Barbie Doll Helps Chart a Life's Course

Happy Friday!


It's true: Barbie can help chart a course for your life - but only traditional Barbie. Not these new "posers."

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/barbie-set-high-bar-for-my-life/

Put Down the Pencil, Grab a Rake

Does it seem sometimes like everything is changing? Is that a function of age, or are things really morphing at lightning speed?


Whew! I can hardly keep up!

Enjoy this article about how even college admissions applications are changing. Your kid may need to spend more time at the soup kitchen to get accepted to a top college.

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/to-get-into-college-all-you-need-is-activism/

Goodbye, 2015

Wow...is it really almost 2016?

What a year it's been. More of my friends have had grandchildren this year, our youngest son entered his junior year in high school, and a beloved horse passed away, leaving lessons of love and commitment behind. Our oldest son makes Tennessee his home, and yet another makes strides in the business world of Boston.

Time seems more precious, and time with our parents increasingly precious. Nationally, 2015 saw an increase in domestic terrorism, and scenes of chaos from Paris that seemed from a nightmare. Society continues to change, and an election for President will happen this year.

Here's my prediction: Trump vs. Hillary in the general. Did I really just write that? How fun and interesting it has already been to observe  and we're just getting going!

Here at the cusp of a new year, enjoy a more light-hearted piece from LifeZette about baby names. Come on, people  they're just getting weird.


http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/the-baby-name-game/

You're A Mean One, Mrs. Grinch

Many times, if you have traditional values, you are akin to the Grinch. To others - especially those who hold values counter to yours - you seem to always be screaming, "Stop Changing Things!" into the wind, furrowing your brow and wringing your hands like a curmudgeon (great word). You slink around corners and with your long, hairy fingers stealthily snatch all forms of interesting, captivating, modern fun.

You are a stick-in-the-mud, a fuddy-duddy, intractably stubborn and mired in "the old days." You're a mean one, Mrs. Grinch. 

It is not a resistance to change that motivates traditional, or conservative people. It is an energetic and optimistic belief that certain things just work. It is an ability to see down the road and say, at the end of the day, this will bring discord and dissatisfaction and a hollowness to either personal or national character.

An applied, exercised foresight. Change for change's sake, or worse, to fulfill empty whims of children, is not worth our time or effort.

This may seem harsh when applied to the story linked to, below, but honestly, we are doing our girls a disservice if we bend to this latest example of whim-ery.

Work to make things better, girls - don't blow them up when they don't suit you.

Here's the subject of tonight's blog post: http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/no-you-cant-be-a-boy-scout/

To prove that I'm neither curmudgeon or fuddy-duddy, here's a list of modern things I DO like:

1. Texting
2. Chipotle Burrito Bowl (get your act together with the e-coli, Chipotle!)
3. Adele
4. Sweaters on Dogs (as long as they're comfortable)
5. Fancy wine-openers that come in a velvet box
6. The Fitbit - it's on my Christmas list 
7. Budweiser commercials with puppies and Clydesdales

Jazzed for Christmas

This year I am so jazzed for Christmas!!

Most years I feel under-whelmed at this point in the holiday calendar; I love to start the holiday craziness a little later than what is now popular. Around December 12th I decorate the house and do the bulk of my Christmas shopping. I begin to listen to Christmas music in earnest around that time, and attempt to  make cookies, too. I basically self-immerse in it all.

 And if it snows? Forget it - I'll be the first one to make a snow angel in the yard.

This  year, I'm feeling that beloved holiday spirit early. I am excited for the Masses at church and the Christmas carols to come. I have also decided to do the following to usher in my interior celebration:

1. Although news-watching is a part of my job, I will limit the amount of time I watch bad news on television. The world is crazy, and we'd better get used to it. Seek out the good.

2. I will go to Adoration once a week - this quiet chapel time where your thoughts expand in the silence and yet are more focused, too.

3. I will pick a way our family can give that is meaningful - and as Mom, drag them to do it. That's the American way.

4. When my boys were little, I used to make tea and sit in front of our creche at night after they were tucked in, contemplating, imagining, and generally being blissed-out on a fact that my human brain can't even begin to totally take in - a loving God sent a Son He so loved into this poor world, and that Son for a time walked the earth among us.

I will try to have a few of those quiet times alone in the dining room again this year.

I would like to thank the Simons, the Lewises, and Pam Koner of Family to Family for helping me remember what is important; it was an honor to write their story. Check it out, below:

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/from-one-family-to-another/

I hope you, too,find your way to a meaningful, super-connected Christmas or Hannukah celebration. I hope you have those moments of seeing how loved you, in your imperfection and striving, really are.

And I hope the shivery light-bulb moments of true understanding come to you as we ready our homes for this most joyous of times.

T hank you for reading. :-) God bless!

Campus Craziness - Don't Attend Victimology University!

College craziness - kids needing safe spaces, apologies, the re-writing of history, and the list goes on, and on...so read on http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/college-campus-craziness/

Have a great weekend, stay safe, and talk to your kids about staying grounded in an increasingly bizarre world.

Don't Spoil Your Teen!

Are you raising a great teen or a self-centered wreck? Read this cautionary tale. Our kids are our greatest work - so lets keep up the work  to have them turn out right - good citizens and adults capable of caring for themselves, as well as others.

http://www.lifezette.com/momzette/spoiled-teens-tune-out/

Happy Monday!

Michelle Obama - don't bother with punctuation - that's not cool!

Click here to read all about Michelle Obama
s new social media sharing initiative - where you should forget grammar and keep content "raw."
What???

The Last Game in the Old Stadium at ENMU

I am taking a trip next week that I am so excited about I have a case of the butterflies. Something on the horizon that is so special, it's as if  my whole system can''t wait to go. I am going back to my college town - Portales, N.M.

 A small dusty town nestled in the southeast corner of the state, next week-end Portales will be my Paris or London.

I live thousands of miles from where I went to college. In what was a blip in an otherwise smooth experience of east-coast-ness, at 17 I left home and traveled from Maryland to New Mexico for higher learning with a side of desert sunsets. It was a culture shock, an adventure waiting to be had, and a savior to a perpetually restless personality - a trait that would continue, in ever-lessening frequency, for a lifetime. 

Restlessness is not cool; it does not make one mysterious in that good way once you're a grown-up. It is a fatiguing, sometimes frustrating need to always see more than what you are seeing; do more than you are doing. It has been a lifelong lesson in appreciation of the now, to mostly overcome restlessness.

I live an ordinary life and am happily immersed in my work as a journalist and the day-to-day of family with a husband and three sons - the last of whom is now 16, the other two well into adulthood and thriving on their own. Now is a good time to take a breath and look back,shading my eyes and scanning the horizon like an archaeologist looking for clues to answer the question: how did this place, put firmly in the past years ago, become so formative to who I am now?

 I am travelling back to the place I've only been once since I left, to see the last football game in the old stadium at ENMU before it is torn down to make way for a new one. I am meeting some old friends back there, and rushing time - that robber, that albatross - will briefly stand still.

After I left school I never looked back and never went back - one of the hallmarks of restlessness. Actually I did go back once, when I was in Arizona with my husband and "popped over" alone to New Mexico for two nights. During that trip, I walked my campus as a grown woman, I let two freshmen excitedly give me the tour I went on 30 years prior as a teen, and I had lunch with the town sheriff (by accident; he was reading the paper and offered me a section; one thing led to another.)

I can't wait to see faces I haven't seen in years (and may have to struggle for the name that goes with them.) I'm not a particularly rabid football fan, so I'll talk through most of the game. (And I have a crazy fear of mascots - anything in a costume with a fully enclosed head - but that's for another post.)

I can't wait to feel the New Mexico air, have a real burrito or chimmichanga, and see faces that are now a bit more lined, topped with gray, perhaps, and the dearer for it. I am ready to time-travel.

Houston, commence the countdown.

And there's this...one of my LifeZette articles on FOX News.com.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/10/15/coddled-kids-crumble-colleges-see-big-lack-resilience-among-stud

Have a great week-end. Get a little restless.

Pope Francis comes to America

Why has the Pope come to the U.S? Is he wary of America? Is he also a political force? What does he want to let us know about what is important in life?

Click here to learn more.

 Enjoy Cuba, Pope Francis!

A Child with Downs syndrome joins the family

Click here to read about an inspiring American family that I am privileged to get to know in relating their story. The video within the story is amazing, too.

90% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted. This is effectively the genocide of a population. Read the article the get the facts on these special people, who may one day disappear from society, as well as a big dose of inspiration.

Life is meant to be lived fully; enjoy what it brings to you, in the way in which it is brought.

Happy Friday. :-)