Pop Quiz

What's that?  You didn't study?  You didn't know there would be a test in this blog?  Well, I'm sure you've picked up enough wisdom over the course of your years to at least pass. 

1. Circle the word that best describes a crisis situation.

a) missing shoes.       
b) having to wear a hand me down shirt.
c) two toddlers running with uncapped markers.

2. When is the best time to start to do homework?

a) after a snack and a brief break. 
b) when your sisters start watching Wonder Pets.
c) when Mom says it's bedtime. 
d) When Mom is drafting volunteers for dishes and laundry.

3. Your brother falls and skins his knee while bringing up the garbage can.  He goes to get first aid from Mom.  You should:

 a) bring up the can so he doesn't have to do it 
 b) leave the can because it's still his job or
 c) put a recycling bin there for him to bring up because your other sister took up his trash can and this will make it fair.

 4. Dinner is in five minutes. It is chicken.  You hate chicken. You should:

 a) wail, fall on the ground and sulk loudly until you get sent to your room so as to avoid eating.
 b) ask for an entirely different meal that would require at least 30 more minutes of cooking in the presence of others who will then make the same request.
 c) begin making an entirely different meal that would require at least 30 minutes of cooking, resulting in onlookers also beginning the same messy process.
 d) None of the above.

 5.   Asking mom to stop at the store and get book socks is best done:

  a) en route home from school.
  b) after 10:30 pm

 6.  True or False: Mom can go without sleep.  Circle one. 

 7. If you receive an allowance of seven dollars and want to buy a magic deck which cost $9.99, you should:
     
   a)  use your credit card since this is important. Hope that mom just pays the bill and doesn't notice.
   b) soft sell by telling your father about all these new cool cards that would enhance his deck such that   he agrees to go to the store and hope the enthusiasm of the moment carries through to getting you your deck that will beat his even if he gets the cards you suggested.
   c) save your money for two weeks.
   d) persuade your younger brother to give you some of his money and you'll get him some sweet cards in the process.
   e) offer to do extra chores to get the extra scratch and butter up mom with a foot rub.  (Hint: it's never been tried).

   8) When a four year old comes slamming into you with an 8 year old bearing down red faced and hand raised and your mother asks, "What is going on?"  you say: 
 
   a) she was in my room messing up my things.
   b) I just wanted to pat her on the head.
   c) you don't say anything, you nudge your four year old sister so that she accidentally falls to the floor and hope Mom thinks it was just an accident.

  9. Mom has collapsed on the couch.  You should:
     
   a) wake her up and ask if she will decide whose turn it is to control the remote.
   b) not wake her up and begin making a cake in the kitchen at 9:15 pm.
   c) build a tower of blocks on her stomach to see how tall it can get before she wakes up.
   d) wake her up and say we all over slept and that she needs to load the car so you can get to the metro on time.
   e) be severly punished for having attempted any of the above.

  10. Mom went grocery shopping.  You are hungry.  You should:

     a) unload the car until you get to something choice, then begin eating.
     b) look over the receipt and figure out that there isn't anything you like, so you start making pudding with the fresh milk.
     c) suggest going to McDonald's in the presence of toddlers, ensuring a chorus of requests.
     d) put away the groceries and then once Mom leaves the kitchen, devour everything in sight while offering bounty to any other children who pass by such that shopping will be needed again in three days rather than six.

Now, the answers: 1: (c), 2: If you can do your homework sans assisstance, any answer but c or d, 3: One of these really happened, bonus points if you can guess which one. 4: (d) Offer to do the dishes if you can have a bowl of cereal instead. 5: Trick question, neither.  6: False.  She does, but it's not good. 7: Given the number of magic cards in this house, only (c) and only if you also do (e). 8: None of the above...ever.  9: I'm never lying down on the couch again.  10) (e) only buy healthy options until the child wearies of asking and says yes to the carrots, apples or yogurt.

Don't forget, essays on the necessity of bed time will be due Tuesday.  Have a great weekend.
 

Go You!

It's Thursday so it's Small Success day over at Family and Faith Live!  Moms have to take victories where we find them so without further adieu...

1) Got the kids off to school with all the needed supplies, materials, special projects, etc. 
2) Started saying an (almost) daily rosary.
3) Finished a good book a friend gave me.  It is a strange thing that I've been writing for about five years now, but reading has always been a fitful pleasure for me.  Normally pregnancy robs me of my capacity to put two thoughts together, but these days, it's letting me read.  
4) Mailed a present to my niece who turns five today before today such that it might get there for today. I hope my mom was sitting down when she read this one. 
5) Fixed a toilet.  Not glamorous but I did it so right now, I'm feeling like the female equivalent of Bob Villa.
6) Went on a date this week, husband took me out for lunch on Saturday.  We're going to get ourselves back in the habit we've declared because having adult time was really nice. 
7) Am doing reasonably well on my sugars, will call them in today.  Wish me luck.

Have a success?  Go share it over at Family and Faith live!  You might inspire and you'll discover there were a whole lot of victories in the past week that otherwise, might have gone unheralded. 

Escaping the Literary Amazon Island

A Rant but then, it's my blog.

There is a trend in women’s fiction in particular that troubles me. Insert the most recent best seller title into the following formula: A woman discontent with her lot in life, whether self-determined or the result of outside oppressive forces and historical or cultural societal demands beyond her capacity to at the moment defy, recognizes her fundamental disconnect.  She's unhappy. Suddenly a crisis is either foist upon her or of her own making which seems to lead out of the mendacity of her daily existence. This journey exposes her to knowledge, skills, people, ideas and surprises. Our plucky heroine even marvels to herself at how easily her prior barriers which were so fixed, now seem so tantalizingly thin, and so she passes through, leaving all old thoughts and rules and obligations behind and begins her new adventure; joyous at her new freedom. She discovers the old mold of her prior to the experience no longer fits, and thus she abandons all that came with that self in favor of newly invented creature she could be somewhere else.

But what none of these stories can tell, is why the cycle will not continue. The tedium of domestic life, even emancipated domestic life can eventually become stale if dazzle, newness, fulfillment and ease are the criteria. I can cite The Piano, Bridget Jones, How Stella Got her Groove back, Eat Pray Love, and any number of other tomes that explore the same conceptual theme, but none supply an answer for preventing a perpetual cycle. The stories end because the searcher stops searching, thinking she has found contentment in her new life with her new lover, her new job, her new locale.

But there is no reason to think that these female Odesseuses have found their male version of Penelope, since arguably, in most of these books, they left a hearth and home behind at the beginning on the presumption that the discontent stemmed from the job, the man, the role, the expectations or lack thereof, and the children. The discontent in these women’s hearts stemmed from their own hearts being unwilling participants in the lives they lived. The story then goes on to allow these lost selves to sate their imaginations and ambitions and longings at all costs; and the sated selves then find that elusive happiness they were missing before. Color appears in their cheeks, sparkle in their eyes, youth in their hearts because they were just in the wrong place before and now they are in a place of their own making.

For the modern writer of women’s fiction, fulfillment is found in carving one’s own destiny, painting the room, setting the hours, limiting the world and its access to what one wishes; it’s all about choice and the opportunity to choose itself.  Bridges of Madison County tries to have it both ways where she finds fulfillment in having had that one night of passion, and the memory of that one night sustains her throughout the years of dull pseudo fidelity to her husband and care for her children.

In a Godless world fulfillment cannot reside in the hearth or husband and children or job, for those require long term sacrifice and limiting one's own capacity to choose one's own fate; obligations are chains and restrictions, liberty is all. Happiness in this type of mindset comes not from community or commitment or selflessness, but from the endless exploring, being out on the sea searching without a compass or fixed star for guidance. It doesn’t matter what you choose as long as you do the choosing. So while they may close the story with pulling into a port and settling down again, the same staleness will return; their new lovers will have faults and problems, the new children will impinge upon these females’ newly invented selves.

Helen tires of Paris. If the pages extended beyond "The End" for five or ten years, we'd find the heroine considering this new Eden she crafted to replace the old Eden she forsook, just as dull. This Sisyphean dilemma eventually leads the lost self back to the ocean to try again or finally in fatigue and despair, to reside on the island with Circe, gloatingly self-reliant, indulged in all things but also beholden to no one and convinced of her own superiority.   The heroine chooses "None of the Above," and thus proclaims her permanent immortality as an independent goddess crafted in her own image, allowing her to warp men into lesser beings as fits her world view.

Maybe I'll dust off my Percy, Lewis, O'Connor and Joyce.   Ahhhhhh. Now....I feel much better.