7 Quick Takes

1.  Happy Birthday to Me.  It's been a good week, complete with a completely indulgent trip to the bookstore with 120$ in gift cards to run amok spending.  Ahhhh.  A brand new stack of books on the dresser to read.  I feel sooooo much better, I'll go work on reading the book I already started, The Life of Pi.   Then I can tackle Dad is Fat, The Writing Life, Elegance of a Hedgehog, the latest by Terry Pratchett and The Night Circus. 

2.  Prayers for a friend's child who isn't a child, but who suffered a horrible accident this week and today, will lose his leg as  a result.  This is a hard thing for anyone to face, so I ask for all of you to pray for this young man, his sister, his parents, his friends, as they help him through this trial that will affect the rest of his life.   The family has the gift of faith, and they need their friends, both known and unknown, to pray for his healing.

3.  Today, I heard a young man playing a Cello as we walked from the bookstore, it is like the difference between a loaf of French bread you buy in a supermarket, and a loaf you find waiting for you at a bakery.  We forget in this age of saturated stimulation, the beauty of clean clear notes that are simply themselves.  May have to go plink on the piano a bit.  Then I will be reminded that all art is hard until it is easy. 

4. My daughter came in from a walk, she'd caught a boxer turtle.  Thus I spent the morning explaining why we were not going to own a reptile. My son caught some fireflies.  We could not keep them either.  I may have to stop encouraging them to go outside. 

5.  She can't read, but she knows the important things.   I had fallen asleep reading on the couch that always makes anyone who lies down on it fall asleep. She woke me by placing a can of cake frosting on my chest and saying, "Mommy?  I like chocolate."   I have only myself to blame. 

6. Yesterday, to celebrate the 4th of July, I put on some Kate Smith.  Didn't know God Bless America was arranged by George Gershwin.  My younger children gathered around just to listen, they got that this was something special. 

7.  Then I hit them with John Phillips Sousa, and I had a pantomime band going for an hour while we fixed dinner, listening to She's a Grand Old Flag, Stars and Stripes and the Washington Post. 

We topped it with barbecue, fireworks, looking for fireflies and constellations.  All in all, a perfect 4th of July.  I'd thought about writing a post about what we need to consider, discuss, fight and address in this country, but the 4th is a day for counting our blessings, all the rest of it can be tabled for another day, not as a means of ignoring our problems, but as a recognition that we are still, the freest people in the world, with the greatest opportunity, and a proud tradition of overcoming even our own worst impulses after trials. 

Because We Need Beauty

Today, if I look at the news, it is hard not to fall into the sin of despair.   It is why we need things like sunsets and the laughter of children, the taste of chocolate, the color red, spring with all of its riotous outrageous color, and beauty saturating our souls, feeding them against the pain, the wrong we creatures made in God's image inflict on ourselves daily.  
So I began a post wherein I wrote out the lies that the serpent says, but it brought me lower, then I saw this lovely lovely post on my facebook wall.  I think it says what good art says, everything through less, everything through love even in the face of death.

Writer's Block and Spiritual Dryness

When I can't think of anything to post, there is a moment of absolute panic in my brain, like nothing will ever come forth that is smart, funny or interesting again.  I've said all I can say, it's all been poured out and the well is empty.

Writing on paper, I crumple up page after page.  Reading for inspiration reminds me of the fact that I am not inspired.   Then, the real desperation sets in, as I grasp at everything and anything, trying to do life such that I can then turn it into an article.  That only works if I actually forget I'm doing to create an article and start doing for real.  As long as I strain to create an experience to write about, the experience remains false and the words, uninteresting. 

No one writes about boredom because boredom is a great pain. It is also the plague of the modern age.  We seek stimulation because we want something we know not what, and think if we just click on the right link, we will feel less dull, less disconnected from the world, from others.  We want so much to belong.  We do not anymore understand the alienation we have being in this world because we no longer consider the reality of our own fallen nature, we no longer acknowledge that the world or ourselves were created to be something fuller, better, more beautiful than what we are as a result of sin.  We do not understand the holes in our hearts or lives because we no longer recognize them as holes.  We think those holes have always been there, they will always be there, they are simply part of who we are and what we are, like belly buttons, so we drift from page to page, from activity to activity, hoping at some point to feel more of that aliveness we know we're supposed to have.

Creative boredom is the acute feeling that you will never create again, and to any artist, it is akin to purgatory.  You may know the feeling will pass, but at the moment, the feeling feels permanent. This feeling is of course, vanity, as much if not most of writing is willing one's self to put words to paper, rather than waiting for inspiration to flash and drive the prose.  Even the art one previously created seems alien, like someone else did that, because the person now trying to create, could not approximate what was done then.  

It may seem silly to compare not having the thrill of crafting a whole world or a painting or whatnot, with receiving graces and blessings and spiritual gifts via a disciplined rigorous prayer life, but the artist is a creator and God is the ultimate artist, ergo lacking the creative spark to create is in a sense, losing a touch of the Divine that one dearly dearly loves.  Not having it at one's fingertips is akin to forgetting how to play a particular piano piece or throw a baseball or ride a bicycle, we don't think we shouldn't have this ability, we know we had it, ergo it is frustrating to not have it now. It isn't that it is lost, only that it is veiled and we do not know how long we will have to endure this separation from that particular divine gift.

In prayer life, spiritual dryness also results in a panic, a sense that the emptiness will always be empty, the disconnect will never be resolved.  You stare into your soul and see the cavernous hole and wonder how in Heaven's name, it can be made holy.   Prayer feels dull and routine.  You do it anyway, hoping at some point, you will forget yourself in the process and grace will take over.  But the spiritual dullness, like the creative dry spell, is an odd sort of gift, demanding that the soul persevere in the process absent the joy of inspiration.  It strengthens the will to obey, to grow, by not giving the simplest of rewards, the "feeling" of peace/grace that can come from prayer. 

One has to be secure enough in one's faith to know, this dark night of the soul is by design.  This dark night of the soul is a rare gift given to illustrate the soul's devotion to God.   The dryness of inspiration in the artist life is also a time to till the mental soil, feed the brain, trust that the talent will reveal itself again if one only persists.   But modern living distrusts stillness, distrust waiting, distrusts not doing, ergo it has trouble recognizing that this stillness in art or in prayer life, can be the fertile soil for much deeper work.   It is a hard thing to accept.  It is harder still to trust. 
The easier thing to do is give a fuller voice to any doubts, worries or anxieties that come with being a creator.  "You were never any good." "No one will read this." "You turned everyone off." "No one cares about what you write."  All of those ugly doubt locust thoughts that usually get packed in a box and sent to the farthest corner of the brain, sense weakness and come crawling out to eat at whatever is left of the heart. They will only feel satisfied when the artist gives up and they can burp smugly and say, "Told you so."    "You should never have tried in the first place." 

The spiritual dimension of the attack on the artist seems clear when one considers these same sorts of mental pests plague any soul when they feel they've somehow wondered out into the dessert and God seems very very far away.   My best advice?  Pray.  Work.  And don't worry.   The inspiration will come when you are least expecting, like falling in love, you will be struck by beauty and seek to create it.   Rest.  You may be exhausted.  Worrying about not being able to create will not help you become creative.  Allow time to grow your creative juices and trust that they will come.  

Lastly, start creating. Anything. Use colors or clay or legos, write a letter, a poem, or a stupid parody, Don't worry about if anyone will like it, children create to enjoy the creating process.   Write because the words are like blocks and you want to create a really cool castle with them.  Draw because you love the color.  Dance because you love the song.   Pray because you love the God who made you. 

The doing for its own sake, is the whole point.   

Cramming Catholicism

This week my daughter had to do some sketches for a theology class.  She was charged with crafting images that would capture the symbolic meaning of the sacraments in a new way.   "But what if I think the sacraments themselves capture everything they are without embellishment?" she asked.

While she could argue the danger of trivialization via simplistic or saccharine metaphors for the sacred, I still just smiled and said, "Yes, but then artists would be out of work."  She had the grace to laugh.  

But the reality remained, she felt stymied and stumped by the task. 

That morning, I'd overheard a snatch of a lecture on Pope Benedict and his writings.  My mom had given me Benedictus and I'd recently taken to reading the daily meditation.  However the book tended to wander from room to room with the business of our household and thus often weeks were lost in the process.  It remained an organic habit rather than a daily ritual.  I happened upon the book.  Opening to the date, the reflection was on Ezekiel and the creation of a truly human heart from our hearts of stone, and how Baptism in effect resulted in a spiritual heart transplant. 

I called my daughter and read the passage. 
She immediately got it and set to work with the final comment, "This is another example of God cheating Mom." 

God cheats she said.

He doesn't have to play fair, He's God.   He can forgive 70 times 7, He can pay the last workers in the vineyard the same as the first.  He can shine on the just and the unjust.  

God cheats with 1000 whispers to our heart every day of how He loves us, pointing out what He hopes we will see. 

My daughter came back with the first painting, the Sacrament of Baptism.  A font of water trickled over a heart of stone, turning whatever bathed in it into a human heart.  We talked a bit about how it could be better rendered, but the thought was there. 

God doesn't cheat.  He just knows we're not very good at studying for the test and likes to hold impromptu review sessions.

Truth, Blogging and Stories

We have a world filled now with stories, opinions, agendas and myths and it is getting harder to get at true information or hard facts and hard news despite the plethora of new media venues. What is, is not what gets repeated or represented; and so an irate mentally unhinged man becomes a poster child for a political movement that some who have power and prestige despise; people who march for life are not covered or are proclaimed to be overwhelmingly old when the vast majority of those who attend are in fact quite young. Nuance has been abandoned for ideology in our modern story telling venues except when it makes an opponent more unpleasant. So we can never know if the story we hear is true True, or myth, revealing truth but being itself untrue; or just a fable, flat out piece of propaganda or absolute lie.

Today, the President's policies and positions are defined by negative space using the theory that if we could see the alternate universe where what he did was not done, we'd understand how good we have it now; and the New York Times posits that part of the reason for all the disbelief and disconnect with the intellectual elites is the greater transparency of the world these days. Sarah Palin becomes a saint to some on the right and the personification of the very worst of all possible worlds to some on the left. President Bush is portrayed as the ultimate village idiot and anyone who doesn't froth at the very mention of his name is deemed a dupe, a rube or too blinded by personal or political loyalty. The very same level of love slavishly lavished on the current commander in Chief is considered pure patriotism and the result of clear thinking about policy.

But Truth is always much more interesting and messy than any of the popular narratives or spins being put through today. All of these people, Sarah, George, Barrack, all of them are possibly greater individuals than their enemies believe, and more flawed than their press releases would reveal. The same is true of all of us. Because the mainstream and alternative medias all wear biases, some with more transparencies than others; we have no sources of pure truth, only story. We get the White House Spin, the Republican's Counter point, the MSM’s angle, the take by Rush Limbaugh, John Stewart, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos. We get the Times and the Post and the Standard and the Examiner and Newsweek and News busters, the Drudge Report, Politico and Real Clear Politics and twitters and bloggers. It's like we're the cop at the accident and we get all the eye witness accounts and even the television footage from the traffic camera and still, we cannot know what actually happened because none of them know or can tell or would tell the whole story. We know incompletely but we forget that we know incompletely because we have so much information. So do all the people who report the stories in their zeal to be the ones telling the stories.

We still are telling stories rather than facing the hard messy truth in the media and politics.  Part of our problem is we’ve decided we can’t know truth. Epistemologists posit that there are multiple ways of perceiving and understanding the world that are culture/time/gender/politically dependent. As such, no one is necessarily lying when they give their spin; it's their way of knowing. The problem remains, that some think truth exists but is unknowable and some think truth does not exist and some think truth is, and can be known and some think truth is, but we can only know partly. All camps claim to be correct despite the readily apparent irony of that sentence. Everyone claims to have a deeper understanding of the world, or that others have a deeper understanding of the world; Rush's "I'm always right." Keith Olberman's "Worst Person of the Week," are two versions of the very same problem.  Everyone thinks they know better, but very very few spend any time discerning anything but that which validates their own opinion.

Ultimately, these multiple arguments about truth, its relevance and its reality matter in politics and life because they determine what we think and how we will act. If all the ways of knowing together make up the composite sketch of the actual reality; then we must perpetually amass as much info as possible looking for patterns from which we can draw conclusions that reveal more truth than otherwise. If reality is ultimately unknowable because we can't understand that which extends beyond our own personal cultural template's standard deviations; if there is no actual truth, then we should only be able to recognize our own echoes; everything else is background chatter or white noise. If such is the case, we are doomed to a perpetual tower of Babel. If we believe that truth actually exists and is knowable in whole or in part; then it becomes our personal obligation to recognize when our own bias is coloring our judgment and when we are seeing things clearly.

How can we know truth? We can know only if we are awake and fully cognizant of why we write and read and think and say certain things. Truth is hard like a diamond. Life or death. Honesty or not. Yes or no. Truth has actions which echo it. "By their fruits you shall know them." A school that values excellence will show by the books in the library, the papers on the wall and the quality of instruction. A school that has lost heart is easy to spot. The same holds for an institution or an athlete or a book. You can see when there is blood in the bricks, sweat and grit on the face, heart in the words that is the art of the piece. The reasons why something happens or someone acts may be myriad, but the truth is still visible and can be seen if we seek.  Truth will out, it reveals dedication, intent, process and time.  Ultimately, if we hold that truth exists, we ought to pursue it ruthlessly as the rare edifying jewel that it is, even if it means we get a less instant gratification and happily ever after style gratification ending. 

Lives, all lives are messy even if they are lived simply; and thus we should be merciful to the foolish, the greedy, the poor spirited, the angry, the proud, the rich, the righteous and the self serving even as we discover them being foolish, greedy, poor spirited, angry, proud, hoarding, righteous and self serving.  All of us need that measure with which we measure to be larger than our lives, because all of us can see everyone else's splinters but none of our own planks. We need God to be unfair in our favor and so we should be with each other and with our hearts and words towards even those who anger or disappoint us.  We ought to recognize that God sees all our messy stories for the messy stories that they are, and still sees through them for the distilled truth that they reveal; how much or how little we believe; how much or how little we seek truth and pursue wisdom, and how much or how little we love.

Speech by Arch Bishop Chaput on the Modern Age, Art and the Nature of Man

It's long but so rich that I urge you to read it all. I'm going to have to check out the writers he mentioned. Click on the title and have a great Sunday.

Real Impressionists at Work

Anyone who has ever taken an art class knows one of the most basic of teaching techniques is imitation. To learn how to paint, one copies the methods employed by the masters. Through the dabbing of dots of paint, one learns how technique influences form and how carpal tunnel syndrome existed long before portable computers became ubiquitous. The overarching idea is to gain an appreciation for method while forming one’s own judgments about how to best express one’s own concepts of motion, form, color and mood. “Wrapping a line around one’s think.” Sr. Betty used to say.

In the forming of an actual person’s personality, the approach is much the same. One of the jobs of parenting is to expose children to beauty. When driving, a father or mother must draw attention to the scenic vista, the historical marker or the local color shop that seems iconic to the geographic area one is passing through. The problem however, is that being shown beauty does not always have its intended effect. For instance, if I show my kids a mountain, they want to know if we can go skiing or hiking. If I show my kids a river, “When are we swimming?” or “Can we fish?” pops up. Farms trigger “When do we eat?” and “Can we pick our own?” responses. Animals alongside the road invoke clamors for pets, rides or visits to the local zoo.

With every attempt to enrich our children, the responses are immediate and beyond what was intended, resulting in the adults having to either ratchet back expectations or dim enthusiasm. We took the kids to a museum. The natural consequence “Can we paint?” made me shiver involuntarily. I could see my floor covered with blue spats, at least four outfits worth of laundry, three full baths with hair wash, seventeen muddy watercolors in my future that I must simply adore and possibly frame, and the very real possibility of my kitchen walls receiving the Jackson Pollack treatment. Yet the Mom gene in me always ignores these clarion cries and says “Yes.”

Things were going smoothly until one child decided her arm needed to be purple. This started a trend. I was now the proud parent of a Blue Man Group franchise. If I could have sold tickets to have people stare at my oddly hued offspring as they made caterwauling sounds while playing Wii’s Rock Band, this might have been okay. As it was, two hours of scrubbing later still left me with vaguely tinged children, like easter eggs in that PAAS dye that haven’t been allowed to sit. It was winter so long sleeved shirts and gloves mitigated what might have otherwise been an awkward moment at Sunday mass, though my three year old sported a skin tone that might have been considered jaundice if it hadn’t been so Trix cereal yellow in hue.

Now, the artists in my home seize every moment possible to cut paper, glue things and add little extras to our walls. I should buy stock in Mr. Clean, as he and I are constant companions, scrubbing the walls to erase what would be otherwise permanent murals paying homage to toddlerhood. I had come to an uneasy acceptance of this situation until one daughter brought me to see her art. “It’s you.” She beamed proudly, and I gulped at my moral dilemma. Erase the portrait offered with love or leave a scrawl of pencil and crayon clearly visible first thing when you walk in the house.

Wrapping a think around the lines, I grabbed a paint brush. Sure the work was untouchable before but that was when there wasn’t actual paint involved. Within minutes, I had a white door again and several pleased artists, including the revisionist who was now reveling in her “White period.” However, before they get too carried away with thinking that they can redecorate the house, I think I’ll take them out in the car and maybe point out a mountain or a farm or a river.

It will give my husband a fighting chance to clear out all the crayons.

Pottying by Numbers

Because we have one newly trained toddler, I'm now trying for two. My apologies to anyone eating breakfast or lunch or even thinking about eating while reading this blog. You have been warned. I will try to be delicate.

There are three problems with introducing a young toddler to the art of going the bathroom.

1) They will show no interest and you will be frustrated.
2) They will show excessive interest in the products and you will be appalled.
3) They will show no interest in going and tons of interest in the product and you will be both frustrated and appalled.

Guess which one I got.

We were giving showers and my new potty trainer had gone. While I was stripping her for the shower, her younger sister toddled in, delighted to see that a shower was pending. She began to strip of her own accord. Checking the water and preparing the first, I had not yet emptied the pot. Then from the corner of my eyes, I saw someone...painting...on my door.

"There is No Painting with Pee!" I managed to get out before grabbing the brush and tossing it in the trash. I decided not to answer "Why?" despite repeated requests.

The first daughter got in the shower. I took off the diaper of the second daughter and caught her in the act and decided to plop her on the potty. It would be a fake success, but visually undeniable. She didn't want to sit, she wanted to squat, but I wouldn't let her move. It took five minutes, by which time; the first daughter explained she wanted to see.

I toweled off the first, thinking she could reinforce the praise I heaped on the second. "She made a butterfly." my newly showered daughter said. "My poop is just rocks." There was a touch of envy. The creator was curious and considering what this strange thing might be. One could see the wheels turning...where's my paint brush...followed by a hint of trauma as I swooped in to throw out the proof before too much fascination was shown. It was then my second daughter got her shower.

Evidently, this whole experience was too much for her, as she finished her business in a diaper to avoid any further scrutiny of her bowel movements. I for one appreciated her discretion and have tabled further potty training sessions for the younger for the time being. But I do know one thing, her motivational prize...a pack of water colors and a pad of paper, but I'm going to eliminate the yellow and brown paints just to be safe.

It's Not Just My Kids...but it Could be

Most of these stories are plucked from my life with slight modifications. Sometimes, I get stories from family or friends. Here's one I got from sitting at a softball game. Much thanks to K.

They had come home from a carnival. The kids had a blast. All three had balloons. Going to the kitchen, one of them decided her balloon lacked style. It needed detailing. So, she broke out the markers. Her sisters quickly followed suit. The balloons now were a multitude of colors, heavy on the purple. Play could resume.

Five minutes later, the balloons floated up to the ceiling.

It's not quite how one sponge paints a wall to create texture but it was a conversation piece.

I'm now imagining my little darlings decorating our living room which is two stories high via balloons. I'm also envisioning me attempting to attach a Mr. Clean bar to a pool cue duck taped to another pool cue and scrubbing the ceiling from the second floor.

Memo to me: No balloons. Secondary memo to me: No markers! Third Memo to me: Surrender and paint the walls purple now.

More fun than a home makeover! Humor-Blogs.com!

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.
Humor-Blogs.com

Mental Dim Sum and Sons

No unifying theme today, just some odds and ends I found amusing and in some cases, profound.
If you've never eaten Dim Sum, think of having a dinner entirely of appetizers. Heart's Delight or Jewels that tug on the heart is the concept to consider here --Tapas, or French courses, the idea is little snatches of yumminess that satisfy.

First: Happy birthday to my four year old. He's potty trained, so I can officially celebrate the anniversary of his birth. He told me, I'm allowed.

Second: We went out to dinner last night and the waiter showed up with a sunday and Sombrero for my birthday boy. When they put on the hat, he stuck his lower lip out and shrunk down to the size of a ball, he looked like a Mexican mushoom with that big hat on his head, but when the ice cream showed up...suddenly that hat was his very favor thing.

Third: And now a word from our sponsor. I don't get many comments. I don't get huge amounts of traffic. Aproximately 20 or so people visit this blog a day. The high water mark was 106 and that was with a serious plug from the Ironic Catholic, a brilliant blog I admire greatly.

The other day, I knew I had arrived on the blogosphere. I got my first Spam comment. I have printed it here minus their plugs to give due homage to the people who indicated I had entered the big leagues...it was in response to the Sous Chef piece.

"3/10/08
A critical underpinning of a healthy diet is unque... A critical underpinning of a healthy diet is unquestionably the consumption of fresh vegetables and fruits. Unfortunately, many adults do not like these fine foods - so kids are the concern. Anyone interested in getting kids to develop a friendly attitude towards fruits and vegetables should take a look at a new book called “Insert title here.” Great for kids of all ages – children even learn their alphabet through produce poems and then go on to more mature activities. Out only six months it is already being used in educational programs. It is coauthored by best-selling food writer Sir SPAM A Lot and Other Notable Quotable writer SPAM Jr. You can learn more at SPAM SPAM SPAM AND MORE SPAM.com
Publish Reject "

I'm sure it's a splendiferous book, postively "unque" and I'd have even given it a looksee if I thought a human had read my post.

And lasty,
Why I should really be both terribly pleased and worried:

Found my middle son's artwork.
He had drawn a rosary.

He made a list entitled "Pray For Every Night"
Here is the list, punctuation included.

1. boy twins.
2. Mom and Dad.
3. poor people.
4. My brother.
5. Everyone!!

I am in big big big trouble.

Don't forget, you can find more laughs at http://www.humor-blogs.com/! They're funny even when I'm not.