The ill Humored

Living through the last ten years or so, looking around at what’s happened and is still happening politically and economically, no large lessons come to mind, and certainly no solid conclusions. Just one thing pops out. American history makes a lot more sense now. The tone and substance of history textbook writing about the Depression makes a lot more sense after you’ve lived through a similar, inexplicable twist of economic fate. Those textbooks never focused on the causes because… they didn’t KNOW the causes, just like we can’t exactly tell what’s happened to our economy now, and we don’t know what’s coming next. Better to focus on understandable images, breadlines, dustbowls. Textbook descriptions of William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” getting us into the Spanish-American war around 1900 ring a lot truer today. Those books were trying to say something about corruption and the perversion of journalistic standards, without actually saying the core truth about the opinion-forming power of the media, even newspapers. And so on, and so on, through parallel after parallel. Just a little disgusting that these lessons never penetrate.

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• Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc (jamesfallows.theatlantic.com)

Today was a wonderful and eventful day! My baby girl Alyvia slept in and cuddled with me until 10:00 a.m.! When we finally got out lazy butts out of bed, I cleaned up the house while Alyvia happily played in her exer-saucer. She loves to play in that thing and it keeps her entertained while I do other things like laundry that I can’t seem to find the time during the week to accomplish. I lost my dog Taylah but soon found her running through the neighborhood! She is such a crazy dog. I think she chases cats all around while I’m calling out her name from the front door. Then Alyvia had a record breaking diaper blowout which required a rinse in the shower, a bath, and a load of laundry! All in all, I’m so thankful that instead of working, I got to spend the day with my amazing, silly, crazy family!

My past week was just like almost all of my weeks. I was not on vacation, nor did I have any company. I spent all day Monday through Thursday at home with three small children. On Friday, my husband was home, as he was on the weekend days. Each weekday morning, I got up and nursed the baby. Then, I prepared breakfast for two small girls. At some point, I changed diapers so they would not leak. Each day, I tried to teach my children some reading or math skills. For the baby, I told him where his head, hands, arms, legs and feet are, and I sung the alphabet and numbers. For the two-year old, I held up flash cards I made with words on them, and she read the words. For the four-year old, I wrote down simple addition equations, and she told me the answers. Sometimes we identified states in the map of the United States, and countries in a world map. Some days, we walked in the yard and identified plants.