Better Parenting via Science Theory**

There are several scientific theories that would have been discovered faster if only the world of science had allowed for mothers to be part of the discussion much earlier in history.

Nature seeks homeostasis: This is a truism. Every time I wash my floor, a child attempts to reassert the natural sticky feeling their feet have become accustomed to, by spilling something impossibly hard to clean up within ten minutes of the floor actually drying. Olive oil, maple syrup, and salt are amongst three of the most memorable illustrations of this theory in practice.

Opposites Attract: Clean white wall. Permanent Black Marker. Any questions? I mean, other than from my own mother asking why in heaven’s name do I even own a permanent black marker, or from my mother-in-law, where is this clean white wall you speak of?

Chaos Theory: Some individuals would stipulate that a child's very essence illustrates Chaos Theory's validity, independent of space, time or setting. Some individuals don't yet know the untrammeled power of a hungry child. For those who are still confused by chaos theory, perhaps a live demonstration is in order.  Please come on over to my house at five o'clock and try to fix dinner.  I will take a nap. 

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

Exhibit A: my son’s laundry.
Exhibit B: An orange oversized tee he got in 3rd grade that defies all maternal efforts to transform or destroy. Handing it down has not stopped the older child from retrieving it for his wardrobe. Purchasing new shirts has produced no measurable effect. Now that it is, arguably, a bit tight around the arms, he still resents the fact that his mom has twice attempted to give it to goodwill. The shirt in question is currently stored in a secret bunker under his bed and heavily guarded by legos, books, smelly socks and other items that if discovered, would lead his mother to despair.

Time is relative theory: The simple errand of driving to school normally takes twenty minutes. Starting at 8:39 a.m. after Mom has whisked away breakfast materials and begun the getting dressed routine for all occupants still home, there is a tearful phone call from her third grade son. “Today is bake sale day and I didn’t bring any cookies.” Thinking about the frozen cookie dough in the freezer, Mom stupidly agrees to bring something by 10:30, as the bake sale starts at 11.

While in the process of getting the toddlers dressed, Mom throws the cookies in the oven, locates shoes, puts three unmatched socks in the laundry basket, flushes an abandoned toilet, puts milk away, turns off the lights, removes four bikes and two whiffle ball bats from the driveway, takes the cookies out of the oven, straps the two toddlers (who both want cookies) in their car seats and the baby and then signs a form for a package being delivered before starting the car.

Once in the car, Mom remembers that the aforementioned cookies are still in the kitchen. Retrieving the cookies, the phone will ring; it will be the same child asking if you are bringing the cookies. While inside, Mom will spot permission slip that needs to be dropped off and feel so virtuous for multi-tasking, she will run to her closet to gather the dry cleaning. Leaving for the second time, Mom gets half way down the driveway before realizing; she brought her purse in, but not out. In the few seconds Mom is in the house, the phone rings again, she forces herself to ignore it. Grabbing a prescription bottle on the counter that is about to run out, Mom returns to the car with her purse, cell phone and a diet coke. Triple checking to make sure she has all her children, her errands, and all required equipment for those errands, she drives.

It is part of the law of nature that she will then hit every red light plus have to navigate one traffic jam owing to a cop issuing a ticket and a second at a train crossing. She arrives around 12:15. The bake sale is over, and the volunteer has several dozen frozen dough baked cookies left over. When she checks the message on her answering machine at home from the phone call she ignored, it was her son saying “Never mind, third grade isn’t doing the bake sale this week, it’s fourth grade.”

Theory of Gravity: How annoyed your mother will be after enduring the above mentioned scenario versus. how much she loves you.

Next week: Scientific Law in Relationships:

Theory of Constancy: The level of stress in a marriage is constant, the level felt by the individuals within the marriage, is fluid.
** Originally ran on January 20, 2008, back when I only had 8 children. What a piker! 

Cramming for the Next Time

Yesterday, I couldn't help my 4th grade son resolve a word problem.  Now granted, it was on fractions and it was a word problem, but I have to admit, I thought I'd still be something of an asset at least until actual middle school.  

My older children long since lapped me in academics.  They're doing cool down runs around the track and waving me bravely on as I try to just finish the assignments. They've been very supportive but they don't ask me for help anymore.

But I'm not going down without a fight.  I'm not ready to resign myself to 3rd grade and down just yet.  So last night after I had to surrender to my oldest son as the tutor for the fractions, I took out the Handy Book of Space Answers, Everything You Ever Needed To Know about History, and my statistics book from graduate school. All three are subjects I completely stink at, and avoided as much as possible when they were actually required.


Effective immediately, I will assign myself 20 minutes of one of the three every night before bed, sort of like intellectual calisthenics. I predict my occasional bouts of insomnia shall soon be a permanent thing of the distant past.

In the meantime, I hear my son's teacher for first grade is beefing up her curriculum so I'm boning up on fractions, phonics and Venn Diagrams. 

P.S. If you are curious, the question that stumped me is: A pet store has 1/3 dogs, 1/6 cats and 19 other pets.  How many animals are in the pet store?  Yeah. I know how to do it now. 

My return question: A mom has a brain.  1/3 is allotted to remembering children and their schedules.  1/6 handles autonomic functions.  19 other separate urgent fields of important stuff like what's for dinner, what I need to do today, the courage to practice driving with my son, how to potty train the 3 year old and when the bills are due.  How many slots of memory are left to fill with 4th grade math recall and will I still have space to remember where I put my purse if I relearn this stuff?

Coffee Free Zone*

Driving my kids to school, my daughter proceeded to tell me about the water cycle as discussed on a "How Stuff Works" video. The theory is that because there are so many trillions of water molecules in a cup of coffee, that some of the molecules from President Abraham Lincoln's coffee on the day he was sworn in, could have followed the water cycle all around the world, through the sewers, the treatment plants, into the oceans and streams, across continents, back into clouds to rain into the local reservoir and thus return through the sinks of the nearby Starbucks into a cup for you.

Sounds tasty doesn't it?

While mathematically, it is statistically possible that old Abe's cup of Joe became a current overpriced cup of java; I've taken statistics and know that what can be illustrated cannot necessarily be proven. There are lies, damn lies and statistics as Twain once said.

For instance, remember Reach Mouth Wash? When it first came out, they touted the fact that they reduced plaque by 300% and they did, when compared to doing nothing. But when compared to gargling with water or brushing one's teeth, they did only 10% against the former. Reach sales plummeted when the scam of statistics was exposed. Having learned the statistical possibility of Lincoln's ahem, "coffee in its distilled by the body form" might be in my water, I predict a Reach mouth wash comeback at least in this household.

But my daughter insisted the water cycle proved it. Feeling really glad I stuck to diet coke at the moment, I pointed out that in some cases, like wines, water is taken out of the cycle for decades. I privately wondered if I should switch to that vice at that moment, it sounded more palatable. There is some knowledge that just isn't very useful for everyday life; or at the very least, for enjoying living. "We don't KNOW know." I countered.

"But the math proves that there's a 100% chance of water molecules from the coffee having come from President Lincoln's the day he took office!" 

I pointed out that it isn't like one can Marlin Perkins style tag individual water molecules and release them back into the wild as it were. I also pointed out that water can get stuck, frozen on the mountains of Tibet, absorbed into a deep river inside the Earth, mingling in the ocean deep off South America, bottled in Fiji and sent here to sit on a 7-11 store shelf. Some of the water might have been absorbed by the woman who drank it, who then had a baby who took in those water molecules as part of his development and be walking around now with Honest Abe's water vapors as part of his DNA!For that matter, the rogue H20 could be absorbed by a jelly fish or drunk by a pig or mixed with other chemicals to make shampoo or concentrated orange juice or toothpaste.

Besides, we don't know if the President went to the facilities on Inauguration day after drinking coffee, so it might be a day younger. The very discussion itself was enough to put me off drinking water period.

She asked who Marlin Perkins was.

"Let me put it this way," I answered. "If your theory is correct, you probably brushed your teeth with him."


* Video of "How Stuff Works" on water cycle is linked in the title if you want to watch. 

All I know, I Learned from the Internet

The older I get, the more I wish I’d paid more attention when I was in school.

That’s not because I wish my life had turned out differently, no. It’s just I would have preferred to not have my ignorance revealed on a daily basis when my children sit down to do their homework. Before I had kids, I figured I was all set. I’d passed through college and even graduate school with nary more than two “C's.” But there were subjects I avoided studiously, so as to avoid studying; like science and math.

Now a days, as a conscientious parent, I try to be a resource for all my children when they come home from school. But I’ve learned, you can’t bluff your way through the periodic table or quadratic equations.

When my science oriented children were engaged in a game of mental catch over the dinner table about the various properties and distinctions between solutions and compounds, I foolishly attempted to join in the fray.

But chemistry is a subject I ignored even while in the classroom with Coach Keister explaining that a mole was not an unwanted growth on one’s skin. Not to worry I thought, I’ve got wireless internet. I wikipedia’d the subject “Chemistry” while in the kitchen while getting the milk and cookies for snack. I returned to toss off a pithy reference inserting myself into the conversation while pouring.

My attempts garnered a “Where’d you learn that?” and “Mom, that site is completely bogus…” plus a snort of milk requiring me to return to the kitchen for towels followed. It got me wondering why Wikipedia’s so popular if it’s so inaccurate. Why aren’t real encyclopedia companies creating giant conglomerates of actual accurate information so parents across the fruited plains can understand what their children’s homework assignments are?

But those sorts of questions aren’t answered by “Ask Jeeves” or “Dogpile” or any of the other handy search engines out there that promise to open the flood gates of information to the world. I know, I checked while getting the paper towels.

“You have to go to trusted sites.” And of course they rattled off a few. I listed a few of my current favorite places to visit and got “tsked.” According to my children, these haunts of mine were the equivalent of “The Earth is flat” in their chosen fields. Now maybe others out there are more tech savvy than me and Lord knows I hope so, but the way my kids spoke about it, I felt as if the whole World Wide Web suddenly collapsed into a three volume compendium.

Listening to my children’s recommendations, it occurred to me that finding info on the World Wide Web was rather like dating. One had to make sure the page in question was honorable, accurate and not just playing with your mind. Playing the field was useful for discovering which ones would be worth going steady with, but blind dates were mostly scary and unworthy. If one wanted to be certain about the accuracy of information, one had to hold true to a properly vetted place with the fidelity owed a spouse, or in these days, a political party. My daughter offered to show me her fave spots that were best for tutoring in science. "That way, you can help my sister with sixth grade lab." she explained.

Having to do research on the classes I’d skipped twenty-seven years ago to comprehend a dinner conversation seemed like a bit much so I turned my attention to my other children who might have subjects of interest that didn’t require independent study. Alas, the high schooler started his German assignment which left me with my two years of Latin and three years of French useless unless he just needed the phrases from the song “Cabaret.”

The 4th grader started to tackle his social studies. Now I am social and I do study so here, I thought I could be of some use, but he didn’t want a 43 year old’s perspective on anything, not that that was any different from any other time of the day. Turning to the younger children, hoping to prove my mettle as a resource, I looked over their homework assignment sheets and asked, “Do you need any help?”

One child was working on a project concerning dinosaurs. I got excited. “We have books on that, and you can make a model with clay or paint something.” I began scanning the shelves for a few I knew had in depth articles on the Jurassic period with great color illustrations. “Mom, I’m just going to go on the website.” My son patiently explained. “But why assign it if everyone will look at the same page?” I asked. He shrugged. “The paper says to go to this page and read this article.”

I’d already pulled three tomes for his report. “Don’t you want any of this?” I asked? But he was already typing in www. And I wondered if we discovered aliens and wanted to share technology, would we need to change the internet to be the igww, the intergalactic wide web. Then I wondered if I should buy the domain name or see if the government would offer me money to devise it as part of the stimulus plan. I was flunking the motherhood “help with homework” section of the day. My attempts to provide aid and comfort were being ignored or rebuffed or bombing absolutely. I felt like the UN.

The second grader sat at the table writing her spelling words. She has a kinder heart than most and seeing me flailing at every front, she took pity. “You can help me.” She said softly. “What do you need sweetie?” I asked as I hugged her. She handed me a pencil. “You can sharpen this one for me in case the one I’m using breaks.”

My oldest finished his German. “It’s not that you aren’t helpful Mom.” He explained.

“It’s that we’d have to bring you up to speed and that would take more time than actually studying.” My teen-aged daughter chimed in.

I sharpened the pencils wondering if I had the mental will to go and secretly master everything about ionic compounds or learn the irregular conjugations of verbs in Deustche before the next evening. I decided I could live with my reputation as an ignorant adult. So, I’m educated enough to assist through third grade. After that, they’re on their own.

And when they’re grown, they’ll say “Mom, she was as sharp as the pencils she provided,” until we hit third grade.

In Defense of REMing...

"Honey? It's seven-thirty, time to get up."

"Did you know that Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness?"

"No. You're awfully informed for having just woke up."

"Radio was left on last night, woke up at 2, heard the report. Couldn't sleep so it was interesting."

"Why didn't you just turn it off?"

"It was interesting. It's a nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A. It reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests."

"Really? So are you a well rested monkey?"

"No."

"So tell me more about this interesting report."

"Well, I started thinking about the commercials they'd run, inbetween change of possession on ESPN Monday Night Football. A College student wearing a HARVARD sweatshirt looks earnestly at the camera. “I was a party all night kind of guy in high school. Getting a good night’s sleep just wasn’t in the cards and my grades showed it. Now, thanks to Orexin A, I aced my SAT’s and I’m living the IVY LEAGUE life.”

"What are you talking about?..."

"Well, this could really change our society. I've been thinking about the possibilities. Night schools would flourish. Law firms would revamp themselves after hospitals, having clients served by lawyers who worked ten hour shifts managing the same patients, selling their profession with lower salaries and better hours. Early Early shows would become the venue for b-list stars to try and create followings and comebacks."

"Did you get any sleep last night?"

"A little, why do you ask?"

"You're flakier than usual."

"No. I'm informed. I even remember the researcher's name. Hah! Try that gassed monkey. Dr. Michael Twery, he's the director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, said that while research into drugs for sleepiness is "very interesting," he cautioned that the long-term consequences of not sleeping were not well-known."

"Really? I'll phone him now, extreem nuttiness and oddly strong retentive recall powers abound."

"Thanks. But this medication worries me. As a devout wearer of bunny slippers, I want my bedtime! I need my winding down time to read a book, take a bath and brush my teeth. I need to stretch out on the mattress and say, “Yes…no more work for today.” And I don’t want that time to become an indulgence rather than a necessity."

"You don't own bunny slippers."

"Figure of speech love. If this medication becomes as ubiquitous as caffeine and chocolate and Viagra and allergen meds, society will expect us to put in 20 hour days. No thank you. Being able to excuse the fact that I haven’t written the Christmas cards yet or folded all the clothing on the fact that even I, need at least six to eight hours of down time to function, will become unreasonable. I don’t want another 56 hours in the week when I could be doing something."

"Me neither."

"As the medication becomes more popular, not taking it will be viewed as a form of sloth."

"Like not having a cell phone is considered being unprofessional?"

"Exactly. No one used to expect that people would be 100% reachable after hours or on vacation but now, everyone gets annoyed if you don't return an email after two hours."

"Bet it's unhealthy."

"It may not cause mood swings or have unpleasant side effects, but purposeful stillness absent being dead is something this society is rapidly losing as an experience. It’s odd, we go to work at jobs where we scarcely move, to earn money we seldom physically touch, to the gym to walk without getting anywhere, and with this new technological advance, perhaps to a bed but not perchance to sleep or dream. Not counting the time we spend stuck in traffic, where we wait to move, our lives are becoming one long sisyphian pursuit of the unreal. How much more of our lives can we find a way to render superfluous to working?"

"One would imagine that the refined versions of these same medications will eventually reach a point of being able to make sleep utterly unnecessary."

"Being on call 24-7 is one thing. Being awake 24-7 is another. I’m tired just considering the possibility."

"Me too. Are you getting up now?"

"No! In fact, in civic protest and in case this ever comes to pass, I am sleeping in today, while it's still socially acceptable. Carpe REM!"

"Alright. Alright, I'll get up and turn off the alarm."