Heaven Help Me!

I am wearing black today. Both of my Roombas died within a week of each other. Bad timing I say. School is about to start and there is NO way I want to even attempt to keep my house clean without these little buddies of mine.

They work to keep my house immaculate all day long, while I cook, clean up, read and teach the kids all day long. I have to say that this is a modern convenience I do not like to do without. Mud, grass, cereal spilled all over the floor…I can continue teaching and the kids can continue learning while the Roomba cleans them up.

However, when I have to go without them, I pause before ordering new ones. Here’s why:

1. While it is not outside of the realm of my vocation to own these devices, it may be outside the realm for my children. What I mean is that I know for sure that it is ok for me (as a homeschooling mother of six, and a wife, a sister, a daughter and a friend) to use any tool necessary to get done what I need to get done in my day. However, I know I need to instill good work habits in my children, and using a robot to clean may not do this. I especially became concerned about this when I asked my six year old to sweep the floor the other day, and, instead she pulled out the Roomba to do it, pushed the ‘on’ button, then ran off to play (until I called her back to do it the way I asked).  Well, I don’t blame her – it makes my life easier, too! How can I ask them to sweep the floor, when I prefer the Roomba over a broom myself?

2. They are expensive! The going rate right now for a Roomba is $199 for the base model.  This is a lot of money for us. Still, it is cheaper than weekly maid service, which costs $120 a week for our home. I can use the Roomba daily for a year and pay a total of $199. That seems to be the better deal.

3. They break.  The Roombas I have owned are susceptible to “technical difficulties”. They require some kind of fixing or cleaning (cleaning a vacuum cleaner? yes, that’s the annoying part!) after using them for a couple months. The batteries wear out quickly and they eventually just break down. IRobot customer service used to be wonderful and based in USA, but lately it has gone downhill.

4. The less fortunate do not own these. Through centuries women have cooked and cleaned like madwomen and somehow found a way to live without dishwashers, roombas and the like. In particular, the less fortunate throughout the world today do not have such things – it bothers my conscience to be so spoiled. At the same time, I know women with large families in the 40′s & 50′s who had nervous breakdowns from trying to “do it all”.  My dishwasher helps my children get read to more often, and keeps my kitchen from becoming grossly unsanitary. To me, a Roomba is another tool that helps me achieve this goal. I guess the solution is to use these tools mindful of how fortunate I am, but also mindful that I haven’t found a perfect solution yet.

VS.

Any opinions?

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Husband and I have always been interested in what makes a successful marriage “tick”. When we were newly engaged, we played out different scenarios in our minds about who would stay home and who would go to work. We mutually hyphenated our names when we got married. We knew the flexibility of modern marriage did not confine us to certain roles.

In practice, it turned out I was not destined for a career outside the home, as I immediately embraced staying home when our firstborn son was born. I was “into” cooking and cleaning and caring for children and found great fulfillment in it. I loved reading the children stories for hours on end, playing with blocks and making birthday cakes. Changing diapers wasn’t all that bad, as long as I got to do these other things, too.

Throughout the years, marriage and the idea of a “good wife” has been “reinvented” multiple times. This is the focus of an article written by Lisa Belkin in the March 22, 2010 edition of the New York Times, entitled, “The Marrying Kind”.

All this redefinition has become possible as women have been given more choices. While some of it has been helpful, as a fairly traditional woman who stays home with my children, and tries to make a home for my husband, I have found some of it a maze to navigate. My impression of what makes “a good wife” has been subject to society’s influence over time, particularly when I was young and forming these ideals. I believe I had the “perfect mother” – she tended to my two brothers and my needs with extraordinary devotion and care, in a way I’m quite afraid to admit that I am unable to do myself today. Dinner with all food groups represented every night at 6:30pm, Sunday brunch without fail, meticulous attention to detail when we were sick. Although I have twice as many children as her, and my life choices have dictated that I won’t be able to pull off motherhood with as much careful concern as she did, a part of me still wishes I could. At the same time, I am grateful that the standards aren’t so perfectionistically high that this type of care come solely from me (my husband is just as active in it).

However, the “osmosis” education that my peers and I received to become a H.I.T. (Homemaker in Training) was conflicting at best. It tooted the benefits & supposed freedom of being a ‘supermom’, who could “bring home the bacon AND fry it up in the pan”, just like the Enjoli perfume commercial said. In other words, we were told we could be a mom just like my mom and a career embracing feminist, as well. In high school, we had a home economics class (one of the most popular classes!) in which we all donned aprons and baked apple pies during school hours. When that class ended, we were whisked off to the next class, “Business Economics” which encouraged us to have skills for a successful career outside the home. Confusing? I’ll say. And most of us still don’t know how to make homemade gravy from scratch.

In the aforementioned article, Ms. Belkin highlights the latest “twist” in the redefinition of marriage and what it means to be a good wife: the fastest growing subset of cohabitating couples today are over the age of 50. These women, having been previously married and lived out the “ideal Mrs.” – having wanted nothing more from life than to don the apron and be married -now scoff at it. These women, who were enmeshed in that rejection of the “old ways”;  ”housewives” protesting they were not married to their houses, began calling themselves the more respectable title of  ”working moms” instead. Gradually, we have realized since then that “Supermom”, due to its unattainability, is more comic than reality. Seeing the old guideposts gone, what impetus is there to follow?

Women today are not what they were and as a result we are probably much more relaxed and reasonable. It is perfectly fine to enlist the help of a device to do housework, instead of scrubbing each square of bathroom tile with a toothbrush like grandma did. With the constant redefining of our roles, it will be interesting to see the scenario play out.

On that note, I am off to eat a wonderful meal, home-cooked by my husband, who is a five star *Mr. Mom*, doing all the cleaning and homekeeping while I recover from birth. In the “old days”, it might be unthinkable that Mom or Mom-in-law would not be at my side for two weeks, so hubby could get back to work since he was clueless when it came to running a home. However, this is not the case for us, nor for many women today. Due to this redefinition of roles for women, our mothers, *too*, have the freedom they earned themselves thirty years ago.

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I’ve always thought those looming “green” wind turbines were a magnificient contrast to the blue country sky I often travel through to get to my parents’ house, until reading this article in the Chicago Tribune recently. Watch the video. Now, I have to admit to having second thoughts about whether or not they are such a good idea. I think the inability to escape those shadow flickers would drive me insane. I understand the people whose land is being leased for the turbines are going to be compensated fairly, but their neighbors, who are perhaps more affected, are not. For those land owners who are affected by “shadow flickers”: does money make-up for a loss in quality of life? Can one be “paid-off” to enjoy a formerly unobstructed view of the countryside? If the government pays you a fortune for your land, but the new outcome is a loss of community, loss of relation with one’s neighbor, is this in the best interest of the common good? Is it true that this is what it really takes to become less dependent on foreign oil? Or is there is way to work out these issues?

What do you think?

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Gone are the days when Mom or Dad could send a kid outside for hours on end, telling them, “See you for dinner!”

Today’s kids are way too technologically advanced to even think about it.

Being connected, sometimes literally, to all sorts of  ”devices” makes it hard for kids to get away from their parents. Well, for safety reasons, these days that’s probably not a bad idea.

However, once in a while, there’s the parent that needs a couple quiet hours who would appreciate some time away from their kids. As in my case tonight, husband and I sent the kids downstairs to play in the basement for a couple hours of R & R.

I would have loved to have a basement when I was growing up like my kids have! With its indoor playground features, and multiple spaces to curl up and read a book or do art projects, I couldn’t conceive they’d get bored down there.

Until I turned on my computer to work on lesson plans, when suddenly I noticed my daughter was “online” and apparently ready to come upstairs.

“Hi Mom, we’re hungry”, her text message said.

So, thanks to today’s technology, parents and kids are not quite as inaccessible to one another as they used to be. Remember life before answering machine and cell phones?

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Some years ago, my husband was inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, to adopt a new code of  names amongst our family members to settle our nightly chaos resulting from the ritual question “what should we do together as a family tonight?”. While our former system used to end in several children in tears or frustrated that no one ever wanted to do what they do, the new system solved the problem by assigning each person a “night” of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc. depending on the childrens’ birth order), in which the assigned child gets to pick the family activity which everyone participates in. The most popular choices are watching movies or playing video games, however, occasionally we do something different like we did tonight for “Tuesday’s” (Clare’s) night: Blue Light Chemiluminescence experiments.

A cheap kit purchased at our local American Science & Surplus shop (in addition, a good site to visit for some comic relief) provided hours of entertainment tonight. A little more advanced than our ordinary kitchen science (like Gianna’s adding vinegar to the juice remaining after boiling a head of red cabbage, producing a color chemical change: purple to blue), this kit used “real” chemistry to produce its results.

Do you know what you get by mixing Luminol, Perborate (Clorox 2) and Copper Sulfate? Lights off for a cool blue glow! This isn’t me – but this is what chemiluminescence looks like. The kids enjoyed the experiments and are glad they now know where “glow sticks” come from.

Hopefully, there’ll be more experiments to come!

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With the advent of new technology, comes new trends, and sometimes a need for new guidelines and etiquette. As I was out shopping over the weekend, I noticed, much more than ever before, people talking on cell phones while shopping. Now this is not a problem, as long as the folks with appendages stuck to their ears keep walking. But it does become a problem when cellphoners have not yet mastered the art of multitasking, and instead of keeping up the pace, just “stall” multiple times in the middle of the shopping aisle!  It also poses a problem when people gabbing on phones park themselves and their cart so as to block other shoppers from getting through the lane, and since they are gabbing away on a cellphone, they don’t notice others politely saying, “Excuse me. Can you move your cart and your body so I can get through?” Puleeeeze! Some of us shoppers are in a minor hurry, since my dear husband is at home watching all the children, so I can do my shopping more efficiently (without 15 minute bathroom breaks, drink breaks, and/or “can we go home yet?” breaks).  And… I… would… like… to… get… home…. QUICKLY! to make sure no one has set the house on fire yet.  I suppose it was just “bad luck” or God trying to teach me to be patient, I don’t know… or unbeknowst to me, was it National “Talk On Your Cellphone While At Target”  Day?

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