weekend stuff

Maddie started her Ballet class this week. This year the class is much more structured than before, and the class will perform at a recital at the end of the semester. I am pretty excited
During her class the rest of the family visited a local park and played on the equipment in the snow. It was full of slushy snow, but otherwise fairly comfortable.

Reed enjoys being outdoors. He is pretty quiet when we go on walks or sit outside. I think that he likes to look around and enjoys watching the other kids play.

Benjamin likes to make tapioca pudding, and the kids like to help him. They all ate the tapioca pudding that they helped to make, and for some reason Maddie and Caleb are dressed up as Lemurs.

Apparently Lemurs are opportunistic carnivores who also enjoy the occasional chocolate tapioca pudding.

I bet Maddie grows up to be a great scientist.

Either that or she goes native and lives as an animal with a troop of wild lemurs.

firefly obsession

lifecycle of an obsession as illustrated by my latest craze, Joss Whedon's Firefly.......

1. watch all of the episodes in earnest.
So done, and you too can join me in this great obsession by going to Hulu.com It is definately pg13, not appropriate for children.

2. visit fan websites and watch fan videos on youtube
this is worth your time even if you are not a fan;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdXkGXD7gDc

3. dress up as the characters
Halloween 2010. I can hardly wait.....

4. harrass friends and family to either locate fellow fans or share the obsession.
See step 1

btw, if you do not like Firefly, please do not tell me. I lost several friends because they didn't think that the series of unfortunate events was the BEST childrens' book series ever.

5. Use taglines and slang from the show in everyday life.
Every year I make myself running tshirts for that year's major races. I also like to make matching shirts for my kids and spouse. This year the gorram shirts might say
"no power in the 'verse can stop me"

shiny.

6. download the themesong
done.

7. Contemplate ways to name potentual future children after the show or its actors.
Kaylie Serenity or
Malcolm Jayne
...Zoe Persephone sounds nice....

8. Check out the actors' current projects.
Nathan Fillion guest starred on season 4 of Desperate Housewives and I watched a few episodes, but I really just kept thinking "how come captain Mal is hanging out on Wisteria lane? where is Inara? Perhaps the great dark secret that they are always worried about is that Mal is harboring a fugitive from the Alliance and is going to expose the truth about Miranda...." and then I got pretty bored after it became apparent that no Reavers where ever going to show up.

The little I have seen of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse has been pretty good.

9. To ensure that this is worthy of my devotion, and not just a passing phase, let a reasonable amount of time elapse, then watch it again, and if it is truly great, repeat steps 1-8

The last step is the real kicker. I have liked a lot of stuff, but found years later that I didn't love it. Such was the case with Twilight. The really great stuff that has stood the test of time is rare, and it is really great. The only thing that can rival my Firefly obsession is my great love of Xfiles. It aired 10pm-2am when I lived in Utah, and I used to happily get up in the middle of the night with my screaming kids because it meant that I got to watch xfiles.

robinson crusoe and revisionist history

We recently started to read our children the classic novel Robinson Crusoe Published in 1719 it is considered by some to be the first English Novel.

The plot so far is this;
The owner of a sugar plantation owner is shipwrecked while on a mission to buy slaves.

Incidently, a bit of research shows that abolitionists in Europe frequently were succesful in limiting the numbers of slavers allowed to operate in the british colonies. Crusoe alludes to laws that have made slaves unavailable locally which prompts him to make his own voyage to africa to get his own slaves.

The Disney version of the story omits this detail.

presentism is the term that describes modern people judging the past by current standards. revisionist history is the practice of changing parts of history that do not agree with what we wish our history to be.

I do not want to white wash history, though I do want to cut it up into child appropriate bites of truth. We must honor our ancestors but not hesitate to acknowledge their sins. We must learn history if we are to halt is repetition, and to learn history we need to take a long hard look at it unencumbered by any rose colored glass.

Slavery is wrong, in all of its forms. It is bad for the enslaved as well as for the owners. The power is corrupting. I know this because it has been told again and again in abolitionist and antislavery literature. The case has to be made against slavery to answer proslavery sentiments pervasive in the society at the time. Today we celebrate our abolitionist literature and forget that it was once considered radical by our own venerated american ancestry.

I want to represent this sentiment to my children. Robinson Crusoe is a great book, the fact that the protagonist is a slaver is incidental to the plot. I am attempting to tell my kids that people do bad things for lots of reasons and that he was simply following the actions of others of his time. It is easy to sin by following others and that is why we must constantly check ourselves, 'examine our lives' as Socrates demands. Do what is right according to the dictates of your own conscience; especially when it is unpopular, unusual or difficult.

mystery dinner

what's in these cans? I do not know
It will be our dinner though....


I found these cans sans labels at the local grocery store discounted for quick sale. I didn't know what to make for dinner tonight, so I got them all and decided we would make a game out of it.

Martin and
Maddie opened the cans and found
kidney beans, navy beans, cherry pie filling, sweet green beans, spicy tomatoes, and chicken broth(?)

for dinner we are eating the green beans, navy and kidney beans, pasta with tomato sauce, and cherry pie mini turnovers for desert.

We will probably not eat the broth, but everything else was well worth the 25 cents per can.

This was fun. I can't wait to buy some more cans without labels!!!

MORE CHRISTMAS PICTURES

Notice how Reed almost blends into his surroundings. Like his christmas outfit is a kind of camoflauge.

Caleb loved Christmas the most. He was too young to really know what to expect so it came as a sort of really great surprise. He wakes up to a stocking full of candy and a whole bunch of presents.

Maddie seemed very protective of her presents. She loved everything she recieved especailly the littlest pet shop, doll, and ponies.

Martin loved his Legos and immediately went to work assembling sets.

Caleb opening his drum set.

Martin with his book of directions for his lego sets

drive thru diet??

So......
Taco Bell is promoting its drive thru fresco menu items as a part of the weight loss plan called the "drive thru diet"
Christine Dougherty lost 54 pounds over two years by following a 1250 calorie diet, which included some drive thru items from Taco Bell. (perhaps the salsa?)
http://www.drivethrudiet.com/

Well, funny thing this guy name Morgan Spurlock tried the drive thru diet at McDonalds and it had the opposite effect, chronicled in his 2004 documentary film Supersize Me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/plotsummary

He gained nearly 30 lbs and became incredibly unhealthy, all by eating at McDonalds three times a day for a month. He summed up the marketing of this horrible unhealthy food well when he said;
"The bottom line, they're a business, no matter what they say, and by selling you unhealthy food, they make millions, and no company wants to stop doing that."

It is not in Taco Bell's interest to have a healthy population. They sell most when the consumers are all a bit stupid, believing their marketing lies; living and dying their own 'unexamined lives'. Taco Bell wants you to buy their junk food, and this add campaign is trying to pass them off as healthy. It is a lie.

What is the solution? should we all, as Morgan Spurlock suggests, slap our children everytime they see the golden arches so McDonalds' gives them a negative association? A bit extreme, and McDonalds, though a great offender, has no monopoly on the marketing of unhealthy things.

We are marketed all sorts of things that are bad for us; soda pop, oreo cookies, and many things are bad for our financial health like a too expensive home, new cars, designer or even just too many new clothes; The job of an informed consumer is great, and rejecting what others hold important is sometimes to violate a social norm. Much of our consumerism is tied up in social customs and culture.
(Just try to eliminate christmas gifts some year...)

The solution, I believe is to embrace and live an examined life. As Socrates wrote, "the unexamined life is not worth living". We must find what is important and seek after that, and weight carefully our decisions so that when we purchase a can of soda pop it is with open eyes, fully aware of the 180 calories and two days' recomended daily allowance of sugar. Not blinded by some pretense that this will make us American or bring us closer to polar bears frolicing in the snow.
We must teach our children ( and model such behavior in ourselves) to be conscious deliberate consumers. To examine their motivations and adhere to the commandment found in Exodus 23:2"Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil"

Also, as I pass by the Taco Bell with the disillusioned dieters waiting in the drive thru queue, wondering why their fresco tacos do not combine into a 54 pound weightloss, I like to shout so that my children can hear "Taco Bell is the DEVIL".

A little bit of negative association can't hurt anything.