Everything happens for a reason. A cultural commentary with a lotta rock-n-roll, semitism, and parenting. See our Etsy Shop! Buy HeadyBands, Hoodies and more at www.wholephamily.etsy.com
As the mother, naturally I kvell and admit that I am biased: everything my children do is great. But trying to remove myself from the parental role, I gotta admit this is pretty good. Wacky and fun, Concealed Light has written a great poem. Way better than I ever did in 3rd grade. It was published in her school's first-ever literary publication, and while the town library judges made a grave error by not awarding her a prize for its entry in this year's poetry contest, there is more great stuff where that came from. She says she wants to be a writer. Oh, how I would love to send her to a writing workshop. One day maybe that will happen. Until then, I encourage her to keep on reading and writing.
Perhaps one of my greatest pet peeves resulting from the proliferation of technology use today via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the like is the misuse of the apostrophe in the word "it." A college professor told me many moons ago about a peril of email: spelling errors would will increase exponentially, and he had little tolerance for such mistakes. This is when, if we wanted to use email, we had to go to the computer cluster. There was no such thing as dorm rooms being connected to the Internet. This is also when I didn't know how to properly spell liaison. Jump forward twenty years, and autocorrect and spell check are partially to blame. Granted, people are busy and lazy and simply either don't have the time or desire to go back and make a correction.
But still.
Come on, people.
We all make spelling and grammatical errors more frequently online, and I am certainly not exempt from making this mistake.
And for that reason, I thank my brother for reminding me that the spelling of the famous cymbals is Zildjian, and not Ziljan as I previously wrote.
Let me introduce you to Led Zeppellin IV, if you haven't already been introduced. If you don't know your Zosos from your Ziljans, stick with me, keep it nice and sticky, and I can show you a thing or two.
We all know Chicago is where Obama is from, and we know here at the Whole Phamily it is important to keep a happy home as well as be mindful of mountain men who wander.
If you have seen the light of a reverberating Ziljan cymbal, you will understand why I feel that this song explains the winner of this year's Presidential Election. Question my reasoning, fine, but at least acknowledge I am onto something.
And that is the way it is for 2012.
What shall be in 2016 is the question. If you're experienced like me, you will agree that none of this and yet all of this is truth even unto its innermost parts. Meaning, how can Rachel use a classic rock tune to validate the result of the upcoming election?
I can't explain it, truthfully. Too complicated.
Be prepared, keep everything in their own pockets, have propergear, and stick together with your family, or you can stick with the Whole Phamily and see better, happier days of goodness and love and ultimate redemption.
In the meantime, you can rage with our machine of the Ganse Mishpucha (Whole Phamily).
If you want to talk Grapes of Wrath, dudes, (aka Tom Joad, the Cats, and all that Dust), perhaps you should look for purple glitter rather during this post-9/11 era than dust of the bowl (better to be two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year than a bunch of red dust flying around the air during the Great Depression). Or just watch Henry Ford playing Tom Joad. That's easier. Even if it's just a 4 minute clip. You can handle a brief clip, kids, can't you?
My take away from all of this is to grow my own food.
And that's exactly what we're starting to accomplish this year with our organic garden.
My writing skills and ability to express myself could never, ever give proper way to a discussion of Moonrise Kingdom. They say it's not good to start in the negative. So let me start over.
The newest film by Director Wes Anderson is yet again a perfect world of great design, conversation, sound, music, placement.
Just watch the trailer!
This is good. This is very, very good. I love you, Wes Anderson. Well, not really you as a person. I don't know you. But I love Wes Anderson. I love him, yes I do. But I don't know you.
I love your movies. I love them a lot. I love them like all of your disciples love them. The style. The music. The dialogue. The message. The story-line. The clothing. The imagery.
I love it/you like the way I love wide wale corduroy on men who listen to the Kinks.
And Charles and Ray Eames.
But I really love my husband who is accompanying me to Mountain Jam this weekend since I really want to go. This will be such a good thing for our whole family.
While all of my observant Jewish friends are still popping their Lactaid pills after last week's dairy-laden Shavuot holiday, I am packing for the next adventure. We reenacted going up to that humblest of mountains, Mount Sinai, where we received our holy Torah thousands of years ago. All the while eating a lot of blintzes.
The journey to another mountain continues, this time to Mountain Jam at Hunter Mountian, New York. My family which as you know include my husband Stango and our children Concealed Light, The Wolfman, and the Wolfman's Brother, has been long-looking forward to this weekend-long music festival. So much so that we temporarily suspending cleaning help to save funds for tickets.
I'll be experiencing first-hand a music festival with three children under the age of 10 in tow. We are camping on the grounds and shlepping everything up the mountain by Radio-Flyer cart. Stango and I have never camped at a music festival together, so this is all new territory. But since live music is the one thing we simply love to experience together, what could be better as a family outing? The kids want us to take them to music that we like, but the shows all run too late and aren't kid-friendly. Mountain Jam is different. Lucky for us that we also have an extended network of friends to enjoy the weekend with. The Nunever is coming, and he has graciously offered to wear my new Whole Phamily t-shirt. Delights such as Awareness Village, Karma Wash and an entire area dedicated to family activities await.
Hopefully my experience as a mama bringing her children to their first music festival will not only be recorded here. Time will only tell.
We are all scratching our heads...why are there so many more allergies among kids today than there were when we were little?
Remember when Dustin Hoffman is told, in the movie The Graduate, the one word, the future in business is PLASTICS?
Well, my dear friend, I bring you the future of today, and when it comes to food allergies, it is the one. The only:
PROTEINS
Check out self-described type-A personality, former food industry Wall Street analyst Robyn O'Brien's brilliant talk at last year's TedX Austin.
Her organization, Allergy Kids Foundation, is making great strides to help protect American families from the additives in our food supply.
Even Erin Brockovitch is cheering her on.
If it takes a polished, professional, educated, smart, savvy, communicative, organized, type-A personality woman to get the message across to our country's citizens (rather than a grassrootsy type...ahem, in the words of Miss Piggy, moí?), so be it.
Stango and I got to hear some music over the weekend. A local Connecticut band, the Juicy Grapes, were playing at the Acoustic Cafe in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Back in high school I didn't get out to this type of activity, so it was like I was having the night I never had in 1989. Lots of fun. In between sets my kind of music was playing on the speakers, and it was all good.
This was a set list for a different band
Love the smart logos...though the other women there didn't know about Lululemon. I guess this could be a generic omega and not a rip on the famous yoga clothing brand logo
A running music-head rabbit with a guitar.
Does this mean I can't display the cute logo from the cafe table (bunny rabbit above) on my blog?
It is so easy to forget how sweet and innocent the 4s and 5s are. Just now at drop off, I reminded my youngest, The Wolfman's Brother, to enjoy his day in preschool as a four year old. He looked at me with that creeping 5 year old just around the corner look of, "c'mon, mama, don't embarras me now." How does he know that already?
The early years slip away too fast. Like Ferris said, if we don't stop to look around every once in a while, we could miss it.
My 4 year old will soon be 5, and that babyness (yep, he is the youngest, which compounds this burst of sentimentality) is quickly melting away. It is so bittersweet. What could be better than a morning of duplos followed by starting a school garden?
There comes a time in every mom bloggers blog-of-a-life where she is granted the opportunity to bitch and moan*. In honor of my 188th post, I hereby grant you a peak at some of my current grievances. Keep in mind I haven't bitched much here at all. The whole point of the Whole Phamily is to seek out the good. But I felt it high time to let out a barbaric yawp, bloggy-style.
I think it all boils down to a few (ahem, um, I meant 20) key points, which are, in no particular order:
lack of focus.
more fun to procrastinate.
my writing sucks balls.
I go on and freakin' on. And on and on and on. Point well taken: there are too many bullet points here for any reader to follow.
Along the lines of #5, I am neither a hard worker nor come from money. I'm so screwed.
Making lemonade out of the proverbial lemon is too hard.
I have good things to say and I think no one will ever listen (aside from you, dear reader who is one of my 20 or so loyal ones).
I'd rather be dancing at a Phish show.
I'd rather be dancing at a Dead show (oh, wait, Jerry is dead). Still, no one is comping my tix or putting me on any guest lists for any shows that I know of.
I'd rather be dancing. Thank you, Capezio.
I want it now (along the lines of Veruca Salt, but I don't want to go down as a bad egg).
Still not a Skinny Bitch. You thought I wasn't a bitch? My nickname at age 6 was crab, but I hide the shell and claws well.
Still not just plain ole' skinny. Don't give me any of that "well, you don't want to be too skinny" bullshit because what I'm talking about is just being thin, not anorexic, okay? And just fitting comfortably into clothing. No, I'm not a plus size.
Everything is too itchy. I like cotton and stretch but not too much stretch because that irritates my skin. No silk. No wool. Only some synthentics. Is my best case scenario relegated to a life clad in Eileen Fisher?
As of yet, still not a fag hag. Derek Blasberg and Jonathan Adler, we can still be buddies. But since #17 and #18 exist, I doubt I fit the bill.
And yet, I have a lot to be grateful for:
Kids
Husband
Health
Parents living
College degree
Masters Degree
Not being able to outsource one of my favorite activities: sleeping
First crack at working in 8+ years.
Maybe I should actually get to work to try to make some bucks so we can rehire the cleaning help. More on my decision to temporarily let go of our cleaning help for about 3 months so we could save $ to afford Mountain Jam coming your way, soon!
More about my new venture another time...If Jamie did it in DC, then I can do it in Philadelphia!
