mathmom's blog

One of the great things about this age is that I can show all the movies and TV shows I loved as a child to my kids.  The peril is that sometimes they really do not hold up. I watched MacGyver with the kids.  They really enjoy his can-do attitude he has and the way he turns chewing gum wrappers into explosives (whether or not the things he builds would be possible in real life).  They see why Dad has MacGyver as his nickname.  On the other hand, women really have one purpose in this series: to be rescued by McGyver.  Even the extremely smart scientists are there to be rescued.  I had found myself skeptical about whether women really had bad parts in TV shows from my past: I was wrong.  It is that bad.  Maybe in the later episodes their roles improve, but I doubt it.  It really makes me appreciate modern writing: it's so much more exciting when everyone gets to help. We watched The Goonies .  I remembered it as being a fun adventure ...

The other day we were looking at the school dress code.  After noticing how silly it was, she noted, "Well, it doesn't seem to forbid Starfleet uniforms." Indeed.  (Well, it might forbid some of the ones from The Original Series...)

Today Amanda was reading at the restaurant where we ate lunch.  I told her it was time to go and she looked around for a bookmark.  She picked up the ketchup packet and placed it delicately between the pages of her book... Immediately I was besieged by visions of books with ketchup stains all over the pages, goopy ketchup all over Amanda's face and hands, napkins failing to contain all the mess... "No no no no no!" I said, and then (and only then) Amanda saw what the problem was.  I always feel like Cassandra standing at the gates of Troy before the Trojan War, foretelling doom and gloom.  I am constantly warning children that if they don't eat they will be hungry during errands, if they don't drink they will get migraines, if they don't put away their shoes they will not be able to find them later, if they carry that down the stairs that way they will fall, and so on.   It is interesting, because biologically speaking their fore brains are not as well d...

I have been cleaning up my house in preparation for Christmas.  Don't laugh: it really needs some work, I go pretty slow, and I'm not opposed to cleaning something again if necessary.  For example, the pantry and fridge already need a bit of work even though I cleaned them in January. I cleaned out my dresser in May and found lots and lots of coins.  I gave them to Amanda and Luke to sort through while I decided what to do with them.  They separated out all the quarters, foreign coins, and really cool coins from the ordinary pennies, nickels and dimes.  But what to do with the rest? My sister suggested Coinstar, which they have at our local grocery store.  It used to be that Coinstar would take out 7 cents for every dollar you put in, which I have a problem with.  It's not a logical problem: I'd probably be paying them 21 cents to take my coins out of my house and give me something valuable, which is actually a pretty good deal.  On the other ...

Amanda and Luke just got back from a church camp.  I asked them when "lights out" was. Luke said that official lights out was at 9 but they stayed up later because their counselor read them stories.  "What kind of stories?"  "Dinosaur stories."  Um, ok?  "They were good dinosaur stories." "See," said Amanda, "that's the difference between the boys cabins and the girls cabins.  We read devotions." Luke replied, "Oh, ours were devotions too!" My mind cannot grasp the idea of devotional dinosaur stories for 10 year old boys, and probably that's ok.