I am sincerely afraid to open my Discover bill this month. Oh, it's true that I never spend much on anything. But a little here, a little there... it adds up, particularly when getting ready for Christmas. And a 1,000 mile car trip with two kids. And when finding such awesome deals at Amazon that I cannot possibly let them pass by. At this point I am pretty sure that my UPS man curses my name every time he pulls up at my house. (But, hey, it's not MY fault that when you order a tub of Legos from Amazon, they send each brick individually, for a total of 750 boxes on the doorstep.) This is, of...
I am home just briefly inbetween church services---this is the morning the choir is doing our cantata at church, and in addition to the service for which we usually sing (the NORMAL PEOPLE service), I had to go sing at the early service (the BUTTCRACK OF DAWN service). Part of my problem really embracing this church has been that I am terribly homesick for the choir I sang in at my old church, for various reasons. I had thought it was mostly because I miss my friends, but there's more to it than that. Like today, for instance. We've performed the cantata once and we're about to go do it...
Otto and I stayed up past midnight last night, and I probably shouldn't tell you what we were doing, but I can tell you that it involved a lot of licking. Oh my GOD; what is WRONG with you??? We were doing our Christmas cards. Sicko. Sheesh. It has generally been my policy to do Christmas cards only on alternate years when Mercury is in retrograde and I'm able to dig the money for the cards out of the sofa cushions, and then I take some pictures of the kids and Photoshop them beyond recognition or transplant a head from one picture onto the body of another or something, and then I send them...
You'd think that with the extra hour of sleep we all supposedly got, that yesterday would've gone completely smoothly. Of course, I let the kids stay up later, because the only thing that sucks harder than being woken up at 6 on a weekend morning is being woken up at 5 on a weekend morning. (And you know, Monkey would totally be the rat who keeps pressing the bar for a food pellet, getting shocked, and pressing the bar again, totally bewildered by each successive shock. He never understands why we are not overjoyed to see him hours before dawn. "I had a good sleep!" he declares, jumping on...
In our old town, at our old school, I confess that I never went to a single PTA meeting. Even though one of my very best friends was the PTA president. Hey, I was a single mom on a budget, and paying a sitter to go to a boring meeting just wasn't very high on my list of priorities. I compromised; I did the newsletter for a while, so that I could say I was contributing. And really, there was an entire contingent of people who positively LIVED for the PTA, so it's not like they needed me there. (I do loves me some justification. Hooboy.) Anyway, here in our new school, I'm more involved. Part...
One of the things that appeals to me about homeschooling is that you get to decide WHAT and HOW your child learns. Now, I know one of the complaints often leveled at homeschoolers is exactly that, that they can (purposely or not) end up educating their children in an incomplete manner, and whether or not that's true (I mean, I think the majority of homeschoolers strive for---and achieve---a better education than one ends up getting in a public school), at least the parents are doing the selection. Of course, I would never ever in a hundred thousand million YEARS elect to homeschool my kids,...
There are many things which I believe it is my job to teach my children. I should teach them right from wrong. I should teach them to be kind to others. I should teach them how to get along in polite society and remember the Golden Rule and how to use their utensils properly and match their clothing and cook a decent meal and do their laundry without turning everything pink. It's my job to teach them the things they need to know so that they can grow up and become productive, useful members of the society in which they live. It is also my job to teach my children to take pride in the the...
There are things in this life I hope that my children will learn, but due to the various laws of parenting and physics, if/when I share these nuggets of wisdom with my cherished progeny, all they glean from it is "WAA WAA WAA WAA." While I hope to stick around on this mortal plane for a good long time, it is my one sincere and true hope that IF I happen to make an early exit, certain important lessons---those which just sounded like maternal nagging whilst I was still among the living---will finally seem worth learning through what I was able to leave behind. Plus, if these children don't...
(This is just a quickie so that I can go back to this new thing I'm trying of pretending that I don't work on the weekends. Woo! Am not checking email! Am just, um, petting my MacBook for a minute!) My family is nothing if not triumphant. I mean, don't be jealous or anything, but we pretty much rock. First of all, Monkey had his first soccer game, and they pounded the other team. Just decimated them. This league doesn't keep score, but I'm pretty sure the final tally was somewhere around 25 to 2. And Monkey---you know I love that kid more than life, and I say this with compassion in my...
