Failure...matey!

As an English major...nay, as an even slightly educated, English-speaking human...I should be too ashamed to admit this even to my closest friends, much less blog about it to all three of my readers. (I admit to a certain amount of overlap in those categories.) And I should certainly hesitate to expose my child by telling this. It puts my cultural literacy teaching skills in the very worst light. It puts my child's literacy in almost as bad a light. But I have decided to pass the buck and blame the school, thus turning this into an expose' of the deplorable academic failures of our education system, instead of a mea culpa regarding my mothering.

So, today we were in the car and something, I'm not sure what, put the September Baby in mind of Shakespeare, and he asked me something about him...something along the lines of why do people make such a big deal about the stuff Shakespeare wrote?

Now, I took a whole year of classes on Shakespeare in college (besides, Kenneth Branagh's Henry V is one of my favorite movies ever). I felt I was therefore uniquely qualified to answer a question like that. I mean, this is what parents wait for, isn't it? The glimmers of a yearning, curious mind in their progeny...proof of life, proof of intelligence! And I'm The Mother, after all. The Stay-at-Home Mom whose job it is, besides chauffer, to Be There when the Big Questions come up. The ones whose answers shape the future, not only of the child, but of mankind! And there I was, the Literary Parent to the Good Doctor's Science Parent. So, I turned down the conservative talk radio show, put down my iPhone, and began...

"It's 'cause...well...Shakespeare...William Shakespeare...was, like, you know...a really good writer and stuff..."

The February Baby piped up, sounding surprised and a little puzzled, and said, "I thought Shakespeare was a pirate!"

I gasped and swerved. "What?" Shrilly, "A...pirate?!?"

Then I laughed and twiddled the wheel, steering the Suburban off the curb and back into the street. "You're just kidding...aren't you, sweetie? Hahaha!"

"No, I'm not kidding," he said. "Honestly, for the past ten years, I've thought he was a pirate. I never knew he was a writer."

Wow.

Yeah.

That story is all I need, if I ever do need to prove my ineffectiveness as a parent--my utter uselessness at shaping the next generation.

However, as I said, I've decided to take the modern approach and shove the blame off on his school teachers.

And The Three will be drifting off to sleep tonight while listening to me read Hamlet...or, at least, while watching my DVD of Henry V.

Grammar-snob Humor

I am helping give a baby shower for a friend of ours who moved to Hattiesburg fairly recently and is having her first girl after having two boys (just like us). I offered to take care of the invitations because I love paper and fonts and spending hours looking at the website finestationery.com. So I did them, and they came, and they are darling. They're ivory and have long green curly grass on the left hand side with a tiny fairy with silver wings perched on one of the leaves of grass, looking down on the words of the invitation below her. (The Three repeatedly pointed out to me that she is "nekkid!" and they're right, but she is tiny, so I hope it's okay to send these to the ladies in the church.)

The wording of the invitation begins "We are enchanted...the Blowings are having a baby girl!" (Name changed to protect the innocent.) Are you with me? The family's name is Blowing. There are two of them who are having a baby girl (or four, if you count the brothers). And I do realize now that perhaps "expecting" would have been a better verb if I wanted to imply that they're all having a baby, because, really, we all know that the mother is the only one who will actually be having a baby...am I getting bogged down here?

Anyway...the Blowings are having a baby girl...more than one Blowing...The Blowing Family, in fact. One Blowing...several Blowings. And that, my friends (who, if you even know about this blog, already know this is true), is the correct way to write the plural form of a family name. I know it's correct; I have the M.A. in English from the South's greatest university to prove it. And it is one of my pet peeves for anyone to write (or, worse, print) something like "Love, The Nelson's." It's just basic grammar, learned in third grade.

Wow. You'd think they never taught me not to belabor a point.

So, back to the story. When I typed the text for the invitation I made sure I had it right, and when the printers sent me the proof I made sure they had it right (that mistake has become so common, I have actually heard of it being changed wrongly by a printer!), and when I opened the box of finished invitations I looked to make sure it was right.

(Do you watch "Monk"? I'm reminding myself of a character on that show.)

It was correct. It said "The Blowings are having a baby girl!"

Now let me warn you...the following will only be amusing to the kind of English major/punctuation stickler who would give her children a copy of the book Eats Shoots and Leaves and expect them to find it as hilariously funny as she does...in short, to me.

And, thankfully, also to Laura (name un-changed to expose the guilty.)

I texted Laura, since she's the Head Hostess of the shower--she's the one who thought of having one; and I told her how insanely cute the invitations are. She registered approval. Then I remembered that she is also a fairly educated girl (though it must have happened in Memphis instead of at her...they call themselves a...university) with a finely-honed sense of humor (that's what I'll call it, at any rate, since it's similar to mine). The Good Doctor was reading the paper and watching Fox News and I figured I should stir up a little humor for myself and the September Baby who was sitting with me because, as I've said in the previous 52 paragraphs, children should be taught early to scorn those who use bad grammar...

Oh, didn't I say that?

So I sent Laura text saying, "And btw, it IS correct to say, 'The Blowing's are having a baby girl,' isn't it?"

And I waited...I imagined that I could feel the tension and horror emanating through the cell waves, picturing Laura's shock and confusion, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, her thumbs, quivering, hovering over the keys, her mind racing, trying to decide how to word her reply to me and whether she wanted her name associated as a hostess for a shower with such a glaring mistake on the invitations.

Win and I were giggling hysterically; I told Kiper the joke; he rolled his eyes and rustled his paper, saying, "It's just S; no apostrophe." (I do love a man who knows punctuation rules.)

"Well, duh! I know! That's why this is so funny!"

There was also a tiny moment of doubt in my mind...what if she didn't realize that was wrong? Would we be able to remain friends? After a couple of tense moments, I sent her another text saying, "Hahahahahahahaaaaaaa!" so she would know that I had been joking. At the same time, she'd finally decided what to say, and I got a text from her saying, "Umm...I think it's Blowings." This was quickly followed by a very relieved phone call from her. We laughed and laughed.

Ahhh...good times.

Now that I look back, maybe the title of this post should be "Grammar-snob Humor...An Oxymoron?"

Get it? More grammar humor! Hahahaha!

(And now, after all this, I have to admit that I am having nightmares that there may still be an as-yet-unnoticed typo on this invitation. And it will be all my fault. And I will die of shame.)

Googling my house, Part 2

Since I can't actually google my house...no matter how long I sit here and kill time on the computer...I have had to find a different solution. It's called Cleaning Out and Putting Things Where They Belong.

And I think I have found the best way to do that...hire my organized and organizing friend Sarah to help me! (Well, actually, Sarah was the driving force...I was the helper.)

I could kick myself for not taking a "Before" picture, but really the final result is beautiful on its own without needing any contrast.

Look! Look at this closet! It is gorgeous! Aside from the quality of the photograph, it could be on the cover of Martha Stewart Living! I want to decorate it with flowers. I want to sleep in there on a pallet on the floor. I want my whole house to be this pretty.

I leave these closet doors open all the time now and just feel the order and peace wafting out over me like a benediction when I walk by.

Now, I know about entropy--that slide into disorder--but I wish it were the other way around. I wish that the rest of my house would, by osmosis, become more orderly because of the good example of this closet. But instead, the rest of the house looks even more slatternly by comparison.

 Ick.

Ugh!

So, I really hope Sarah will keep coming back and nudge, cajole...or whip...the rest of the place up to the same level of beauty and order as what is now known as the Pretty Closet.

Sarah?

Please call me back...

Please?

I wish I could Google my house

The Good Doctor has been looking for our copy of The Screwtape Letters...not, of course, the easily found one that's included in a beautiful collection of C.S. Lewis' works that lies picturesquely on his bedside table. He wants the tiny, old, red, frayed, cloth-bound one that he read the first time he read the book.

I can't find it, either.

I also can't find my camera battery charger. In a whole tangle of camera battery chargers, I can't find the one particular charger that I need for one particular camera. Nor can I find the stickers that are supposed to go on the car tag of the new Suburban. Or the third big square pillow form that I got to go on the May Baby's bed. Sadly, this list could go on and on.

I am so spoiled by being able to walk over to the big Mac (Big Mac! Hahaha!) in the corner of my kitchen, whenever anyone has a question about anything, and type it into the blank space and find the answer. "What time do the Rebels play?" "What kind of insect is this?" "What are the words to this song?" "Do they have flamingos in Europe?" So, even when I need to find some physical thing in my house, my first instinct is to "Google it." I want to be able to type the name of a physical object into the search bar and, instead of having Google tell me where I can buy one, I want it to show me where it is in my house. And I'm not particular about how it would tell me: it could give a written description or a photo or an X on a floor plan of my house. I just wish I could Google my house.

Too bad I can't.

(Yeah, I was going to take a picture of the book for this post but, as per the inspiration for writing it, I can't find the book. So then I was going to take a picture of the computer, but my camera battery is dead. And I can't find its charger. If I could show you a photo of my desk, you'd be surprised that I can find the keyboard.)

The Season Begins...

The Good Doctor has a meeting on Thursday nights and so doesn't get home until 7:00 or so. Tonight when he got home, the Three had already eaten supper and done their homework. Two were upstairs playing Halo and the September Baby was watching a James Bond movie (Goldeneye with Pierce Brosnan), resting his brain from memorizing the squares of 1 to 30.

Kiper walked into the family room and said, "Hey, Win, there's a football game on. Will you pause the movie?"

"For how long?" Win asked.

"Until January," was the answer.