Sentimental Value

Is there anything in your home that you absolutely would not get rid of because it has sentimental value? I’m not talking about irreplaceable family heirlooms, but about stuff that can be replaced with a similar item or not at all. Why am I asking?

I love to watch Clean House, that’s the show that cleans up a cluttered home by getting rid of stuff people don’t use or need. What surprises me about the people on the show is how attached they are to their stuff. Stuff they are not using and that’s buried under more stuff. The clean house crew literally has to pry items from their hands. People cry. I’m thinking what’s the problem, get rid of it! Now it’s possible I could be missing my sentimental gene, so I tested out my theory by walking around my place to see if there was anything I could not part with…….

The result?

I ended up putting mental price tags on everything! I don’t feel any emotional or sentimental attachment to this stuff. I have furniture, possible antiques, given to me from a relative, but if I had to sell it, without a second thought, it would be soooo gone.

So to tap into my sentimental gene, I have my daughter making a patchwork quilt with clothing from me, her dad and some of her old clothing. We’ll be collecting patches of clothing from other family members as well. Maybe when she’s done, I’ll start feeling sentimental about something, but for right now, my sentimental gene is MIA. I probably sold it at a garage sale. Just recently I asked my mother to bequeath her china that belonged to my father’s aunt to me because it’s a beautiful set and I would use it, but everything can’t have sentimental value, can it?

Please tell me I’m not the only one, are you the sentimental type? Is there anything in your home you would not part with because of its sentimental value?

What Does It Mean…

What does it mean when your mother calls, asks you for your email address (she has it in her contacts) and you tell her it’s your initials, your birth date @whatever.com and she gets it wrong! She repeated it back to me and gave me the wrong answer and I’m like “Mom, how can you get this wrong?” I thought I was giving her an easy to remember formula and I get the pregnant pause like I just asked her a final Jeopardy answer. Now I’m thinking, just tell me if I was adopted, it would explain so much.

I pride myself on knowing things about my friends and family, middle names, birthdays, anniversaries. I like “knowing” people and I like when people know me well enough to remember certain things about me. It tells me that you are just as interested in me as I am about you. Okay, I don’t remember phone numbers too well unless it’s one I have to memorize, but I know some people well enough to have an entire conversation with just my eyes. How do you feel about your friends or family remembering facts about you or are we all excused from remembering anything because everything is remembered for us?

I’m calling my mother back later this evening. Hi Mom, I have a question for you. What is my birth year, minus the time I was born, divided by four times two. If she gets it wrong, I will know for sure she’s hiding something. With my history, she will probably ask which one of “her” kids am I.

Writer’s Breakfast

This morning was met with much excitement in our home. Today my daughter and her peers read their published books in front of the class and parents. The children were free to write about whatever, many wrote about their dreams, some read poems they had written, others spoke about trips they had taken to Africa and one read about Passover.

It was nice meeting parents that I have not met before and great seeing the parents I already knew. One parent commented on how well my daughter reads and boy, does that make me feel good! Although when it was her time to read, she didn’t read loud enough and I’m standing in the back wanting to give hand signals to direct her. Sit up. Enunciate your words. Speak louder. Hold your book up when you read. Maintain audience contact. Of course, I didn’t gesture my thoughts to her, that was just my 20 plus years of public speaking experience thinking out loud. I thought she, as well as the other children, did great reading in front of an audience. That’s not such an easy thing to do, I still get nervous.

After they were done reading their books, we had a light breakfast and chatted with the other parents and kids. At least once a month, I take some time off from work to doing something in her class, whether it be for show-and-tell or reading with the other kids, I think it’s important to be there. Nothing compares to the return I get on my investment, the joy on her face: Priceless.

Mr. Mom

In the December 2007 issue of Essence Magazine, I came across an article I thought would be interesting to blog about, Stay at Home Dads (SAHD).

The only SAHD that I know are called unemployed and they are there, temporarily, by default. There are, however, a growing number of men who voluntarily opt-out of corporate America and are choosing to be the primary caregiver for the kids and work from home.

Being a SAHD comes with many challenges, prejudices and sometimes even ridicule. They have to deal with stereotypes of what a man’s role in the home should be. Typically, he’s the one that works outside the home.

Then there are the stay-at-home-moms (SAHM) who are uncomfortable with a man assuming what is traditionally known as a woman’s role. Often times he is excluded from playgroup activities and mothers refuse to send their kids over to play if the primary caregiver is SAHD and the wife is not home.

Friends and family are also quick to voice their approval or disapproval on the man being the primary caregiver. This is especially true if the woman’s father is still alive. He may view his son-in-law as a freeloader who should get a real job.

Male friends may give the SAHD a hard time with the thought of a woman taking care of him and the family. Female friends may give the working mom a hard time because she is out working while he sits at home watching Oprah.

Interesting enough, statistics show that “half of all children with highly involved fathers in two parent families reported getting mostly A’s through twelfth grade, compared with 35.2% of children whose fathers resided outside the home.” Source: National Center for Education Statistics.

1.8 million - The number of preschoolers whose fathers care for them for more hours than any other child-care provider while their mothers are at work. Source: U.S. Census Bureau.

Spike TV Poll reports that 31 percent of black men taking care of their children full time compared with 18% of white fathers and 25% of Hispanic fathers.

Census Bureau estimates that across the country last year there were 159,000 fathers who remained out of the labor force to care for their children while their wives worked.

It’s unfortunate that many SAHD are looked upon as inferior or less than a man because they choose to stay at home with the kids. Parenting is challenging enough without outsiders forcing their ideas of what the roles should be in your family. Personally, I don’t have a problem with a man staying at home and taking care of the kids (sometimes, I’m glad to go to work to rest - shhhh), because parenting is no walk in the park.

The times we live in today are very different from yesterday. Whatever reasons (be it financial, inadequate childcare or a desire to be there) a family may choose in having a SAHD, no doubt it is in the best interest of their family, and if it works for them, who am I to criticize?

Maintain the Fish Tanks In Your Life

To me, my fish tank is a thing of beauty, sometimes I stand there just mesmerized by its comeliness. I even invite people over just to look at it, other fish enthusiasts, of course. Initially, setting up an aquarium is a lot of hard work, especially if you have a large tank. A lot of time, money and energy is invested for it to be successful. It truly is a labor of love.

Basically, an aquarium requires my being dedicated to weekly water changes, vacuuming the gravel, changing the filter media, pruning live plants, cleaning the glass, spending time observing my fish and keeping an eye on the water temperature and parameters. Sure, I can skip some of these steps, but if I want to have a thriving tank and healthy fish, each task deserves some regular attention and maintenance from me!

So my tank has been up and running smoothly for weeks, but the work is not over, it’s just beginning. This is no time for me to slack off and throw it into auto pilot because I can still run into problems. There may be times when I could have issues with my tank that may threaten the life of my fish, such as disease, or I could have something I’m currently dealing with now, snails. I hate snails. “Snails are like roaches” is what my local salesperson at the fish store says. Now, not every tank will have snails, but there is a chance if live plants are placed untreated into a tank, snails may be present. So, left untreated, I now spend a good amount of time plucking these suckers out of my tank and discarding them because they are a threat to my plants.

There are times, however, when I can’t stand to look at the darn thing and that’s when I have let too many days or weeks go by without giving my tank the needed care and maintenance. If the glass gets too much algae (high wattage from the lights) on it or if the water looks less than clean, I don’t even want to look at it, it’s almost non-existent. I see it, but I don’t. I won’t even bother feeding the fish because that will just add to the chaos in the tank. To me, it has lost its beauty and I’m no longer interested because I failed on maintenance.

Now, I’m a busy person and sometimes I just don’t have the time needed to take care of the maintenance as often as I would like, but I never let it get to a point where the tank is in danger. I find it necessary to have to make, and sometimes create, the time for maintenance in order to keep me interested and the tank free from disaster.

Where am I going with this? I was just thinking how relationships are like fish tanks. They need to be maintained, some things need to be changed, other things monitored, some things pruned and sometimes things, like snails, need to be removed for the overall health of the tank.

I’m just wondering what we do when problems arise in our relationships. Have we slacked on maintenance? Do we look the other way? Do we ignore the symptoms? Do we lose interest? Are we too tired to deal or are we quick to pluck these “snails” from our lives and make the necessary changes? Regular maintenance of your relationships, any relationship, is what will help it thrive into a thing of beauty. May you never be too tired or busy to maintain the fish tanks in your life.

PS - Here’s a link to small video of my fish tank. Okay one more.