At my age, there are lots of things I wish. That I could read without glasses, the pants in my closet would still fit and I could walk up a flight of stairs and not feel like I was on fire by the time I got to the next floor.

More than anything, I wish I could tell new moms and dads what makes a good parent. The answer is – I don’t know.

Books and the internet are filled with advice, most of which sound great in theory but aren’t practical in real life.

Be patient, they recommend. That’s all fine and good until you realize children have no sense of time or urgency and you’re running late.

You can be hurrying out the door, and they think nothing of stopping to watch ants crawl by on the sidewalk.

Be fair, they recommend. That is impossible if you have more than one child. One of them will always think they’re getting cheated.

My neighbor’s two daughters were arguing over a stick – yes a stick – and each one claimed the stick belonged to them.

My neighbor had a solution – he broke the stick in half so each one would have a stick. One child was content, but the other sobbed because she had a broken stick.

Be calm, they recommend. Parents can usually keep their cool. However, when your toddler is running down the driveway as fast as they can, using a calm voice does not work.

Be wise, they recommend. That’s easy when they’re young. Be kind, eat your veggies, and brush your teeth.

Giving wise advice to teenagers is tough. The advice our parents and grandparents dispensed still applies – don’t talk to strangers and save money.

But today’s parents have to know what to say when a teenager is visiting online sites they’re not supposed to see and to not trust anyone because they could be a predator.

Be firm, experts recommend. But different situations and personalities call for different parenting techniques.

Some children are instantly sorry if they hit their brother or sister and will apologize. Others would rather rot in their rooms before admitting they did anything wrong.

Be encouraging, they recommend. That’s easy when your child wants to be a doctor when they grow up. When their life’s ambition is to live off the land in Alaska, encouragement is a little harder to whip up.

Roll with the punches. My nephew once held three adults at bay with the kitchen faucet sprayer.

He was standing on a chair at the sink and had the water on full force. Whenever we’d try to come close, he’d let us have it with the sprayer.

Not only were we sopping wet, so was the kitchen floor and the cabinets.

By the time we got close enough to grab the hose, we were all laughing.

You can’t be too loving, most experts say. I agree but I’d add a cautionary note – sometimes love means doing the hard thing.

Maybe that’s the definition of good parenting – doing the hard thing. Taking away privileges when they don’t live up to promises. Turning off the computer or television when it’s easy to let electronics occupy them.

Loving them when they’re throwing a tantrum, yelling that they can’t stand you or choosing to spend time with friends instead of you.

Out of all the recommendations given, the only trait I believe works year after year is keeping a sense of humor.

Even when your child tries to flush a big candle down the toilet.

Even when your child leaves his Legos on the carpet and you step on them in the middle of the night.

And, yes, even when your child is spraying you and the entire kitchen with the water hose at the sink.

Smile and remember… they’ll be grown and gone way too soon.

Enjoy the chaos while you can.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

I went grocery shopping over the weekend and sticker shock got me. Grapes used to be 79 cents a pound, and they were now $2.49 a pound. Shrimp was often $5.99 a pound, but those little crustaceans were now $8.99 a pound.

Our mom somehow made sure her seven children had cereal, lunch and dinner every day, and we weren’t rich. My sisters and I reminisce often about the things she did we resented as kids but appreciate as adults.

She usually went to the grocery store without us because kids are needy in the grocery store. Mom learned early that a trip without kids was a lot cheaper, so she’d stop at Winn-Dixie after working all day.

Her Saturdays were spent shopping for the week, but we usually went with her. We’d start out at Globe, a discount store similar to Wal-Mart, where we’d get what we absolutely had to have for clothes or shoes.

Then it was a trip to the day-old bakery store. We liked going there because there were usually doughnuts or some type of pastries on sale, and she’d let us pick those out.

The last stop with all of us was to the meat market, a place we hated. It was a bare-bones butcher shop where the prices were good and the meat cuts were usually the tougher ones.

But Mom was a good cook and we never complained about the roasts she made every Sunday for after-church dinner. She had a way to make them tender and we never thought we were eating on a shoestring.

Every day, I grow more in awe of how my mom managed to feed and take care of seven kids while working full time. None of us felt neglected and we were never hungry.

So during these inflationary times, I thought about the ways I learned to economize from her. Some lessons I mastered. Some I have not.

My grandmother taught me how to cut up a chicken, a skill I’m thankful to have. While looking in the meat section this weekend, four chicken thigh-and-leg sections were $9.50. A whole chicken was $6.

Now I’m a little rusty when it comes to slicing up that chicken, despite watching Gordon Ramsey do it before I hauled out the knives. The cuts aren’t clean, but you can tell which one’s is a leg and which one’s is a wing, so that’s a success.

I also learned how to make spaghetti sauce from scratch. For less than $10, I can make a big pot of spaghetti sauce that’ll feed all of my grandchildren a couple of times.

Cajun cooks know a pot of red beans and rice costs less than $10 and can feed a crowd for days. Some of us Cajun girls, however, never learned how to make red beans and rice, so it’s leftover spaghetti for us.

Teenage girls like clothes, and I didn’t have the money to buy what was in style when I was a teenager. So my Grandma Marguerite taught me how to sew. Back then a McCall’s pattern was 75 cents. I looked at patterns at the local fabric store and was flabbergasted to see patterns are now $20 to $15 and that’s a digital pattern, not even printed on tissue paper.

Fabric is $13 a yard, and that’s just basic, plain cotton fabric. A dress usually requires three yards of fabric, plus thread, zippers and buttons and we’re now up to over $60 for a dress.

I can bargain shop at the resale shops for less than that.

I have rationalized how to save money. If I don’t dust, I don’t have to buy Pledge. A bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid replaces almost all of the cleaning products in my cabinet, and, as my Aunt Domina used to say, elbow grease doesn’t cost a dime.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

Store aisles are crowded these days. Overwhelmed shoppers are blocking aisles, school-supply list in hand, while youngsters beg for glitter crayons or three-ring binders big enough to hold a copy of “War and Peace.”

The faces of the parents seemed to be wondering why they were piling their cart up with boxes of glue sticks, pencils and paper when they had to practically beg their child to write more than 25 words for a book report.

This question is legitimate, but parents need to understand just how kids use school supplies.

Children dispense enough hand sanitizer as if they’re going to clean their entire body. They don’t just clean their hands – they rub the sanitizer all over their arms, neck and sometimes their legs.

Most of them will taste the sanitizer at least once. When the teacher isn’t looking, they’ll fill up their hand with the goopy stuff, stick their tongue in the puddle and decide whether or not they like the taste.

Now you know why the teacher needs gallons of hand sanitizer.

When it comes to tissues, I’ve yet to see a child retrieve just one tissue out of the box – they’ll stand in front of the box and yank out tissue after tissue until someone stops them.

Now you know why teachers need extra boxes of Kleenex.

Children are taught to sneeze into the crook of their elbow.

None of them do that. They sneeze right onto the table and the teachers have to quickly wipe that up.

Now you know why the teacher needs a zillion bottles of Clorox wipes.

Highlighters and markers dry out when the tops aren’t put on tight. Children have a different idea about the tops of the markers. They on the end of their tongue, perfect when they want to pretend they’re a rattlesnake or cobra.

Now you know why their highlighters dry out in three weeks.

Here’s the reason you need 148 Ticonderoga pencils.

One year, pencil break was a favorite recess pastime. This is when kids hold pencils out like a board in a karate class. The others try and break the pencil. Most of the time, they’re successful.

Plus nothing’s more fun for a child than standing at the electric pencil sharpener and watching it eat their pencil right out of their hand.

A bottle of glue is the best excuse for creating a new layer of skin on a child’s hands. They’ll pour out as much glue as they can, smooth it out and wait for it to dry. They love nothing more than grossing out the other kids by pretending to peel off a layer of skin.

And now you know why teachers need a gallon of glue.

If a child makes a mistake on a piece of paper, they erase it. Of course, they will erase until the eraser is half gone and there’s a hole in the paper.

So they get a new piece of paper out of their backpack. This can go on at least five more times until the teacher tells them it’s okay to cross out a mistake.

Now you know why they go through notebook paper and erasers so fast.

Glue sticks are fun and children believe you need a lot of glue in art projects. You need lots and lots of glue, in fact, to make sure those construction-paper feathers stick to the cut-out of the turkey.

The tops will get knocked onto the floor and land right next to the tops to all the now dried-out markers and highlighters. Those forgotten tops will stay on the floor until the custodian sweeps them up and throws them away.

Now you know why they need 15 glue sticks and new markers.

So happy shopping, parents, and remember you’re not alone. Somewhere out there is another parent, wandering the school-supply aisle muttering “How many bottles of glue do I have to buy?”

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

We were at a skating party for my grandson, and a small crowd was forming near the concession stand.

At the center of the group was someone in a life-sized Elmo costume, red fur from head to foot.

On the way in, Elmo had handed my husband his business card. I read the card and realized dressing up as Elmo was somebody’s job.

The owner of the suit proclaimed he could show up at a company event or birthday party as everyone’s favorite Muppet.

In these days where traditional jobs are getting harder to find, many people have decided to pave their own way for jobs a bit out of the ordinary.

My entrepreneurial nephew has a bitcoin machine mining money. The last time I visited their house, he smiled the whole time.

He said while we were watching the football game and eating mini hot dogs, he had a machine churning out money.

I’m not sure how much he’s making, but he loves believing he’s his own boss and following his own destiny.

One of the smelliest, but lucrative, odd jobs out there is picking up dog feces. They call themselves “scoop soldiers” and “pet waste removal specialists,” but don’t laugh. They’re making $40 to $45 an hour as a pooper-scooper.

I passed a house the other day and there was a van in the driveway specializing in mobile car washing service. The homeowners had three cars in the driveway in different stages of getting washed.

I Googled the business, and the basic wash and dry was $50 with prices going all the way up to $219.

That’s the price for a “vehicle enhancement service” for one car. SUV’s and trucks are easily $50 more.

You can also get paid to stand in line for people. Nobody wants to wait in line, especially in the Texas heat.

I recently passed the DMV office, and the line was out the door and down the sidewalk past four or five offices.

Somebody had the ingenious idea of renting themselves out as a line holder for people. They might be getting the last laugh. Line holders can make up to $40,000 a year.

If you love seeing life color-coded and organized into see-through boxes and baskets, you can get paid to declutter someone’s house.

You’ll never run out of work because most of us have a tough time getting rid of “stuff.”

Along with decluttering, people pay big bucks for someone to organize their bathrooms and kitchens.

You can tackle the job yourself, but buyer beware. You’ll easily spend hundreds of dollars for fancy see-through containers, a Cricut labeling machine — $200 on Amazon – and woven baskets.

And your kids will still stand in front of your perfectly organized pantry and proclaim there’s nothing to eat.

If you like working in the kitchen, there’s a couple of jobs for you. One of the most popular is a sideline cake baking business.

You need a fancy mixer, counter and refrigerator space and the ability to create The Hulk or Elsa out of butter and sugar.

You also need to know what the following words mean:  fondant, buttercream icing, royal icing, ganache, marzipan, and gum paste.

This home business might not be for you if those words sound like a foreign language.

If you can whip up a delicious King Ranch Chicken casserole dish, throw together a tossed salad and bake a pan of brownies, people will compensate you to make their dinner. Not bad if you like spending time in the kitchen and getting paid for it.

So if you’re looking for an outside job, consider dressing up as one of your favorite superheroes or rolling up your sleeves and throwing away people’s junk.

Who knows? In the words of organizing guru Marie Kondo, you might spark joy in your customers’ lives and your own as you follow your sideline job dream.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.