7 Quick Takes Friday

1.  William and Kate's Wedding

I didn't get up to watch it, but turned it on when I started my day.  After ten minutes of watching BBC reporters indicate a toddler took her first step, seven people had camped out all night and all were from various parts of London, and interviewing a man who if not drunk with happiness for the young couple, was at least drunk, I decided that short of golf on TV, never have more words been said about nothing happening in the history of television.  (They were waiting for the bride and groom to emerge and give their first public kiss as husband and wife).

2.  Don't Know Much about History

For the life of me, I do not understand the uproar over how poor the political discourse is in our nation.  Those who insist that we need a new tone seem to have conveniently forgotten the history of this country.  We began by picking a fight with the oldest democracy in the world, at the time the vanguard of governments, over of all things, taxes.  We began with greed, wanting to keep more of our own.  Our Secretary of the Treasury had a duel to the death with the Vice President!  Senator Charles Sumner was beaten with a cane on the Senate Floor for denouncing the compromises that had allowed slavery to perpetuate itself.  We had a civil war that was extremely uncivil and included the burning of towns.  We have not always settled our disagreements with mere words, nor have our words always been more urbane or respectful.  President Lincoln's was called amongst other things...a "Filthy story teller, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, perjurer, swindler, tyrant, field-butcher, land-pirate" all by Harper's magazine.  (I got the quotes from http://www.insults.net/). 

Moving to the 19th century, we had yellow rags that ran daily savaging the leaders of our nation and the low tone of politics while creating more inventive ways to insult the very people they demanded be civil and yet solve all our nations' woes.  We've had riots over good and bad issues, sublime, important, trivial and banal.  We've endured sit ins and unjust jailings and civil boycotts.  We've unleashed fire hoses and tear gas and dogs.  People have been lynched and buildings have been firebombed and still this nation endured and eventually did the right thing. We've had satires and books written out of whole cloth and fabricated conspiracies and actual conspiracies and lying and perjury and money laundering and cover ups. And there is so much more than this that we have done over the years; yet we are always complaining that today's sins are worse than yesterday's.

So now that no one is killing one another, and there is the DNC, the GOP and the Tea Party, and people make signs and post their opinions and speak their minds and there are venues for every sort of political thought, the incivility is worse than ever?  As a country, as a people, we have a twitter's worth of memory for our past.

3.  Speaking of Memory

I guess I can't blame us for forgetting so much.  We live in a world of distraction and the brightest shiniest object will catch our mind's eye. Having just uploaded our digital computer, I was treated to a time capsule of three year's time.  Three years ago, we were only a family with eight kids and I thought that quite a lot. 

4.  More Signs of Success

We'd been introducing Faith to a favorite family game, Magic.  She'd used very simple decks before and almost always wound up playing a supporting role in team games but not making much of an impact.  Now, she's got three decks she uses to great effect and has beaten her dad three times. (She reports this herself with no small amount of pride in  her voice).  She also had fewer fights with her brother because she's not overwhelmed by his gift (which he abuses) of words.  I did correct her about the pill making her smarter.  I pointed out the pill could NOT have given her the correct answers for the multiplication test.  It simply allowed her to focus and not get distracted by the other thoughts in her head or things in the world around her; just as her glasses allow her not to have double vision but do not give her the gift of sight. 

5. Despicable Me

I just watched this movie with my kids and loved it.  It was a fun way to wait out the tornado warnings for our area yesterday.  If nothing else, I prefer my children walking around saying "Not cool." to the prior favorite movie quote from Tangled  where my five year old daughter would pretend to be drunk and say "Whoa...somebody get me a glass because I just found me a tall drink of water."  and then she'd say "Oh stop it you big lug." with a laugh and a tilt of her head. Her perfect mimicry of the scene creeped me out.  This is the same daughter who can sing the chorus from "Pycho Killer" from rock band "Pscho Killer, Qu'est que C'est...Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa more better" and knows the words to every song she EVER hears on the radio. 

6.  Gardening 101

Today we are planting beans. Now I am not a gardener.  I'm also not a mathematician.  In both areas of discipline, while I don't mind, I certainly don't seek it.  Yet today, they must go in and so we will test out how badly this can be done, as I have a reputation and history for killing plants.  Even grass dies under my care. However, I will not continue the metaphorical parallel between gardening and math as I manage our family's check book and pay all the bills. 

7.   Spring Break

Having a week of everyone off has given me a taste of summer and let's just say June can't get here fast enough.  Yesterday my son created a city scape of his legos and various toys and filmed a monster movie. The other day he and his brother built a rope swing that lasted three hours. We've played Pirates and magic, read books, colored the driveway, ridden bikes and gone to the library. We planned a birthday party. We saw forgotten movies and ate ice cream and planted carrots, chased deer, had a water balloon fight and spent a morning watching thunderstorms scream across the county.  I have enjoyed sleeping in until seven or eight and not having to march the kids through the day with schedules and homework.    Today's ambition is hair cuts and a date night. This morning the kids made a club house out of blankets.  It has been a  very lovely week.  Have a great weekend!

Cramming for the Next Time

Yesterday, I couldn't help my 4th grade son resolve a word problem.  Now granted, it was on fractions and it was a word problem, but I have to admit, I thought I'd still be something of an asset at least until actual middle school.  

My older children long since lapped me in academics.  They're doing cool down runs around the track and waving me bravely on as I try to just finish the assignments. They've been very supportive but they don't ask me for help anymore.

But I'm not going down without a fight.  I'm not ready to resign myself to 3rd grade and down just yet.  So last night after I had to surrender to my oldest son as the tutor for the fractions, I took out the Handy Book of Space Answers, Everything You Ever Needed To Know about History, and my statistics book from graduate school. All three are subjects I completely stink at, and avoided as much as possible when they were actually required.


Effective immediately, I will assign myself 20 minutes of one of the three every night before bed, sort of like intellectual calisthenics. I predict my occasional bouts of insomnia shall soon be a permanent thing of the distant past.

In the meantime, I hear my son's teacher for first grade is beefing up her curriculum so I'm boning up on fractions, phonics and Venn Diagrams. 

P.S. If you are curious, the question that stumped me is: A pet store has 1/3 dogs, 1/6 cats and 19 other pets.  How many animals are in the pet store?  Yeah. I know how to do it now. 

My return question: A mom has a brain.  1/3 is allotted to remembering children and their schedules.  1/6 handles autonomic functions.  19 other separate urgent fields of important stuff like what's for dinner, what I need to do today, the courage to practice driving with my son, how to potty train the 3 year old and when the bills are due.  How many slots of memory are left to fill with 4th grade math recall and will I still have space to remember where I put my purse if I relearn this stuff?

Ten Percent Mental

Experts say that a woman’s brain shrinks during pregnancy by 10%. I don’t believe it. According to science theory, matter cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed…and to my way of thinking, grey matter is no different than any other matter for that matter.

But it is a convenient excuse.

So I am torn morally and mentally…I could wave off my shirking of intellectual responsibility for my own continued education based on hormones. I could rest on my dusty laurels of academic achievement by claiming to be intellectually incapable of managing. But pregnancy eventually ends. That means I’ll have to assume responsibility at some point for my own mental faculties faultiness.

The problem is, I’m a vain little thing. I dislike thinking that there is something I "can't" understand or master. I don't even like the word "Can't" in my vocabulary. And it isn't just a case of being unwilling to acknowledge the barriers of my own brain, it's with respect to the body as well. I have kick boxed at 8 months pregnant, just to show it was possible. Don’t ask me who I was showing, we all know it was me.

It’s a very simple case of pure self delusion. I dislike limitations on my intellect, talent and physical ability and seek actively to disprove them whenever they pop up. Once, I spent three days on a super hard Sudoku just because I wasn’t going to be defeated by a mental puzzle even if I had to Xerox it three times and start over to eventually get it right. I am annoyed whenever I fail to guess who done it in a mystery novel. My brain IQ may not be Mensa worthy, but my ego says it is, and that it’s just that I don’t test well.

So I don’t want to surrender even that 10% to pregnancy, no matter the facts. I have to own my sloth and slacker ways and keep trying to prove I could have been a mental contender. For example, I keep checking out Joyce’s Ulysses from the library, and trying to read it so I can then nail the book on a wall like a stuffed boar’s head trophy with the date it was successfully endured engraved on a brass plate. I never get very far before I have to return it. If I bought the damn thing, it would eliminate my exculpatory excuse for not finishing.

Every summer, I make great plans to learn Spanish and master American history the way my husband and son can recite it with love and accuracy, and settle for memorizing the list of presidents in chronological order, watching a few PBS historical documentaries and having suffered through two or three sides of a language tape, two Spanish, one French. (It’s all I could find in our collection of cassettes). Then I sniff out loud, mollifying my wounded self that is chaffing at all the work and my unwillingness to persist at the same time, “Well, I took Latin anyway, so it’s reasonable that I don’t know French or Spanish.” As if I could actually say anything in Latin.

And I eat smart food like blueberries and pomegranates and fish when it’s fresh. I read things that bore me and listen to classical music or jazz, straining in my disingenuousness to prove somehow, I’m urbane, sophisticated and elite intellectually, and not a mere suburban house mom. I want to be the kind of person who would get the jokes in the New Yorker so well, she never bothered to read them. “Too telling.” I’d sniff.

Oh. How I’d love to be able to know enough to be a snob about something; wine, politics, literature, baseball, music, art, anything at all. Someone who gets “it,” whatever “it” is.

In the meantime, I’m just assuming, whatever it is I haven’t learned or mastered, it’s because of that missing 10%.

To find the other ten percent, click on over to http://www.humor-blogs.com if you liked this post and give me a smilie...it will molify my ego which clearly is in need of some serious praise, and if not, well, humility is good for the soul.
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