You're grounded!

Ah kids. Gotta love 'em. As many of you know, Chris and I have 4 children: a 16-year-old girl, a 13-year-old boy, a 12-year old girl and a 7-year-old boy. As much as they bring joy to our lives, they also provide plenty of headaches, frustration and general consternation. 

Here's my question. What consequences do you enforce when your children misbehave? In this case, when one of the teens misbehaves at school? And how severe should said consequences be when the act isn't even anything catastrophic or earth shattering and he's already served an in school detention for a whole 15 minutes? It's just the cliche, misbehaving when a substitute teacher happens to fill in for the day. What punishment fits this crime?

Gone are the days when we'd look at our middleschooler with the stink eye and he'd quiver in fear. Now we actually have to follow up that stink eye with action!

Here are some ideas we've come up with so far: 1. Make him run lines until he either drops in exhaustion or loses his school lunch. (This may actually be the most effective form of punishment for our son since he definitely is not a runner). 2. Let him catch my husband's pitches to him. (Again, could be pretty effective since catching is his least favorite baseball position). 3. Make him miss a friend's Royals watch party. 4. Take away his phone for several days. Hmmm, decisions, decisions.

Which would you choose?

 

Eww gross!

One of my favorite activities is cooking. I could wile away an entire day perusing my go to cooking haunts, sites and books to develop more creative menus for the hubs and kiddos.

Last week - spicy Thai noodles; pork chops simmered with spiced apples and onions served over glazed squash and potatoes. This week - shrimp with parmesan and parsley rice. And since I know all my friends and family are on the edge of their seats waiting to see what I've made, I like to take pictures of the finished masterpieces and post them on FaceBook. Here's my beef (or pork/chicken/fish) about this though.

None of the pictures I take, make the food look REMOTELY appetizing. The colors are muted and dull. Pork chops are ghostly pale, vibrant cilantro fades to a dark seaweed like appearance. Yum...not really!

With these visuals, my ability to boast about the finished products becomes obsolete. And let's face it, why else does anyone post pics of food they just created on FB unless they're bragging just a little? If they say otherwise, don't let them fool you, myself included :-)

Who gets custody?

After an over year long absence from blogging, I've decided to resume my blogging site again. Missed me haven't you? :-)

Tonight I'm feeling a little more brave about the topic (and a little courage called red wine doesn't hurt) I'm going to write about. After all, I've been threatening to write about this, but just haven't done so until now.

When I ask who gets custody, you may be thinking I'm referring to children in a divorce case. While I am referencing a divorce, the custody agreement I'm questioning doesn't pertain to the children, but to the adults themselves, as in who gets custody of the formerly married spouses? Do you keep sole custody of the husband or the wife? Is it possible to get joint custody?

Let's look at this logically for a moment. For joint custody, you'd have to have both parties agree to an equitable amount of time spent with you. Now that the friends are no longer married, your time commitment would double just to be able to spend equal amounts of time with the former spouses. If you rarely saw them when they were married, how do you propose to spend even more time with them as individuals. And what about vacations, holidays and birthdays? Do you alternate times, every other year?

Now the flip side, sole custody. Just the word "sole" signifies someone is going to be left out. And how does this scenario play out? Do you remain friends with the person you knew the longest? If you loved both the husband and the wife, do you completely sever ties with one of them? Either way, sole or joint custody, it's a no win situation when you dearly love both parties. My head (and my heart) aches just thinking about it. I think I'll just have another glass of red wine.