Make Me Laugh

1. Articulates his thoughts and feelings with sounds that don't require moving his lips.

2. Disassembles tampons every time we are in the bathroom. I should put those in a locked cabinet.

3. Picks rocks out of the ficas pot (used to keep the cat from mistaking the tree pot for a litter box) and tucks them all around the house. Oh, first he gnaws on the rocks - this is an awful noise.

4. Eats dogfood and drinks dog water.

5. Helps fold the laundry by unfolding everything.

6. Helps wipe his round little bottom during diaper changes with his hands.

7. Throws food during every single meal (we have to stop laughing when he does this).

8. Prefers fruit to all other foods and YELLS during meals for more fruit.

9. In public bathrooms when I am taking care of my own needs his hands promptly go right into the toilet.

10. Pulls off his bibs

11.Goes for his junk the minute he is naked.

12. Eats toilet paper and baby wipes.

13. Is indiscriminate about where he kisses the animals (this can and does include rear-ends)

14. to be continued.....

Bird Feeding Bonanza and My Man

I have been heard to say that Mr. Silly Pants belongs in the age of men in tights with buckle shoes. He's sometimes loquacious. Let's be honest, he's often loquacious. Below is something he wrote to our bird loving family about our feeding efforts gone awry. It's classic Silly Pants - I wonder if he wrote it with a feathered pen and ink well?

Clean feeders plus new suet and thistle (not to mention the addition of a novel cedar block filled with "bark butter") has yet to attract much attention from feathered friends, a fact which has been vexing me more than it probably should. All of this centers, I think, around the "mix" feeder, which I usually fill with "premium blend" from Wild Birds Unlimited; it has historically been the gross tonnage leader in bird traffic. To say it is popular among our winged residents is like saying that Wisconsinites have a small interest in dairy. I had expected that new thistle and suet plus the new bark butter feeder would become big hits once birds who came to the ever-popular "mix feeder" figured out there was tasty food for them at these alternative locations. However, the mix feeder has been unexpectedly quiet over the past two weeks, something which I have been puzzling over. This morning, I got up with Blueberry at 6:30am with great expectations (that slice of the morning usually a prime time for birds); there was no bird traffic over a 10 minute period, which caused me to shake my head repeatedly as Blueberry and I played with his noisy toys. I went to look at the mix level to see if it was lower than yesterday, hoping that birds were, perhaps, eating at unsupervised opportunities. It was then that I spied a funny looking "ball" on top of the seed. Puzzling. More puzzling yet was the fact that the ball was moving. Much to my amusement, I found a furry, fat and unbelievably contented field mouse enjoying a private dining experience inside the house-shaped feeder. I surmised it had apparently climbed up the cords I fashioned to stabilize the feeder in heavy wind. What's more, the feeder I thought was "half-full" was mainly adorned with empty sunflower shells, undoubtedly left over from a number of relaxed, happy meals for the pesky mammal. I watched him exit the feeder about 15 minutes later to make certain I knew how he was accessing the food stores; he did, in fact, use the stabilizing cords to make his getaway. I took the feeder down, cleaned out the well-masticated bird mix (plus a moderate amount of hidden mouse droppings, which would certainly affect the appetite of all but the most desperate of avian friends) then rehung the feeder with sparkling new mix and without the cords which served as a causeway to the rodent food court. The birds will just have to get used to the swaying, I guess. Once again, I'm filled with guarded anticipation.

Topics of conversations over the weekend and why I love having grown daughters

Ballroom Dancing
Racism
Kazillions of darling observations about Blueberry
Classism and Elitism
Boobs
Cultural definitions of beauty
Leg shaving and armpit shaving
Boyfriends and how much do we have to have in common?
Hair Products and Perfumes
Feminism
Organic foods
Budgeting
Job searching and resume writing

The Diva Cup - and how awesome it is
Books we are currently reading
Movies we want to watch
Skinny Jeans and Kapow Shoes
The value of travel and our family privilege
White Privilege
Grandma's Poker Chips
Myles and Maura and California fashion
Baby Toys and Birthdays - Blueberry is 1 next week!

Birthday Cakes: Past, Present, and Future
Post Prandial Slumps

UW Madison and Beloit College
Art and Osteology
...and in small font becuase it was so funny and risque; hair houses (yeah, you know what I'm talking about)
Vagina Monologues and the following related inquiries:
If you were a vagina, what would you wear?
Pubic hair - to shave or not to shave
Demistifying women's body parts
Dick Talk

*all of this in less than 48 hours of fabulous time with my girls

Dancing Queens, Young and Sweet

Songbird (left) is on spring break this week. We are so happy to have her home and all to ourselves for a whole week! She arrived home tonight with a smile and a giggle - which is just like her. Songbird and Twinkletoes (right) are kicking off the weekend tonight with ballroom dancing. They both just left the house looking beautiful and smiling with delight. I LOVE having daughters/sisters. These two young women are what "sisters" are all about. They just radiate, don't they? (See, I'm not ALL about deep thoughts!)

More on Class and Race and What is the Middle Class?

It doesn't take much mental work to recognize we are all impacted by both class and race. I enjoy digging into this topic - because we struggle in our lives to make sense of class and race. In fact, class is often as difficult to discuss as race. How many times have you heard someone claim a middle class identity with earnings that far exceed the middle class? The middle class is somewhat ambiguous - and there isn't a clear agreement on income levels. I've got some Census numbers from 2006 that give an idea of middle class in real numbers: Median income among all U.S. households in 2006 was $48,201. The middle 20 percent ranged from about $38,000 to $60,000; and the middle 60 percent—the "Baucus middle class" named after a Senator which measures the middle and eliminates the bottom 20% and the top 20%—stretched from about $20,000 to $97,000.

In a very good piece in the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber discusses class and race and their intersection. She criticizes calling Michelle Obama a middle class woman (even if she does wear JCrew - check out the outfit prices in her article). On the topic of race and class Ferber states, "Even in the face of legal and political gains, there is no evidence to suggest that the racial economic divide is decreasing. And the reality is that during economic downturns, minority communities suffer first and worst. Economic gains made by people of color are generally only very recent gains, and thus most tenuous and vulnerable. They are much less likely to have inherited wealth from previous generations to soften the blow during a crisis." She points to the following statistics to undersocer her arguement:
·The racial gap in median family incomes gap narrowed only slightly over the past 50 years ·Black households are twice as likely as whites to have a negative net worth or none at all
·Less than 10% of whites but almost ¼ of all Black and Latino households live in poverty
·The unemployment rate for blacks remains twice that of whites, unchanged since the early 1970s
·From 1970 to 2007 the gap between home ownership rates for whites and blacks actually grew, and is now being compounded by the current foreclosure crisis.
You want more? Take a look at these charts to hammer down our troubling economic disparities.
Don't get me started on the Wage Gap. I'm tempted, but I'll hold off today in favor of ....reading my book.

Class and Race

I had some wonderful family time with my dad in Ohio. We were in Cleveland, and I enjoyed the urban influence of the city of my birth. We broke up one day with some time at a book store, and another we spent at the zoo's rainforest building. My radar was working overtime - aware that in this Ohio community there were many people of color making up the fabric of daily life. Let me be honest, where I live there is diversity, but it is a mostly white and affluent community. The story of many black americans in our city is that they have relocated from difficult circumstances in nearby Chicago. This looks like the following: the book store in Cleveland had both staff and patrons of color. In my WI neighborhood Barnes and Noble I do not often see either staff or patrons of color. So, my radar is working and I'm working out what this means for my "place" and the place of my family, my family of color.
But, I really started this post to respond to Clare's concerns about class. She raises a good point - and points to class as a concerning "ism" in the discussion. Class and race do intersect. In fact, I am certain that there are mutual influences of class, race, and gender on individual lives. There is a preponderance of evidence that suggests, however, that class does not trump race. There is a very active dialogue "out there" about this very topic. One resource that is worth considering is this piece on "Racialiscious." The author states: "Class and race and two different things which encompass a wide range of experiences and scenarios. They build upon each other. Just like there is no one universal race experience, there is no one universal class experience on any side of the divide. Being upper-class and black is still different from being upper class and white. Being lower-class and white is a different experience from being black and working poor." It's a great piece. Really great. And it's not long - you might want to check it out. The comments are similarly interesting.

Finally, after you do your own investigation, check out this youtube lecture by Tim Wise. He is one of the country's leading anti racist lecturers, and he's a white man. (If he was a black man his comments would be considered to be "whining and complaining" and THAT'S a whole 'nother topic!!) Anyway, I think Tim Wise is worth an hour of your time while you're doing something that allows you to listen. He talks about class and race in a way that really makes sense. Plus, hes' straight forward and intense. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UJlNRODZHA

Ohio Peeps

Blueberry and his peeps - what a great trip!