Tag: Laura

Categories
life

Jail Break

I just love having two kids who are such good friends. Laura told me a great story that took place yesterday with Savannah and Alyssa. I just have to share how Savannah chose to play the protective big sister for Alyssa.

Alyssa was doing something that she was not supposed to do. Laura warned her that if she did it again she would have to go sit in her crib – she did it again. When Laura was taking Alyssa to her crib Savannah followed her down the stairs. Savannah was talking to herself saying things like “I’m going to go help my sister.” After Laura put Alyssa in the crib she went to do whatever random things she needed to do. Savannah went into the bedroom where Alyssa was while Laura was busy and pulled the reading chair in their room over to Alyssa’s crib and helped Alyssa out of her “prison cell.”

A few minutes later Laura peeked into the girls room to find Alyssa out of the crib playing with Savannah in the room. The chair was left right at the scene of the jail break.

Categories
culture

Learning for Life

Laura was talking about the need to do better at preparing young women for motherhood. This is not the first time that she has talked about this lack in preparing for life. It has not taken her very long to figure out that her expectations of motherhood were not accurate to the realities of motherhood. She was talking about a great idea which would help young mothers and young women who are not mothers yet.

Laura was proposing that teenage girls be given the opportunity to help young mothers during the early months after their first children have been born so that the new mothers have a little extra help and the young women get a very real perspective on what motherhood is like. They would have fewer incorrect ideas of what to expect.

As we talked about it a little I realized how much things have changed in the way we learn about life from the way they were less than a century ago. Back then children learned what to expect from life when they grew up by participating in the adult activities of their parents. Children might help on the family farm or for those who could not participate in the work that their parents did they might be required to work a job to help support the family. Back then young women learned what motherhood was like by being close to their mothers and by spending a fair deal of time taking care of younger siblings and helping around the house.

In our current society where children are not expected to do anything for their families but instead are supposed to devote their time to learning in the abstract (school) and being cared for as if they were guests at home, it is no wonder that childhood activity is often extended past college with people not knowing what they want out of life. I know that is not always the case but that seems to be the prevailing trend in society.

Categories
life

The Web is Slower Than Life

Society has grown impatient generally because of how fast computers can get things done. I remember when waiting 30 seconds for a program to load on the computer was considered acceptably fast. Now I see people complaining when they do not notice any response from the computer within 10 seconds of them trying to do something on it. I thought that computers had made things generally faster.

I have fully immersed myself into this accelerated culture and I decided that I wanted to make my website more up-to-date by maintaining it as a blog so that I could put new thoughts up as often as they happened. That required that I restructure the site so when I got a break I did so. It took less than a week for me to completely restructure the site. That is when I started looking back at what had happened since I made the decision to change the site. Savannah got run over by a car in the library parking lot (thankfully she didn’t get hurt), Alyssa started walking, Laura got hit by a second car in the same library parking lot (no damage to the cars again) and I flew down to Albuquerque to see my new niece. All of that took place in about a week.

I guess the lesson that I learned as I looked back on all of that is that we like the speed of computers because life is fast. No matter how fast computers get life is faster. The reason that we get impatient as we start becoming accustomed to the instantaneous lifestyle is that we forget that the speed of the computer gives us only the illusion of going at the pace of life and not actually the reality of going as fast as life. We’re still behind even at the speed of life.

If the speed of light is “c” (from e=m*c^2) then the speed of life, “l”, must be close to “c^2” thus e=m*l . . .