Monthly Archives: March 2007

03.17.07
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Spring cleaning

Well, I did it. And it wasn’t too too painful either. The big clothing swap.

This past week, we’ve taken a spring break of sorts. We had just completed nine straight weeks of school with no field trips, no fun, no days off. Work, work, work. We needed some down time.

I picked a good week, too. The temperatures soared into the 70s on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Yesterday it was cold, blustery, and ended up sleeting in the evening. We enjoyed some time at the playground, had a picnic at the park with friends, and pulled bikes, skateboards and roller blades out of the garage and into the alleyway for hours of good exercise.

I stripped all the beds and washed everything – comforters and blankets too. Moved beds and dressers to vacuum underneath and behind. Removed broken toys and other junk to the big garbage can, and collected 6 bags of clothes and 2 bags of toys to drop off at the thrift store.

And that’s just the upstairs.

The warm days were great for airing out the house, and then the last cold, rainy day was perfect for scrubbing grime off white bedroom furniture (no fantastic weather luring us outdoors and away from chores). But of course, with only winter apparel in our drawers and closets, the kids began begging me to get out the summer clothes.

It’s mid-March. It’s northern Virginia. This is not the Deep South. Wednesday: 78 degrees. Friday: 38 degrees. In another month, perhaps, the kids will regularly be wearing shorts and t-shirts and sundresses, but even then, sweaters and long pants will need to be kept available for rainy days or chilly evenings. And I had already planned my big clothing swap for the first week of April – right before we head off to sunny Florida and Alabama.

But then again, I look at all of Fritz’s pants which are about a half-inch too short, and his “church” pants no longer fit. The kids will need stuff for Easter and for vacation, and did I really want to be scrambling that week doing shopping instead of packing and battening down the hatches? And so, I took a deep breath and dove in. As expected, Fritz needs everything from tennis shoes to a bathing suit (except for t-shirts…I actually made him give some away). And Jenny needs nothing except for sandals and a pair of light-weight tights. I’m relieved the chore is mostly done – still some heavy clothes in the laundry or the dressers because it is still winter. And I have several weeks to get to the stores and find some good deals.

Today, I’ll finish scrubbing the crib rails which were shockingly yucky and haul the giveaway bags to the car (if I can sneak them out without the kids noticing). And I’ll try to get my husband to help me with one remaining closet in our room with mostly his stuff (just to straighten it up). Next week, we’ll go back to school, but I’ll begin working on my downstairs spring cleaning. Two and a half weeks until vacation time!!!!

03.16.07
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Do you have Office Depot near you?

Do your kids have an incessant craving for “scrap” paper for their various art projects?

I got these instructions in an email, and followed them. Yup, 10 reams of copy paper and a box of paperclips for $16, including delivery. I didn’t need paperclips, but I think they’re the cheapest thing you can get that ensures your order is over $25 (which you need for the $10 off coupon – spend $0.29, save $10, quite a deal there).

Follow these step by step instructions so that you can apply the coupons.

1. Go to www.officedepot. com
2. Search and Add 345603 ( Price : $5.59 ) – Buy 10 of these
3. Search and Add 429266 ( Price : $0.29 )
4. Coupon Price : -$31.00 Code : 73649244
5. Coupon Price : -$10 off $25 Code : 44141777

Final Price : $16.25 Shipped (mine was $15.95…different state taxes, I guess)

Offer ends soon.

03.16.07
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College drinking

I don’t mean to pooh-pooh this article. As a mother of future college students (I hope), a culture that promotes dangerous behavior is worrisome. But perhaps quite a bit of my concern stems from personal experience where I can soberly and seriously consider my own college behavior and say, “My goodness, that was stupid!”

Certainly, through the grace of God and not my own savvy or inner strength, I survived. But survive I did.

I can’t help but wonder who the alarmists are who are responsible for this article and the research that went into it. Are they people who themselves rarely drank, never skipped class in order to recover from the previous night, never did homework half-lit? Or are they ones who were funneling yards of beer while the entire frat house chanted, “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!”? Does puritanical disdain or the sagacity of experience motivate their panic?

The report by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, argues substance abuse isn’t an inevitable rite of passage for young adults. Rather, it argues a particular culture of excessive consumption has flourished on college campuses, and calls on educators to take bolder stands against students and alumni to combat it.

{snip}

Young adults in general have higher abuse rates, so a higher rate for college students is to be expected. But other research indicates that college students drink more than high school peers who don’t go to college.

Is this truly shocking? A 20 year old in college drinks more than a 20 year old not in college? Could it be that the non-college student has to get up and go to work or risk being fired, while the college student can blow off Professor Peabody’s chemistry lecture without anyone even noticing?

At the University of Kentucky, longtime administrator Victor Hazard says he too has noticed a change, with more students drinking simply to get drunk.

“To the extent there is such a thing as a social drinker, it was more of a meet-and-greet type of environment in the earlier years when I was here,” said Hazard, Kentucky’s associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students.

Now, he said, students are “drinking to become intoxicated as fast as they possibly can.”

Ah, yes, when I was a student, we only drank socially. These hoodlums of today just want to get drunk. Sorry, buddy, take off the rose-colored glasses. Even if you yourself did not participate in binge drinking or illegal drug use, surely you were aware of others who did? Or did you wear those rosy lenses back then, too?

“It’s getting more intense,” she said. “Drinking games that were happening in private parties or houses or bonfires 10 years ago are now happening in public venues. That to me reflects a sort of larger acceptance of extreme drinking.”

Either I went to the best kept secret of party schools (it didn’t make the Top Party School list when I was there), or the woman who said this lived at home and didn’t experience campus life in its fullest…or spent her free time in the library or dorm studying. Or she’s 80.

And the concluding quote:

“People need to step up and realize this is not a rite of passage, this is not something we should tolerate. If it keeps going, we’re going to destroy our best and brightest.”

How bright are you if you kill yourself with booze or get yourself addicted to prescription drugs? Here is the bottom line: it is not the campus culture that is victimizing helpless students. These are adults making personal choices. If your “friends” are pressuring you to drink an entire bottle of vodka, find different friends. If there are no sober people to be found on campus, find another campus.

And if you are a parent, I suggest you encourage your children to seek a Bachelor of Science degree. In my experience, the workload required to cut it in those programs naturally reduces the opportunity for binge drinking. It’s all those Bachelor of Arts students with excessive free time who are out drinking 3 or 4 times a week!

03.15.07
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Mom to Mom, Day to Day by Danielle Bean

I will never forget the day I met my future friend, Kathy. Kathy had just given birth to her fourth child, and mutual friends were organizing meals for her family. My oldest child was 9 months old, and I thought it quite heroic for me to manage to make her very large family a meal considering I had an infant of my own. I drove to her house and anxiously left the baby in the car (I couldn’t carry him and the meal, naturally). She let me in, and I stood dumbfounded as she calmly introduced me to her mother, showed off the newborn babe in her arms, and attempted to point out her other three children among the dozen or so running amok throughout the house. The parents of the playmates were nowhere to be found.

Fast forward to a month or so ago. I offered to take a meal to a neighbor – a friend of a friend – who had just had her second child. I made a double batch of stew (for her and for us) and some homemade rolls in between my regular duties like laundry and school. I put the toddler and the food in the double stroller, bundled the four others in their coats and mittens, and walked everyone around the corner to her home. And I smiled inwardly as she and her husband stared in obvious shock and amazement that I was even able to get everyone dressed, let alone to make and deliver her a meal.

Danielle Bean’s newest book, Mom to Mom, Day to Day, is just the book for both of those young, struggling mothers described above. How do you do it? I often get this question, sometimes actually spoken, sometimes as a pleading look in their eyes. Being a wife and mother, managing a household, passing on the Catholic faith – these responsibilities are challenging even to a battle-hardened woman with nearly a decade of experience. To a young mother who hasn’t yet acquired a taste for cold or reheated coffee, the job seems daunting or even impossible.

Many parenting books just make things worse: do it just like this or you are a failure, they seem to say. Mom to Mom, Day to Day is refreshingly different. Instead of a list of musts and shoulds, Danielle encourages women to discover what is best for their family. She de-emphasizes perfectionism without encouraging sloth, recommends a positive attitude without condemning our occasional fits of impatience, and suggests ways to live out our Catholicism as a family without overwhelming us with lists of things we simply must do in order to fulfill our obligation to teach our children the faith.

Mom to Mom, Day to Day has short, easy to read chapters – perfect for the hectic mother of little ones who snatches reading time between diaper changes and the cleaning of spilled Cheerios. If a woman ever wanted to pick the brain of an experienced mother just to get to the essence of how to live out that vocation, this book is it. I found myself nodding in agreement throughout, and had Danielle, myself, and another mother been sitting at a playground together sharing advice about raising families, I’m sure all I would have to add is, “Yeah, what she said.”

It is high praise for me to recommend a book – higher still if I actually give it to someone. I’ve already purchased a few more copies of Mom to Mom, Day to Day and can think of a couple of women from my church who could use it. And I need a spare copy, of course. So the next time an exhausted woman juggling her toddler on one hip and a newborn on the other asks, How do you do it? I can simply say, Here, read this.

03.15.07
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Kindergarten biology

Some of the best conversations happen in the car.

Katie: Mom, we need to get another baby.

Me: OK.

Katie: Hooray! {pause} When?

Me: October? I hope that’s OK. It’s takes a while, honey.

Jenny: How do you get another baby?

Me: Well…I need Daddy and some help from God…

Katie: She and Daddy have to hold hands or something, right, Mommy?

Me: Uh…

Katie: You and Daddy hold hands and then God puts a baby in your tummy, right?

Me: Uh…something like that…

Thank goodness, for once, Fritz sat silently in the back of the van.

03.14.07
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blogging and bloglines

If you give up commenting on blogs for Lent, and then you just turn what you would have said into a blog post, does that break your commitment? Nah, I didn’t think so either.

This is mostly for Denise at Ordinary Grace who wants to know how often one should blog. I think it depends on what your motivation is for blogging.

If you are trying to appeal to an audience, to generate regular readers, to provide some sort of service (source for news, source for spiritual comfort, source for amusement), then I would suggest daily posts as a minimum. If you consider blogs like Open Book and The Cafeteria is Closed, they post multiple times per day. Danielle Bean and Eric Scheske generally post once a day.

If you are writing primarily for you, then you should write as often as you feel like it.

I write, primarily, for me and for my family. Sometimes I post every day, even more than once. Sometimes, generally on the weekends, I post not at all. I’m trying to capture bits of this crazy life with these kids. There are things I want to remember about them, and about me, and about daily life, and I’m just not a big scrapbooker or photo journalist, and a written diary with a little lock and secret thoughts just isn’t what I care to do. I want my kids to remember or to learn what life was like when they were little – so when they’re adults and they claim to have been perfectly well behaved children who never gave their mother any grief and why is such-and-such niece or nephew such an awful brat, I can laugh at their sketchy memory and remind them (and myself) just how normal the child really is. And I want to share these glimpses of personality with family and friends who don’t live nearby and who see the kids infrequently.

Plus blogging cuts down on the amount of time I would otherwise spend talking to myself.

Denise also asks about tracking feeds. Someone else already clued her in to bloglines, which I began to use this Lent and absolutely love. I have it set to check for updates every six hours, so if I pop over to my computer to send an email or check the weather forecast, I’m not always tempted to click the link which screams “new updates!!” I really wish I had subscribed sooner.

The only downside to bloglines is that you don’t necessarily go to that person’s blog. Most blogs offer full feeds, so you can read the latest entry in it’s entirety from the bloglines page. There is a bit missing when you don’t experience first-hand the fonts, colors and layout that enhance a post or add depth to personality.

And if someone should happen to make a minor change to their sidebar, you might never notice it. Of course, even those reading a blog at it’s source might not notice such a change either…

03.14.07
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pathetic

I guess my shoulder is too bony. He fussed on my lap, then climbed into his dad’s unpadded wooden chair. A moment later, with his head on his little stuffed puppy, he was snoring.

The flash woke him up, so he spent a few minutes fussing on my lap, but now he’s climbed back into the hard chair.

I didn’t wake him up this morning. I would have preferred he stay in bed. But no, he had to get out of his crib.

{sigh}

03.13.07
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Phileas Fogg loses his wager

Mr. Fogg crosses the international date line and actually does manage to win his bet when he realizes it is Saturday, not Sunday. Lucky him.

My husband did not cross the international date line. He left Germany last Thursday morning when “engine trouble” made it “necessary” for his plane to land in Scotland. There were “no parts or mechanics” for their type of plane in all of the U.K., and so they sat awaiting rescue via another plane returning from a trip to Afghanistan. Until Saturday.

He complained bitterly about his horrible luck in being “forced” to stay in Scotland, when he would much rather be home with us. Just to pass the time, he went to Edinburgh Castle, saw the crown jewels of Scotland and St. Margaret’s Chapel, and learned how they make Scotch whisky.

But he had very little fun without us, of course.

And I’m not jealous, at all, because I happened to give up haggis for Lent and the temptation would have been too great, I fear.

And so, instead of an 8 day trip, it was 10 days. And instead of a 3 day weekend, he took yesterday off and had 2, which I’m sure that as he is staring at his desk right now for the first time in nearly two weeks, I’m sure he regrets, but not really, since he really did miss us.