This is not about kids

No time for pleasantries. The little tyrants are in bed, and I have about half a minute before one of them calls me in for some emergency, like a toe not being covered by a blanket, or a paci falling out of a swaddled infant’s mouth, or a papercut on the pinky of an overtired girl. (I am sure a good parent would nip that kind of behavior in the bud, but alas I am not one of those parents.)

The second reason I haven’t written much (the first being the Tyrants themselves, of course) is that I have no good material. I don’t want to write only about my children because to me that means my thought life as well as my daily life has been completely taken over by people not even four feet tall. So I have some sort of rule in my head to not write about my kids very much, except HA HA HA I am writing about them right now, and they have taken over my thought life, because I haven’t written about anything else for months now.

(But while we’re on the subject of Them, let me ask some advice. Madeline has started refusing to wear diapers. That’s not a problem, except for the fact that she has no idea when she NEEDS TO GO. Or WHEN SHE IS GOING, for that matter. What the heck am I supposed to do about this?)

And now for some non-kid thoughts:

1. Ryan and I are watching The Good Wife on Netflix. We are halfway through the most recent season and are trying to catch up before CBS takes the current episodes off the site. I won’t say this is the BEST show I have ever watched*, but I really enjoy it for several reasons. First, the logic that is used to navigate the cases really stretch my brain. I am FOR SURE not smart enough to be a lawyer. Secondly, the law is an area of American life I know very little about, and I enjoy learning about its many strengths and flaws and politics. Thirdly, there are no kids in it. 
2. I just finished up Cloud Atlas for my book club, and I fully intend to write a review of it. Someday. The thing I liked best about the book was the political and social satire--there are soooo many quotes I want to share with you . . . it is rife with “warnings” about the way America (and the rest of the world) conducts herself. There is even a line about the disastrous Pentecostal takeover of North America. Doesn’t that sound ominous? I wonder if the author thinks we are in that now.
3. This is a really good one: my friend (well, if you want to be technical, she is my parents’ friend and the parent of my childhood friends and now my friend) recently started a blog so that she could be intentional about living her 59th year of life. One of her goals for the year is to glean wisdom from different women she would not necessarily otherwise have befriended. One woman is an Iranian Aziz (think princess, though she says that princess is a new term and her tribe has been around for much longer than princesses) whose title dictates that she marry a hero. Only she defines hero as “someone who fulfills his destiny so that a woman may fulfill hers.” Don’t you LOVE THAT? She goes on to explain that a hero gives a woman space to be more fully herself: When he takes care of her needs, she can explore ways to be more fully herself. Likewise, when she takes care of his needs, she frees him up to be more fully himself. Think familial roles, with a lot more elegance and significance. I just really love that thought. A hero is not a strong man in the muscly sense we all think of; a hero is a strong man in that he serves his wife. And she in turn can serve the family from a place of peace and conviction rather than from a place of duty. Wow.

Ok, I think that is all. I can only think of THREE NON-KID THINGS. 

I am so ashamed.

*Those would be Friday Night Lights (drama), Arrested Development (comedy) and Parenthood (hybrid).