Oh Mother

Well, it's Mother's Day, and fittingly, I am channeling my inner Ma Walton, waking up to a houseful (four) of kids. Even though it's more work, I absolutely love when kids sleep over at my house. It makes it feel so cozy, and I like making chocolate chip pancakes and bacon for them, which I would never do for just myself and my son. My son had his birthday party yesterday, which consisted of putting up his soccer goal and his volleyball net, making some birthday treats, ordering in some Chinese and staying the hell out of the way of the kids.

I saw something really weird; my son was goofing around with his friends, and I noticed him doing the exactly the same kind of funny dancing schtick with them that my ex-husband used to do, which of course he has never seen. So bizarre.

The other thing that intrigues me about my son is I think he's popular. I was never, and will never be, popular (or unpopular for that matter). I think I'm just kind of a quiet eccentric, which is ok by me.

Here are some family values I can really get behind. And here is the logical conclusion of Bush's anti-women, anti-sex education, anti-contraception and anti-abortion flavor of family values (even though it's in the UK, but you know what I mean).

Two awesome visionaries bought the farm recently, J.K. Galbraith and Jane Jacobs. I think if I had known Galbraith, I would have had an almighty crush on him; arrogant, charismatic, and an advocate for the underdog. Sigh. He wrote a critique of the American way of life, The Affluent Society, which took issue with living in affluence amid public squalor, and was involved with implementing the New Deal.

Jane Jacobs was an aficionado of urban life. Not the faux communities that seem to be the mode now, but real urban life, with neighborhood hangouts and corner shops and real characters.

Some wonderful person scanned Rosy Grier's Needlepoint for Men and posted it on Flicker. Needlepoint and knitting both use graphs, so I could knit from those charts, and I am absolutely itching to knit a Samurai bag.