Month: November 2008

what we have here is a failure to communicate

Doug: “Why are you so stressed?” Me: “I have a million things to get done and most of them feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.” Doug: “Why don’t you narrow the list down a bit.” Me: “Well, there are three things that absolutely, positively must get done in the next two days.” […]

Large Family Equilibrium

In a large family, the Equilibrium Principle states that the number of your own children going to sleep at other people’s houses is balanced by the reverse reaction of other people’s children coming to sleep at your house. The number of children in the household remains constant. Exceptions to this rule occur on birthdays and […]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Thanksgiving meal conversation topics in order of appearance: recipes and cooking, cranberries, relatives with cancer, newspapers vs the Internet, Mumbai, Twitter, books, old people, guns, children, video games, riding lawn mowers and Christmas.

anything to stay awake

Amy is going through a very annoying sleep avoidance phase. Every single night she uses all the traditional excuses to avoid bed and then she creates some new reasons to stall. If Amy is to be believed, every night at bedtime she is suddenly starving to death, dying of thirst, hot, cold, itchy and in […]

school projects are for parents

In theory, school projects are a good idea. Instead of just spending weeks learning that A+B=C, students make something that applies the concept. In reality, the projects are almost always done primarily by parents while children watch them and listen to an endless lecture about why they are doing this or that. “…and what do […]

Calls from the teacher = Not a good thing

I love caller ID. Without even picking up the phone, I see one of the children’s schools on the ID and I know something is wrong. Is it the middle school? Noah must be having a nosebleed. Is it the high school? Sarah must have lost her cell phone. Is it the elementary school? Maybe […]

subjective or objective?

One of the middle school teachers told the class that the United States is THE most racist country in the world. I tried to imagine what criteria was used to make this assessment. Clearly, sexism didn’t factor into the equation at all, because women and girls in other countries are routinely raped, mutilated, killed, bought […]