I remember when I was 16, seeing the cover of some magazine that featured Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.  Actually I don’t really remember if Wozniak was on the cover or not, all I remember is thinking that Steve Jobs is really cute!   I also remember thinking, wow, he’s just a few years older than me, so young to be so rich and successful.  And then, “I wonder if he has a girlfriend…”

Steve never became my real life boyfriend, but he’s always been my pretend techno-geek boyfriend.  I’ve always had a crush on him, I’ve always had a thang for smart geeky guys.

Steve changed the world in many ways, not the least of which, he showed the world that geeks can be hot and that being a geek can be a cool thing.

But the biggest way he changed the world is in how we communicate and stay connected, how we learn and how we process creativity.

When the news broke yesterday that Steve Jobs had died, I read different reports on his life and what various people had to say about him. They talked about all he had accomplished and how he changed the world with his products.  And it’s true, because of the products he envisioned and brought to market, people can do more in less time, be more creative, share more, connect more, learn more.  I am one of those people.

I’ve always been a big fan of the “i” products and recently splurged on an iPad2 for Sean and I.  We love it with a deep intensity and use it all the time.  I have loaded it up with educational games for him and photography and design apps for me and just all kinds of fun and cool stuff.

Last night Sean and I went out for an early dinner at Chili’s.  He confiscated the cardboard coasters off several nearby tables so that we had a deck of about 20.  While we waited for our food we tried stacking the coasters in different configurations to see what kind of load-bearing structures we could make and how much weight they could bear.  Answer:  Triangle structures can bear the weight of a drinking straw – if you hold your breath and no one bumps the table. When we got bored with that, we divided up the coasters.  I asked him spelling and math questions and if he answered right, he got one of my cards; if he answered wrong, I took one of his cards.  Very low tech, but fun for geeky geeks like us and just a tad educational.  But most importantly, we were engaged.

As Sean and I were playing our silly made-up coaster games, I noticed a mom and little girl in the booth across the way.  The mom was staring into her iPhone and the little girl was watching something on her iPad, both bathed in the glow of their devices, a separation of less than two feet, but worlds apart.  I am not making a judgment here, just an observation. I realize there are many many reasons why a mom might need to decompress and veg out and that I have no idea what she’s dealing with.  But I will say that AD and I have taken note of how often we see this when we go out, families out to eat together, but not together – silent and zombie-like, the face and spirit of each lit up by their personal device.

I thought about Steve Jobs and how everyone is talking about how he changed the way we live for the better, that we are better connected than ever.  But, I have to wonder, if perhaps in other ways, we are not changed for the better, if our beloved devices are more of a wedge than a bridge, if we are not more connected than ever, but more disconnected than ever.

What do you think?

* * *
Addendum:  Found this post along the same lines from Jon Acuff who writes Stuff Christians Like: http://www.jonacuff.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-marriage-instantly/

So far we have had two chilly mornings.  So far Sean has worn a jacket to school two times. So far Sean has lost two jackets.

So this morning, as he put on his 3^rd and final jacket, I said to him that his first order of business today was to locate the other two jackets.

“Mom,” he said, “If the jackets are not claimed within so many days they give them to someone who does not have a jacket.”

“Sean,” I said, “That someone without a jacket may be you if you don’t come home with your jackets.”

And I was not kidding.  I am a big proponent of Love & Logic parenting. If he comes home with no jackets today, tomorrow he will be mighty chilly as he walks to school.

After seven years of parenting, I have yet to discover how to teach this child to keep track of his stuff.  I have tried to teach him that when you do not return things to their proper place, they become lost.  When you just put things down wherever you are done with them, they are not in their proper place and therefore — become lost.  When you do not put mommy’s scissors back in her desk, the proper place of scissors, they are not there when mommy wants to use them, and they become lost.  And that makes the vein in mommy’s neck bulge just a little.

The constant losing of stuff is a source of aggravation to me for two reasons.  1) It somehow becomes my job to find or replace the lost stuff, usually at the very inconvenient 11^th hour and 2) I am not now, nor have I ever been, one to lose stuff.  I obsessively keep track of my stuff.

I grew up with not a lot and if I lost my stuff, I would have been transferred from the “grew up with not a lot” category into the “grew up with nothing” category.  There just wasn’t any getting more stuff.  Period.  Papa Ed and Vivian practiced Love & Logic out of necessity, long before it was a parenting philosophy, long before people said stuff like “parenting philosophy”.

Last fall, Sean lost his jacket the very first day he wore it.  It was a very distinctive beige and black plaid jacket that I loved that someone had handed down to us.  I had an inexplicable sentimental attachment to that jacket — probably because when he wore it with the hood pulled up, all I could see was my own 1^st grade face and that melts my heart like butter on a hot waffle.

At any rate, several times a week I would go up to the school and rifle through the lost and found box of MIA lunch boxes, jackets and water bottles looking for that jacket.  And let me tell you, that is not an especially pleasant job.  That lost and found box falls into the category of “smells not that great.”

Finally I gave the jacket up for lost, grieved it and went to the resale store and bought him a bright orange jacket for $5.  I figured that maybe he would be less likely to lose an orange jacket, and if he did, I was only out $5.

But then in the spring time, when it warmed up, Sean came home with the brown and black plaid jacket.  Which was now too small.   I could never get clear how the jacket resurfaced, if Sean checked the box again and there it was or if at the end of the year, some kind soul looked through the box and saw his name in the jacket and returned it to him.   If the jacket could talk, I’d ask where in the heck it had been all year.

And maybe the jacket would say he went home to spend a season with a little boy who was growing up with not a lot.

I love the Mother Teresa quote which says, “I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.”

I would like to be like Mother Teresa, to be able to say that my life is a love letter to the world, but some days, I’m afraid my life looks less like a love letter and more like graffiti.

The other day I went to Walmart to pick up just a few things, and is always the case, when I walked into the store there was no one in the checkout lanes.  The lanes were so empty you coulda gone bowling.  The cashiers were standing in the main aisle chatting and looking around hopefully for someone to checkout.  Ten minutes later, when I had gathered my few things and headed towards the lanes, they were backed up, three deep.

But that did not matter, for I was in a love-letter-writing-to-the-world mood.  I stood in line behind a lady who was apparently stocking up for the apocalypse.  But what did I care? I was all love, peace, patience, kindness, yada yada —  I was busy browsing the September issue of Good Housekeeping (the one with Meredith Vieira on the front; I’m featured somewhere around page 150, in case you care).

Now let me pause here and say that someday I am going to write an entire series on grocery store etiquette, but for now, I will just tell you that at the top of the list of grocery store do’s and don’t is this:  Don’t crowd the person checking out.  They own that space until they have been cleared for takeoff and pushed away from the checkout tarmac, so BACK OFF.  I hate it when I am not even done loading my stuff on the conveyor and the person behind me starts putting their stuff on.  It makes life complicated.  As well, don’t stand right beside me when I am paying.  You are not welcome in my space at that time, so please, step off.

So since the lady in front of me was the current owner of the conveyor, I politely left a reasonable 12-18 inches between the end of the conveyor and me.

As I was standing there, flipping through the pages of Good Housekeeping, I sensed a cart was very close to my backside.  Apparently my backside has some sort of extra sensory perception, my backside has ESP.  So I turned and looked and sure enough, there was a cart there, with only a whisper of airspace between my Hanes yoga pants and this cart.  But again, I was feeling the Mother Teresa vibe, so I didn’t turn and shout, “BACK OFF BUSTER!”  I just kept reading.

And then I heard this very large middle-aged man behind me grumbling loudly. “You are a complete idiot!”  I turned again, anxious to find out to whom he was directing his ire and boy was I surprised when I found out it was ME.  And my first thought was this:  I am glad my kid is not here.  My second thought was this:  Wha?

He continued his tirade against me, describing me in inventive and colorful terms.  That was a day brightener.

I finally figured out that what I had done to upset him so was that I had not moved forward 18-inches and sidled up next to Apocalypse Lady to watch her write her check.  He was upset because he had to stand at the end of the aisle and not next to the gum rack.

I was stunned.  In my years of shopping at Walmart, I’ve encountered the occasional less than pleasant electric cart lady, but never has anyone behaved so aggressively towards me.   So in an effort to smooth his ruffled feathers, I said to him, “I’m really not trying to upset you, I just want to give the lady ahead of me her space.”  But he didn’t care to hear my thoughts and provided an exhaustive description of the content of my character.

And frankly, I didn’t know what to do.  I felt like opening up a can of Antique Mommy whoop bottom on him. I felt angry. I felt intimidated. I felt scared. I felt like crying. But at no time did I feel like writing a love letter with God’s little pencil.

So I just turned away and ignored him as best I could and tried to convince myself I wasn’t terrified.

When it was my turn to checkout, I put my few things on the conveyor, anxious to get checked out and get gone.  I had picked up a water bottle for Sean that did not have a price on it, and for a split second, I was tempted to insist on a price check, just to gig him. But I didn’t.  The urge to flee trumped the urge to gig.  So I told the cashier I didn’t really need it and I would get it another time.  That was as love-lettery as I could muster.

As I left the store, anger began to overtake fear, so I stopped by the manager’s station and told her what had happened and pointed him out.   And then I high tailed it out of there, anxious to get home and get some sympathy from Antique Daddy.

As luck would have it, when I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the lane that passes in front of the store, Mr. Asshat was coming out.  And he notices me in spite of my clever disguise of sunglasses.   He stops in the middle of the of lane with his cart and blocks my car.   He bares his teeth at me, like some kind of animal, and then punctuates his point with his middle finger.  Wow. What an awesome display of manhood. His mother must be so proud.

So then I did what I’m sure Mother Teresa would have done.  I stuck my tongue out at him.  And then I sped home taking a circuitous route.

Yes indeed, Mother Teresa’s life was an inspirational love letter to the world. Then again, Mother Teresa didn’t shop at Walmart.

The last time I wrote here, Sean and I were coming to the end of his of first grade year of school.  I say “Sean and I”  because, really, it was not just his first grade – it occupied a large share of my time and my thinking and my emotional space too.  It was my first grade experience by proxy; a much needed do-over of sorts for me.

It seemed to me that first grade would be a pivotal point in Sean’s academic career.  In that first school year, he would either decide school was a good thing or not a good thing, and it would have everything to do with his teacher.

I had a sour, joyless and surly nun for first grade named Sister Edwina.  I decided early on in that first grade year that school was an exercise in misery.  That’s a rotten way for a six-year-old to spend seven hours of a day, hating it.  Thereafter, I pretty much hated school and I was a cruddy student with a cruddy attitude and the grades to prove it.  All that changed when I was 30 and became a professional student, but I don’t want that for Sean.

For Sean, I wanted a teacher who would make him toe the line in terms of behavior, as we do at home. I wanted a teacher who would appreciate his creativity.  I wanted a teacher who would not allow him to get away with doing the least, as he is wont to do.  I wanted a teacher who wanted to be a teacher, whose nature it was to be happy.  And, as important as anything else, I wanted a teacher who would not make me feel like “that mom” or a big fat bother any time I had a question or an issue.

We got the teacher for which we prayed. She was Sean’s advocate, and for me, she was an encourager and adviser and even a friend.  It was a terrific first grade year that came and went in a flurry of papers and projects and lunches and parties and jackets lost and found.

And now, here we are at the top of the second grade school year and I’m still having trouble saying second grade instead of first grade and Ms. W. instead of Ms. S.  And by the grace of God and the awesome ladies who run the school, Sean was assigned a second grade teacher who is picking up right where the first grade teacher left off and we are off and running on our way to another exciting write-it-all-down-in-your-diary kind of school year.

One of my favorite quotes is that education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire, and thus far, all of Sean’s teachers have been pyromaniacs.  May it ever be so.  I’m sure it won’t ever be so, but may it ever be so at least until his learning spirit can’t be easily broken.

The other morning, Sean got up and got dressed for school and came to the breakfast bar for the most important meal of the day.  I asked him if he had had any dreams.  He said he knows that he has dreams, but that he never remembers them.

I stood on the other side of the bar wringing a dish towel in my hands for no reason and watched him eat his toast.  I noticed the jelly marking the corners of his mouth and how he is still unable to resist the urge to use his shirt for a napkin.  In the haze of a morning-minded fog, I saw not a long-legged soccer-playing second-grader, but my kindergartner, the one I could still carry on my hip, the one I picked up from school at 1pm and took with me to the grocery store in the afternoon.

“As soon as I open my eyes,” he said, “the dreams rush out of my mind, like the tide, and I can’t catch them.”

I loved how he said that, loved the imagery.

I thought about how that is exactly how it is with each passing school year – dream like and slow motion and mixed up when you’re in the middle of it, and then before you know it,  it rushes away and you can’t hold onto it.   And when you look back, even from a short distance, you don’t really remember it.

You just know it was.

excels at soccer, second grade and being seven

As he walked towards me, I could see that something wasn’t right.

That is not to say that I saw anything unusual, but my momtennae went up. There was something about his posture and his expression, something that telegraphed that all was not well.

His hair was a crazy mess.  Nothing unusual about that.

He had a red popsicle ring around his mouth which matched the red splotches on the front of his t-shirt, also not so very unusual.

I took his backpack from him and slung it over my shoulder.

“Hi dude! How was your day?” I asked as we turned and walked towards the car.

“Okay,” he said unconvincingly.  I noticed the spring in his step was missing.  He did not run off and play tag with the other kids as he usually does.

Instead, he heaved a heavy sigh and watched the ground pass under his feet as he walked.

I decided not to push it and instead wait to see what he would offer.

He reached up and grabbed my hand as we walked along.

I looked at his fingers interlacing mine – dirty jagged nails, scraped knuckles, long slender fingers, red and sticky with popsicle and marker and who knows what all else.

I reflected back to the days when those same hands would reach up for my face as I cradled him and gave him his bottle.  He would gaze into my eyes as though he were trying to figure me out and play with my chin as he slurped and gnawed on the bottle.

When we got to the car, he confessed.

“Actually Mom,” he said, “I had a bad day.  A reeeeeallly bad day.”

“Oh no,” I consoled, “Tell me about it.”

And he did.

He told a friend at school a secret, that he liked a certain girl in another class. The so-called friend didn’t keep the secret, but blurted it to everyone instead.

The bandwagon was a 1956 Chrysler, big and wide, with room for everyone in the 1^st grade class, save one little boy named Conor.  There was chanting and teasing.  He said he started crying, so he pulled his sweatshirt up over his face.  He said he cried because he was embarrassed.  I don’t know exactly how it all played out but the teacher sent Sean and Conor for a slow walk around the school while she chatted with the class.

We sat in the car and talked about what happened for a long time.  As painful as it was for Sean, for me it was a gift – a golden opportunity to talk about trust and compassion and other important things, all wrapped up in a real life experience.

We talked about the importance of trust, of figuring out who you can trust and the importance of being someone who can be trusted. I told him that at school, at least, if you don’t want everybody to know everything, don’t tell anybody anything.  I told him that first graders are notorious blabbers and that’s why there are no 1^st graders in the Secret Service.

We talked about compassion, about how it felt to be teased and what a good and noble thing it was for Conor to choose not join in the teasing.  I told him Conor’s mom and dad could be very proud of him and that is exactly how I would want him to respond if someone else was being teased or picked on.

We talked about how sometimes you have to just not care what other people think, that there will always be people who don’t like you or what you are doing and want to make you feel badly about it.  We talked about how you can’t control what others think, you can only control your own response. Although I was quick to admit that that was a hard one, one he might have to work on his whole life if he is anything like his mother.

Then I told him the true story of how one time when I was in 1^st grade, I had to go pee, but I was afraid of the nun and too scared to ask to go to the bathroom, so I just pee’d right there in my seat and it puddled on the floor by my desk and ran clear down the row to the back of the room. When the other kids saw it, there was a mighty uproar as they all laughed and made fun of me.

“What did you do?” he asked aghast.

“I cried,” I said as a matter of fact.  “I pulled my shirt up over my head and cried.”

We both laughed about that just a little, because after 45 years, the humiliation has worn off a little bit and it’s kind of funny.

He looked me in the eye and squeezed my hand.  His eyes shone softly with compassion.

“Mom,” he said, “I’m sorry that you pee’d, I mean, you know, that that happened to you.”

“Yeah, thanks buddy,” I said.  And I squeezed his hand back.

And I tried not to cry.

When I picked Sean up from school today he thrust a handful of papers at me along with his backpack and took off up the hill to run and play with his friends.   When we got home, he saw that I was looking at the papers he had handed me. “Mom!” he cried, “Don’t look!”

“What?” I said, “You HANDED them to me!”

“Okay, you can look,” he said, “But don’t look at everything.  Just pick the one thing you want.”

So I agreed to that and chose this lovely portrait of me.  He said he drew me in that one pink fuzzy shirt that I have.  I am quite sure I don’t have a pink fuzzy shirt, but maybe I do.  Please, as you gaze upon this portrait, do not hate me because I am beautiful.

After I gushed sufficiently over the picture, he asked if maybe I’d like to open just one more thing. No, I said, I think I’d like to wait for Mother’s Day.  No really, he said, just open one more thing.  So I opened the letter which you see below.

It reads:  My mom is very special. She’s 51 and very beautiful. She does a lot of foatoshop. She loves me and I love her.  She buys suff for me like little models on stands that are real models.

It is a good thing that I don’t care if people know how old I am or how much I weigh for that matter.  Mental note to self:  Don’t let child see tax returns.

Aside from all that, I was touched at how he tapped into the raw truth about me in his essay, starting with my beauty.    Beauty of course is in the eye of the beholder and the fact that the beholder in this case gets suff at Walmart is probably irrelevant.

Random thought:  If there are no ugly babies it stands to reason that there can be no ugly mothers.

He also noted how much I love him and how much he loves me and how I do a lot of foatoshop.  I’m sure some of the other kids wrote about how their mom’s cook fabulous meals and keep a spotless house or have paying jobs, but Sean’s mom does foatoshop!

Well since we were on a roll, he decided that I might as well go ahead and open the 3rd thing, so I did and inside was this exquisite brooch, hand-crafted of semi-precious plastic jewels and foam stuff.  Don’t covet it y’all, it wouldn’t be right.  I will wear this with my pink fuzzy shirt. If I actually have one.

And not because I was so well loved today, but because I just can’t stop myself sometimes when it comes to that boy whose freckles make my heart ooze stupid goofy irrational love, we went to Walmart and I bought him suff like little models on stands that are real models. Just because.

It’s all true, especially that part about the freckles.

* * * * *

Happy Mother’s Day all!  Do me a favor and maybe take some time to look around you and see who might be on the fringes and not feeling the love this weekend.  And be extra kind.

* * * * *

BREAKING NEWS:  I was wrong.  It turns out I actually do have a fuzzy pink shirt. I foatoshopped on my brooch so you could get the full visual affect.

Not too long ago, Sean was invited to a roller skating birthday party.  It was at a big roller skating rink where several birthday parties were held at the same time making it unclear which kid belonged to which party. It was one big crazy mass of rolling kids all jacked up on icing which makes for good times indeed.

Much to my dismay, my son does not have the skating mojo.  Skating to me is the equivalent of say, walking or breathing.  It is unthinkable to me that anyone could not automatically know how to skate.  Or swim for that matter.  I understand that mathematicians feel the same way — how can one not know how to do math?  I don’t know but I don’t. My brain don’t bend that-a-way.  So in theory I understand that some people can’t skate.  In practice, I do not.

Be that as it may.

Unfortunately, Sean does not understand that he does not have the skating mojo. He imagines that he does.  I think this imagining comes with the Y chromosome package, the delusional tendencies towards overestimation about ones looks and abilities. But I have no scientific research to back that up.  Along with sweeping over-generalizations and invented facts and other bad habits, I digress as well.

Anyway, Sean wants me to go along side of him and “help” him skate.  What helping means is that he slips and slides and flails and twists and clomps along as he claws at my clothing while I wrench my back trying to “help” him stay upright. This is not fun. For me. It is exhausting is what it is. And after about 5-minutes of this I am somewhat not having fun.

So at about the 6-minute mark, I go sit down and send his father in as my replacement so that he might partake of the fun as well.

As I’m sitting there watching the swarm of seven-year-olds circling the rink like a pack of drunken and disorderly bees, I notice that none of them seem to have the skating mojo and I wonder if this because kids today (anytime you use the phrase “kids today” you are automatically OLD) don’t get out and roller skate on the sidewalk like I used to when I was seven.  Probably because of all the newly discovered dangers of CONCRETE and the need of helmets and pads and whatnot.

But then my attention is turned away from the swarm and towards what sounds like a wrecking ball.  I see a boy about Sean’s age wearing in-line skates standing in front of a video machine of some sort.  The machine has apparently trespassed against this boy and he is kicking the skunk out of it with his skates. Not just a little tap-tap, nudge-nudge, but an all out repeated whacking with the toe of his skate. (Yeah, I know. He might have issues. I shouldn’t judge.  I should give him a hug and help him explore his feelings. Gotcha.)

Had it been one of Sean’s classmates, I might have hollered, “Hey Dude! KNOCK it off!” But I didn’t know this thug child and I was kind of shocked to see such a fearless display, such a blatant abuse of public property.  I was stunned quite frankly and so I just sort of stared at him and I tried to make sense out of what I was seeing.

I looked around to see which gal was is his mother, which gal was going to swoop in on her broom and open up a can of Crazy Lady on him.  Because that’s what I woulda done had it been Sean.  That is what any mother I knew would do, so I assumed that Machine Kicker was with one of the other skating parties, not ours.

But no mother swooped in and he continued his rage against the machine, giving it a proper beating.  I did notice a gal nearby watching him in a disinterested manner as she chatted away on her cell phone.   Perhaps she was calling the authorities.  Perhaps like me, she was stunned and had no idea who this kid was.  Perhaps his mother had dropped him off and he was here by himself, free to express his feelings.  Perhaps.

Later, as the party is wrapping up, I see my friend who is hosting the party chatting up the woman on the cell phone and standing next to her is Machine Kicker himself, thanking the hostess for a lovely time.  For the second time that day, I was stunned.  I could not believe that Machine Kicker was one of us!

And that’s just the problem.  All the machine kickers are one us, on some level, and we don’t quite know what to do about it.

I love to have people over for dinner.  I think hosting small dinner parties of four to six, is about the funnest thing you can do.  But, in all honestly, since Sean was born, I have not done as much of that sort of thing as I like to do.  I am out of dinner party shape.  But now that Sean is getting older, it’s a lot easier and so I have been trying to get back in the swing of entertaining.

If you did not know, I am a bit of a foodie.  I like to feed people.  I love to buy food, I love to talk about food, I love to learn about food.  I read cookbooks for entertainment and about the only television I watch is the Food Network.  So it was weird that as I was planning my little dinner party menu, I was stumped.  I could not think of one thing to fix.  Even foodies get in a food rut from to time.

Someone suggested that I make Lazy Chicken. Frankly that didn’t sound all that great for some reason, and I think it was just that the name evoked unpleasant imagery.  As does yogurt.  I don’t really care for yogurt and I think it is because the word yogurt is an ugly and unappetizing word.  Yogurt just doesn’t sound like something you oughta eat.  They should call it buttery creamy caramel toasted stuff. Then I would like it.

Anyway, I looked around on the internet and this Lazy Chicken had a pretty good reputation, except for you know, being lazy.  So I went with it and followed the recipe without deviation.  But I had a not-so-good feeling about this dish all along.

If you are interested, here’s the recipe:  Take a bunch of spices and coat the chicken, either frozen or fresh, and then bake it at 350.  So that’s what I did.  But when I pulled it out of the oven and tested a piece, my not-so-good feeling was confirmed: this chicken was not-so-good.  I just couldn’t serve it.  So I rinsed off all the spices, smothered it in salsa and covered the pan with heavy foil and set it aside to rest, to take a little power nap.

I then said a little prayer that through a baptism of salsa, the not-so-good chicken might experience a trans-substantiation of sorts and turn into something not-so-bad. Salsa can cover a myriad of culinary sins.  And with the guests set to arrive in 10 minutes, there was nothing more that could be done.  I had to move on.

And if the chicken wasn’t so great, then at least I had prepared other things.  Lining the counter and ready to go was some hummus I had made for an appetizer, a spring salad, creamy au gratin potatoes, clover leaf rolls and pretty little homemade cobbler topped with a dusting of sugar which sparkled in the glow of the under-cabinet fluorescent lights.  Pretty much, my entire meal was setting out on the counter waiting to be served.  All that was left to do was make the tea so I boiled some water in the microwave.

When the microwave beeped, I popped open the door and retrieved a small pitcher of bubbling hot water.  But as I did, the pitcher caught on the heavy12-inch glass platter that rotates inside the microwave. And out it fell.  It first crashed onto the granite counter top and busted into a zillion pieces and then the rest of it crashed to the porcelain tile floor and busted into ten zillion pieces.  Granite and porcelain tile are not forgiving surfaces.  Keep this in mind should you be thinking of remodeling your kitchen.  One unfortunate incident and your grandmother’s china is history. As well as any food you may have prepared.

When I opened my eyes there was glass everywhere. Every. Where.  For weeks after, I found bits of glass all the way into the breakfast room and even the den.  There was shards of glass in every dish I had prepared — everything that is except the stupid lazy good for nuthin’ chicken which was covered tightly with foil.  And my guests were set to arrive any minute.

I wanted to cry big fat sloppy unappetizing snotty tears.  And I also wanted to bust something else and stomp my feet and maybe even shake my fist.

But I didn’t do any of those things. I screamed for Sean to go get his father to help me clean up the mess.  My plan was to first clean up the glass and then figure out how to prepare another meal in six minutes.

While AD swept up and wiped up and vacuumed up glass, I dumped all the food into the trash, dish by dish, making up new curse words in my head with every scrape.

Then on to Plan B.  I always have a couple of blocks of cream cheese and crackers on hand, so I think I poured Somethingoranother over the cream cheese and put out some crackers and called it an appetizer.  Then I made a pot of minute rice and seasoned it with a leftover packet of Somethingoranother that I found in the freezer.  Then I opened a couple of cans of green beans, also seasoned with Somethingoranother and for dessert I pulled a Sara Lee Somethingoranother cake out of the freezer.  If you don’t stock Somethingoranother and salsa in your pantry, you really should.

As luck would have it, our guests got caught in traffic and were a few minutes late and I magically pulled a meal together in time.

When the guests I arrived I tried to forget about the fact that I had glass dust floating in the air, and just relax and enjoy their company, which wasn’t hard to do as they were a fun couple, good conversationalists with entertaining stories.  When they complimented me on the chicken I didn’t quite believe them because, in my opinion, it was really not very good. But they did clean their plates, so maybe they were sincere.

I guess as is often said, all’s well that ends well and no sense crying over shattered glass in your entire meal and if it ain’t broke, then Antique Mommy hasn’t touched it. Whatever.

So then, for a truly smashing dinner party, stock up on Somethingoranother and have Plan B. And maybe a dustpan handy.

Sean’s first grade school year is about over and, for the most part, it has been a good year.

Nothing has happened over the course of this year which has made me regret my decision to put Sean in public school.  Which is kind of surprising to me.  I thought there would be something.

So, it looks like we’ll give public school a go again next year.  I say “looks like” because if there is one thing I’ve leaned as a parent, it’s that anything can change at any minute.  The minute I make a decision and plant my feet, it’s highly likely that something is going to change to make me look foolish.

At the beginning of the school year, I wrote about how our plan all along, from the day he was born, was to put Sean in private school. But a few weeks before school started we we had not fallen in love with any of the private schools we researched, so we enrolled him in the local elementary school by default.  But not without some trepidation.

One thing that is important to me is that Sean learns how to behave appropriately in public and I wanted a school that would reinforce what we do at home, which is not tolerate uncivilized behavior.  And it seemed to me, at the time, that a private school would do — could do, would have the freedom to do — a better job in this regard.  While Sean is a pretty good boy, I figured that in public school I’d be dealing with the influence of a population of people whose values and parenting philosophy may not necessarily align with my own. Whereas at a private Christian school, that’s really what you are paying for – people and an administration whose philosophy aligns with yours.

Last April, when we were looking at private schools, we attended an end-of-the-year show the kindergarten class at a particular private school put on for the parents.  The admissions counselor invited us suggesting that it might give us a feel for the school.  And boy, did it.  The children stood on risers in their cute little uniforms and sang a variety of songs. Each child had a line to say or sing and it was apparent that they had worked very hard all year on the show.

Unfortunately one little boy in the front mugged and waved and danced around, and shoved and stage whispered to the the kids around him, and was just generally disruptive and acted liked an ass a spoiled brat.  This went on for the entirety of the 45-minute show.  He ruined the program for the other kids and their parents.  Perhaps his tuition-paying parents thought it was cute, I don’t know, but I thought it was terribly unfair to the other kids that no adult stepped in and put the skids to his antics.

Is it unthinkable that a 6-year-old boy would act up and be silly?  No.

Is it unthinkable that at an adult would not correct this child?  Yes.

Had that been Sean being so disruptive, I would have yanked him off the stage by the ear with the intention of inflicting upon him the maximum embarrassment one could possibly experience.   And because I’m just that crazy, I’d probably make him stand up and apologize to the entire room after the show thereby decreasing the odds that it should happen again.  I am a mom who means business when it comes to courtesy.

When the evening was over, and not a minute too soon, I asked Sean what he thought about the show. He shrugged and said it was nice but he noticed that the boy in front was being bad.  I told him I was glad he noticed that because if he ever did anything like that, I’d yank him off the stage so fast his socks would be left behind wondering where he went.  He found the imagery amusing, but he got my point.

After that event, I was soured on the school.  That not one adult corrected this child — not a teacher, not the kid’s parents, not an administrator – indicated to me a top down philosophy that I can’t abide.  That sort of thing ought not slide and I wasn’t going to pay money to a school which allows it.  I don’t buy the whole “boys will be boys” thing.

And then soon after it was August, and we put Sean in public school, and now it’s April again. (sigh)

I thought back on that end-of-the year show when Sean’s 1^st grade class presented their musical program for the parents this year.  And to be honest, I was expecting a fair amount of bad behaving kids. For one thing, there are 100 first graders, so the odds of bad behavior rises exponentially just by the numbers and – I just have to say it – its public school.  You might just sort of expect less in the behavior department for a variety of reasons.

But you know what?  Not one kid misbehaved.  Not even a little.

Not one.

Paint me surprised.  Pleasantly surprised.

So what has Antique Mommy been doing for the past month and a half you ask? I have cleaned out my garage so that I can now walk in it and not trip over anything or have something fall on me. I can even set something down. This makes me very VERY happy. I am the anti-hoarder and orderliness gives me a thrill. And I’ve been playing with my camera and Photoshop and just generally goofing off and enjoying having the windows open and watching the grass turn green. There now, doesn’t your life seem more exciting just by comparison? You’re welcome.

But enough about my clean garage and neat freak tendencies. I am here today to tell you about Fotolia, a photo stock company. They contacted me a while back and offered me some some free photo stock and asked me if I’d tell you about them and I said yes because I have been a Fotolia fan for a couple of years. And I like free stuff.  Don’t ask me how to pronounce it though because I do not know.  Is it “fo-toll-ya” or “foto-lee-ya”?

Why would you use stock images you might ask. Well I use them on my blog from time to time. Sometimes a picture punctuates the story nicely. Any given post might not be worth a 1000 words, but a picture is.  I also have a company that makes photo montage presentations for businesses and people and sometimes I need an image to thread the story together, an image that I can’t get myself. A lot of what I do with Fotolia stock images is make digital art. But you can also make invitations, Christmas cards and scrapbooky type stuff.  In fact my blog background which I have had for the past five years is from Fotolia.

So, here’s some stuff I’ve done with my Fotolia images recently.

I call this Waiting for Miss Riding Hood.  It was made in Photoshop using a Fotolia stock image of a wolf (all three wolves are the same) and a Fotolia stock illustration of trees along with some stock textures. I thought it was very cool and put it on my Facebook page, but no one “liked” it.  Not even my mother.

This is a Fotolia stock graphic into which I inserted Sean’s pictures.

Below, I used a Fotolia stock graphic of a blank book and put Sean’s picture on the right and the text on the left.

So there you have it. If you are in need of reasonably priced stock images, check out Fotolia today!