Each year my daughter gets together with her two best friends, also homeschoolers, to have a Christmas party. My youngest daughter attends our local special services school and gets a Christmas party every year so why shouldn't my homeschooled daughter?
Kids love playing with Playdough. Playdough can get expensive after awhile because kids often forget to put the lid back on the container. This allows the Playdough to dry out and become useless. Plus, parents and kids are limited to using the colors available for sale in the store.
I remember when a friend of mine met his future wife. His words were simple and telling: She lets me be myself.
Who could ask for anything more? Granted, the guy in question happens to be of exceptional character and work ethic, but that doesn’t mean that every woman that he would have ended up with would have granted him with the same amount of respect.
Be yourself.
My husband and I used to have an annual tradition of going to Dave and Buster’s for his birthday. It’s an expensive date between dinner and games, so it’s a once-a-year thing. We weren’t able to do it for the past two years, but this year we were fortunate enough to go. We took our daughter with us so it wasn’t much of a date, but he was so stoked that I didn’t even care.
See, there’s the thing: I hate the place. I call it a yuppie haven. I don’t even like the food. The place is crawling with yuppies after work in their suits, sneering at us in our obviously cheaper clothes, and it’s as loud as Chuck E Cheese—a place I don’t care much for, either. But he loves it, so I’m more than willing to go with him. Usually I have a drink, at least, which I can enjoy—but since I was on kiddo duty while he played games, I didn’t do that, either.
When humans first invented religion—yes, we invented it; hard to remember, I’m sure—it was mainly to explain the unexplainable. We didn’t have microscopes or telescopes or any scopes, so we made up gods who were much like we were—jealous and horny and angry, only with much more power—who were in charge of these things. Why did Cousin Leon get smallpox, why did the drought hit, why did the invaders take over the land? Easy—the gods made it all happen.
Since we can explain so much more today than we could back then—not everything, of course, but much more—we seem to have turned to using religion for two main things: political control and radical forgiveness.
We all know this person. Whether he or she is the relative you dread, the family friend who knows everything, or the mommy at the playground who thinks you’re an idiot and tries to get every other mom on her side, too, it’s the person who just has to have the last word.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve proven yourself to be correct; he or she will just sniff and say, “That’s a questionable source,” or “That’s disputable,” or even, “Well, I guess you know everything!” You take to tiptoeing around this person to avoid trouble, sticking to subjects like the weather—which is even tricky now that we have so many record temperatures—or your clothes or anything else that might not make this person start spewing their righteous blather.
The thing is, you really can’t avoid it because he or she is probably already planning on bringing up some new thing to dumbfound you—and everyone else with—for attention. It will be something they saw Jesse Ventura mention, for example (my uncle loves to talk about “Obama death camps”), or something Fox News had on that they’ve decided is pure gold. And it doesn’t matter what you say; not only will you not change their mind, you will also not satisfy them with your “Let’s agree to disagree” or your rationalized arguments with evidence. They will not be happy until you say these words exactly: “You’re right and I’m wrong.”
Tune you should be listening to for this post: Piano Man by Billy Joel
From People: Channing Tatum and his Wife Will be Dancing Off on the Xbox Kinect for Christmas.
The Good: Great idea and tons of fun.
The Bad: Tremendous amounts of concern about what the pair will wear.
Though airplanes do touch down and take off from Changi International Airport in Singapore, the complex itself seems more like a city. With hotels, restaurants and a smorgasbord of other activities, Singapore visitors can enjoy themselves without even heading into the city center.
