“Augghh! The naked monster is coming!”

My four-year old daughter streaks by chasing her seven year-old brother.

We live in a naked house, appropriately naked (at least we think it is). We aren’t making breakfast with all the bits hanging out, but there are times when I am getting out of the shower and walking to my closet when I am starkers and the kids are walking around. The younger kids still shower with either me or my hubby. And, yes, doors are crashed open while I am standing in the nude or going pee and my husband has been caught with the towel at his ankles while shaving.

My sister-in-law was horrified to hear this.

It’s Thursday which means that I have  run out of blog ideas and gone to MamaKat for some writer’s prompts. Every Tuesday she lists five prompts which many bloggers use for their Thursday post. This week I chose: Write a letter to a reality star of your choice, go back to her site and check out how other bloggers handled the assignments this week.

Dear Jamie,
I feel that we are on personal terms now that I have been to your hotel room, seen you speak, cooked your recipes, written about you a couple of times and logged hours listening to you talk about food.

So I think I can tell you. I love you, I mean I trust you. I trust that you are filming Jamie’s Food Revolution for all the right reasons, I think that you really want to make the world a better place and I think that you are doing it because you feel almost ashamed at the incredible success that you have had and so you are trying to give back. I buy your tears, your enthusiasm and every time your face registers shock at people’s eating habits. Of course the ratings don’t hurt when you are building an empire but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

I am sure that working in Huntington, West Virginia wasn’t easy. It is shocking to see what people eat and what they feed their kids. I have no doubt that your producers picked some extreme cases to prove a point and make for good TV and it does. But even our family, who doesn’t eat very much packaged food can learn something from your show.

I watched a couple of dads contentedly pushing their strollers yesterday, they were chatting and one dad bent down and re-adjusted the baby’s blanket without missing a beat. It was a scene that is becoming less and less remarkable as this generation embraces modern parenting. I realize how lucky kids are today to be fathered by a generation of fathers that embrace all aspects of fatherhood.

There was an article in Maclean's magazine that quoted a study saying dads have a more hands-off approach to parenting that encourages exploring and independence in children. Daniel Paquette, a professor at the Université de Montréal School of Psychoeducation, says the ‘activation theory' is just as important as the ‘attachment theory' in parenting. While there wasn’t an explanation of what activation theory actually is, attachment theory is a culturally significant theory that says that a primary caregiver (usually the mother) creates a sense of security for the child through being available and responsive to the child’s needs.

My son’s inability to play alone has turned us into a family of game players and not just video-game players, actual board games. Games are a good rainy day activity because they have a formalized set of rules that can be referred to every time a conflict comes up (which is often); they force people to play together and they are kind of fun.

Our only problem is that my oldest son always wins, I’m not sure if it is his superior logic skills, he is cheating or he is just the luckiest person on earth (or a combination of all three). I think every family has a person like that – in my family it was my sister and she is the reason why you will not find Monopoly on my list of faves.

My memory of seeing the King Tut exhibit when I was 10 is so clear. It was first time the exhibition had travelled to Canada. The crowds were immense, the line-ups were long but seeing that golden mask shocked and enthralled me.

So of course, I took my two boys to see the King Tut exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and they weren’t so much shocked as they were happy to be out of school for the afternoon. They whined about the line-ups, they wandered around the exhibit, they kept looking around the secret doors, and my younger son obviously had to pee. After they heard Harrison Ford do the voice-over for the opening movie, I am pretty sure that they were disappointed that Indiana Jones didn’t show up.

A friend told me that school decisions are the hardest things you face as a parent – harder than the illnesses, the tantrums and the lack of sleep. And she may be right.

This is the season when parents are considering where to send their kids next year and you can feel the tension in the schoolyard. The parents of the grade sixes are trying to balance their child’s desires to be with their friends alongside their parental concerns; the JK parents are trying to figure out the immersion system and the parents of the kids who don’t quite fit in who are hoping a new school will solve all their problems.

We’ve been there. Last year at about this time we made the major decision to send our oldest child to a new school. It was the right decision, but that doesn’t mean that it was easy or that it hasn’t left some scars.

A sure sign of spring is the mud streaks down your kids’ legs, the grime under their fingertips, the little smudges near their hairline and the mud-encrusted shoes. Little kids don’t often look in the mirror and since they don’t smell (yet) being dirty is not a big problem. In fact, being dirty definitely falls into the parent’s problem category.

Which results in a discussion like this:

“Umm, Sam it’s time you had a bath.”

“No.”

“Can you remember the last time you had a bath? Because I honestly don’t.”

“No mummy. Maybe last week or was it last month?” (he’s not so strong in time measurement.)

“I really I can’t remember when the last time you bathed was. You need to have a bath now.”

“No. I WILL NOT HAVE A BATH!”

I am going to leave out the next few interchanges to protect the innocent, and the guilty. Forty-five minutes later:

Life is toxic, polluted and dangerous. Maybe it always has been, but we modern parents are now burdened with the weight of knowledge, and as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. How do we balance our fears and anxieties with allowing our kids to be kids?

I live in a pretty green neighbourhood. Most us try to do what we can to reduce the toxic load on our kids, while at the same time reducing our carbon footprint. At our house, we rigidly divert our garbage, we buy organic (and/or local) food and personal care products and we use green cleaning products. These small endeavours may be erased by our gas-guzzling SUV, but we all make choices that we feel comfortable with. 

Out greening each other can be a bit of a competitive sport on the playground – one that our household does not win. Sometimes I wonder if the parents who worry obsess about organic everything and staying plastic-free remember that part of what makes kids healthy is their interaction with the world, not their fear of it.

Could you manage if you lost your partner? I’m not sure I could. Not to be morbid, but it’s one of the things that my hubby and I discuss, he is wracked with anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to support our family if something happened to him. That’s why our wills and insurance are always up-to-date.

But pieces of paper can not protect you from the realities that bad things happen and they can happen in an instant. Last summer, a father of my son’s classmate had an aneurysm and died in two days. It was sudden and terrible and the kids were away at camp so they never got to see their dad again.

It was a tragedy that rocked our community but once we delivered our casseroles, we were able to move on to our daily life. The now-single mom is left with trying to pick up the pieces. And there are a lot of pieces, she met her husband while travelling through Canada and has never worked in this country. Within days she went from having a comfortable life as a hockey mom and playground staple to being forced to find a way to support herself and her two boys.The widow is fiercely private but being the centre of a tragedy has made her life open to neighbours and friends discussing all aspects of her personal life – both financial and emotional.

My mother has this habit of giving my kids a (small) box of Smarties before they get into the car to go home after dinner. No parent would do such a thing because if the kids fall asleep in the car the chocoately-candy goodness wedges into their little teeth and becomes a breeding ground for cavities.

But do I stop her? No. Because she is the grandma, and with grandparent-hood comes a few rights. And the most basic one is the right to spoil your grandchildren with candy and whatever else you can think of.

So I asked a few people, what do your parents do to spoil your kids?