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Monday, June 13, 2011

Long Distance Grandma

Can a person buy stock in the U.S. Postal Service? If so, tell me where to buy. The Post office is making so much money from just me. I have those eight grandkids and four children who live so far away. Between all the family members we have a birthday almost every month (okay only nine months out of twelve). Therefore, cards, emails and packages must be sent.

Oh, don't get me wrong. My children and their spouses try hard to keep us in the loop.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Good Grandchildren come from Good Parents

My daughter is so patient and kind with her children. As a stay-at-home Mom she is doing a great job with her four kids: Jane, 7; Ron, 5 (soon to be six in August); Peter, just turned 4 in May; and Susan, who was 2 in March. I don’t remember being so patient with my four children, so I don’t know where she learned such good parenting skills.
The kids are not perfect little angels, but close enough to be called angelic—most of the time. For example, yesterday Rebecca and the kids treated me to lunch at their favorite restaurant, “Olive Garden.” Yes, that is the children’s choice, and we had a lovely time. Each one was well behaved and didn’t give any of the other dining customers concern. In fact, the large groups of six and eight adults made more noise than my grandchildren.
I know I sound biased because they are mine, but the credit is due all to my daughter and “favorite” and only son-in-law, Phil. I hate to use the word “trained” but it is appropriate here. They have set the behavior rules and carried the discipline through repetition in everything they teach the children. Every day in all aspects, the kids have specified chores and expectations of behavior that are reinforced each day, not with yelling or lashing out, but with repetition, discussion and reasoning. All six of them (kids and parents) are doing a great job.
This is not a put down of my oldest son L.J. or his family. They too are raising four children with manners, patience and responsibility. I admire their parenting skills as well; I am not around them daily as much as Rebecca’s, but the brief visits of a week, weekend or even a few hours are just as enjoyable. When we get to put the two families together, it is quite the clan. Rebecca with her four mixes with L.J. and Nicole’s four: Corban, 6; Taher, 5 (next month); Brenan, who turns three this month; and Daycia, who was 1 in March. We have a fortunate Evers-Sherwood reunion.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Cool Days --Summer Fun

While shopping in Oklahoma and Texas, I kept finding new fabrics called "Cool and Dry" or "Cool Days." Some how these clothes are suppose to "draw out the heat and sweat" away from your body so you will be cooler or at least drier on your skin.

Well, I don't know about that, but I do believe the "Cool Days" label applies to my summer trip so far. I am having a COOL time in Texas with grandchildren and grown children. They are so funny in what they say and do; just ordinary events (my grandchildren, not the grown-ups). There is so much activity and laughter, I can't begin to remember it all or even write it down. I have used up my camera battery, so now when someone does a cute face or looks adorable, I just have to say, "No picture, just a memory now."

To let you know, I have eight grandchildren all under the age of seven--four in each of my two oldest children's households.
I tease them about they started late and then it became a contest. Rebecca had a girl; L.J. had a boy three months later. Rebecca had a boy; L.J. a girl. Rebecca had a boy; L.J. a girl. Rebecca had a girl; L.J. had a girl. Rebecca said she was done; L.J. says they want as many as God gives them. We'll see.

It was cool when L.J. brought his family up to Rebecca's house Memorial weekend. Then we had a big campout in the house; six adults and eight kids in four bedrooms. It was fun while it lasted. Grandpa went home to Colorado; L.J. and family went home to Houston, Rebecca's husband went on a mission to Canada, so now it just me, my daughter and her four kids.

It is still Cool Days in the Summer Fun.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Back to Texas

Well, I made it to Tulsa, Wagoner, and Hulbert and back to Texas. What a trip!

Saw more family, did more things and drove all the way by myself. With nothing to do but watch the scenery and search my soul, I talked and talked to myself. In my mind I fixed the family budget, gave my opinion on all current events, but especially, I remodeled my Colorado house completely--at least three times.

Now I can't wait to get back home to do all those plans. If I remember them by then.

Until then I have plans to enjoy the grandkids, enjoy the Texas heat, and most of all enjoy watching my daughter manage everyone and everything so beautifully.

Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
Westley gets a hug from his mom the minute after he receives his diploma from Fruita Monument High School, Class of 2010.

He's BACK! Billy Crystal is 2012 Oscar Awards Host

Remember Bohemian Rhapsody Mountain Dew parody Ad

The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.