Fantastic, Jimmy Fallon

scatamoosh, scatamoosh can you do the fandango

Happy Thanksgiving, boys and girls!

There's something so reassuring about this graph. Enjoy.

Riboflavin

JB always says "riboflavin" to make me smile when I'm sad. He's done this for the past 18 years (good god. I've known this man my entire adulthood.) So here's a little Dilbert in honor of that strange  tradition.

Indian pow wow

A goes to a precious little preschool. I love it. So I guess it was a blessing in disguise when she missed the age cutoff for our neighborhood school by one day last August. Still, would've been nice to save that tuition $$.

Anyway, yesterday was their Indian Pow Wow, and it pretty much went down EXACTLY how my Thanksgiving celebration did when I was in Pre-K. Which was about 6 eons ago.

So the kids work Indian vests, painted with tempra. They had little feather headdresses and war paint decorated their sweet faces. Each child had an "Indian Name". Audrey's was Happy Dancer (!)

The program started with songs that celebrated every stereotype about native Americans known to man - the kids sung about shaking their tomahawk, banging the drum....and having a great meal with the Pilgrims.

Then we adjourned to a little "table" (actually, just a square of kraft paper taped to the ground), where we had cheese cubes, turkey lunchmeat, carrot sticks, grapes and cheetos for lunch. I mean, other than the cheetos, which were obviously part of the first thanksgiving, this was probably not the most historically accurate thanksgiving meal.

Sweet, sweet.

Adolescence is coming

My beautiful S is 10 1/2, and we are already seeing signs of what's to come in adolescence. Some of the little girls in her class are developing, and she knows of at least one who has already started her period. Seems really early to me and perhaps ignorantly, I attribute this to all of the hormones in our food supply.....

So JB and I have an ongoing debate. He is able to get her ready, out of the house with absolutely no conflict - on-time to school. In fact, when she gets the beat the clock award each semester (for no tardies), he takes the blue ribbon. Problem is, they leave a mile-wide path of destruction in their wake: unmade beds, pajamas under the couch, lost hairbrushes...and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

My "side" is that S needs to start learning some personal accountability and helping us to pick up her messes so it doesn't appear as though we live in a crack den when we return home each evening. The problem is, anytime I ask S to pick up after herself, no matter how calmly and kindly the request is made, the end result is a screaming fit. I'm really not exagerrating. Every freakin time.

JB argues that this is just the beginning and we're in for much more serious battles regarding skirt length, boys, curfews.....and "my way" isn't working. I argue that if she doesn't learn some maturity now, with simple tasks like picking up her PJs, there's no way we can expect her to make good choices when things get serious. And avoiding the conflict isn't making it go away.

I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between, and things will get worse before they get better. What next?

lamebook

Holy cow. this is priceless. Thanks lamebook.