Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Note: this post begins with "recently" but it was recent then not now. Then was around March 2012. At some point, someone for some reason reported this post and the platform pulled it down. However, the concept is evergreen so I am republishing it! ________________________________________________________________________________ Recently on Facebook, a friend disgustedly posted another "how French parents are better" article (this one cruelly about how French kids have less ADHD and it's because the French parents are BETTER -- or so it read to a lot of parents dealing with this situation in their own families, and boy do I understand that POV). She was appalled, we were all mainly appalled. Though there was a slight thread of "maybe there's a point here...how can we have so much more?" running through it. Feeling insecure about your parenting is pretty de rigeur for parents, I think. We are raising a person who will go out into the world, rep...

There's a meme going around Facebook called, "This is my senior." For ten days, I should post photos of my senior and tag another parent of a senior. I was tagged, and I finally posted a photo and tagged someone but I am loathe to commit to ten days of photos. Why? 1. There's a mouse in my mudroom/laundry room It could be a new mouse, or the one I thought we'd eradicated a few months ago. That one (this one?) shredded the rubber bits of my washer, costing hundreds of dollars in damage and creating a major flood in that room. The cleanup was brutal. The second and third cleanups were caused by my repairmen who inexplicably didn't believe or comprehend me when I said that THE WASHER LEAKED AND FLOODED WHEN YOU TURNED IT ON. So they went ahead and turned it on and flooded the room. "Oh," they said lamely, "It really does leak, badly." I 100% attributed that to the male/female filter in which men presume women know nothing of which they s...