonMarathonBombers were Chechens.

Three hours later, NPR reported they were born in Kyrgyzstan.

They have lived here for 10 years.

The one who’s still running is described as a “sweetheart”.

And I feel terrible.

I am a mother of four children.

Back east, there is a mother whose son has gone missing.

For most of last night, tens of thousands of people said her son was a bomber. At some time overnight, it is likely she worried her son – her son, a Brown University student – was a terrorist.

I can think of little worse for a parent, to believe a child of hers has done such great harm to so many.

I was a part of doing harm to that child. And to his family.

I am so very, very sorry.

I can say with great certainty, I will never turn to Twitter for “news” again.

And now the TV in my office is broken.

I can’t even watch CNN.

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A little bit of zen in my backyard.

Happy Tax Day, everybody.

…  in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. (Ben Franklin)

This week, in honor of Tax Day, I’m doing a series of posts about talking to your kids about death and dying — with an emphasis on how to talk to YOUR kids about YOUR death and possible dying. 

Let me be clear here: I’m not a child development experiment. I do not have a background in psychiatry.

But over the last few years, MrBigIdeas and I have started losing friends to illness and accident. Some of them have left kids behind.

At the same time, our kids have befriended other kids with sick parents, or parents who have died.

That’s  got them asking questions about what a sickness or death in our family would mean for them, and it’s got MrBigIdea and I asking questions about what that might mean for us, too.

So I’ve spoken to a few people with better cred than I have in this area — a great rabbi, and a fabulous psychiatrist specializing in family care — and I’ve put together a few “best practices” posts about how to discuss a parent’s serious illness or death with kids, and how to help them cope with grief and mourning.

But I’m starting light today — we all have enough on our plates this particular morning, with taxes looming, to dive right into the Big D without some light relief. Hopefully this will serve as some light relief.

I give you:

Gaga and her friend S. murder their own dinner (cue “Circle of Life”). Photo courtesy of S.’s mom.

Shortly after my grandmother died last fall, Gaga, then nearly 4, started asking questions about death and dying.

She only did this when we were driving around.

At first I thought this was odd, that every time we got in the car she got morbid – my driving’s not THAT bad – but then I remembered that shortly after college, long before I was an Angeleno, I dated an Angeleno. It wasn’t a great relationship, but it I was deeply enough invested to fly out here to see him and try to make it work.

He dumped me while we were parked in his parents’ driveway.

Yep. I got dumped in the car.

When I pointed out how … ass-hatt-y that was, he said,

That’s how we talk about all important things out here, it’s an LA thing, we’re always driving, plus it’s easier to bring up all this stuff when you don’t have to look at each other.

At the time I thought he was insane and even more emotionally closed-off than I’d previously believed, but now that my tiny little LA kids are constantly springing deep conversation on me in the car I’m beginning to re-think his position.

Anyway, for weeks, every time we got in the car Gaga wanted to discuss death and dying – especially MY death, and MY dying.

As in, “Mom, when are you going to die?”

Talking to Gaga, I defaulted to the preschool language I learned when Diddy was in a classroom with a 2yo who’d lost his Mom. The preschool pitch is,  ”People die when they’re very very very very old and their bodies don’t work anymore.”

Anyway, I tried this on Gaga, and  she considered it carefully and came right back at me with,  ”Well, you’re really old, and I’m still really young, so you’re gonna die a lot sooner than me, Mom.”

Fair enough.

Then, a  few weeks later:

“Mom, since you’re so old and you’re gonna die soon, who is going to take care of me?”

“Honey,” I said, “By the time I die, you will be all grown up and taking care of other people already, so you won’t need me to take care of you anymore.”

I thought that was a pretty good answer. She did too. I heard her repeat it to a few teachers, and some friends.

I thought we were good to go.

Then about a month later, she brought it up again.

Apparently I hadn’t been logistically specific enough about the chain of Gaga-care.

“Mom,” she said, “when you die, I’m going to go live at S’s house. S’s mom will take care of me.”

OK. Points to the kid for long-term planning. And I applaud her choice of surrogate — S.’s mom is pretty rad. But something about this little chat made me feel somehow … flattened.

And then it hit me:

I’d just been dumped again. In the friggin’ car.

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I did my bedside table:

And attacked the pile growing in, on, and around our bedroom loveseat (ok technically that’s not a shelf or drawer, but after I did my bedside table that pile just sat there taunting me and had to be handled):

And our breakfast bar:

And the shelving unit beside the boys’ changing table:

Plus as I was getting the boys to bed tonight I also put away all the junk that tends to collect on the over-sized ledge of our bathtub. Go me.

Not bad for a week that also involved two networking lunches, two conference calls, three posts on this blog, drafts of five upcoming posts, a full guest post for another blog, and a draft of next week’s newsletter for MomciergeLA.

Oh and: I finished our taxes and went to the dentist and organized MrBigIdeas into going out and buying me four sorely-needed new tires. (You rock, babe. I was never in a million years gonna find time to do that myself.)

On top of which I had the pleasure of hanging out with my dad four days in row and faux-hosted a school fundraiser.

No wonder I’m feeling so proud of myself.

And so very very very very very very tired …

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