I’ve noticed a lot of blogs do weekly themes. I’ve jumped on some like {pretty, happy, funny, real} over at Like Mother, Like Daughter and Seven Quick Takes hosted at Conversion Diary. Lots of other blogs set daily or weekly themes like Wordless Wednesday or Thoughtful Thursday or Psychiatric Saturday or something. Plus there’s weekly round ups and carnivals sometimes containing articles from all sorts of people and links to a million sites with reviews and giveaways galore. I don’t put that much thought into lesson plans, let alone my blog.
But I’m going to jump on this bandwagon and create my own weekly theme which will appear on no particular day. It will be called Laugh, Think, TINK, Drink. Let me explain. I will write on four things, with or without links that will (hopefully) make you laugh, make you think, make you see the silver lining *TINK* and make you want to grab a drink. (TINK, like flick your finger against something fancy and it makes a pretty noise? Get it?? ) Now on with the show.
To Make You Laugh
I don’ t understand the whole Ryan Goseling obsession or where this ‘Hey Girl’ thing came from, but I do know this makes me laugh.
To Make You Think
A good friend of mine blogs over at House of Virtue. This post about clearing out clutter from our lives, physical and otherwise popped up on my feed as I was taking a break from rearranging our entire first floor. I’m dealing with a ton of books, toys and miscellanea and wondering what can go and what needs to stay. I’ve found myself asking, do I own books, or do my books own me? Letting go of dramatic people, grudges and that old vampire erotica book might be the perfect spring cleaning.
Find the Silver Lining *TINK*
I wouldn’t call myself a mean person per se, but I hear the sass mouths on my kids and I know their father isn’t responsible. I’ve decided to try the advice of Kellie over at Building Cathedrals and hopefully not make the situation worse by getting all pissed off about not being able to be less pissy. The silver lining is, hopefully someone in this house will offer this experience up (we’ll call it Mama’s happiness boot camp) and shave some time off purgatory for me.
Will Drive You to Drink
The talk. With your kids. Yeah, that one. My oldest daughter is nine and I know it’s time to start broaching the subject of “stuff” with her. When I was her age, they sent all the boys out of the classroom and made us watch a movie sponsored by Kotex and featuring some actress who played Annie in a Broadway musical. They sent us home from school with a manila envelope containing an informational booklet and coupons. When my mom got home, I handed her the envelope and said, “We learned about this today.” She opened the envelope, looked at the book and asked, “Do you have any questions?” I said no, and that was that. If only homeschooling was as easy. This post by Ask Mary Martha confirms that yes, you can wait too long to start that talk.
What made you Laugh, Think, TINK or Drink this past week?
yeah I don”t get the ryan gossling or the hey girl thing, but they are funny. Also, I to have been dreading the “talk” and know it needs to be done this summer. I did do the american girl book last summer but I’m thinking it’s time to step it up a notch. let me know how it goes, then I’ll know what not to say LOL
What do you mean you’ll know “what not to say”?? That’s not the vote of confidence I’m looking for Carrie!
LOL!!! I just mean you need to pave the way on this topic for me, and if the conversation doesn’t go like you were “planning” then I will learn from you, as I’m sure you will blog a entry entitled “the talk” . 🙂
RE: The talk
You can do it. Pray hard, hard, hard for the Holy Spirit to guide you, but once you open up the dialogue you will be so glad that you did, because then when abortion and teen pregnancy and contraception come up you can speak honestly with your daughter about it. For puberty stuff, we used a book called The Girls Body Book, which was a good conversation starter, and we are also using the All Things Girl series.
Here’s the cool part — as a Catholic homeschooler, I was able to tell them, right from the start, that sex is a sacramental part of marriage. They didn’t have to learn how to put condoms on bananas (like I did, in 6th grade) and then come home and have me try to impose my morality over the top of that, it works the other way around. So, when you explain real love, real sex, and then you explain contraception, the natural law is obvious, even to a 9 year old.
Also, we did not talk about arousal and did not go into much detail about sex, I am going to wait a few more years for that, but will talk about it before there is any sort of dating.
I think 9 is a good age to do it, much older than that and they are going to withdraw in embarrassment rather than ask you questions.
Mary Alice, I will have to look into those books. At this point I was planning on getting a copy of Grey’s Anatomy and doing “the talk” from a strictly biological point of view with no talk of feelings or hormones or anything remotely “Summer’s Eve” like.
And bananas on condoms?? Good grief; I didn’t experience that until college. Talk about stealing the innocence of our children. But perhaps I’d be appalled at how many kids nowadays would realize they were being handed a condom and not a balloon in a fancy wrapper.