Pirates, Parenting and Pouring Down Rain

A pirate yanked my toe at intermission last night. Well, not exactly. The door to the movie theater that shuts out the light and keeps us in a casino-like trance for 172 minutes raked over my pinkie toe and made it bleed.

"Argh, matey!" you shout. "Swab the deck and get on with it!" But I'm going to the largest book fair in the US tomorrow, and I'll have to walk on it, mate. You spit your words through a salt-water grin. "It's the plank for yer yellow-bellied self!"

We watched the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 last night. The kids are at their grandparents' house for an entire week. Given our new-found nocturnal freedom, we had a late dinner and took in the late show in town. During intermission I got up to stretch my legs. Little did I know I'd stretch my toe out of whack, too. I was wearing sandals despite the pouring down rain. Silly me.

I've been hobbling about today, but I think it will be better by Friday.

In the meantime, I received a funny book from Tim Bete called Guide to Pirate Parenting. It uses a pirate analogy to help parents lighten up and accept their kids for their swash-buckling smelly ways. Since my kids have been known to turn the backseat of a car into mutiny, I appreciated his book very much.

Another great one I read a while back and which is now available on amazon is The Home Office Parent. In fact, here's my full-blown review of it:

"Home Office Parent: How to Raise Kids and Profits Under One Roof"

By Jennifer

Kalita (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing 2007)

Most books written by home office parents aren’t FOR home office parents. Sure, you catch a glimpse of their struggles as they wipe away peanut butter puke from their keyboard while typing the next line. You get a vague sense of their concurrent chaos, but you never get the full-blown picture or a recipe for how they overcome their condition to move beyond survival to sustainable success. Lucky for us, Jennifer Kalita does.

This brilliant writer provides home office parents with a practical guide to home office parenthood. Her tone is real, her advice true. I found myself acknowledged within the first pages of her book. Being a home-based businesswoman with small children, I was on the writer’s side from the moment I cracked the cover. Her witty, smart writing reeled me in and I was hers the moment she claimed home office parenting is a synergistic lifestyle assembled with tears, temporary insanity, mind-numbing tedium and a full-blown case of mutual respect. It is the basis of the entire operation.

My favorite lines include:

"Check your superman/superwoman complex at the door, and accept this truth [that you cannot be a perfect parent and perfect business person simultaneously]."

"You need to watch a movie and eat a bag of pretzels sometimes…" As simple as it sounds, we all need to hear this every now and then.

For anyone who wants to shout out "Just because I’m home doesn’t mean I’m available," will find themselves in this book. Even better, they will find a way to improve their best practices to return to the joy borne of their decision to work from home in the first place. I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s ever thought working from home would be a cakewalk.