Saturday Night Retro

It's Saturday night, the dishes are done, the kids are in bed, time to harken back to my teen years.  This was retro even then, but it was at the top of my hit parade.

I'm calling it a night early tonight, so I'll leave you with this gem.

Why Are We Normal?

On the heels of my last post about attempting to keep creepy, neurosis inducing images out of my kids' heads, Rachel found this gem

How did any child of the 60's turn out ok, with that soul sucking monstrosity showing up during the Saturday morning cartoon time?  That's the stuff of nightmares, right there.

Scaring (or Scarring) Kids

(warning: this posts contains images or links which may be disturbing to some.  consider  yourself warned.)

As a homeschool mom, I have the ability to shield my kids from a lot of information and images.  In addition, we have very limited television in our house, so unless it's Rick Steves Europe or Bill Nye the Science Guy, my kids don't watch much that I haven't previewed and approved.  My older two haven't even seen The Lord of the Rings movies yet, despite having read the books, because of a few scenes with orcs and uruk hai that I think are too disturbing.

 

a mild example

I will admit that I might have gone further than necessary in hoping to prevent psychological scarring.  Having a Bachelor's degree in psychology means you read too many case studies of people who were emotionally unstable as adults, perhaps due to influences in childhood.  I think I spend more time than necessary worrying about that.

My kids are not without knowledge of evil.  The older two know the facts about the holocaust, and other historical atrocities, because that is important to understand when forming a world view.  We've visited the Holocaust Memorial in Boston and the Oklahoma City Memorial, and talked about the heinousness of the crimes that led to those events in history.

That having been said, I have been very careful to shield them from artificial evil.  Horror movies, cop shows, and fictional books that involve twisted characters or events are not allowed.  Same for books about dying siblings (the 70's were a big decade for dying sibling books.)  Any disturbing images that turn up in my Facebook feed are hidden, to ensure that the kids don't see them.  I am really overly paranoid that my kids will have psychological problems later in life, due to one disturbing image that I allowed to contact their optic nerves prior to adolescence.

Silly.

Or is it?

Enter

Just when I had almost convinced myself that my older kids were sufficiently loved, educated, and emotionally stable to handle the world, I found a website that assures me that something as simple as a Sesame Street short can scar a kid for life.  Nothing is guaranteed innocuous.  Even an anti-smoking PSA can linger in a kid's psyche for decades.  Great.  Do we have to move to a cave?

Saturday Night Retro

Saturday night.  Time to sit back, relax, and remember some of the great music from the past.  Etta James passed away this week, so it's fitting that we enjoy her amazing gift.

And when I was a kid, several of my friends' moms had these lamps.  I loved to watch them then, and now I think they are totally boss.  I want one!  (my poor husband is mortified at the thought)

What item from your childhood would you love to get your hands on now?  Leave a comment with a link if you can find one, if not, a description will do.

She's Not Weird, She's Interesting

My youngest child, Bekah, has had imaginary friends since she could talk.  Perhaps earlier, but I wouldn’t know about those.  Some of them have come and gone, and some, most notably Dorothy Ann, have stuck around.  Bekah is seven now, and Dorothy Ann still shows up from time to time.  In fact, recently I was yelling, I mean correcting calmly and cheerfully, in the way all good Christian mothers do,  up the stairs, griping out Rachel and Joshua about something.  I was really reading them the riot act, and I finished with, "Bekah, come down here!"  After a few seconds I heard her on the stairs, and she was saying, "C'mon Dorothy Ann, maybe she has ice cream for us."

Some of our favorite stories involve Bekah and her imaginary friends.  She’s always been a fairly dramatic kid, and that tendency led to a legendary encounter with me when she was about four years old.  She had been spending a fair amount of time with an imaginary friend named Honornah (i don’t know!!).  She came to the table for dinner and announced, in a very sad, heavy voice, “Honornah died.”  Not wanting to encourage such macabre play, I said sternly, “Rebekah, Honornah did not die.  If you don’t want to play with her anymore that’s fine.  Just say, ‘Honornah had to go home.’”  She sighed heavily and said, “Honornah had to go home. (dramatic pause) And she’s never...   coming...    back.”

 

Oh boy.  

Raising Girls

I read a lot.  Not as much as I did prior to having DSL.  For you younger folks, that means that there was a time when getting on the internet was either A) very slow and irritating, or B) impossible.  We all read a lot more in those days.  Anyway, as a teen and young adult I read voraciously.  I read everything, including plenty that was not exactly suited to my age.  Some that was not suited to anyone’s age.  When I was about 14 I read Seventeenth Summer.  Although I enjoyed it, and thought it was well written, I giggled and scoffed my way through it.  For those who might not be familiar, it’s a novel written in 1942 (wow!! until i looked it up just now, i always assumed it was written in the early 60’s.  this puts a new slant on a few of the issues in the book.) about a 17 year old girl experiencing her first crush.  It seems quaint and silly by today’s standards, as it did by my standards in about 1983ish.  However, the story is very engaging, and the characters are well fleshed out, so I’ve owned a copy at all times since then.

So here’s why this is blog worthy.  I recently thought of it as a potential book for my 13 year old insatiable reader, but I thought, “Oh, not yet.  She’s a bit too young for some of the themes.”  Basically, in the year 2012 I am raising a teen daughter who is less worldly and romantically knowledgeable than I was 30 years earlier.  This despite the fact that she is much more knowledgeable about the world in general, political and social issues, and great literature than I was, even when I was 10 years older than she currently is.  (i think that sentence made some grammar gurus’ heads explode)  In simpler terms, my 13 year old who can discuss Shakespeare, ancient Egypt, the current presidential race, Robert’s Rules of Order, and how to repel down the side of a cliff knows a lot less about “romance” than I did at her age.

Rachel as Mercutio

And romance is what you get with this book.  No sex scenes, no inappropriate language.  There are plenty of people out there who would fault me for shielding her at 13.  So be it.  I’m glad I get to raise my girl and they don’t.  I'm glad I get to influence how soon she starts getting her heart broken, how calloused she is before she is even old enough to actually know what romance and love really are.  One of the scenes in the book involves the 17 year old getting her first kiss.  She and the boy are on their second date, and it's a very chaste kiss by today's standards.  She is appalled by her own behavior, and can’t imagine what her friends would say if they knew she let the boy kiss her on the second date.  When I read it in the 1980’s I thought how silly and weird it was that she would think a kiss was anything to be embarrassed about.  In the 2010’s I would imagine that for most 17 year olds a first kiss is something barely remembered from long, long ago.  But when I thought of this book for my 13 year old blogger, baker, writer, hiker, and actress, what I thought was, “Oh, I don’t want her filling her head with romantic ideas about kissing boys.”  She's got a lot going on her life, and much more to come.  I don't think there is any advantage to adding the mental and emotional strain of romance to her life at this point.

What's the point of this little narrative?  I don't know.  Certainly not that I have stumbled upon some great daughter raising secret.  It's just something that occurred to me, and I thought you might find it interesting.

Saturday Night Retro

It's been a busy week.  The sewer pipe in the house clogged.  The temperatures dropped into the teens.  We made a long drive at the last minute.  I'm ready for some downtime, how 'bout you?

Let's start with...

 

And follow it up with...

And raise your hand if you remember these...