Grumpy Cat

So I woke up this morning to snow... And the only thing running through my mind is this:

Again?

Good job People Magazine. CT is hot and all, but you have got to get it together.

Bad Luck Brian

Driving home today, I heard an advertisement for a local summer concert series featuring Nickelback. I thought to myself, what poor bastard would win tickets to that? Then I realized....

Bad luck Brian would.

Baby's Room

She's almost 1, but I finally got her room 'done.'

It took me a while to get it right - I kept hanging on to the green paint from when my older daughter was in the nursery. But once I painted it tan, it was much easier to go a certain direction - Purple and brown. =)

The curtains, lamp, and rug are from Target. The chair was brand new at a consignment store (it still had the plastic on it!), and the art work is scrap paper cut to design. One is a tree with a chandelier and the other is a peacock. The frames are from Michael's.

I got all the wooden funiture from Ikea. It's the Leksvik collection - which I don't think they make anymore. (Boo!) But it is 4 years old and is still awesome!

The pitcher vase is from Target, and the box and flowers are from Michael's. The teddy bear on the top left was made from my great-grandmother's fur shawl.

Matching Ikea crib. I am really hoping I did the "My Baby" translation correctly! I ordered the wall decal from Uppercase Living's online catalog, and made the wreath from materials from Michael's. I love that place!!

Paid Maternity Leave

A friend just posted this petition from Change.org onto Facebook. It's a petition to have paid maternity leave standard for new moms. A good case for signing this petition is made on the Moms in Maine blog.

Listen, I think we all know how I feel about women's rights - or lack thereof. This country's attitude towards women has really been in the spotlight lately, and I hope we use it as a wake-up call to erase the paradigms about working moms, parenting styles, and motherly competition.

We're told the fetus belongs to the government. Once the baby is born, the woman belongs to the employer and the baby belongs to the daycare. Unless something goes wrong, then the mother is to blame. We can't win.

I think a good step forward is to sign the petition and let Congress know we are serious. New Mother rooms are a step forward for many employers, but it's not enough. FMLA is not enough. Using disability insurance coverage as maternity leave is not enough. And listening to the HR employee scold me about getting pregnant before I've been at the company a year is just unacceptable.

I mean, what do the decision-makers in this country want? They don't want to pay for birth control, they don't want us to get abortions, they don't want to pay for maternity leave when we have the baby, and they don't want us subsidizing our income through government programs (WIC, food stamps, etc.) if we can't afford to raise our kids on partial income. Even more, they don't want us being in high positions and earning as much as men.

Just sign the petition already.

Toddler Mayhem

My favorite thing to do is be a mom. I have two beautiful girls that are 3.5 and 10 months. Even better, they love each other. The other day my older daughter said, "Mom, I used to be lonely before sister got here." Sooooo much better to hear than what all the books tell you they will say, which is something along the lines of "Mom, when are you going to take that baby back to the hospital?"

Due to my love for these wonderful beings, it is easy for me to overlook some of the newly budding toddler mayhem coming from my well-mannered daughter. Mostly because she's so dang polite when she does it!

Case in Point:
Last night I was upstairs giving the baby a bath. Generally they bathe together so I can keep an eye on both of them, but sometimes the oldest wants a little independence. I mean really, how can you say no to a 3-year-old that politely asks you to have a turn playing with the bath toys all by herself? So there I was, washing baby hair while trying to keep her in a sitting position, when the toddler comes into the room and says, "Mommy, I cut the string off the rug for you."

Since we have hardwood floors, I have a lot of nice rugs in multiple rooms. Some of them have tassles on either side. Actually, four of them have tassles on either side. Now I am trying to rationalize what she means while keeping an active 10-month-old from either drowning or getting soap in her eyes. My only response was, "Oh? Well you'll have to show me when I am done giving sissy a bath." No yelling, no cussing, but maybe a stink-eye thrown in.

After the baby was done, the toddler got into the tub. She wanted to play for what seemed like a rather long time, and then she delayed a return downstairs with lots of games in her room. Fortunately, what is left of my brain reminded me there were some rugs I needed to inspect. Off we marched down the stairs. This is what I found:

Pretty straight line for
a toddler!

First, we had a talk about what is OK to cut with scissors and what is not. Then we created a new rule in the house about not using scissors unless an adult was in the room to supervise.

Since I was the genius that left a toddler in a room alone with safety scissors, I figured I should get most of the blame. What did I expect? At least it was one of the small rugs and she still had all her hair.

Now it came to cleaning up this well-intentioned mess. I asked my daughter where all the "strings" went. Her reply:

All the tassles neatly
placed in the trash can.

How To... Make an Awesome Invite

I thought I would start to share how I make some of my projects. This one is an invitation for my daughters' birthday... Which is going to be an awesome party, but that's another post. For the invitations, I wanted to incorporate some of the party themes including: bright colors, paper lanterns. I also wanted the girls to wear those cute custom birthday shirts on Etsy. But I didn't want to wait for them to be made, or spend the money.

Another problem were the professional pictures.Most good parents get professional pictures taken of their children at least once a year. I am lucky to get them done once every few years, and even then I fail getting them ordered in a timely manner. So here I am, wanting pictures with custom shirts and themes. What is a modern math girl to do?? Solve her own problem, of course.

First, custom shirts. I found some cute white shirts and shorts on sale at Kohl's. Then I went to the fabric store and found two cute (and very bright) coordinating cotton prints, with some buttons, fabric paint, and ribbon for extra decoration. I washed them all and ironed them. Then I used some Iron-On material I've had for about 15 years to glue the fabric to the shirts.

Iron the paper (paper-side up) to the backside of fabric #1 and fabric #2. Make a pretty big area, around 1.5ft x 3ft, or however wide your fabric is.

Then use a plate to trace a circle on the paper on fabric #1.








Cut out your circle, peel off the Iron-On paper, and iron onto the shirt sticky-side down. (Make sure to note how your fabric aligns.)

Then repeat the process of tracing a circle on fabric #2 of the Iron-On paper, and draw whatever design you want within that circle. But make sure you draw it mirror-reverse!

Once you cut out your design, iron to the shirt on top of the circle. You can also play around with words or names.

Now it's fabric paint time! Use a small bead of fabric paint around the edges of your iron-on fabric. This will help with fraying as well as outlining your design.

Let dry for a minimum of 4 hours. Wash and dry as usual after 72 hours.







For the shorts, I used the ribbon and buttons to make a cute decoration. The only sewing skills you need are how to sew on a button.

Coordinating ribbon, buttons, and thread.

Make a simple bow, sew it to the shorts with a button.








Now, what about professional pictures?? I created a mini-studio in my dining room with a white coverlet and paper lanterns. I set up a make-shift light diffuser using an adjustable lamb and the matte side of aluminum foil taped to the adjacent wall.

I took a few pictures with a stand-in to get the lighting and flash setting right.














How did they turn out? You be the judge! Total cost: $60 - including 2 outfits and all materials.

Click "LIKE"

Is it just me, or are we being bombarded with people telling us what to think?

I say this because it is increasingly popular for businesses to post status updates on Facebook with the caption "Click "LIKE" if you think this is funny." First of all, I know how the "Like" function on Facebook works, thank you. Secondly, don't tell me what to do! Maybe I do think it's funny, but now I am not going to click "Like" just because you are telling me to click it.

This social feedback phenomenon doesn't stop there. I was at Kohl's the other day and the cashier looked me straight in the eye to tell me about an online survey regarding my shopping experience. She then went into some psychological Jedi mind trick of telling me that I should select 'Highly Satisfied' for all the questions because their store gets reviewed every week. She even threw in a little Sullivan Nod. Listen lady, even if I am highly satisfied, don't tell me how to answer the questions.

I am all about customer data extrapolation to ensure satisfaction. Customer surveys are important, and tracking data on past purchases helps companies send me relevant ads. That whole 'scandal' of Target modeling purchase patterns to identify newly pregnant consumers and sending them relevant coupons for baby items... I LOVED IT! It makes me happy that Target is paying attention to me and trying to give me what they think I want. Thank you, Target. I've even signed up for their Red Card so they can track me until I die.

But there is a line that a company shouldn't cross when trying to get customer data. When a business tells the consumer what to think, they aren't trying to gain information about the consumer. They are instead validating what they think of themselves through a consumer channel. I don't mind falling into predictable patterns of basic human behavior, but don't tell me how to do it. It's then that I lose respect for your business, and perhaps decide not to click "LIKE" even though I think it's a fantastic status that I would have shared.

The Reek of High School Attitude

Sometimes I am a college math instructor. Sometimes I am a grad student at a prestigious university. Sometimes I am a mother to two young girls. The hat can change multiple times a day. So depending on when you see me, I can be a completely different person with different issues at the top of my mind. Right now I am an instructor teaching a class of adults - with one adult in attendance who still stinks of high school.

High school is good for many students. For some other students it's a place they are forced to go day in and day out. It's a (supposed) waste of time and skills. This can be true. It can also be true that the people who think high school isn't working for them probably aren't working very hard to get anything out of high school, either.

I have a guy in my class that is in a pre-apprenticeship program. The program is phenomenal in terms of skills taught, job placement rate, and starting (and future) salary. This guy has the world in front of him. He even dropped out of high school in his senior year, got his GED, and has just been sitting at home for three months waiting for this program to start. And he got a 30 on his first homework assignment. A 30 out of 100, mind you.

This isn't rocket science we're doing, it's basic math. And this guy isn't missing problems because he's ignorant, he's missing problems because he's not doing them. I mean, he'll just quit half-way through the assignment because (I have to assume) he's tired of doing math problems. As I am grading his paper, I can smell the "I-don't-give-a-shit-about-your-class" attitude wafting up from his paper. His thick-ink writing emulates "What-a-waste-of-my-time." High school.

One day he may understand how fortunate he is to be in such a great program. He may realize that learning is a gift that many people around the world don't have a right to do. Or he may come to understand that the results we get out of the world are directly proportional to the work we put in to it. Until then, he is just a cog that sticks in the inter workings of my math-instructor brain, sucking up valuable space intended for my girls and maybe a little bit of my own homework.

Protecting Our Children - And Ourselves

I have two wonderful children. They were both born in July, both via Cesarian, both girls, both truly magical. But I have to say, honestly, being a mother to these girls is much different than being pregnant.

I have been pregnant four times. I lost the first one early, around 7 weeks, and the second one I lost at around 10 weeks. I say around 10 weeks because we didn't discover it was dead until 12 weeks when I had a severe kidney infection that required intravenous antibiotics and hospitalization. My doctor and I spoke at length, and we both felt it best to perform a D&C. Or, as Terry England of Georgia might call it, an abortion, on the dead fetus.

Terry England knows a lot about babies. He's delivered dead pigs. See his comments regarding delivering dead pigs and how it relates to women having abortions.
As a woman, it is my duty to protect my children. Part of protecting my children is protecting myself. 36 hours after my water broke with my first child, I still had not dilated past 3 cm. At that point, it was time to get the baby out before any harm came to it or me. My second child was born via c-section because of the same reason. My doctor once said to me "You are the type of woman that would have died during childbirth 100 years ago."

So tell me, at what point do we stop allowing women to protect themselves?
Allowing me to reproduce as God intended, I would have probably died 3 times. First from my daughter, then from the dead fetus that was infecting my body, and third from my second child.

I am going into very personal detail here to make a point. Right now there are a lot of people trying to make decisions for women based on the Word of God. They are saying women shouldn't have birth control options through health insurance, women shouldn't be able to abort fetuses, and women shouldn't be able to abort DEAD fetuses. Instead, reproduction should be totally natural as God intended. Dead fetuses should be born when they are ready to come out, poverty-stricken women should raise rape babies, and birth control should only be given to sluts that can pay 100% out-of-pocket.
If these things came to fruition, where does is stop? No c-sections? Women should be able to die during childbirth as God intended?
There also needs to be a flip-side to these debates. Condoms should be prescription and not paid for by insurance. If you want to have sex, you should get pregnant as God intended. Viagra is outlawed. If you can't get it up, leave it down as God intended. There should be no artificial insemination. Not for humans, not for livestock. Can you imagine taking away AI for couples trying to conceive??? What would happen if farmers couldn't artificially inseminate their livestock? People wouldn't eat! Is that what God intended?
This debate is insane. It is not about what God intended, it is about taking away women's ability to protect themselves and their children. We are sluts for using birth control. Giving birth to dead fetuses is what God wants us to do - just like pigs!

Haters

Math Proof

I like to FB while I go potty. It's true, and I know you all do it, too. This morning I saw the first posts for the KONY2012 video and spent the entire 30 minutes unable to move from my location. Which, needless to say, was not the best spot to watch the film. But it captured my attention and it should capture yours as well - just make sure you are comfortable when you watch it.

When I finished watching the video (and moved to a better spot), I googled "Kony 2012 Donate." I found a lot of criticisms about the charitable organization, ranging from their expenditures to their egocentric viral message. [See Jezebel.com] Invisible Children has published an answer to these criticisms on their own website. There will always be a better way to do certain things, but there will never be a better way to do something if you never do it.

My point is, you may as well donate. And I'll give you a mathematical proof as to why.

Let X=amount of money you could donate
You know at least (1/3)X goes to support central African programs
If X=0, then (1/3)X=0
Therefore, as long as X does not equal 0, MONEY WILL GO TO SUPPORT CENTRAL AFRICAN PROGRAMS.

There. Now you are empowered and have a mathematical proof as to why you can donate.

Finals

I am currently in grad school. I really enjoy getting back into the learning portion of school, as well as the peer-to-peer interaction. Although my courses are online, I feel there are ample opportunities for discussion and reflection. It also helps that I can think about the material 24/7 instead of just Tuesdays from 2-4.

Anyway, it's finals time, and I am in the process of taking part 1 of a 2-part final. (Hence the blog entry while I am supposed to be working on my final.) Part 1 is take home, and we can use open notes, open book, open Wikipedia, whatever. What I usually do to study for an exam is this:

My point is I expect material on the exam to be covered in the book. This exam is blowing my mind.

First Post

Why not start off the new blog with something funny? I saw this collage of wonderful images on the Ann Taylor webpage for work attire. My first thought was, "Really, AT?"