mamasewingcircus.com

Thinking about renaming the site, “Sarah, the commie pinko tree-hugging liberal leftist from Berkeley”

I’m very amused by the responses I’ve seen to the Wall Street melt down, and subsequent government bailout. A group of people have posted the text of the proposed bailout online so that we the people can suggest edits.

One of the Senators poised behind the bailout, Senator Bernie Sanders, spoke in a forum this week stating,

“For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”

An angry mob created the website BuyMyShitpile.com where instead of protesting the government bailout, you can post your bad investments in a plea to the government to bail you out as well.

And best of all, Obama’s got a new commercial comparing McCain’s healthcare reform plan to his support of de-regulation of Wall Street.

We’ve seen what Bush-McCain policies have done to our economy. Now John McCain wants to do the same to our health care. McCain just published an article praising Wall Street deregulation. Said he’d reduce oversight of the health insurance industry, too. Just “as we have done over the last decade in banking.” Increasing costs and threatening coverage. A prescription for disaster. John McCain. A risk we just can’t afford to take.

Last night was the congratulations happy hour at our local watering hole for the street’s Olympic gold medalist, Jessie Lorenz. Jessie’s goalball team won gold at the Beijing Paralympics a few weeks ago.

Doug got to hold the medal. It is about 6 inches across, gold with a jade inset.

The Contra Costa Times has a short article on Jessie’s glory.

Congratulations, Jessie!

It is soccer season, again.

The official first day for under-5s was two weekends, ago, but we were in the woods battling poison ivy, so this past weekend was Will’s first for the Fall season. Check out the mad soccer skilz that run in our family:

We’ve been recycling grey water since April. Specifically, we have been re-using the run-off from our showers and baths to water the garden and flush our toilets. The result? We used 60 fewer gallons per day this billing period than we used this time last year, and 40 fewer gallons per day this billing period than last billing period. I expected a thank you note or a congratulations in with our bill, but East Bay Mud didn’t even acknowledge our efforts. 

To be  honest, this is not all from lugging water around the house in buckets. We installed a low-flow shower head (1.5 gal/min), dropped our lawn watering, bought a front load washing machine, and began re-using our bath and shower water for watering the lawn and flushing toilets.

“At last the doors of government have been thrown open, and anyone can obtain the highest office in the land.”

I’ve mentioned before that I know my son is intelligent, but I am struck by how his learning style is so different from mine. Approach this kid with an activity book and a pen, and he recoils in terror; come at him with a box of wooden blocks and he dives in ready to play for hours.

We pulled out the Capital Letter blocks and alphabet placemat yesterday to start more focused “schooling” in preparation for kindergarten. Several months have passed since I last approached the ABCs and writing, though these things are covered in his daily preschool curriculum. He seems to confidently know all of his letters, and enjoys inventing new ones. (Who am I to stop him!) Yesterday’s exercise focused mainly on building uppercase letters that we identified on the placemat. I’d ask him to find a letter on the placemat and then try to build it. The pictures are some of his freeform building – an S with a long tail, a U that became a Y, a Q that grew into a spaceship…

On our drive home from school we’ve been working on thinking of words that begin with certain letters or end in certain sounds. This game is becoming increasingly popular as they reinforce it at school. I admit all of this has me anxious, though. I’ve heard kindergarten is a struggle for many little boys, and in my exercises with Will, I can see how this could be. If his early classes were to focus on physics, chemistry and math, I can see how this kid would thrive, but they sadly focus on wordplay and drawing. I think he might do as well as anyone at following the rules, but pressed to draw, I wonder.

I’ll be paying close attention to his progression over the next year or two, and who knows – we may end up going an alternative route for early schooling.

This past weekend, while Ike beat up Texas, we were roughing it at Samuel P Taylor park. The more camping we do with kiddies, the more relaxed our definition of “camping” becomes. Earlier this year, deciding we couldn’t handle the dirt in Housekeeping, we spent a weekend “roughing it” on some of the more comfortable beds I’ve slept on in my adult years at the Yosemite Lodge. In keeping with that theme of deprivation, hostile wilderness retreats, bare-bones living – we started this past weekend’s trip with burritos from Grillies in Fairfax which we washed down with Trader Joe’s supplied Swiss chocolate + designer marshmallow + organic graham cracker smores cooked to gooieness over a crackling Duraflame log. Oh, roughing it.

After smearing marshmallows and chocolate drippings all over the campsite, we retreated into the tent to sleep. No sooner had we zipped the tent shut than a gang of raccoons came rustling through – digging in our pantry box, rummaging through our cooler. There were at least 6 the size of Sylvie. These suckers were bold. When I stuck my head out to hiss, bark, yell, and clap at them, they gave me that confused teenager look – almost embarrassed for me – and carried on about their looting. Doug was able to run them off with a few flashes of the light and a barked “Get outta here.” After re-securing the site, we were back in the tent ready for slumber. They descended from the woods, again. We went through this cycle a few more times before we reached the optimal balance of food secured in the car and at the site. The final solution involved the camp stove turned on end and ratcheted to the doors of the pantry, and the picnic table perched on top of the cooler lid. Why didn’t we just put all the food in the car once we realized they’d be so relentless? Just try to argue with a Diego…

In the morning, the sun rose over camp revealing a sea of poison oak surrounding our site. It was within 1 foot of our car, our tent, our path to the bathroom… Refreshed from our adventurous night, we took a deep breath, calmly coached the kids to stay out of the woods at all cost, and sat down to finish our coffee. You’d think I haven’t been a mom for 4 years! Sure enough by noon, we were exhausted from the deadly wood avoidance. We’d caught the kids by the nape of their necks skipping towards, in mid air flying into, and mili seconds from sliding right through it. Common sense sunk in, and we packed up and headed home.

We spent 2 hours scrubbing bodies and clothes with Technu, and another 4 loads of laundry driving the poison from our camping gear. 4 days later, we’re thankfully still itch free.

The eyes? I don’t know…

Mom – the sweater came clean of camp dirt, too.

I had some pictures and a post to upload, but last night the blog ate my post, so you’ll have to make due with today’s short snippet.

This afternoon, Will laying on the floor whines, “Mom, my nose feels funny.”
“What do you mean funny? How does it feel?”
“It feels like diarrhea.”
“Diarrhea in your nose?”
“Yes.”

and, recently:
“I love you to gravity, and gravity and gravity and gravity”
I guess that means he loves me more force than the weight of the world? And I him.