Tuesday, May 15, 2012
It is so hard to watch our kids fail—especially if we might be able to prevent it. Why I think we have to let it happen sometimes anyway.
My oldest son plays on a soccer team that is at a fork in the road. Some of the players will be trying out to qualify for more advanced teams. Some of them will stay in the purely recreational space they currently occupy. My dilemma: Do I let my son, who is mentally and physically destined to stay at a lower level in soccer, try out anyway? Or do I protect him from the heartache of loss and failure? It is a cliche, but there is a reason it is so. As Elizabeth Stone said, “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Once you have a child, once you have that heart walking around outside your body, all you want to do is to protect it, to keep it safe, to …
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
In advance of Mother's Day, I want to say thank you to all the mothers out there.
Mother's Day is coming up this Sunday. If—and I know this only applies to a few of you—you have a mother or know a mother, consider this your fair warning to put a note on your calendar to say something nice to her this weekend. If you are a mother, prepare to put your feet up and be doted on. That's how it works, right? My family doesn't usually do a lot for Mother's Day. Generally they let me sleep in—without guilt—and I get some lovely handmade gifts, which are the best kind, in my opinion. I know that I feel like I get a wonderful Mother's Day gift every single day—and that is having the privilege to parent my three beautiful munchkins. That said, it's not all ceramic hand prints and relaxing mornings around here. I'm betting it's not …
Monday, May 7, 2012
The run-up to the weekend led to more grumbling about the transit agency. Was it warranted?
This weekend was supposed to be a big one for getting out and about in and around DC. The Caps, the Nats and the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer were all in town on Saturday, along with the usual complement of springtime tourists. And then there was the usual track maintenance on Metrorail. With trains running once every 24 minutes on the Red Line from 10 a.m. Friday through close on Sunday, Metro advised riders to add 20 minutes to their travel time. Transit advocates asked for a reprieve. No can do, a Metro spokewoman said. “For many, it's getting to the point that Metro is just unusable during weekends and even during off-peak service on weekdays,” Unsuck DC Metro wrote Friday. “It's as if Metro is thinking construction must go on, riders …
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Submit a letter to the editor by emailing Esther.French@patch.com
Daniel Hess, a Montgomery County parent and a graduate of Highland Elementary School (Class of 1989), submitted this letter to the editor in the wake of an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article that cast doubt on the Wheaton school's test scores: I attended Highland Elementary School in Silver Spring, MD in the 1980s for six years. I know that school well and I looked into the data. It is every bit as suspicious as has been suggested. I too was suspicious of this data when I saw it a few years ago. I still live in Montgomery County with three children of my own. You should ask more questions because I am very certain that the test data of Highland Elementary School shows that something is amiss. Here are four important issues that the…
Deciding how many kids you want to have can be a difficult decision. For me, that decision came in a moment of clarity at a traffic light.
I remember the exact moment I knew I was done having children. I was stopped at a traffic light after a visit to the pediatrician's office. I had three kids under the age of five strapped into their car seats and they were not pleased. I had spent a long wait at the doctor's office corralling and trying to keep those kids happy through the waiting room, the tiny examination room, and, based on their age, probably a vaccination—that part I don't remember. I blocked a lot of that screamy-type stuff out. That was a year of my life that I have very little memory of. I had a one-year-old who refused to walk, a three-year-old who was headed down the road to an autism diagnosis, and a four-year-old who never stopped talking. I don't remember a …
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Patch highlights the best of our Local Voices section.
Each week, community bloggers contribute to Patch sites across Montgomery County and Maryland through our Local Voices section. Non-profit groups, students, residents, and government agencies and officials are among those that weigh in with their viewpoints and help contribute to the dialogue in our communities. Check out a few of the blogs we featured on Patch sites this week. Kennedy IB Students Host Cherry Blossom Festival Japanese brush painting, sumo wrestling, origami and haiku workshops -- students at John F. Kennedy High School created their own version of the famous Cherry Blossom Festival earlier this month. See the wonderful (and funny!) photos posted by the school's IB coordinator. The Book I'm Carrying Around: The Global …
Friday, April 27, 2012
MoCo officials want the Maryland Court of Appeals ruling overturned.
Earlier this week Montgomery County law enforcement officials called on Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Maryland Court of Appeals decision that bars police officers from taking DNA samples from a defendant charged with a crime. So we want to know what you think. Is taking DNA from a defendant an invasion of privacy or is a good tool to help law enforcement?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Sure, when you pick your kid up after the playdate, I tell you it went great—and for the most part it did—but this is what I left out.
Do you want to know what one of my favorite things in the whole world is? Playdates—at, you know, someone else's house. The thing about playdates, though, is that if you want to ever get the call that says, "Sure, drop off all three of your kids for a couple hours at my house," you have to extend the invitation as well. In their defense, even playdates that you are forced to host can be great. Often, adding an extra kid to the mix is exactly what you need to keep your own kids happy and occupied, even if at other times playdates are like throwing an incendiary device into a watermelon patch. Usually, however, they run by a pretty standard schedule. Sure, there are variations, but here is how things tend to go down at my house. Hour One: …
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
As I finally accept that I am, indeed, a soccer mom, I also give in to the commandments of the sport.
It seems like pretty much everyone I know has at least one kid who played in their first soccer game of the spring season last weekend. I had one of them myself. My 10-year-old plays soccer and headed out on Saturday, the warmest day of spring thus far, to kick the ball around. I headed out to keep my other two kids from running onto the field and to own my soccer mom-ness. As I acknowledge that I am, indeed, a soccer mom, I also acknowledge that there must be commandments to such a condition. Mayhap ten of them. I. Thou shalt not be able to remember the names of your child's teammates, even if they've played together for years. There is the kid with the brown hair, the kid with the longer brown hair, and that kid who always wears two …
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The county school board is reconsidering a policy allowing nonprofits to distribute fliers in schools.
Should the Board of Education allow nonprofits to distribute fliers through county schools? Or are students' book bags not the proper way for organizations to spread their messages? County schools are the staging ground this week for a debate between gay rights advocates and a group saying they can help those who don't want to be gay. Both sides of the debate have used schools to spread their messages under a Montgomery County Public Schools policy allowing nonprofits to submit fliers for distribution four times a year. Now, the county school board is reviewing the policy and could bar nonprofits from distributing fliers through schools, The Gazette reported this week.
Elaine
10:09 am on Wednesday, May 16, 2012
There's another reason to avoid the soccer try-out. Kids need to be out playing more, not less. If this could make him turn away from a game that he's getting out and doing, into not doing it any more, that's not a good thing for him. That said, I am totally a believer in letting my kids fail, and I am also in the camp that they don't deserve compliments for everything they do. more ›