I was going to the restroom this morning when Paul popped his head in. I asked him kindly to give me a little privacy. I am allowed to dream.
"Privacy? You want privacy?" Paul said brightly. "Coming right up." He promptly left the bathroom. Well, that was nice for a change, I thought.
A moment later Paul reappeared. "Um, we don't have any privacy."
Your 2 and 3 year-olds request John McCain: American Hero as a bed-time story. (You probably didn't even know there was a children's book about John McCain, did you?)
Your 3 year-old son thinks the local weatherman looks like Ron Paul.
The same small boy sees one of those tall cigarette dispensers outside his soccer facility and excitedly proclaims, "Look, Mommy, a giant chess pawn!"
When a college football game is turned on and you ask this 3 year-old what game is being played, he replies, "Tennis?"
Your 2 year-old's favorite activity is pilates.
I'm sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor across from Baby Jane, engaging in one of my favorite milestones, the introduction of the sippy cup. Jane begins drinking like a pro - despite the "help" of Lucy and Paul. It takes real skill to drink out of a sippy cup being held by a two and three year old.
In high school, my close friends and I would always joke about laughing ourselves skinny. Laughing supposedly burns an outrageous amount of calories - and is waaaay more fun than running. Plus it was a great excuse for our corny jokes and addiction to silly, B-levle movies.
The whole thing never really saw the results we wanted, sadly. However, inside of abandoning the basic premise, I've come to firmly believe our failure was due to the lack of access to blogs like this one. This site will produce side-splitting, doubled-over, tears-streaming-down-your-face laughter. However, the weight-loss benefit of the site does not stop there. It also works hard to curb your sweet tooth. Join my new diet - visit Cake Wrecks daily!
The use of fantasy - and the magic and mythology that come with it - to form our children's imaginations is always a popular topic here at Ordinary Time. You can read here for some background on my views on the issue. Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con recently linked to a wonderful article touching on the subject, Enchanting Children, by David Mills. Mills treats the use of fiction as a tool to help train the imagination quite well, but his main thesis is much more important:
"What we want our children to imagine depends upon what we want our children to be. As Christians, we want them not just to learn to understand and analyze rightly, but to react rightly because they see the world rightly. We want our children to know by instinct or intuition what is the right answer, the right action, the right attitude.
Revulsion is a much better protection from the force of the passions than an intellectual understanding by itself. To feel “This is yucky” is not a final protection from sin, but it is better than thinking “This is wrong” but feeling “This is okay.” Lust offers the paradigmatic case (examples come quickly to mind), but this is true of pride, gluttony, envy, and all the rest, even sloth.
To put it another way, we want to raise kings, children at least somewhat worthy of the status of sons of God they have received through our Lord’s death on the Cross. We do not want the average, the mean, the mediocre. We want the elite."
"Just before she was offered the nomination two weeks ago, Gov. Palin went shopping at Out of the Closet, an Anchorage-based secondhand store, with her 14-year-old daughter Willow and her infant son Trig. She picked up a Juicy Couture coat for Willow and a tweed blazer for herself by Escada, which is one of her favorite labels, a saleswoman says.
The saleswoman, who gave her first name as Alison but wouldn't disclose her last name, says Gov. Palin comes in often and is friendly with the store's owner, Ellen Arvold. Ms. Arvold says Gov. Palin has shopped at the store since before she became governor. She confirms that Gov. Palin has worn some Out of the Closet purchases on TV since she clinched the nomination, but declined to say when."
Wearing second-hand clothes on national television! And looking better than any other female politician out there! And not a pants suit in sight! You gotta love it.
When Palin makes it to the White House, maybe I'll send over a list of the best thrift stores in the DC metro area. I'm well-known in the second-hand clothes universe.
(HT: Justinespired)
Mommy is sweeping the floor. Jane peeks around the corner. A gleam sparkles in her eyes as she spies the dirt pile - a treasure trove of delicious leaves, tasty bits of paper, and oh-so-yummy day old cherrios. Mommy hurries to finish. Jane moves into crawling position. Mommy sweeps the dirt pile as far away as possible...
And they're off! Mommy runs to the kitchen for the dustpan. Jane makes a dead heat for the dirt pile. The stakes are high. The excitement mounts. Who will emerge victorious?
As I tell the kids almost daily, Mommy always wins.
My response on first seeing this video, "Wow, Palin did SNL?!?" Then as I watched I thought, "Wow, Palin is looking really good. She's taken some pounds of on the campaign trail - a really tough feat." Then I finally stumbled on the truth, "Wow, that's not Palin; that Tina Fey!" It was very early Sunday morning.
Warning: It is very, very funny. Of course, it's SNL so it's not for kids.
For a break from the political coverage...
Bold--I've read it.
Italics--I started it.
Highlighted--I want to.
Nuttin'--I don't care.
Dripping with blood--Burn, baby, burn.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights --Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
10. Great Expectations -Charles Dickens (I just don't have a taste for Dickens)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Maybe while homeschooling I'll finish up those I haven't read.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife -
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Sitting on my desk right now.)
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I like other stuff by Melville, but just do not understand the love some have for this book.)
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo9
9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
100.The Outsiders -S. E. Hinton
I tag whoever wants to take the time to do it. (Mandy, I would love to see your list!)
Updated: Following Mandy's example, I added the italics category for books I've started.
The anger and hostility focused on Sarah Palin and her family over the last few weeks should not have really surprised me. She is the liberal talking classes worst nightmare: a smart, successful, and beautiful woman, balancing family and career, who is a pro-life, conservative Republican. Still, I must say I have been a little shocked by some of the attacks.
Earlier this week, Sarah Fowler, the official head of South Carolina's Democratic Party, stated that Palin's “primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”
But Wendy Doniger, Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, really takes the cake with her blog post yesterday:
"Her[Palin's] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women. "
Sarah Palin is not a woman. Now I have heard it all. I truly hope the radical feminists keep up this kind of talk. Mock her motherhood. Pontificate on what it means to really be a woman. They are alienating women from all walks of life all over this nation with their mean-spirited, narrow-minded, radical views. The McCain campaign could not create better ads for themselves if they tried. And this stuff is free!
Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa, seems to be losing some sleep over abortion. Since he is an OB, one may assume that he would be worrying that high numbers of abortions are slowing business for him and his colleagues.
But no. Dr. Lalonde is worried that Sarah Palin's now renowned decision to loving accept her son, Trig, who was diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero, may cause abortions in Canada to decline as other women decide to keep their children as well. Dr. Lalonde worries that "that greater public awareness of women making choices like Palin to complete a pregnancy and give birth to their genetically-abnormal baby could be detrimental and confusing to the women and their families."
I guess a 90% abortion rate of Down syndrome babies just isn't enough for Dr. Lalonde. Obviously, he is not going to rest until he knows that society is never burdened with any "imperfect" child.
My husband just texted me from the black-tie event he attended for work purpose - Barak is there. McCain-Palin rally in the morning; B.O. in the evening.
Lesson #1: Access, access, access.
Lesson #2: Work the crowd.
Lesson #3: You can never have too many buttons.
Lesson #4: Always be ready for the photo-op.
Lesson #5: Politics can be very strenuous.
The news broke today that Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews will no longer be anchoring live political events on MSNBC because they are too partisian. That is the understatement of the year. For those of us who have had to suffer through their often patronizing, heavy-handed, and generally humourless bias over the past few months, it seems relief is on the way.
that I love Danielle Bean as much as I love Sarah Palin? Danielle has a wonderful article addressing concerns about a young mom running for Vice President.
As a woman who left politics to stay home and care for my children, I can certainly understand concerns stay-at-home moms have about Palin's status as a working woman and the effect her election to the Vice Presidency could have on her family. I strongly believe that American women have been sold a bill of goods by the feminist movement, telling us we can have it all - a full-time career and a family- and no one will suffer. We women suffer from unrealistic expectations to be all to everyone; our children suffer from absent parents; society suffers from disjointed families.
But I also believe that God has different plans for different people - sometimes even mothers. In the past, I have often thought about St. Jane Frances de Chantal stepping over the body of her sobbing young son to enter the convent as the founder of the Sisters of the Visitation. How could a mother do such a thing? How could such a saint like St. Francis de Sales advice such an action? I have simply trusted that the Lord knew what He was doing better than I.
Danielle addresses this issue well in her article: "God's view is bigger than ours. God's plans are bigger than our own. Might it not take the unique strength and perspective of a woman, and particularly that of a mother, to wake our sleeping souls and at last affirm and protect the dignity and worth of all human life?"
If God uses a working mother to help bring a greater culture of life and to stand up to the holocaust of abortion in our country, far be it from me to question His choice. At this point, I am simply thankful to have any candidate that understands the evil of abortion in every case and in every circumstance.
What a week to be cut off from internet access! My husband has been talking to me about Palin for Vice President since McCain won the nomination last spring. I was probably one of the most informed people in the continental 48 about Govenor Palin last Friday. At least, I didn't need to go to Wikipedia to find out about her like some national newscasters.
It's probably just as well, though. My readers would probably have begun to tire of my all-Palin-all-the-time coverage. Still, it was bitter pill for me not to be able to liveblog her big speech.
The lost blogging opportunity of a lifetime aside, we had a great week at Grandpa and Grandma's in Ohio - feeding baby calves each morning, learning to fish, the kids' first campfire, visiting with aunts and uncles and cousins, running around barefoot all day. It was wonderful for the kids, and it was wonderful for me to give my children a little taste of my childhood in the country. It made my sacrifice of a fast broadband connection 100% worth it.
