New Year Resolutions

1. Stop Procrastinating (clearly I do not have a good start with this one since I am doing this well after New Year's)
2. Be a better hostess
3. Write more letters
4. Spend more time outside
5. Organize my bedroom
6. Deal with my crisis of faith
   

Mommy

During this Christmas break, I had the chance to spend a good deal of time with my children, which was wonderful. Children have a way of making you feel so loved and so needed. This is a wonderful thing, but at times this is also overwhelming. All weekend I heard three crying voices
"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"
"I need you, Mommy!"
"Look, Mommy!"
"Mommy, What's That?"
"Mommy, it's a cow."

I was feeling like I didn't want to be needed, like I just wanted some time to myself. I didn't want to hear "Mommy." But then, I heard something I hadn't before. "Mom, I need a drink of water, Mom."

Since when did my soon-to-be-4-year-old make a switch from "Mommy" to "Mom". Not only did he use it this once, but he seemd to be intentionally making the switch. "Mommy, I'm... MOM, I'm all done."

I was surprised at how I reacted. I felt heartbroken. This represented some kind of a milestone in his life, his growing independence. I was expecting this from a teenager, maybe a 10-year-old - not a 4-year-old!

Now I will cherish every time he slips up and lets out a "Mommy, I need you."

My Quest for Automation

How do I know that I am a super geek? Well let me just tell you about the ways I automate my life. I built a database application to plan my wedding. I built software to track all of my contacts, addresses, christmas card lists, remind me of birthdays and the names of my friends's children. I made an application for tracking my recipes, meal plans, generating a weekly menu, and generatting my grocery shopping list.

Now, I don't have my curtains and lights hooked up to a single remote control as some of my geeky electrical engineering friends, but that is only because I don't know how.

I believe that everything that can be automated, should be automated. I would love it if my refrigerator could automatically detect when food has gone bad and throw it out for me. It should buy me a replacement while its at it.

What is such a paradox about who I am is that at the same time, I prefer to make my own candles, crochet my own afghan, and hand craft my own birthday cards. Clearly, it is much less efficient to do these things by hand when there is mass production equipment out there to do these things more quickly and more cheaply.

Maybe it is not such a paradox after all. Maybe I just like to make things. Maybe creating a Meal Planning software is just an electronic manifestation of my need to do crafts. Maybe writing a VBA procedure to email me my grocery list is not so different from figuring out how to do a dcfps (double crochet front post stitch).

Smalltalk

What do you think employees talk about on the elevator ride at the National Weather Service?