Yesterday we had our first decent snow of the season. For Maryland, that’s 3-inches. But the beauty was the snow had that perfect consistency for snowballs. Actually, snowballs rolled big enough for snowmen. Morgan & Austin were revealing a green grass carpet as they bullied the snow boulder across the apartment’s courtyard. Morgan told Austin to “Push,” while he pulled.

Two other kids joined them—Little Ryan and some girl. Ryan was surprisingly well bundled. His crack-whore mother usually sends him out ill prepared to face the elements. The lanky girl, who I didn’t recognize, was in that prissy 10-12-year-old range. I never saw her actually help. She had the typical coat, hat and gloves. But on her feet were what I first took to be fluffy blue bedroom slippers. Turns out they were blue plastic recycling bags on the outside of her tennis shoes and tied in place by more blue bags. Yes, scuffing around in the snow with the bags on the outside.

When M’s Dad got home, he couldn’t wait to join them making the fort. Austin’s Mom came out on her balcony, waved hello and went back in. The other two parental-units were MIA. Even though I didn’t go out there, except to snap pics of the growing snow-VW, Billy represented our family. Besides I was busy inside being Mommy, making hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows for the gang. Two stirrers for each cup. I took the steaming hot cocoa outside on a tray just like June Cleaver or Aunt Bee. Except for the "instant" part.

What I want to know is—where was everybody else? The kids were outside for hours. Did it occur to any of the other parents to go play with the kids or make them something hot to drink or even give a shit where their kid was as long as he/she wasn’t inside bugging them? And what’s with the blue booties?

Yesterday Morgan and I caught a QVC-type ad for a showerhead with eight different pulses and aromatherapy cartridges you can insert into the handle and if you call RIGHT NOW, they’ll include one of those pink puffy nylon body scrubber. M was intrigued.

He decided we should switch showerheads in our two bathrooms. The shower with the bathtub has the apartment-issued standard showerhead. We bought a pulsating head for the shower stall of the master bathroom. And since we’re currently using the shower stall as a storage closet, M concluded we were wasting money but not using our nifty head.

“Get me a wrench!”

He precariously balanced himself on the edge of the tub, fumbled a little with a large wrench and then, lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, got off the small showerhead. Then he stood on the toilet lid, reached over the shower stall frame, tightened the wrench on our fancy showerhead and with one firm ratcheting, stripped the head right off its base. M looked shocked.

All I could do was laugh. In all probability, the metal had fatigued and it might have broken off into the hand of the first person to use the shower again. (If we ever get out all those Rubbermaid containers.) That night, M took a “waterfall” shower without any head. But his dad insisted we put the original one back on.

“Get me a wrench!”

And I realized that something as basic as teaching M how to use an adjustable wrench falls to me. From my stagehand days, I’m able to show M how to hold and adjust the wrench with one hand. But I hate cooking. So Billy, with his culinary background, is the one who shows M how to dice onions, salute chicken and spice dishes to perfection.

And if we don’t do it, who will? Parents still show their kids how to thread a needle and sew a button back on a shirt, right? And how to hold a buttercup under a friend’s chin to see if he likes butter. And how to sort the laundry. And play jacks. And sing! Ah, the joyous minutia of mothering.

Riddle me this – How come when a beautiful woman’s breast is accidentally flashed during the halftime show at the Super Bowl, the FCC fines Fox 1.2 million dollars? But you can tune in an episode of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs to watch a boar be beat off and see a sow’s swollen vulva up close and personal before the show's host artificially inseminates her through a long tube inserted up her twat.

"Squeeze it nice and slow, Mike."

Only in American can you learn Sex Ed by watching Dirty Jobs. Pretty Freudian, huh?

Twenty years ago, when my older son, Dallas, was his half-brother’s age, it was all about brands: Nike, Powell & Peralta, Tony Hawk. And back then; working in the film biz, I could bankroll that mindset. I wouldn’t see him for weeks at a time, but when I did, I could buy his love.

Dallas was a solid public school student, star catcher on the baseball team, had alotta friends (some with whom he still keeps in touch). Happy, kind and well balanced. Now in his thirties, he’s living that urbanite hipster life-style I could never afford. And for him, brands still matter.

On the other hand, Morgan, my homeschooled rag-a-muffin, is clueless when it comes to what’s hip in clothes, footwear and gear. And that got me thinking about what’s the biggest influence on a child to adopt those values. I’ve concluded it’s not that Old Devil television it’s peer pressure. Here’s why:

M probably watches more TV than most kids. He’s bombarded with the same commercials on Nick and G4 and MTV as public school kids. But he’s just not interested. I’ve even pointed out ads for shoes or jeans and asked if he likes and would want to buy them. “No, thanks.”

Jez, I can barely get M to wear more than boxers at home. His socks, if he puts on any, only match through the laws of probability. When we shop for shoes at Wal-Mart, he looks for the right size, not designer, label. He prefers his WWE t-shirts and will pick between them if I offer him a choice. But most of the time, M puts on whatever’s on the top of the laundry pile.

In fact, on the way to a field trip, a fashion-conscious 8-year-old girl in our co-op even commented that M was wearing the same T (The Undertaker vs. Kurt Angle) he’d worn to the previous outing. Out of fear M would snip, “Who gives a shit?” I piped up and joked, “Well, at least it’s clean.”

So what influences children to latch onto labels? I’m certainly no clotheshorse. The only difference I can see in upbringing is D lived with his classmates’ judgment every day and embraced it. M is confronted only on rare occasions, and when he is, couldn’t care less.

Granted, if he’d been a girl, hormones might win out, even over homeschooling.

Homeschooled kids think different. Granted, in some regards, kids are kids everywhere. But I can recall several field trips where their collective out-of-the-school-box mindsets have spontaneously combusted to the bewilderment of docents.

In Maryland, October is the month for corn mazes and pumkin’ chunkin’. Local agri-tourism farms make their field trip nut in the Fall to last all year. A group of us, about 30 moms & kiddos, were getting the 10-cent tour, ending with pumpkin demolition.

The farmer was explaining how the slingshot device worked. We encircled her at the wide-open barn doors to watch. She had two Moms hold the side handles and she loaded up a softball-sized gourd, well past its prime, pulled back the glorified rubber band and let it fly. The pumpkin smashed into the square hay barrels stacked 50 feet away. Bull’s-eye. Obviously, she’d done this before.

Then she announced, “Okay, line up and everybody can have a turn.”

Without hesitation or discussion the 20-some kids each found a place along the knee-high hay barrel wall at the barn doors where the slingshot had been demoed. You could see the confusion on the face of our farmer. Obviously she meant a long column, snaking back well into the middle of the dark barn, with just one child at its head. You know, the way school kids line up by the classroom door to go to assembly. No butting!

But how could anybody near the back of that kind of line see what was going on with the pumkin’ chuckin’? By forming a row across the straw wall, everybody could catch the action, cheer on their friends and have a turn without there being a linear “first.” The docent shook off her momentary befuddlement and went on with her scripted routine.

Perception is everything.

I chuckle every time I watch that commercial where an employee is asked to put a pushpin in China on a world map and, after pointing at Greenland and other not-even-close countries, the guy accidentally-on purpose trips, grabbing and tearing the map as he falls. There goes China, wherever it is.

The sad fact of the matter is, that phenomenal geographic ignorance is not so far from wrong. And although I hope Morgan is never in a suit, in an office, in a meeting being asked to put a pushpin in China, I do want him to know where it is. Why?

Well, if you asked M what he knows about China, with some prompting, he’ll probably tell you about Macro Polo traveled there before Columbus didn’t discover America. And he might show you the paper “scratch-&-sniff" Chinese spice rack that he made when we were studying how trade brings new ideas.

But he won’t remember that Polo was born in Venice in 1254. Or the emperor of China, Kublai Khan. Or that the Chinese had invented a way to print paper. But he will remember they invented gunpowder and that China was a pretty happening place compared to damp old Europe.

And that’s about all I can ask for. Dates he can look up. Concepts he needs to figure out.

We play the “Where do you think this was made” game when we buy stuff. M reads the manufacturer’s labels and discovers alot of that stuff comes from China. Including our frozen organic corn! International trade continues 700 years later.

“Is that always a good thing?" I ask.

I dunno. Ask the ”Look for the union label when you are buying that coat, dress or blouse” ladies. Or GM assembly line workers. Or the Susquahannock Indians, if there were any of them left.

But we like our clothes cheap and our corn organic. So what’s an American consumer living in a global economy to do?

Maybe Marco Polo could have lived out his life merrily paddling around Venice, never knowing the wonders of the Orient. And maybe M can live out his life equally content, never able to find China or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or even Europe on the map.

But somehow, I suspect, both lives would be alot less spicy.

On Monday, my upper right second molar went Super Nova. I take such lousy care of my teeth; it’s my own lazy-ass fault. But being among the working-class poor with no health/dental care, I’m not financially (or emotionally) prepared to spend hundreds of dollars getting my tooth pulled, or worse—get roped into the whole root canal/crown route. So I rubbed the tooth. I paced around. I couldn’t concentrate. But we still did schoolwork. I didn’t yak as much, but we forged ahead. Morgan was sympathetic, but still had his own agenda. As well he should.

That got me thinking about how a chronic illness or injury would affect our homeschooling. Shit, if I drop dead, Morgan might as well start packing. I suspect out-of-state military school will be in his future. But what if I got sick for a long time BEFORE I die? I hope I won’t linger long, making everybody miserable and resentful and wishing me dead—to end ALL of our suffering.

But I watched a TV news feature about how much money people spend for health care/meds that insurance, if they even have any, won’t cover. They interviewed a woman recovering from cancer who was bitching about her family’s debt caused by putting her treatments on their credit cards. Yeah, so? You want something, even if it’s life, you’re gonna have to pay for it.

But this woman was indignant. Like the government owed her affordable health care. Where does she think she is, Canada? She didn’t think it was fair to have to choose between financial security and her life. Well, darling, sometimes all the money in the world isn’t gonna save you. And even though we live in a country that will, for your own good, ban trans-fats in restaurants and ticket you for crossing the street while listening to your ipod, there’s NEVER gonna be affordable health care, let alone socialized medicine in these here United States. It’s just too big of business.

Okay, if I break my arm, I’d like to get it set, please. But if I’m just delaying the inevitable (since Death does come a-knock sooner or later), I hope I’m willing to go graciously. And if I stroke out on the kitchen floor with that cheeseburger locked in my hand—Do Not Resuscitate!

My responsibility is NOT to drag my family into a debt hole they could never dig out of. Grief fades, interest compounds.

I was watching Shepard Smith on Fox News recap Wednesday’s Boston bomb scare fiasco and I’m thinking this will be a great opportunity for one of those teachable moments with Morgan. He knows all the players and certainly understands America’s War on Terror. He also watches Adult Swim, including Aqua Teen Hunger Force, on Cartoon Network. It’s an acquired taste but I gotta admit that little meatball guy can be pretty funny.

M had seen the news story play out as I flipped from Fox to MSNBC to CNN and back. He asked what was going on and at that point there were three or four “devices” that were turning questionable but had nevertheless closed down Metropolitan traffic and the fucking river. I didn’t put it quite that way, but I did give the situation a somewhat skeptical spin.

So yesterday, now that we got the rest of the story, much ado about nothing (except in Beantown), I wanted to hear M’s opinion. Morgan loves George W. and I figured he might be a little hard on left-wing advertising gone awry. You know, that whole Republican “tough on terrorists” mindset. WWGWD?

So I asked him if he thought the two 20-something goof-balls who were hired to place the devices around the city were at fault and should get in trouble.

“No, absolutely not,” said Morgan.

“Even though they scared alotta people and caused the city to shut down?” I asked.

“That’s not their problem,” said Morgan. “That was Boston’s stupid fault.”

End of story.