Working in a small but well-known dot-com has its advantages.

For one, I have the option to skip breakfast if I’m running late because there’s always free oatmeal:

Quaker Oats -mmm.... warm and delicious

For another, there is ample supply of free non-alcoholics:

Warriors in the great battle of our age ... Coke vs. Pepsi

Specifically, my favorite:

The Dr recommends one at 10, 2 and 4.

And for those cold train rides home, a lovely gal from Switzerland will warm you right up:

She'll get you hot!

All of this is located in my lunchroom. Imagine my surprise when I entered it yesterday to find a new guest had joined us all for lunch!

It isn't this blurry in real life, but this accurately reflects the colors. Stupid cellphone camera.

If you can’t make that out through the blurriness, it is a MAME machine. Chock full of arcade games dating back to 1976. Three sets of controls though … One set short for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2! Oh the Terrapinanity! I was never an Arcadian, but I love not having to spend quarters on it

The MAME Game!

I may be skipping lunch the next couple of days after the holiday! Hey! I have something new to be thankful for!

So, like all responsible parents, Bat-Mom and I have done our level best to carefully monitor the media that Lana (newly 7 WHOLE YEARS OLD!!!!) and Lois (who is adjusting quite nicely to being 5) are exposed to. This means that:

• we don’t let them surf  the internet alone (they have their own folder of bookmarks to which they are allowed to navigate unsupervised, but all searches and queries are done by mom and dad who then read the wikipedia article or whatever with them)
• they don’t watch movies that we haven’t seen first or that we aren’t sure about the language and subject matter content.
• we don’t swear where they can hear (our words are a medium as well, and if you don’t believe that it is the most powerful medium they will ever be exposed to, you are dead wrong) and we strongly discourage our friends from doing so as well – Grandpas can’t be helped, they are a breed unto themselves.
• they don’t play video games that we haven’t vetted
• they don’t have a lot of time unsupervised with the tv, and in fact, they don’t have the knowledge and skillset to navigate the wide wide world of cable tv on their own – with the possible exception of On-Demand, where they also have a set of proscribed options to choose from.

I know all of this makes Bat-Mom and I sound like over-protective parents. We would disagree. We create clear boundaries for our girls and then give them a great deal of freedom within those boundaries. Included in that freedom are plenty of options for getting themselves mildly injured, testing their own personal limits and opportunity for spectacular failure – all VERY necessary aspects of childhood.

And I think that, using this philosophy, we have two pretty well-adjusted, intelligent and happy kids.

In fact, I have never heard Lana utter a stronger curse than “dang!” and Lois has only once said “dammit,” but tentatively, and at a dinner conversation where Lana was trying to remember her class’s “Word of the Week.” She remembered that it began with D, ended with “-ght” and the “gh” was silent and meant “frustrated or angry.” Lois ventured “da … dammit?” which, ignoring the spelling aspect, was a pretty good guess actually (the word was “distraught”). To her credit, Lois had a look on her face that indicated she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to say this unfamiliar word. We then had a conversation about “grandpa-words” and how some words are ok for grown-ups, but shouldn’t be said by or around little kids. They understood that, but I didn’t give them a list of the bad-words. Best not to encourage through discouragement!

So, now, I think we might have done our job a little too well.
More navel-gazing after the jump