Busy

Last Friday, the girls' little recital was great. It was at a small church (where they take voice lessons) and it was a "Valentine's Evening." There were about 13 or 14 selections. Many were performed by members of the church choir. The "audience" was primarily people over 60 (the exceptions being the young students and their families). The women of the church had all baked and brought desserts. The strawberries were the best! The Strawberry Festival starts this week. I love seeing the giant strawberries grown. I like eating the strawberry shortcake even better! I'm hoping to go see the Christian group, "Casting Crowns" next Saturday as they're playing at the festival.

I definitely have a busy week. I'm off to South Carolina to see John and Gwyn and my parents. I'll get a chance to see my big sister, Elaine, too (for a few hours) before I leave Thursday afternoon. I'll drive to the Florida/Georgia border Thursday night (it's about 1/2 way) and then I'll drive home Friday morning. Next Friday night we all get to go see "Wicked!" I can't wait! We've had the sound track since last Christmas, we bought the tickets last February, and we now are finally going to see the play. The hardest part will be remembering our manners and not singing along with the actors. The music is really wonderful. "Defying Gravity" is one of my favorites. It'll be fun to get all dressed up and go to the Performing Arts Center together. We haven't been in quite a while.

Then next Saturday is the Strawberry Festival and then it's back to normal chaos.

The Imp won her school's competition of the Readers' Digest WordPower Challenge. She then took an online test at school, and she finished in the top 100 6th, 7th and 8th graders in Florida so is off to the state competition on March 19. I'm thrilled. The Imp isn't so excited. She looks at it as a place to fail. I look at it as a place for her to shine, no matter how she does at the actual competition. She does not seek the spotlight like her sister does. As a spotlight hound myself, I don't always understand her.

Lent has started. I found it very telling about our society (and how our religious holidays have become so secular) when the Imp came home from the store last Sunday with a box of Peeps. She wanted to eat them before Lent started since she knew she wouldn't during Lent. I don't know, some thing's off-kilter when you buy Easter candy before Lent which is the time to prepare for Easter. The fact that Lent is 7+ weeks long, tells a little something about the commercialization of all things today. People hunger for fulfillment, but few realize that only God can bring that fulfillment. So many will try to fill up on things and activities. Is the current obesity problem a consequence of Americans turning to food to fill them up instead of personal growth and a relationship with God? I just read yesterday that the average American child drinks 65 GALLONS of soda a year. Whoa! That's a lot of soda. As I was exclaiming about this stat, the Imp tells me many of her classmates, including a close friend of hers, have coke for breakfast! Huh? Her friend goes through a drive-thru on the way to school and gets hash browns and coke each morning. Yuk! I feel my arteries clogging and the pounds settling on me just thinking about eating that each day. The Imp, seeing how appalled I was, defended her friend by saying, "They're so busy they don't have time to cook like we do." I didn't argue with her, but thought "Breakfast doesn't require a lot of cooking time...a box of cereal and milk is a lot healthier and cheaper than McD's every morning." I also know that when I was working we did eat out more than we do now, but I still planned a menu each week and we still had most meals at home. But that is one of the reasons I quit teaching, so I could contribute to the well-being of my family by making our lives less hectic. By being at home during the week, I can get grocery shopping done, do laundry, go to my Bible Study during the day and not have to take away from family time to do that. Our evenings and weekends are still full, but they aren't frantic because I view the 3 pm - 9pm time-frame as my prime work time. I'm not too exhausted to help with homework, listen to little daily problems with friends or at school, make dinner. The saying "If momma isn't happy, nobody's happy," has truth to it. I do set the tone of the family. If I'm calm, the family is much calmer than when I'm stressed out. Hubby is wonderful and is a very hands-on dad, but I'm the one who keeps tabs on the emotional well-being of each individual in the house and the family in general. That's my job, and I like it.

I'm obviously an advocate of stay-at-home moms. I stayed at home for 6 years after the Singer was born. When the Singer was 6 and the Imp 2 1/2, financially things started to fall apart for us (including renters moving out in the middle of the night with no notice). We decided that I would go back to work. It was a hard decision because teaching is a very demanding job, and one that is rarely confined to the time in the school building. But when I went to work, it was with the idea of achieving financial stability (not wealth) so I could then be at home once again. When I was working, we did not change our life-style in that my salary was used to cover working expenses (day care, wardrobe expenditures, increase eating out, gas, etc) and the rest of my salary was but towards our debt and our savings. So after 6 years in the classroom, I could easily leave without an impact on our standard of living. We bought our house with the idea of being able to afford it on one salary. Trust me, the sellers wanted us to upgrade and kept telling us we would qualify for a bigger house, with more extras. We kept saying, "No." We knew what we wanted.
I know there are people who have to have both parents working to make it. But I also know many more people who claim that both parents have to work but in reality they have put themselves in that position. Yes, if you buy a 3500 square foot home, you may not ever be able to make it on one salary. But if you bought a modest home, instead of a huge home, you could. I'm sure the Imp's friend's mom would say she can't afford to stop working (she is a teacher's aide at a private school, so her salary is not large). But I wonder how much the family spends because she works (eating out is very expensive). Our ideas about living "comfortably" are really skewed as a society. A roof over your head (clean, not bug-infested, working plumbing, etc), steady food on the table and a few outfits per person. Anything beyond that is luxurious. Kids don't all need their own room, or 12 pairs of shoes, or the newest Playstation console or game, or an ipod, and on and on. We are financially blessed. But when I look around, my kids have much less "stuff" than most other children their age. I don't feel guilty about it. I'm happy. They know stuff won't make them happy, and much of what they have, they've earned. (Both girls have an MP3 player, both paid for over 1/2 of the cost). I don't worry about them losing their MP3 players, because they know I won't buy them a new one, and they know how hard it was to save that kind of money.

On a different topic, although still on how much I think our society has lost focus. A hamburger chain "Checkers" began an add campaign with RapCat. RapCat is a hand puppet of a cat dressed as a rapper (and he raps, too). As part of the campaign, the company made their bags with lines of where to cut holes to make the bag into a rap outfit for your pet cat. The outrage over the "mistreatment" of cats by putting the bag on them has been way out of proportion. If your cat doesn't like it...don't do it! If that's the mistreatment of animals, how is America's Funniest Home Movies still on the air? The treatment of the animals on those clips is much worse than putting a paper bag on your cat (as an outfit). How many people put outfits on their cats and dogs? How often do the cats and dogs not like it? Should we prevent the sale of animal outfits? [Actually, I wouldn't mind, as I think we spend too much on our pets, but that's another story]. What really floored me with this whole story is that it led the 11 o'clock news AHEAD of a murder! Huh? Somehow we've really gotten off track about what's important.