Little Brother came home from school today with a religion project he’d made on the computer. For November, the month of All Saints, the students in his class had found quotes from different saints and made signs with pictures of the saints and their quote.
Here’s my son’s:
St. Martin de Porres
Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness.
For a boy who thinks that just about ANYTHING is preferable to cleanliness, these are definitely words to live by.
Little Brother came home from the hospital today with a giant bag full of syringes and test strips and meters and all manner of things–just in time for lunch. Nothing like jumping right into things with both feet!
When they told us yesterday that we could take him home today, I panicked. I liked it a lot better when the wonderful nurses at CHOP were holding our hands through the process. They had us figure it all out, but they could confirm our evaluations of how many carbs were in a meal and how many units of insulin to dose.
I knew that when we took him home, we were on our own for all this stuff. It’s like bringing home a newborn when you have never held a baby before, much less fed, bathed or diapered one.
And the temptation to rely on packaged foods with easy-to-read carb counts on labels is high when I have to do higher math while I’m cooking dinner.
Here’s what we ate tonight:
Vegetable blend: carrots, broccoli, cauliflower
Caesar salad
I can’t believe I have to add carbs for garlic!
I’m not looking for a pity party. I saw enough very, very sick children (and their families) at CHOP in 3 days to realize how very, very blessed we are that Little Brother is doing so well. We can’t make this go away, but we can help him live with it.
Little Brother is rehearsing for another show: this time it’s the Christmas play at the community theater. He’s playing Charlie Bradley in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
Last night he found out what he has to bring for his costume:
I told him that he needed to check with the director about the church clothes. Normally he wears a golf shirt and khakis to church (then tops it off with his altar-server robe.) I mentioned that the director might have had a button-down shirt in mind when she requested he bring church clothes.
He replied, “If I have to wear a tuxedo, I’m going to flip out.”
I’m cooking pot roast for dinner, so there’s a bag of onions on the table. I’ve been trying this unique storage method for onions and garlic–so far so good. I keep the onions and garlic in paper bags in a hanging wire basket in the basement; holes punched in the bags allow air to circulate.
So Little Brother wants to know why there’s a bag with holes in it on the table.
“It’s for the onions. They need to breathe.”
“Onions aren’t alive. Dead things don’t breathe.”
“Right. Well, the air needs to get around them so they don’t rot.”
“Does it work?”
“I think so.”
“Oh! They should put holes like that in coffins, then, so dead people wouldn’t rot.”
“They’d rot anyway.”
“Why?”
At this point I’ve had about all I can take of this strange conversation. “Because they’re not onions!”
Little Brother is downstairs watching a football game that’s nothing but background noise to me. Turns out it’s Giants v. Cowboys.
My mom is a Giants fan; my brother is a Dallas fan.
“I bet Nannie’s having nightmares right now,” Little Brother observed. “The Giants have 3 turnovers already! (Insert painfully-detailed play-by-play of all 3 Giants turnovers here. The kid is going to grow up to be football’s answer to Dick Vitale.)
“Do you want to call her?” She loves to talk sports with him.
“No way! She’s probably really mad right now. I don’t want to take any chances….Plus, she might not even answer the phone.”
There’s a commercial on SportsCenter that both creeps me out and makes me worry on behalf of my sons.
It’s a hair-removal ad, and while I can’t remember the name of the product (which goes to show that the ad isn’t doing its job), the subject matter gives me pause.
In this ad, several beautiful women are introduced, along with the amount of body hair they prefer on their boyfriends, who are more than happy to go along with the women’s wishes.
It’s creepy. There’s no other way to describe it.
And the ad makes me think: if the tide were turned, if a commercial showed several handsome men making demands regarding their girlfriends’ physical appearance, you’d have an awful lot of people up in arms. They’d rant about it on The View. The ad would be decried as offensive, abusive and degrading to women.
I’ll admit, if Middle Sister and I were watching TV together and a commercial objectifying women was aired, I’d say something. I want her to know that she is more than a pretty face and a female body.
It’s OK, these days, to objectify guys. We’re all about empowering girls, which is great for the girls, and I’m happy that my daughter has the chance to participate in sports, study pre-calculus and marine biology, and be the stage manager for the school play. She has earned these opportunities on her own merits–not on her looks, not by virtue of her gender.
We want to make sure our daughters have a healthy understanding of themselves as young women, that they grow up with good self-esteem and aren’t willing to be pushed around or bullied by the men with whom they are building a relationship.
Don’t we want the same for our sons? Don’t we want them to be able to accept themselves for who they are–intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and physically?
Men who demand that women in relationships with them make changes to their physical appearance are considered sexist. But in commercials like this, women who demand that men in relationships with them make changes to their physical appearance are admired. That’s pretty scary. The double standard hasn’t gone away; it’s just changed its focus.
As Murph (of Murph and the Magic Tones in The Blues Brothers) said before signing off, “Don’t you go changin’.”
We went out to dinner tonight to celebrate TheDad’s birthday. At his choice of restaurant, many walls were decorated with Old West portraits–except for the ones by the bar, which held large TVs featuring SEC football.
Middle Sister mused aloud about whether, in 150 years, our portraits would be hanging on some restaurant wall somewhere. “Would we even know? I wonder if those people know we’re looking at their pictures right now.”
I didn’t think that we’d know about it if this happened. “How would we be able to keep track of all the places where our digital images wind up?”
Little Brother disagreed. “We’d know about it in heaven!”
“How?”
“God has excellent eyes!”
While putting food on his plate at dinnertime tonight (we eat buffet style), Little Brother dropped a piece of chicken on his foot.
Fortunately, he was wearing socks and I was able to remove the chicken before the sauce soaked through the sock and burned his toes.
He ran upstairs for fresh socks as the rest of us sat down to eat. Returning to the table, he remarked, “It’s a good thing I didn’t get food on both my socks. I had this other sock in my drawer, and it’s the same as the socks I was already wearing, but I couldn’t find the wife…”
The other day Little Brother opened a Fanta, and I made the mistake of informing him that Fanta is Pope Benedict’s favorite soda.
I also made the mistake of mentioning that Pope Benedict is called “Pope Emeritus” now that he’s retired. Now he’s fascinated by the term “emeritus,” which he somehow thinks is a term that can only be applied to popes.*
He has just declared that he wants to be a professional soccer player (we knew that) and when he’s a soccer player emeritus, he’ll star in commercials.
Aspirations to the papacy have also been mentioned. I guess that’s for when he’s too old for soccer and the commercials deals run out. “I’m not going to be a pope, because there’s only one, Mom. Get your facts straight.”
That’s a lot of ambition right there. However, his hopes of playing on a national soccer team outside the USA have been dashed by the cold, hard facts: both TheDad and I were born in New Jersey. We’re not immigrants. “I was kinda hoping Dad was born in Poland….are you sure?”
How does he even know the eligibility rules for national soccer teams?
*See the beauty of Kid Logic? Adults had no idea, before this past February, that “emeritus” could be associated with a pope. Kids, though, just take such things in stride.
Little Brother is a soccer fan. This morning he announced, “Mom, the World Cup is going to be in Brazil next year! Can I go?”
Denied.
I thought his request was funny, so I was telling Middle Sister about it. She replied, “I’d love to go! I’d bring my friend. She speaks Portuguese. And I’ll learn how to ask where the bathroom is. I’m pretty sure it’s almost just like Spanish.”
“Right. The last thing I’m going to do is send the two of you and one other teenager to Brazil.”
Little Brother, for whom Hope Springs Eternal, had a plan. “Wait! Aren’t you and Dad going to celebrate your 25th anniversary soon?”
“No. It’ll be 23 in January.”
“Oh. Well, I have an idea! You and Dad can go to Brazil on your honeymoon!”
“And I’m guessing that you and Middle Sister would be the chaperones?”
“Well, no. We would go to the soccer game, and you and Dad can go visit that big Jesus on the mountain. I thought of everything! It’s a great plan! What could possibly go wrong?”