Ask MCB/CG Day – 14
Today is ask MCB/CG day. We try and do this once a month for any new readers. Everyone is welcome to ask a question. I should have done this yesterday but fell asleep watching MNF. (I was when I woke up that the team I was rooting for won.) This is the fifteenth time that we have done this. It’s usually been pretty fun. We’ll be back later today or early tomorrow with our Two For Tuesday post. Here are the rules for any new visitors. Feel free to ask us anything. You can ask a question in a comment or in the Shoutbox. We’ll respond in the comments or, if the answer is long, in a separate post. We will answer anything that is asked, usually before our next post. If you don’t read this when its first posted but still have a question, go ahead and ask it. There isn’t a cutoff date. So please leave us a question if you’ve got one.
Since your kids are in High School now, and life is getting just a little more serious, have they thought about any careers choices?
I have a junior in High School myself and she can’t decide from one day to the next what she is interested in doing.
Have a great day, and thanks for a great well rounded site.
Hi… we are a couple from Lisbon and we have a blog that is now launching a contest, just for fun… To participate, you just have to send the pictures of his “tool” and the nick by which you wnat to be identified. The contest is called “My Willie is more beautifull than yours…” and we will appreciate your participation just for fun. If you participate, we would like to invite her to be part of the jury that will go through all participations and elect, not the biggest “tool” but the most beautifull one… So, the question is “Will you participate?”. Kisses from Portugal
I discovered your site yesterday and my immediate question was wondering how widely do you let people know of your web site. Do your kids or other family members know? How open are you about it “around the house”?
Despite the pixellation of your faces I feel like if I happened to know you I might guess who you are… how do (or would) you react when you get “outed” by folks in other circumstances, like at work or the supermarket?
And since your kids are teens, how do you discuss sex and nudity with them?
(If you’ve already covered these things feel free to point to another post or two!)
In all my time reading your blog I dont think I have ever asked a question on Ask MCB/CG Day.
When the Boy and Girl are grown and out of the house and you have retired, what is the one thing you and CG dream of doing?
For Mr SD and I it is selling up, buying a yacht and sailing the seas.
Ms SD
Wow, long time since I’ve participated and seems like forever since I’ve left a comment!
My question is this……sex and the kids……I know we all wish our children would NEVER, EVER have sex, but 1) do you think your children would come to you before hand and say they’ve met someone and would like to have sex? 2) would you provide condoms? 3) If they told you they were having sex, do you think you could stay calm?. Oh, BTW, I’m talking age 15-17ish.
I only ask this because I have 6 of my own. 4 of them boys. We’ve been very open with them about sex (the ones old enough to discuss this with) and I would only hope we’d have another conversation when they’ve decided they’d like to rather than “I have been for 6 mths now”. And I’d like to think I wouldn’t keel over of a stroke when that time comes. (my kids are 21 mths-13 yrs.)
John in PA: Not Really. In fact, The Boy deletes emails from colleges without reading them because they “just want your money”. He really isn’t thinking that every college is unique and that the only way to learn about them is to request information. He is a junior in high school too and has some ideas about what he wants to do; but, beyond getting good grades in high school, isn’t far along the college selection process.
So far as The Girl goes, she knows what she wants to be when she grows up (as much as anyone can know at age 14). But what she would like to do is not known for its high pay so she struggles trying to reconcile the two.
Thanks for the kudos about the site. Compliments are always appreciated.
Ursinho: I’d be glad to participate in your contest. We think it would be fun. I will visit the site for more information; but would also appreciate an email or comment with the rules and guidelines since neither of us can read Portuguese and the online translation tools are not always the best.
Tommy: We do not tell people we know in real life about our web site. And, we don’t “advertise” on the ‘net or participate on any traffic building web sites. Since we do allow robots to crawl our pages, most people discover the site from search engines or other blog feed/aggregation/indexing sites. The kids don’t know about our blog and we’re not even going to consider telling them until they are adults. So, it’s not something that we talk about when they are around.
And yes, we know, the pixilation of our faces doesn’t really hide our identities. But you can’t have a blog and truly remain anonymous. Even an innocuous text-only post about your birthday would probably be enough for someone who knows you to guess who you are. Especially given the basic background information that is available in most blogs. We haven’t been “outed” that we know of at work. Although you never know until it happens, I don’t think that would change things much. The biggest concern would be our parents, especially mine who have never adjusted to having grown kids and still provide unsolicited “advice”. We wouldn’t care in the least if someone in the supermarket recognized us. We learned long ago to live our lives for ourselves and not be overly concerned by what other people think since they are never satisfied anyway.
The kids aren’t interested in sex right now and we aren’t encouraging them. Neither of them has a steady boyfriend/girlfriend so sex and relationships are not topics that come up as much as they might. It is something that we talk about but not something that we dwell on. We’re trying to strike the right balance between providing the right amount of information and guidance without encouraging or condoning things.
Ms SD: When the kids are out of the house we’ll probably enjoy being by ourselves for awhile like we were before we had kids. Then when the “novelty” of being an empty nester has worn off we’d like to do all of the things that we didn’t have time and/or money to earlier. Like take a cruise in the Caribbean. Travel to Australia and new Zeeland. Get season tickets to The Ohio Sate University football games. And just basically try and relax and enjoy each other’s company. We don’t have one big thing that we would like to do. It’s more many small things that we haven’t done at all or done as much as we would like since we have been too busy raising a family.
Lori: That’s what Ask MCB/CG Day is all about. Glad that you are still reading. Now to answer your questions:
1) The Girl would probably come to us but not The Boy. He’s so overly concerned with trying to keep things quiet and peaceful, that sometimes, he doesn’t talk when he should and we have to drag things out of him. Part of it is because he’s older; but most of it is because he doesn’t like to make a “big deal” of things even when they are a big deal.
2) Condoms or other birth control? Absolutely. Unwanted pregnancies can easily derail a promising future. We’re not naive enough to think that I can forbid them so we have to try and put aside our concerns and look at the big picture.
3) I’ don’t think I’d stay calm but I’d probably get the news in a text message so they wouldn’t know how I’d reacted. But I would try to stick to the facts and not become overly emotional. Hopefully by the time that I saw them face to face that I would be calm and objective because that’s not the type of thing that you want to drive underground.
I’m more concerned about The Boy than The Girl. Even though she is younger, she seems to understand the big picture better. They both need guidance as all kids do but she’s more worldly (almost to the point of being suspicions) than he is. The Boy is probably a bit too trusting and doesn’t see the down side of things as much as he should. And when you’re dealing with sex, the consequences can be enormous.
Guest_2416: We haven’t had any close calls with the diaphragm. We use it conscientiously and don’t press our luck by limiting its use to only certain portions of California Girl’s cycle. It’s a bit of a nuisance but it’s the best method for us. And neither of us likes surprises when it comes to being pregnant.
We may take some more pictures of the diaphragm some day; but there are a lot of things on the short term to-do list since our lives are so hectic in the fall.