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“Mommy, guess what? Did you know this bracelet was MADE IN CHINA?”

I turned around and saw Alex in the back seat of the van, holding up the rubber wristband that serves as admission ticket to Annheuser Busch’s Clydesdale breeding farm, which we had just left.

“I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised,” I told him.

The ensuing conversation, about why it’s cheaper to make things in China, led directly to questions of power and abuse of power by those entrusted with the governance (and by the same token, the care) of their people. In short order my insides were roiling. Because I could hear the words I wasn’t actually saying aloud: We’re the Good Guys, and they are the Bad Guys. And for the first time in my life, the sentiment rang incredibly false. On the heels of the debt ceiling debacle, I find myself wondering: Can we really claim to be the good guys anymore?

Ever since 9/11, people have been raked over the coals for asking this question. I’ve never doubted anyone’s patriotism, but I have shaken my head when people suggest that America is on the decline—that we are truly the decadent West we’ve been accused of. Like many others, I’ve always considered that no matter how bad it gets, we still have the best system in the world. It’s not perfect, but there just isn’t a better way out there, and after all, if we don’t like the way things are being run, we have the power to change them.

And there’s the rub. Because I no longer believe that’s true.

We have free speech, but by and large, those in power don’t care what we say. How many thousands (millions?) of us wrote to our Congressmen and Senators in the past couple of weeks to tell them what we expect of them, and got back a canned manifesto declaring the party line, without even a token “thanks for your opinion; I’ll take it into consideration”?

Have you ever tried to effect change in the government via grassroots swell? I have. It’s like emptying the ocean with a thimble. The system is stacked against the ordinary person. You need money, and lots of it, to make a difference. You have to be well-connected to a group of people who are all willing to make heroic sacrifices in their lives to make it happen. (In our case, the problem was that the parents were so overwhelmed by the care of their children, how could they make those sacrifices to get politically involved?). Plus, the polarization of the elected is so complete these days that even when you have an issue that should cross party lines, you’ll find yourself roadblocked by around half the people whose support you are lobbying. (Like this issue, for instance.)

I’m not an expert in anything. I’m just a normal person going about life trying to do the right thing. My mother taught me that on some things, you simply can’t compromise. There are issues that must be defined in black and white; they are matters of morality, and to compromise would violate morality.

But there aren’t as many of those as our politicians think there are. And the budget is not one of them. If our system has become so inept that an issue like deficit spending has been defined as a moral issue on which compromise is unacceptable, then as far as I am concerned, we have sacrificed the moral high ground.

But when someone speaks with authority and without demagoguery, and it makes sense, that tells me what they have to say is important. So I would like to introduce you today to my uncle, John Luth. If you read the link, you’ll see that this is a man who knows financial and economic matters. I asked his permission to share some of his comments from a recent email discussion, because he’s bringing up a point that I have not heard anywhere else. (Bold face emphasis is mine.):

“Unfortunately both parties are equally at fault. Even the ‘cost cuts’ are against inflated spending in the future as opposed to real cuts.

…

We need to raise revenues (read income AND social security taxes) significantly AND cut dramatically our spending AND increase everyone’s personal savings rates from < 5 pct to > 10 pct. Folks, we really are out of money and another 2-3 years of the current deficit spending and we will never, ever recover as the math doesn’t work very well now (without all of the above), but once we hit 115-125 pct debt to GDP we will never be able to get debt to go anywhere but flat to up.

I believe the lesson learned (reflected in that trillion dollar loss in US equity values) is that nothing short of the threat of a bullet to the brain will get Washington to make a decision, which is what Wall Street and Main Street are finally realizing. Sad that both ends of the politcal spectrum control our only two political parties.

In a global economy significantly higher tax rates simply mean companies, jobs and even wealthy individuals will, at the margin, leave theUSfor better environments – likeCanada.

…

As a business owner, my effective tax rate is around 44 pct on average right now, before including social security and medicare taxes I pay both sides as the business owner, so my real tax rate is well over 45 pct, and actually over 50 pct on the first $100,000 of my income subject to social security taxes. Notwithstanding that, wealthy individuals in the US (like me) need to pay significantly more, but the tax base is too narrow to only raise taxes on the top 10 pct – we are too large of a country and too much in debt. And that is where I believe ‘moral courage’ will fade…and we will be in the ‘smoke and mirrors’ world of ‘government accounting’. Reagan (and later Bush) gutted our tax base (both individual and corporate) and now, at the critical juncture when we need more consumer spending, we ALSO need more tax revenue from the ‘middle class’ – and that is the sad state of affairs.

…

Gov’t expeditures need to go down significantly in today’s dollars, not inflated dollars – and that, unfortunately is where even the Republican members of Congress don’t have the experience, courage or even educational background to deal with these issues.”

If you comment, and I hope you will, please avoid the blame game. I have readers, friends and family all along the political spectrum, from the far right to the far left and all along the middle, like me. I don’t want any more useless hurling of accusations, blaming one side or the other. The fact is, we are ALL part of this. We created the culture of spending and excess ourselves, not just with our ballot-casting, but in the way we live our own lives. If you noticed above, part of Uncle John’s solution is us. Not as participants in the political process, but in the way we handle our own money. (See para. 2 of his quote.)

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A year and a half ago, I was working on legislation to ensure that children with disabilities weren’t denied therapies because of their disability. Our sponsor (my mom) was approaching her term limit, and we needed a new one. We knew we had to find a Republican, because the legislature is Republican-controlled. We also knew that putting mandates on insurers could be a tough sell. Still, we felt sure people on both sides of the aisle would recognize that this issue was bigger than political philosophy.

I contacted a former Republican state senator who was well-connected and reportedly supportive on disability issues. I told him what we were hoping to accomplish, and asked him to suggest people to approach as sponsors.

His reply raised my blood pressure for weeks afterward. (Eventually, its presence in my inbox became such an open sore that I had to just delete it. Just thinking about it still gets me going.) However he intended it, it came across as condescending: a man clearly much wiser than this do-gooder little girl, and determined to teach me the error of my ways. His philosophy went something like this:

Insurance is not meant for ordinary care. It’s meant for emergencies, for extraordinary circumstances, cataclysmic events you can’t anticipate. Therapy is normal, ongoing care for kids with special needs; thus, insurers shouldn’t have to pay for it unless they want to. And the government certainly shouldn’t be putting a mandate on them. It’s the responsibility of the families to provide for their children what they think is important. He understood how tough this was for families to accept, but nonetheless that was the way it was.

I’m sure you can appreciate why I hit the roof when I read this email. Never mind that raising a child with special needs is extraordinary circumstances and something you often can’t anticipate. I had the good sense not to respond at all, because there wasn’t one polite thing I could have said. But believe me, I’ve composed many, many responses in my mind. And the more time passes, the more convinced I am of the grave flaw in his argument.

Because this man calls himself prolife—by which he means that he believes abortion is wrong. But respect for life is so much bigger than abortion. It’s an attitude that should permeate all of life, in all its forms and manifestations. Prolife politicians are very good at being outraged by the systematic termination of “imperfect” children. But if you’re going to ask people to shoulder the responsibility of caring for children with disabilities, you can’t abandon them once the child is born.

Missouri has a great program called First Steps, which provides these services. But in rural areas, it’s hard to find providers to come to the home. And First Steps ends at age three, after which kids enter the school system. We’re lucky—we have a great early childhood program where I live. But we’re in an urban area. What about families in small towns without the resources to provide for kids through the schools?

When I was serving on the Children’s Therapy Act committee, we heard stories of people who had to sell their homes to pay for their kids’ treatment, people who deliberately stayed in low-paying jobs so that they would qualify for Medicaid, which does cover these therapies.

How dare politicians stand on a soapbox, claiming that all life is precious, that children with disabilities have a right to live, and then turn their backs on families who actually have them? Do they not realize that, unlike insurance companies, parents can’t negotiate reduced rates? Do they not realize how crippling the expense of therapy becomes? Or do they just not care?

Political philosophy is all well and good, but it cannot be so rigid that it leaves behind those it purports to serve. I happen to think that minimizing regulations is a sound principle—within reason. But the reality is that power companies aren’t going to implement environmental reform if it’s going to cost them money. CEOs aren’t going to give up their huge bonuses just because the economy’s rough on the little guy. Some things MUST be mandated, or they won’t happen at all.

Doesn’t it make more sense to get these kids the treatment they need to become productive, (tax-paying) members of society? And if we don’t, if we shove the disabled population into a corner, behind a wall where their lack of function doesn’t make everyone else uncomfortable—if we don’t show them the respect they are due as human beings by providing them the tools necessary to integrate into society—then how can we be horrified and outraged by the eugenics of aborting the “imperfect”?

I share this example today in the hope that it will open people’s eyes to the many ways besides abortion in which life is disrespected. We’re accustomed to hearing about certain issues: death penalty, abstinence education, end-of-life issues—but respect for life is everywhere, all the time, in every single issue we face as voters. As we head into an election cycle, I beg you: challenge your candidates to man up and be consistent. If you’re going to respect life, you have to respect life in all its forms.

But they’re all missing the point.

It’s a big world out there, and the problems are even bigger. Once in a while, a regular person finds him or herself thrust into a position to change the world—like intern Daniel Hernandez. But most of the time, people like you and me have no control over the big stuff. And the more time we spend bemoaning the state of the world, the harder it is to see that our responsibility in making the world a better place lies in the normal course of boring, everyday life, amid soccer tournaments and office politics. The Big Picture isn’t a single, gigantic image; it’s a compilation of countless single pixels, a mosaic made of billions of individual persons, whose actions send ripples into surrounding pixels. The world doesn’t change from the top down; it changes from the bottom up.

“Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of the cosmos, from the largest scale (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level). In the system the mid-point is Man, who summarizes the cosmos.” (Wikipedia)

When we rail against headline-grabbing problems at the “big picture” level, we fail to recognize that these incidents don’t come out of nowhere. The way we treat the clueless clerk at the checkout stand; the words we use when addressing other drivers—this is how we impact the world. These are the lessons our children learn, and build upon as they grow. If we never admit our own fault in a conflict, the next generation will believe that they never have to apologize. If we never make a calm, respectful attempt to reach understanding with people who upset us (at church, at school, at the office), our children will grow to believe that it’s normal to harbor grudges that fester in silence and resentment.

These attitudes grow, like a big snowball of negativity rolling downhill, all the small-scale pettiness, nastiness and cruelty that humanity is capable of, naturally giving rise to more cruelty and nastiness.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be outraged, that suicide bombers and shooters and sexual predators are blameless, or shouldn’t be held accountable. But in the end, the only way to change it is to change the messages that people hear.

Whatever your beef is with the world, work to change it within your own sphere of influence. The fact that 90% of children diagnosed prenatally with Down’s are aborted makes me nearly choke with rage. But howling about it isn’t going to change it. When the Scary Bad messages are deafening, and people have nothing with which to counterbalance it, how can I expect them to do anything other than exactly what they do? The only way I can change it is by giving Julianna to the world—publicly, as I do here; by advocating for tearing down the walls in the schools and in the community, and (to a much lesser extent) by weighing in politically.

Changing the world starts with you and me. If you don’t like what you see, change the message in your own pixel. If you abdicate your responsibility because the business of life is overwhelming, how can you stand on any kind of moral pedestal and pass judgment on everything that’s wrong with the world?

I hardly ever click on anything in the Facebook sidebar, but this one caught my eye:  “What’s the point of Girls? Challenge one father’s goal for what he’s trying to raise his father to become by clicking here.”  Uh-oh, I thought.

But I was wrong. His post is stellar, and although at first I thought, “I wish I had a daughter this applied to,” I realized almost immediately that it’s even more applicable to Julianna than to her typically-developing peers. Check it out.

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You know it’s campaign season when you find yourself witnessing the worst of human behavior from people you don’t even know. Here’s  an excerpt from a series of emails I got this week:

Proposition B will do NOTHING TO SHUT DOWN PUPPY MILLS IN MISSOURI.   NOT TRUE!
Oh, come on, people.  Really?  You are going to vote against a law that will reduce the number of breeding animals in a puppy mill from thousands to 50?  Please, think about this. 

 The HSUS sponsored Prop B was passed in California and now they pay $7.00 for a dozen eggs. The HSUS doesn’t care about puppies! They only want to turn the human race into vegitarians. They have stated they would rather see the human race die off so the other species could have the earth. I say let them lead by example. The left has always tried to use compasion as a lever to get their agenda passed. Do your research on the proposal’s sponsors and find out for yourself.

$7 for a dozen eggs in CA?  I Googled “Price of one dozen eggs in CA” and immediately found this:

http://answer.co5.biz/food-drink/how-much-does-a-dozen-eggs-cost-where-you-live.html

Please look at response number 8, dated August, 2010.  Eggs in CA are a whopping $2.50.

As for your ludicrous portrayal of the HSUS…poppycock.  Please include the source of this rumor in your next email, I’d love to see it. 

And please, Mr. ——, use your spell check.  It’s hard to take your email seriously if you won’t even bother to present your ideas in a literate manner.

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When I start getting emails like these, I just want to retreat from social media. C’mon, people. No wonder the candidates treat each other the way they do, if this is what they see from their constituents!

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Well, there are happier subjects to address. I’ve been meaning to make note of it for two weeks: Nicholas has taken his first baby step out of TwinLand and ahead of his big sister. He can now repeat Mama, Dada, Wawa, Gege, Yiyi, Nana and Vava at will, on command. He’s also made progress on the toilet in the last week, for what that’s worth. But Julianna’s starting to show signs of a difference in the way she thinks & communicates, too. Christian brought home a new Signing Times video from the library, and she keeps coming up to me and signing Daddy–baby. Baby being code for her videos. After a while I realized she was asking for the Daddy Signing Times video. Ain’t that just too cute?

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It’s another sleepy morning. I stayed up to finish reading Catching Fire. If you haven’t heard of this latest YA book craze, it’s time to go to the library and put your name on the waiting list. Suzanne Collins makes me despair of being able to write a well-plotted, compelling book. She’s got it down, man. When was the last time I read a book between sunup and sundown? Oh, yeah. Six weeks ago, when I read The Hunger Games.

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I’ve been hard at work this week, clearing out writing projects and trying to outline in bits & pieces, in preparation for NaNoWriMo, which for those who are unfamiliar is a really stupid, hard-to-write-and-say abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. Let me tell you, I am feeling intimidated. I know all the back stories for my characters, all the things that have to happen to them, but the thought of figuring out what events it takes to get them there, and have those events actually draw people in…I don’t know, from this side of November 1st, that just seems more than a little overwhelming!

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But I’m sure once I get started writing, things will begin to flow. There’s only so much you can do in prep, and then you just have to plunge in. And I warn you, I have quite a few writing blog topics in mind.

Have a great Halloween!

I will not be voting for either of you this November. You have both lost my vote with your attack ads full of half-truths, distorted truths, and untruths. If you cannot treat each other with a respect based on your opponent’s dignity as a human being, you cannot possibly treat anyone with respect in the U. S. Senate. You demean each other, you insult the intelligence of the entire electorate by trying to manipulate us with twisted facts taken out of context, and in so doing, you belittle yourselves. America deserves better than this.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Basi

(And yes, I am going to send it. Anyone want to join me?)

con·sci·en·tious (k n sh – n sh s) ob·ject·or (ˈäb-jikt-ər)

Noun Abbr. CO

One who on the basis of religious or moral principles refuses
to bear arms or participate in military service.

I walked into the bedroom after blogging yesterday morning and was greeted by the strains of a nasty political attack ad. “Oh, brother,” I said, “here we go. It’s time to stop listening to the radio for the next few weeks.”

In our local U.S. Senate race, we have a country song calling the Republican the worst of Washington D.C. As a songwriter, I can say it’s actually a really clever, well-written song. But the message is so nasty that I can’t believe the Democrat actually “approved this message.” What was she thinking?

On the other side, we have the Republican using a married couple who are throwing out all the usual half-truths, warped truths, and outright lies in a tone of voice that makes it clear that if I’m so stupid as to think differently from them, I’m without worth as a human being. It insults the intelligence of every voter while stripping the opposing candidate of her innate human dignity.

How did we reach this point? I know that negative campaigning is the reality of the game, but I’ve had it. The attitude flaunted in attack ads is one of profound disrespect for the human dignity of the person’s opponent, and I’m not going to reward it anymore by voting for them. Which means I won’t be voting for a new U. S. Senator, for one.

To those who are horrified by my casting aside my civic duty, I say: this is my civic duty. It is my civic duty to send people to Washington (and to the state government) who will represent me and what I believe. A person who shows every day that he or she is willing to do anything, however morally offensive, to achieve power, is incapable of representing what I believe, because treating others with respect is fundamental to everything else. How can I teach my children to care for others, to think outside themselves and seek a better world, while I am systematically putting people into office who can act in such a way?

To those who say we have to make the best of the candidates we’re given, I say: enough. I don’t care what they say they believe in. Nothing justifies the full-frontal assault on human dignity. If they are capable of that level of disrespect for their opponents, they are capable of that level of disrespect for you. They will not listen to you; they will not listen to each other; they will do nothing but pursue their own agenda, thus continuing the cycle of vitriol and general uselessness in politics.

So any candidate that approves this kind of slime this campaign season will not get a vote from me. Anybody care to join me?

Related Articles

• Political ads: It’s getting really nasty out there (sfgate.com)

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Last night was one of those nights—you know the ones—the kind that always follow bad nights (in the plural), that start bad and escalate. It’s as if God and the universe are determined to clump all the ick together in one night. I’ve just deleted all the details…suffice it to say, while Christian was teaching piano lessons, every time I turned around I discovered another piece of ick, in ascending order of ickiness. There were five or six in all, compounding over the course of an hour and a half, and by the end of it I was pretty crazed and uh, let’s just say, not on my best behavior. At 9:15p.m., I felt like I was going to throw up, I was so tired. And then Nicholas woke up crying. “I can’t do this another night,” I said, and Christian took over.

So I got a decent night’s sleep—for the first time this week. Still, there’s no waxing philosophical for me this morning. I’m still in recovery. And I think I need to go to Confession…for sure, I don’t have any business preaching about caring for “the least of these,” which is Ann’s topic du jour…

Fortunately, I have an amazing mother to take up the slack. She left me a long comment a couple of days ago—a comment so good that I asked if I could share it with all of you as its own blog post. I had reviewed Donald Millers’ Searching for God Knows What, who takes issue with Christians who reduce the entire Gospel to two hot-button political issues. My mother responded beautifully. I know that I have readers across the political spectrum, but I think she really gets to the heart of the matter, which is that first and foremost, we are called to act close to home:

I doubt that most conservatives think that abortion and gay marriage are the sum of all morality. Without hearing in more depth what Don Miller thinks we should all be doing about health care, world trade, and the environment, it’s hard to make a focuesed response. I probably hold very different views from him on what I think should be done (or not done), but it is NOT because I don’t care about those issues. I just don’t happen to think that the liberals’ way of attacking these issues with more government programs and money is the most efficient, sensible way to get things done. I still recycle almost everything. I bury my garbage, recyle my newspapers, magazines, cardboard and plastic. When I run hot water, I save the cold water that comes out of the tap first to use for cooking purposes later. I don’t run the shower continuously, wasting precious water. I get wet, turn it off, soap up, and then turn back on to rinse. I oppose cap and trade because it a very costly solution looking for a problem to fix. The science of climate change is all over the board. Equally qualified scientists have come down on both sides of the issue. Contrary to what the liberal media is feeding us, there is no consensus on what the scientific data is telling us, and much of the data the cap and trade folks are citing as the basis for their proposed solutions has been shown to be flawed by the way it was handled.

As far as the poor and hungry, I seek out local individuals or programs to put my 10% tithe money where I can see it will do good, and avoid most of the national health charities because they all support embryonic stem cell research to which I am strongly opposed. I take my extra garden produce to the local food pantry.

With regard to healthcare, I oppose Obamacare because it promises what it cannot deliver, increases the cost of our health insurance, and decreases the quantity and quality of the health care I will be able to get. There are things that should be done, but Obamacare doesn’t address those things–things like medical malpractice tort reform, transparency, and empowering consumers with information to shop as wisely for health care as they shop for food, clothing, and cars.

I’m a conservative, and I do care about all those issues and I act on my concerns.

You might remember that last year a group of us put together a bill to mandate coverage of “habilitative” services for children with special needs. This extremely frustrating process has shifted me from a default status of “big government=bad” to support of national health care.

Consider this:

• A child who has a stroke on the birthing table will receive whatever therapies s/he needs throughout his/her life. But a child who has a stroke in utero, even a day or two before labor begins, will be denied the same coverage.
• Likewise, if Alex (Heaven forbid) suffered a fall and received brain damage that made it necessary for him to receive ongoing physical, occupational, or speech therapy, he’d get it. But Julianna, who already faces an uphill battle for learning anything (aside from being cute, which she gets naturally ), gets denied based on her diagnosis of Down’s.

As long as we were covered by First Steps, we got what we needed. It is a great program. But it only goes to age 3—and Julianna didn’t even walk until 2 ½. For 2 ½ years, we threw all our effort behind the basic gross motor skills, with OT and speech taking second place. This is the natural order of learning. But by the time she walked, we had less than six months to focus on speech therapy. Six months, when it took 2 ½ years to teach her to walk.

At 3 ½, she receives one hour a week of one-on-one speech therapy from the public schools. And although her comprehension is within twelve months of normal, she’s not even as far along as Nicholas (16 mo.) in speech production. She doesn’t know how to control her muscles. She can’t even babble the back of the mouth sounds (k, g, etc.) The only solution is speech therapy, and a lot of it. Can the school give her more? Probably. We’re certainly going to ask, come fall. But through insurance, we’re just plain old out of luck, because she has a pre-existing condition—namely, Down syndrome.

And we have good insurance. Insurance that served us well, as long as we had somebody else providing therapy.

This is the inequity—dare I say, the discrimination—that the Children’s Therapy Act seeks to address. But even knowing that grassroots-level legislation takes years to get passed, the complete and total lack of responsiveness from the political leadership was disheartening, to say the least. For weeks on end, we deluged the speaker’s office with calls to assign the bill to committee. We called senators, trying to get someone to listen to us. No response.

I contacted a former state senator, hoping for advice on who might be open to listening to us. Instead, I heard how insurance is not supposed to cover ongoing needs; insurance is supposed to be for short-term, emergency care, and we should not be putting mandates on private companies. I wanted to strangle him. Political philosophy is all well and good, but not when it holds us hostage. Because folks, there is not another good option.

A health insurance company can negotiate a rate with providers. A family can’t. It’s not because the therapists are unwilling; it’s just not allowed. That means that where an insurance company pays a fraction of the fee, families pay the whole freaking thing. Every time.

We know of people who have sold their homes to pay for therapy. People who have turned down good jobs, preferring to stay in low-paying ones, because Medicare does cover therapies. People who have gone into debt to meet their child’s needs.

How is this just?

This is why I put my support behind federal health care. Because as of 2014, it requires that insurers provide coverage equally across the board, regardless of “pre-existing condition.”

Now, I know the arguments. High taxes, socialized medicine, general governmental incompetence. I get it. I do. I’ve heard from people who lived in Canada and loathed the system, saying it was absolutely useless. But I’ve also heard from people who lived in Canada and said it was fabulous. Likewise for people in Europe, who come here and are appalled by our for-profit health care system. No system is perfect; somebody’s always going to be upset. But I truly, honestly believe that most of the backlash against “Obamacare” is about political power and fear of change.

What about abortion? Well, here’s the thing. Abortion, horrific and loathsome as it is, is not going to be legislated away. Not now, anyway. We as pro-life Christians would be far better employed changing hearts and minds than banging on a door that simply cannot be broken down right now. Through Theology of the Body, through natural family planning, through support of unwed mothers, we can change the world. Because where hearts and minds are, laws will follow.

One final thought. Parents given a diagnosis of Down syndrome during pregnancy are presented with a world where their child will be discriminated against every day. If parents can’t even trust their health insurance to help them get needed care for their child, how can we be surprised by a 90% abortion rate?

1. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of Saturday Night Live. But as a National Anthem singer (who grits her teeth at the ludicrous versions we’re subjected to) and a liturgist (who can’t stand the fact that the national anthem has become a solo op instead of a community song), I found this performance by Maya Rudolph absolutely hilarious. Enjoy!

2. Continuing the pursuit of fame is my son Alex, who rode his bike almost a mile to the grand opening of the new fire station on Sunday. He got interviewed by a reporter and his picture is #9 in the slide show, where he’s sitting with his friends down the street. But the paper didn’t use the best material they were given. “Do you want to be a fireman when you grow up?” asked the reporter.

“Actually,” Alex said, “I want to be Batman when I grow up.” HA!

3. You know those weeks when life is busy, and yet somehow you clear your to-do list by Tuesday, and by Friday you’re six items into bonus territory? That was not this week. No, this was the week when you start with a list of ONE item and by Friday, you STILL haven’t made any progress on it.

4. I lost Monday and Tuesday to snow days (completely unjustified ones); Wednesday to an advisory committee meeting for the state early intervention program; Thursday to a THREE HOUR visit to the pulomonologist. Julianna went to exactly ONE day of school this week. Out of FOUR.

5. The other time killer this week has been work on the Children’s Therapy Act. It’s exciting to see people paying attention to us, but it is taking up a lot of time. I’m spending around an hour every day on emails and phone calls. We are scheduling a meeting with some people from the government’s insurance provider, which means we have to collect denial letters from families to justify our bill. My mother tells me this is the “vetting” process.

6. On the up side, I did get my book, Joy to the World: Advent is for Families sent to Liguori, and my editor had virtually no editorial changes for me. So I am almost finished with that assignment. Available June 2010!

7. Finally…you know how I love to chew on my children. I’ve decided that I chew on Alex for substance, Julianna for spice, and Nicholas for spun sugar.

Happy V-day, all!