I love all of that stuff, but the best part about Halloween is how terrified my children are at the prospect of it not happening.

Have you guys seen the movie The Sixth Sense? You know how for 95 per cent of the movie Bruce Willis is basically just talking to himself because none of the living people can hear him. (Oops. Sorry. Spoiler alert)? Well that movie pretty much sums up every conversation I have with my children ten months of the year. But as soon as school starts and the Halloween decorations come out, I can make my kids do (or not do) pretty much anything with these magic words: ‘I won’t let you go trick or treating.’ F-Santa or Elf on the Shelf. The best threat is no Halloween.

Fights stop. Rooms are cleaned. Homework gets finished. Adult women get hand massages. I don’t know why this simple threat resonates so much better than every other threat, but it does.

Before you start judging me for using threats as the main part of my parenting strategy, I will have you know that is absolutely not the case. I also use bribery. But threats work much better. The problem is that I am generally terrible at threatening my kids. They can tell when I’m bluffing.

But with this Halloween business, I am not bluffing. Maybe it’s because they know that trick or treating with two kids is easier than trick or treating with three and that trick or treating with one kid is even easier than trick or treating with two. This is a punishment that I would actually follow through on.

It is no secret in my house that I am terrible at coming up with punishments in the moment. They range from the absurd (I’m calling that lady from Craigslist right now! She said she wanted a son to go with her cats!’) to the inane (‘I will write to the BBC and tell them to cancel Peppa Pig. Just watch me!) to the short-sighted. Like the time I threatened to take away my son’s birthday party if he didn’t stop a tantrum. After the invitations had gone out. So when the tantrum didn’t stop, I had to decide between being mean, looking weak or finding some kind of crazy loophole. I have also taken away (and given back) the school fun fair, Hanukkah, and dinner in perpetuity. Based on the number of loopholes and last-minute reprieves happening in my house, you might think that my kids have Johnnie Cochrane and Robert Shapiro on retainer.

Of course I wish that I were better at discipline. I worry that every time I dole out a crazy punishment as a means of gaining control, only to take it back when I realize that I don’t want to cancel Hanukkah (or leave my kids at the Miami airport) I am diluting my authority and my credibility. But sometimes I don’t know what else to do. I mean, isn’t adult life also largely about punishment and rewards? Sure, we do some things out of the goodness of our hearts (see: leave Miami airport with fighting children, despite better judgement) but don’t most people work for the reward of money? And don’t we adhere to the law (or at least the laws of traffic and parking) because we are worried about a stiff fine?

Though the writing of this piece has made me reflect a little on my parenting skills. I need to stop taking the easy way out. For example, there is something that I have wanted to do for quite some time but I have been worried about how hard it would be to implement. And also, I really hate asking for help. But as Hillary Clinton said …it takes a village. So I am going to do it. I am going to ask my village for help and I am going to plan three more Halloweens per year, every year. Because without that, I really don’t know what I am going to do for the next eleven months.

The post Why the Day After Halloween Is the Saddest Day of the Year appeared first on SavvyMom.

9 Time-Saving Techniques & Tricks for Busy Moms (lol)

1. Don’t fix things that still kind of work.
   

   A phone call to the dishwasher repair guy could take up to five valuable minutes (twenty seconds to dial the phone, three minutes to apologize for the yelling children in the background, one minute to make myself heard over the yelling children, and forty seconds to explain my issue and set up time for a service call). What’s a quick pre-wash every time I load the dishes and a quick post-wash every time I unload them compared to all of that wasted time on the phone?

2. Hedge your bets when shopping.

   Don’t let your kids try clothes on at the store. Instead, buy multiple sizes of the same item and return the ones that don’t fit. I like to wait until after the return date and/or lose the receipt before I bring things back. Even though arguing with the manager might feel like it’s taking extra time, ultimately having a credit note (the only thing they will be willing to give you after an hour of arguing) will save you the hassle of having to choose where to shop the next time you need something.

3. Don’t waste time making grocery lists.

   Just buy whatever strikes your fancy. It helps to go food shopping when you are ravenous. If you get home and realize that you don’t necessarily have ingredients to make an actual meal out of the seven bags full of random impulse purchases, just plug it all into Google. It only took me one hour and fifteen minutes to find a delicious recipe that used the Cheetos, kale, white chocolate chips, and cheese curds that I bought on my last trip. Forgot something? Go back tomorrow (and the next day)! Everyone knows that multiple short trips to the grocery store will save you infinite amounts of time and money!

4. Don’t check the mail unless you absolutely need to.

   Just bring it in and stash it somewhere. (Don’t waste time worrying about where.) Sure, every couple of months you might need to devote eight or nine hours to finding a tax-related document that you or a (very frustrated) loved one might need. Sure, you might need to make a few calls to get it replaced when it doesn’t turn up, but it’s better than wasting up to three minutes daily on pointless mail sorting.

5. Don’t dirty home appliances when you can do it by hand.

   How many hours have you spent assembling, disassembling, washing and reassembling your food processor? I would rather grate ten cups of potatoes, six cups of cheese, and eight cups of onion by hand than be forced to put that food processor back together when it comes out of the dishwasher.

6. Don’t check voicemail until your box is full.

   By the time you get around to listening to messages, forty percent of callers won’t need a call back and twenty percent won’t want a call back under any circumstances. Fewer friends means fewer social engagements and fewer meaningful interactions, which means more time saved!

7. Pay your bills on the last day possible.

   The surge of adrenaline when your computer freezes minutes before your Visa bill is due is better than a strong cup of coffee. Enjoy that sudden burst of energy and use it wisely.

8. Don’t bother making appointments for personal maintenance.

   Aesthetics, optometry, hairdressing, and dentistry are all trades that can be learned online at home. Sure, these courses might be time-consuming and expensive at the outset, but think of all of the time you will save in the long-run (unless you have to go for emergency dental surgery because of a botched home job, but how many times can that really happen?).

9. Read and adopt self-help lists that you find on the Internet curated by completely unqualified people.

   Nothing will go wrong. I promise.

The post Expert Time-Saving Techniques for Moms appeared first on SavvyMom.

My husband is an early person—the kind who makes you go to the airport three hours in advance (of a local flight) and starts telling you to put your shoes on for a twelve-o’clock appointment at nine (the night before). As I understand it, the early people overestimate how long everything is going to take, late people are chronic under-estimators, and my people just know how long things take. I know that it takes me exactly seven minutes to walk to my daughter’s preschool and nine to walk to my older kids’ elementary school. I know how long it takes me to shower (remarkably less time than I ever thought possible), to eat, to dress, to work-out, and I plan backwards. This system has always worked for me. More or less. Because once you have kids, you have to add buffers for tantrums and bathroom breaks and lost shoes and lost pants and the refusal to wear shoes and the refusal to wear pants. And sometimes these things take longer than the buffers I have provided for in my calculation. Which is why, sometimes, I can be up to five minutes late.

I have discerned that everyone goes down a level after kids. On-time people become occasionally late people. Occasionally late people become chronically late people and chronically late people become social outcasts unless they have excellent personalities to compensate (you know who you are). The only people who end up arriving earlier than ever are the early people, who tend to go the other way (much to the dismay of the long-suffering spouse of the early person). The early person begins to see obstacles where none exist and overestimates the small ones (I’m convinced I saw the attendant snicker the last time we checked in to a flight to Florida three hours in advance).

The biggest issue obviously occurs when two late people marry and procreate, as there is no-one to keep them in check. No one to remind them that they need a bigger buffer (and a time-keeping device of some sort). We have friends who have arrived closer to dinner when we had lunch plans on more than one occasion (and not only were they unapologetic, they didn’t seem to notice). Dinner plans with them and all of our kids turned into a rave (I don’t get out much, but overtired, hungry children plus darkness = rave, right?). We no longer make any specific meal-related plans with them, now choosing to meet them in parks for picnics (read: we bring our own food and eat it before they arrive). They are the excellent personality type I was referring to above. Less charming people would have been dumped after the second missed lunch.

In general, I think that people who plan to have kids can easily marry up or down one level (early people with on-time people; on time-people with occasionally-late people) but the chronically late person (hereinafter referred to as the CLP) would be a terrible influence on an occasionally late person (who, without intervention, will naturally become a CLP upon the birth of their first child). As such, my recommendation—though a bit radical and controversial in some circles—is that the CLP marries a full three levels up. That’s right. I am suggesting a CLP/early-person pairing. Obviously this creates a great imbalance, and as such, the CLP needs to be at least 70 percent hotter than the early person (HF70%) in order for the early person to want to stay with them (EP + (CLP x HF70%)). In addition, the CLP must be willing to change, otherwise the early person will not hang around regardless of the hotness factor. This is not to say that two CLPs can never marry and procreate, they can, provided they plan to hang around their kind exclusively (say on a commune or in a cult).

Now I know this is a lot to think about, given that prior to marriage you also need to consider values, education level, religious beliefs, and the man’s head size at birth as compared to woman’s waist-to-hip ratio at present, but I think it’s worth it. I hope you do too.

The post How Having Kids Affects Your Timeliness (or Why Two Chronically Late People Should Not Procreate) appeared first on SavvyMom.

The things that make being on my own challenging at times are the following: I have kids. My kids expect to be fed. Some of my kids have to go to school, which means they have to be woken up in the morning, which means they have to go bed at a reasonable hour. Oh and also, the older two fight constantly. Just to give you an idea of what my house is like, imagine a monastery. The kind where everything is peaceful and serene. Now imagine if instead of the distant sounds of a choir practicing inside a chapel, the only sound you can hear is high-pitched shrieking. And you’ve just stepped in something sticky on the floor. Imagine there was no serenity. Or peace. I also feel like the monks probably have fewer almost-made-it-to-the-toilet issues, but I am just speculating.

There are, of course, fun, easy days. Days when we picnic in the park instead of going home for dinner or have an early dinner and bath and then have time to play hide-and-go-seek and read as many books as we feel like for as long as we want before bed. There are nights when we make pancakes for dinner and nights when we get ice cream for dinner (no-one tell my husband, I’ll deny it). But there are also many nights when all three kids are up twice each at different times (you do the math) and mornings where the coffeemaker overflows all over the counter because I forgot to put a filter in (again) and my toddler is refusing to put pants on and my older two are fighting so loudly, I fear the neighbours are going to call Children’s Aid and I can’t remember how to work the toaster oven for the life of me. (Don’t judge. It has a convection button. Also, I haven’t slept through the night for seven years.)

There are times that my life feels so chaotic it’s comedic, like the night last week when the fire alarm went off while I was upstairs trying to put my youngest back to sleep (an apple crisp that I was baking for a friend with a new baby had burned when my gas oven overheated). I ran downstairs still holding her and then let her wail on the floor while I opened doors and windows and stood on a chair fanning the alarm in an attempt to get the damn thing to stop ringing before it woke up the other kids. (Or the dead. That thing is loud.) This would have been less ridiculous had it not happened hours after my daughter dropped and shattered a shatterproof (!) bowl. Of course when I used my Ninja-like grace to save her from stepping on the broken, shatterproof glass, I knocked a pan off the stove, spilling all of the hot, sticky contents onto the floor.

A bigger issue than overturned pans and midnight fire drills is the fact that when my husband comes home, he is a special guest star. The kids have missed him all week and he can do no wrong. And I don’t blame them. He isn’t the one who forced them to bathe and brush their teeth and do homework and wake up when they were still tired. He didn’t yell at them to stop yelling when he couldn’t take it anymore (the irony is not lost on me), or force them to give him a bite of their dessert because he ate his too quickly (I don’t want to talk about it). He is the guy who has been missing them all week, who is coming home with a present in his bag and love in his heart (I have love in my heart too, but my love is everyday boring old mom-love. Not shiny dad-love). And I am sometimes jealous of that.

On the other hand, I treasure all of the extra time that I get with the kids more than my fantasy of leaving for a week (or three) and having them miss and appreciate me (in my fantasy, they cry tears of joy when I walk through the door and then start a choreographed number of ‘I Don’t Need Anything But You’ from Annie). Also, as I learned in yoga class, chaos is transient. (And by ‘learned in yoga class’ I obviously mean ‘I might have read this on a lululemon bag at some point’.)

The morning after the fire alarm, everything was fine again. The glass had been picked up. A new crisp was being watched closely in the oven. I had even remembered to close the doors and windows before going to bed. And after school that day the kids and I decided to hang out at the park until six because it was such a perfect late fall day. When we got home, I made eggs for dinner and everyone was happy.

The post My Life in Solo Parenting: Pancakes for Dinner, Midnight Fire Drills, and Happy, Crazy Chaos appeared first on SavvyMom.

And then I knew.

My son lost his first tooth while my family was on vacation this summer. As it happened suddenly (it had been loose for so long that I had forgotten that it was eventually going to fall out) I hadn’t put any thought into what would happen when the tooth finally broke free from my son’s seemingly giant mouth. Not being the type of person who is able to just roll with things or trust my own judgment, I found a fantastic app that had me plug in some personal information (SIN number, address, banking institutions and full name….just kidding. It actually just asked for my province, education level, marital status, household income and age) and it was able to tell me what people in my demographic were giving their children for teeth: five dollars and a small gift. This app even generated a letter from the tooth fairy, which my son believed and loved.

That night, after the kids were tucked away in their hotel beds, I went looking for a store to purchase the little gift component. I am not going to lie, the selection at the tiny all-night convenience store was suboptimal and after much soul searching (candy, gum, or chips?) I chose my son’s favourite treat, and came back to the hotel with a small pack of caramel Turtles. From the Tooth Fairy. So obviously the Tooth Fairy wrote a note explaining that she was leaving Turtles because of how sparkly and clean the tooth had been—because what better reward for excellent brushing than chewy caramel wrapped in sugary chocolate goodness? My son ate up the note and the Turtles. Little could describe the pride I felt for being able to manipulate my son so successfully (and for teaching him that the chewiest, junkiest candy could be part of a good dental hygiene regimen).

When tooth number two came out, I suggested that my son ask the Tooth Fairy for the Pokémon book that he wanted—after all, we did have her email address (and the book was available at the Shoppers Drug Mart three blocks from our house). So that’s what he did. And she delivered both the book and another note. My son was so excited. And so was I—in large part because I thought that he might finally stop talking about the Turtles to everyone who would listen.

What I hadn’t taken into account was the fact that he might tell his classmates about what the Tooth Fairy had brought him and that they might ask the Tooth Fairy for the same Pokémon book. Right before bedtime. And this is why I was in trouble. So I explained myself. He is my first kid, I got excited. But more importantly, we don’t have Santa. Or the Easter Bunny.  And I never knew what I was missing until now.

As a Jewish kid, I learned at a very early age that there was no Santa Claus. My parents took pity on me after the second consecutive Christmas where I stayed up late to decorate house plants and woke up early, hoping that Santa had come because of how good I had been (at least compared to my less-good friend Anne-Marie who was always guaranteed a Santa visit). I also have no memory of ever having believed in the Tooth Fairy (I think because Anne-Marie told me she wasn’t real—why Santa ever visited Anne-Marie is beyond me).

My son on the other hand, does believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa (contrary to my excellent advice, my husband did tell him once that there was no Santa and within two hours, my son had told so many people that I forced my husband to issue a retraction so that my son could admit his ‘mistake’ to his friends). I love that my sceptical kid, who was once almost kicked out of a children’s magic show for heckling the magician because he deemed the tricks too obvious, can believe in something that is not concrete. Maybe because it reassures me that he is still a little kid and that little kids can believe in fantasy and magic. In fact, I am loving this so much that I am wondering if we should put out some milk and cookies for the Tooth Fairy the next time he loses a tooth and also, whether she might want to leave him a little Chanukkah present, just for being a good boy.

The post My Family’s Tooth Fairy is Out of Control appeared first on SavvyMom.