Exactly.

Because of your kids, you get to know someone you probably wouldn’t have stopped to talk to on your own. You get past the initial shy, gawky stage of the relationship—you have to; you’re inside another mom’s house—and you get a window into how someone who is actually different from you thinks. We get too few of those opportunities, I think. And so I try to be open when my opportunties come around instead of inveighing against pacifiers or chocolate cake or the right moment for toilet training. In the end, we’re all muddling through as parents, right?

From In Defense of the Play Date by Emily Bazelon

Sounds Familiar

From Slate:

The hardest part, perhaps, is coming to terms with her parents’ limitations. “I can’t make them into frugal people who are good financial planners,” she said.

Summer’s Here

Henry smelled the air coming in through the open windows this morning, when it was still only in the 80s, and said, “THAT’S the smell of summer!”

I’m a Sacramento Valley girl, born and bred, so while I’ll curse the heat later on this summer, right now I just love it.

Of course, it helps that it’s just a short walk to a river with icy Sierra-born water to dip my feet in. Helps even more that I have air conditioning these days, and no baseball to watch today (except on TV).

For now, I plan to lie in the hammock, read, drink lemonade, and watch the bees and butterflies buzz around my flower garden. l’ll plan what to plant and trim and pull out, but I won’t do any of it. That’ll have to wait until it cools.

Best Part of Spring?

Smelling orange blossoms through the open windows of my house.

Oh, Amazon

Don’t do this. I’ve had such a good couple of years with you. Don’t make me have to start all over again with some other bookstore.

Seeking Sunshine

It’s the kids’ spring break, but not mine, so we’ve got two parents working full-time and two kids home (or at work) with us all week. (Kid #3 is in L.A. until tonight.)

It’s raining.

The dog had to get stitches in his paw, so he can’t go for long walks. Also, he’s stir-crazy. Also, he’s starting to smell really awful.

All of the above mean I can’t go for long walks, either, and long walks are the key to balance and sanity for me.

So I’m seeking sunshine and color in other places, like here. Odd for a Californian to turn to an Englishwoman’s blog for sunshine in April, but there you go.

Placeholder Post

Buried under piles of student papers I must grade this week. So busy can’t use subjects in sentences. Will return after a few more days.

These teens’ thoughts about the economic crisis left me thinking about all kinds of ways my kids, and the incoming freshmen I’ll be teaching in the fall, are going to be affected by the current crisis.

Like Kiki Vo, one of the students interviewed in the above article, the young people I work with have grown up aware of economic realities. Dropping out of school to support their families is something many have considered.

Since I work at a state college in California, where the budget problems mean tuition increases for already stretched students, I worry about losing students. This semester, the state college grant program went unfunded, and students who started the academic year thinking they had a certain amount of financial aid available were suddenly told, “Oops, we miscalculated. No money for you!”

And yet several of the students in the article spoke of their trust in our leaders and institutions to get us out of this, along with hard work and charity on the parts of citizens. I was struck by that, mostly because I was much more clueless about the impact of government on my life when I was their age. (Also more cynical, but I didn’t really know enough to know what I thought I was cynical about.)

One hope I have that the teens seem to share is that even if another Depression is here, we’ve been there before and made it through. I grew up with grandparents who had been shaped by their Depression-era childhoods; today, I can see my grandfather’s obsession with financial stability as the expression of love it truly was. Passing on that generation’s stories of making do with what’s at hand seems like a good start to helping us all through the coming years.

Slumdog

Worth reading: Chitra Divakaruni’s “The Slumdog Fight” + Nick Hornby’s response to a critic of Slumdog Millionaire.

Stay Tuned for the Continuing Story of my West Wing Obsessions

My (somewhat fanatical) appreciation of the fictional version of Rahm Emanuel pretty much guaranteed that I’d devour this article the second I got my hands on it. What can I say?