Welcome to the Parenting Roundabout podcast. I'm Terry Morrow.
And I'm Catherine Hileco.
Every Thursday, we're bringing you a library find, a pick from our archives, and a parenting or pop culture tidbit or two. Let's start with Catherine's library find of the week.
So one of the nice things about working at the library is, you know, I come across books all the time where I'm like, oh, I like this author, I should read this book. Or if I need something to read, you know, I can just go and look for what else that person may have written. So I came across a book called every Tom, Dick and Harry by Eleanor Lippman, and I was like, oh, yeah, I like Eleanor Littman. I should I'm going to read this. So I checked it out and I read it and it was charming
and very fun. It was it was basically like a romance light. I mean, there was there was a story beyond just meet cute. There were other things going on, but it was it was a fun little adventure and I enjoyed it. And so then I went to her website and didn't recognize a single one of the other books that were listed there. It's like no, no, I mean, because I'm not great at remembering what I've read, but given a title and a plot summary, I usually can
be like, oh yeah, I recognize this. No, nothing, absolutely none. So I don't know what happened there. I mean, I did I read something and I just slipped all the way out of my mind. I mean I really had it in my head that I liked this author. So how does unless you've read something by that birds.
One would thing. It's just the name seems familiar to me too.
If you go the dogs guys and see if you don't whinny, Yeah, do.
You have a book you want to talk about? Whinnie Winnie? Do you have a random recommendation? She recommends that all motorcycles and trucks people just like.
People outside the way maybe people people love talking inside the house.
She would like us to wrap it.
Up everything anyway, So if you go to the website, do you recognize anything?
The name seems familiar to me, but I just search it. I don't see it in our archives anywhere. And the title news demeanor is both clever and infurious. But she's very very clever.
Yeah, yeah, so wow.
She has written a lot of books.
Yeah, and you'd think, man have I think I had heard of some of them, but.
Read Oh then she found me that was a movie. They made that into a movie, But.
I don't remember watching that movie either, So I don't know.
She's doing quite well for herself without you, ket.
I know, yeah, she doesn't need me to be recommending stuff.
But anyway, I still enjoyed this book, even though I apparently have no previous contact with this author.
It's the story of a.
Maybe you went to school with her. Do you remember her like a name from college herself? No?
I only I recognize her as an author. But it's the story of this youngish woman who's kind of drifting around and then her parents have an estate sale business and they decide that they're going to retire and they
want her to take it over. And also they have this friend who's a retired teacher who his wife died, and his wife's daughters from a previous relationship have inherited the house where he lived, so he has nowhere to say, so he's going to rent a room in the house with this woman and they turn out.
So this isn't written by Linda Holmes. It sounds like a Linda Holmes WoT it was.
It did remind me of that. And so they turn out to actually be like, you know, he's very like fatherly towards her and she's daughterly toward him, like encouraging him to go out on dates. And uh so it's it's sweet, it's it's a nice Yeah, it's a nice story. And you know there they land an estate sale that's uncovers a lot stuff that went on in this little town. So so yeah, it's it's a fun read every time Dick and Harry by an author I apparently have never read before. Eleanor Littman.
I don't know. She's written a lot of books. Maybe there's one that didn't make the listen.
Maybe maybe that's what happened.
She sounds like maybe there was a you know, Ellen Tipman that you read a book right, could be no more up woman. That's uh yeah, that that happens sometimes when you see an author's name. I've had that happen and you feel like I know that author, but I don't know how, and then you can't figure it out. But maybe you read a review or something.
Yeah, and.
So the list of things.
You need tell us what you have found.
Well. My name is Terry, and I am a planner addict, and I always feel that the one thing that will get me to get all my life and work together is the right planning tool.
Right.
I have gone through a large number of them, and spoken on with great enthusiasm of some of them.
Right here, I'm here on this very podcast.
I still I'm still searching. I'm still out there. It's out the thing that can make me organized and productive and get my work done in my workday and then have the evening to myself that exists.
Right.
It's not just that my personality doesn't work with that and that I will always be screwing up. No, No, it's finding the right tool, the right system, the right that cute little thing to put on my desk look like cute, that's what's going to do it, the right thing on my computer. It's just so, I it's ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous, and I know that it's never gonna I'm never going to be an organized person. I just am not. But I still will pardon me,
still believes so. I have been using artful agenda for quite a while, and it's good. I still have a subscription to Trello. I use that for some organizations and it's good. Recently I made the mistake of like clicking on an organizational tool on Facebook, and so now every day I have like sixty oral tools on Facebook yelling at me over here, dairy, look over here, this is the one quick hair, and then I do click there, and then there's the next day there's one hundred. Right.
So yeah, I have been inundated lately with planners who are certain that they can get me in hand. They just know it. All I have to do is pay for this thing, and some of them are not cheap. I looked at this one. There's this one thing. Do you ever see this? Ugmunk is the name of the company, And it's just it's a wood box and a pile of index cards and you take one of the index cards and you put it up so you can see
it during the day. It's like standing up and it has like things you're you're doing, things you're gonna do, things you've done, and you can color in the little circle next to it. One hundred dollars for that for the box, and like a six month supply of cards. Wow, So I'm just I keep looking at these things, and I keep wanting them, and I keep thinking, from the deepest part of my being, that's it, that's what will make me an organized individual. But I've been resisting. I've
been resisting. I've been keep using my artful agenda, keep using my trillo. But the other day I was in Barnes and Noble, as I am every weekend, and I went looking at the date books and I found one with Snoopy on the car. Come on, it's Snoopy, It's Snoopy, Snoopy and Woodstock taking a nap on top of his doghouse, which is kind of where I am most of the time.
So I bought me that planner, and it's very cute, and I have rearranged my desk so I can have it here open next to me, with the thought that I could if I don't feel like going into one or two other computer things and typing something, I could just scrawl it down with my pant on this piece of paper. That could happen. I could put stickers on it. There's like lots of little peanut stickers, and I can have the whole week, my week's agenda open all the time.
I don't have to click over it to it or anything. So this is it right?
Well, I mean maybe the analog nature of it is valuable because then you're, yeah, you're not getting yourself distracted with online.
Yeah, right, stuff that sounds good. And it was only nineteen ninety nine, It wasn't one hundred dollars, right, And there are peanuts? Did I mention? They're peanuts there? And you know I can always flip to the front and see Snoopy. This is like from the days of my youth or peanuts. I guess peanuts are still popular because
I still make things with them. But when I was a kid, they were super popular and I was super into it, and there was a whole theological I think there's the Word according to Peanuts by Charles Schultz, like an actual book that was like applied theology to peanuts.
And I was into that for a while, and so I've always had I know, still no many many many many years later, the lyrics to some of the songs from You're a Good Man chopping around, which I would perform spontaneously back at a certain time in my life, kny I do it's up time? Yes, it's up A time for the dog a lot, and she does not enjoy it anyway. So I have scratched both my peanuts
Itch and my yeah another planner. That's what I need, Itch with this very nice Peanuts planner that I purchased in Barnes and Noble for a reasonable amount of money, especially since I now have the membership. So should you be needing that close your eyes hum as you walk past the many expensive things online. Go to Barnes and Noble. They have a ton of planners. Just pick one, anyone.
It'll be reasonably priced and you'll be able to get out of there with something that'll tide you over six months or so.
Yes, I mean, shouldn't they be on sale right now because it's.
Yeah, probably? Well, this is what I love about planners. It's no date or no, it does have dates, but it's the academic planner. So it goes from July through next December. It's like a year and a half. I don't know why it's a year, because a year and a half is in an academic year, right, but it's just they got to next June and they thought we'll give them the rest of the year, so it started.
I bought it for myself as a birthday present. It starts on my actual birth so it's just like it was made for me.
That's right, How could you? How could you say?
Now?
Nah?
And it's snoopy. Look at snoopy, look at snoopy and little woodstock there. You gotta love it now. I didn't realize that since it's an academic planner all the all the stickers are like for school things, fantastic vacation, right, but I'll find ways to use them. Yeah, so date books and finding modest ways to deal with your ridiculous obsession. My random rack for the day?
Nice, love it?
Jot down our next record? Yeah, so what do we have for the archive this week? This week we are what do we have from the archives?
We are again going back to twenty twenty, which I feel like we've been revisiting a lot, even though that's the.
Time not to talk about in twenty two, even though.
That's the time we may not want to read this, But this is this is not a pandemic topic. It is The title was telling parenting like it is, and it was about whether you should be honest with other potential parents and current parents about the hard stuff. Because we have to you know, perpetuate the species, and we don't want to discourage.
Yeah. I hear that a lot now with social media of people saying that all you people are saying hard things about parenting, you're going to make people not want to have kids. It'll be your fault. It's like, well, I mean people complain about their jobs. Does that necessarily mean nobody's gonna want to get a job. Maybe I
don't know, but it's I don't know. I grew up reading Irma bomback and thinking she was hilarious and she was not saying cozy, flowery things about parenting, right, and it did not make me any less want to have kids. So I think there's a time honor tradition of you know, parents complaining that this current generation of parents should not be denied because somebody thinks it's On the other hand, you are opening yourself up to judgment.
That is true. But also I think one of the things that we talked about in that episode was you're kind of doing a disservice to other people who are struggling if you're painting it as like, oh, everything's fine and great all the.
Time, Well, you really can't win.
Yeah, well, that's that's a classic that we returned to again and.
Again, because if you're too chirpy, then you're going to make people who are having a hard time feel that there's something wrong with them negative, then you're gonna make people feel like, oh, I do that right. And either way, you're not really telling the whole story, right. But you're I mean, you're the There's always the question too of where your story ends and where your kid's story begins. And are you being disloyal to your child by talking
about them in less than positive ways? And yes you are, but at the same time, you need support.
You're in the story too.
Yeah, And we're in such a performative era now that we're not talking about Hey, I told this story to the mom's group. You're saying, I put this story on Twitter. Yeah, so it you know, that's maybe part of what makes a difference. But I probably talked about this the last time we discussed it, but I still think about it. When I we first adopted our kids, I was on Uh, this is what we did back then in the nineties. A list serve, an email list serve where you would
talk to other people through email. A group of people and there was exactly this thing going on that the people who were legitimately having significant problems were being told, if you say negative things about Eastern European adoption, nobody's going to adopt those kids and that will be on
your head, right. But if people were saying only positive things, that were like, you are leading people to believe that they're going to have this perfect, picture perfect thing and they're going to adopt a kid with a problem, and then they're not going to know what to do. So it's like you're too positive, you're too negative, you know what.
It was just fights all the time between the people who feel like you have to be positive, whether it's positive or not, and you have to tell it like it is even if it's bad, right, and I've.
And the people who were like, I need support, so I'm telling it like it is, you.
Know, yeah, exactly. I mean I really benefited from reading some of the Some of the forthright and honest stuff was very useful. What wasn't useful was the how dare you be forthright and honest and you're sugarcoating it? It's really one hundred times worse than that. Why are you telling people it's like that there's a middle road that's useful but not resoundingly negative, and then there's either side yelling at each other over you, and it's hard to know.
It's a spectrum, and it's hard to find where exactly you pass from helpful to unhelpful. And I think that's true just of typical parenting too. You know, it's if you're struggling with your kid, you don't want to read people saying everything is perfect and if it's not perfect, it's your fault. But you also don't want to people read people saying it's terrible. It's horrible and it's never going to get any better. You want, Yeah, this is tough.
Right now, here's something I tried. Maybe this would work for you. If if not, here's some books that I found useful. If not, yeah, just have yourself a good cry. You know, that's helpful. But the two ends are not, right. That's mostly what.
We get because it's the internet.
Yes, because it's the Internet, and because people enjoy screaming, and because people react most fervently to those, you know, so they get the most hits. But you know what, just a calm hey, yeah that sucks. Here's what I did for that. You know, the person who reads it needs it, reads it and moves on, and nobody else pays attention to it, which is why our wonderful podcast is just languished.
Nobody wants to hear people being reasonable. We're just gonna watch TV now.
Yeah, I do think you have to. You have to tell it like it is. But with.
Well, if you're telling it like it is, but you're acknowledging like it's different for everyone. Our our standard mantra that we write that we are disclaimer slash mantra that we bring to most topics. You know, this is this is my experience, it's you know, this is how I dealt with it, like you were saying, this is how I dealt with it. But obviously your child is different.
So yeah, anything that you can accompany with some some usable intel is helpful. Just complaining with no particular complaining to complain is less so, but there's not always.
But there's also like a need for venting.
Yes, that is true, that is true. We should there should be a safe space to vent and.
Uh, but probably that space is not online.
No, yeah, because you don't. The problem is online you don't always get the kind of reaction you are wanting. Maybe some people are real sympathetic and give you what you're looking for, and some people are going to tell you you're horrible from one end and some people are gonna tell you you're horrible from the other end of the spectrum. So friends, friends are good. Yeah, people still have friends you real like, go and have a cup of coffee with and talk to that's what that's what
you need for that stuff. That's you vent to your friend. Maybe you go to, you know, a coffee shop and vent to a friend. And then you wonder if people around you are listening to you and judging you. But maybe so, maybe you vent with a friend, like in your.
House, go to a coffee shop in a different town where you don't know anybody.
I have wondered that over the years, are people around me listening to me? I don't think I listened to people who are having conversations at Barnes and Noble.
But oh I listened to people at the library if I'm like shelving or whatever.
Yes, they'tos be talking in the library.
Oh they can talk, that's really Oh yeah, especially in the kids area.
Oh okay, all right, so you've heard any good conversations that you want us to jump in and say, I'm a parenting No.
I just leaned back the other day. I was I was working down there, and I was just listening to this person, Like this conversation was so one sided, Like I just felt so bad for the receiver of this just like download of information, like and it was very much like, well, this is how I did it, and this is the best way, and it was just not ending.
I think she was a grandma too, like it just oh yeah, I was like feeling just so bad for the other person, like this person is a know at all who does not know when to stop and yikes.
Well, you know, we talked earlier about my obsession with planning materials and whatever, and I've been thinking from a parenting point of view, a product that is needed is like either a notebook or just a pad of paper or something where you could take a piece of parenting advice, whether it's in a book, whether it's from your mother
in law, whether it's from somebody online. You write down that piece of parenting advice, and then you figure out how you can make this work for you, So parts that don't apply to me, you write that in a column parts, that will never work for me. You write that in a column parts, I could maybe try. You write that in a column parts, I could How could I tweak this so that it would work for me? How can I make a change? So you have that
beside you. When you're reading a parenting book and every time something good or stupid comes in, you write it and you say, okay, well this is dumb. But how a baud if I did it this, you can still learn from things that are wrong. How about if I did the exact opposite, how would that I'm right? So maybe we need that not only for parenting books, but
just for random social interactions. You can go home, you can open up your parenting planner and you could write, somebody told me I have to do this, but I think I should do this instead, And that's what I'm going to learn from this interaction. You always learned something, even it's I never even he no right, But even in general, I find that even the heck knows you can learn something from Yeah. Either would I would tweak it this way or I would do exactly the opposite?
Or what is it about this that people thinks works? And is there a better way to do it. You know, you can adapt things to your particular situation, and so just then write that down, and you know, we learned from We learned from all different places, even from things that infuriat us.
Amen, feel like we should leave it that right.
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