Tuesday Follies

ART GALLERY: So what do you do when every horizontal surface in your home is covered in one of a kind artistic creations?

I pride myself on making a nice cache of art supplies readily available to the kids and boy oh boy does Annabelle avail herself to the supplies - to the point that seriously every table, counter, cabinet top, etc. is covered with her creations.

It presents quite a quandary. What to do with all of them? We simply can't keep them all, our house is waaaay too small. So I talked to her today about how we will, of course, save extra special ones, but the rest we'll have to photograph and recycle.

Maybe I should just upgrade her art supplies and let her open an Etsy store.

FUNNY STUFF: Today, we took two huge bags of things to donate to Value Village. Of course, that meant we had to go in the store and BUY stuff to take its place. ;)

I found CJ admiring this at one point ..."It looks pixelated," he said.

Hahahaha. I told him it's called cross stitching. :)

One of the items we bought today was a riddle book, since the kids both love riddles. This afternoon Annabelle was peppering me with new material. Here's one gem:

Annabelle: How do librarians file melted marshmallows?
Me: I dunno, how DO librarians file melted marshmallows?
Annabelle: The gooey demical (sic) system? Get it? Get it?!?!

Ah yes, soooo funny. ;)

CJ'S NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS: Time travel is impossible, or so some Hong Kong scientists recently announced.

IN HAPPIER NEWS: It was a two-magazine day for CeeJ. His Nintendo Power came in the mail and he found a new MAD Magazine at Fred Meyer.MISSION COMPLETE: Today, the kids took their completed summer reading program certificates back to the library. On them, they'd each listed 10 books they've read this summer so far.

As a reward, they each got to choose a free book, enter their names in a drawing for a special "Breakfast of Champions" and post their name on the wall of the library.

This evening I was laying their goods out on the stereo top to photo them and Annabelle (pizza sauced face and all) worked her way into the frame.GRUMPY MOM: One of the kids' education-related Facebook groups I subscribe to posted a link to an article with the headline, "Lost something? Not my problem. Frumpy Mom rule: Never look for missing kids stuff."

That got my attention. As I read the author's diatribe, I felt my blood pressure rising. She started with, " ... I have a very firm rule in my house: I do not look for kid stuff. Period. Exclamation point. End of paragraph," and was basically downhill (at least for her poor kids, IMHO) from there.

I feel like quoting the whole story, but won't due to that whole copyright infringement thingee. I would just encourage (or should I say discourage?!) you to read it and then come back. ... ;)

I don't usually post comments on group posts, but I couldn't help myself today. I wrote: Wow, not a fan of her philosophy at all. Do we need to teach kids to take care of and keep track of their stuff? Absolutely. Should kids be asked to (really, REALLY) try to find their lost items on their own first? Of course. But teaching kids NOT to help someone in need of assistance finding something, no matter what? Really? How does that help someone become a better person? And where do you draw the line? Will she also not help a neighbor find a lost dog? How about a lost child at the store? Are those also "not my problem" situations, because the things aren't hers? Has she never misplaced anything herself and hoped for help finding it? And when you live in a household with others, sometimes the other people move your stuff - so when other people mess with your stuff and you can't find it, are you still on your own?

Obviously (hopefully?) by the writer's tone, she's trying to be humorous, but I guess I don't see much funny about a statement like "I don't really care so much if my kids like me or not ... at my age, I just don't give a horse's behind." Sounds more like a grumpy mom than a "Frumpy Mom" to me.

BACK IN THE DAY: Harvard used to boast about its easy entrance exam, hoping to attract more applicants in the mid-19th century. So when I read that a 1869 Harvard entrance exam was recently posted to the Web (PDF HERE), I thought, "Oh, that sounds like fun."

Um, not so much. At least for me. Turns out, in order to even take the test, you need to know Latin, Greek, Greek history, ancient geography, and more. Yikes. :/

ANOTHER OUCH: Here's a comment from a NASA-related Facebook group I'm a part of, which was posted today: "If you watch NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands on the moon." Yikes. That will leave a mark! :(

In other news, tonight a robotic space probe scheduled to orbit Jupiter made its way to the rocket assembly building at Cape Canaveral's Complex 41. There, a powerful Atlas 5 booster awaits its $1 billion cargo, per Spaceflight Now. Juno's launch is scheduled for August 5 at 11:34 a.m. EDT.