Jade only a few days old

This was Jade when she was only two days old. She already had tons of dark hair which definitely came from me! You should see how much she has now!! My husband and I are hoping that it is going to be curly like mine as well. The suspense is killing us!!!

Proud grandma holding Jade

This is my mother holding Jade. As you can see she is totally thrilled and though Jade is not her first grandchild, she is the first female grandchild. We have had way too much fun shopping for Jade. Little girl clothes are absolutley adorable!

Christmas morning

This is me and Jade on Christmas morning. We were both exhausted and Jade wanted to snuggle. I love this picture and Jade still loves to snuggle. It is one of my favorite things about being a mom

First Christmas

This is Jade on Christmas Day. As you can see she is sleeping. She slept through the whole day, presents and all!!! I love her little Christmas outfit!

Sleepy girl

This is Jade sleeping. I treasure these moments because she looks so cute and I get a chance to rest too!

Jade smiling

I love this pic too! Jade had just started to smile and I started snapping pitures right away. She is obviously the most beautiful baby ever!

Mom and Jade

Okay, this is my absolute favorite picture so far. This is Jade and mom hanging out one afternoon. As you can see she is growing super fast and is getting bigger by the minute. I could show you pictures all day but we have to get down to business! Now you will at least be able to picture Jade when I talk about her, which will be often. I hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Okay, just one more……..

One of the highlights of my winter vaca was the chance to go see Wicked at Proctor’s theater. I received tickets for my birthday and I was eagerly anticipating the show. As I suspected, it was fantastic. The sets were incredible, the story was poignant and beautiful, and the music was simply inspiring. I left the theater thoroughly pleased and wishing I could see it again. I liked the show so much I started talking about it with anyone that would listen. The one question everyone asked me after I blathered on about the show was – Did you read the book? The answer was no, I had not read the book. In fact I had put off reading it for a long time thinking that it was wordy and dense. But I felt ridiculous saying this, particularly because I am an English teacher, so this week I picked up Wicked, and this time, I didn’t couldn’t put it down.

For those of you that don’t know, Wicked is the story of Elphaba (aka the wicked witch of the west) before Dorothy shows up in Oz. As I initially suspected, the book is dense and it can take some serious time to get through it. However, I have also realized that it is worth it. The story focuses on the beginnings of Elphaba’s life, her time at Shiz university where she befriends Glinda (aka the good witch of the north) and how their friendship and personalities develop through their numerous encounters. There are so many themes that are pertinent throughout the text it is impossible to discuss them all in one post. There are allusions to scapegoating, intolerance, racial and gender prejudices, theological battles, and-the most ubiquitous of them all- the question of the nature of good and evil. Gregory Maguire has an intense and incredible imagination, and his story, though fantastical in nature, is  timeless.

The idea that you can’t escape from as you read the book is the question: What is the true nature of evil? It seems like a straightforward idea but the more one reads about Elphaba the more difficult the question becomes. Elphaba is idealistc, intelligent, serious and of course, green. She encounters loads of intolerance for her strange color from everyone, including her parents, and this has a serious effect on her persistent and hardened nature. She cannot be classified as entirely good but it is also impossible to describe her as a bad (or wicked) individual. She fights, terrorist-like, for the rights of Animals as they are slaughtered and silenced; her passion is overwhelming and incredibly moving. But at the same time she has an affair with a married man and is most likely responsible (to some degree) for his supposed death. So, is she admirable for protecting living beings from genocide, or a cold blooded terrorist that kills for the greater good? Is her love affair for Fiyero beautiful and pure or is she a mistress, keeping a husband from his family and putting him in harms way? Hard to determine, isn’t it? It is difficult to hate her and very easy to admire her ideals and convictions, but even this can be somewhat confusing. Even Elphaba herself constantly questions her own motivations and actions. This is proven when Elphaba thinks to herself, ”But the witch stopped herself short, hearing her words about Madame Morrible-she had a choice-and echo of what the Elephant Princess Nastoya had once said to her: No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst-there is always a choice.”

Elphaba questions her choices the same way that we do after we have had time to reflect. This makes her very human and imperfect. It’s all the more endearing because, as the dwarf says to her, “You try very hard at life.” It’s true. Elphaba tries very hard at life, just like the rest of us. I question the choices I make or have made and wonder if I am a good person in this world. What does it mean to be a good person in this world? Do we really do anything purely for good without some kind of benefit to ourselves? These are tricky questions, ones that we can ask over and over again without ever really finding a satisfying answer. The sad fact is that there is, and always will be, good and evil present in every human being. Elphaba is not perfect, but she tries. Over and over again she tries to stand up for others and to stand up for herself. I think this is what I love about her character the most. She may fail but she never stops trying.

One of the most admirable aspects of this book is that Gregory Maguire forces readers to ask themselves some very deep questions. As I said earlier it can be a bit dense at times but it is worth it. It will, no doubt, reinvent your thinking about the wicked witch of the west as you knew her, and perhaps get you to  think about your own life, and just how much goodness or wickedness you may have within yourself.

That’s right, back at it. To the gym!  After reading The Brooklyn Follies and thinking about how little control I have over everything, I suddenly found myself with a desire to take back some of the little control that I do have over my life. I know it all is ultimately in vain but so what? It will make me feel better…I think. So tomorrow I will be signing up at a new gym near my home and getting rid of some of these holiday calories. Let me tell you, I did not skimp on anything this year, be it food or drink, so I need to get my act together and get back to working out. I’ve taken seven months off and I believe I can officially classify myself as lazy and out of shape. So, I’m going to start from square one, get into a schedule, and get my tush to look less like the jello-mold it’s become and more like the rock it used to be. My husband loves the idea. In fact, he is going to sign up with me and start working out as well. We are both looking forward to having more energy and getting off the couch.

But before all of this wonderful pain begins, here’s a little info on the Christmas nuttiness. Most of it came from my adorable cat, Willie (sarcasm intended). He is just a little ball of energy and LOVES Christmas trees. Even though we opted to put up our fake tree this year, he still can’t get enough of all the blinking lights, decorations, and the fact that he has something new to climb on. We actually got through three weeks of only yelling, stamping, clapping, and running after him when this occurred…

Sweet. I found the tree at about nine thirty on a Thursday night after a very long day. My husband and I just decided to go to bed and deal with it in the morning, but we actually were so disgusted we didn’t touch it until that Sunday. Here is a pic of the little culprit. He is hiding from me and looks very guilty for what he did.

Willie

What a Grinch! He knows he is in trouble. After much complaining my husband and I put up another fake tree. I took the lights from the old tree (the new one was pre-lit) and wound them around our banister. It actually looked good when we were finished and the house was more festive than before. Of course Willie had the most fun with all the chaos…

Willie playing in the remnants of the broken tree

Here is a pic of the new tree that was up for a whole five days…

Christmas tree number two

 How do you keep your pets from ruining decorations? I am open to any and all suggestions! Anyway, this certainly added to the Christmas Craziness but all in all the holidays were good. Though our decorations and trees are all put away now (my husband took them down yesterday) I am looking forward to starting the new year with some new goals and hopefully a less crazy cat. Maybe if I bring him to the gym with me I can tire him out on a treadmill or something. Happy New Year!

Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel, though in a style his readers might never have predicted — a fable of an alternative universe, in which America has gone fascist and ordinary life has been flattened under a steamroller of national politics and mass hatreds. Hitler’s allies rule the White House. Anti-Semitic mobs roam the streets. The lower-middle-class Jews of Weequahic, in Newark, N.J., cower in a second-floor apartment, trying to figure out how to use a gun to defend themselves. (”You pulla the trig,” a kindly neighbor explains.) The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.

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Ed Lam

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 Roth seems to be taunting, ”You think swastikas are only for other countries?” And you turn the pages, astonished and frightened.

There is a solid tradition in American letters of novels like this, phantasmagoric pictures of a United States whose every promise has been turned upside down — jeremiads about America’s ability to transmute overnight into a fascist monstrosity. Jack London wrote the earliest example that anyone still reads today, I think — ”The Iron Heel,” in 1908, from the period before the word ”fascism” even existed (though fascism was plainly what London had in mind, in the form of a plutocratic-Republicantrade union dictatorship). Nearly 30 years later, Nathanael West produced a variation of his own called ”A Cool Million,” which the Library of America resurrected not long ago — a freaky picture of an America taken over by murderous right-wing screwballs. But the classic of classics has always been Sinclair Lewis’s ”It Can’t Happen Here” from 1935. The very title of Lewis’s novel entered long ago into the American language, a sardonic phrase, mocking the sweet naïfs who persist in believing that evil dwells anywhere but at home.

  It is a bit odd to think of Philip Roth as a descendant of Sinclair Lewis, but when I reflect on some recent appreciative essays on Lewis by John Updike and Gore Vidal, it occurs to me that half the writers in America may be Lewis’s descendants. For what has Roth been doing during these past 45 years, except fulminating against the conformist oppressions and hypocrisies of bourgeois life, writing Lewis’s ”Babbitt” in versions all his own — sexual, generational, comic, anti-McCarthyite, anti- P.C., antipuritanical, academic, East Coast, Middle Western and Jewish? One of Roth’s characters in ”The Human Stain,” fuming over America’s prissiness and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, wonders how the stupid public could have learned so little about human nature over the years. For hasn’t anyone read ”Babbitt”? And so, having dwelled over ”Babbitt” for long enough, Roth has evidently decided to dwell over ”It Can’t Happen Here,” and has even found a clever way of setting his own tale of America-goes-fascist in the post-1935 era, exactly as Sinclair Lewis did — quite as if ”The Plot Against America” and ”It Can’t Happen Here,” not to mention ”A Cool Million,” were, all of them, contemporaries: nervous novels from the Age of Roosevelt. And there is a reason for this.

So the last post I left was about Brooklyn Follies. I was not thrilled with it at the time but to be fair I was only halfway through it. I’m glad I didn’t completely judge it because the book does pick up at the mid point when the character of Lucy is introduced. The plot begins to move again and it gained my interest. However, one of the main ideas of the text is an uncomfortable one. It is the idea that we essentially have no control over anything in our lives and chance dictates everything. This is an uncomfortable idea but I have to appreciate the fact itself. Chance does direct all of the lives in the book. Tom, Nat, Lucy, and essentially all of the minor characters cannot escape the fact that fate and chance rules their lives. Anything that happens to them is essentially out of their control.

This forces readers to consider the ways that chance has controlled our lives. We like to think that we are planners. We plan for the careers we desire,  the relationships we have, the upcoming holiday menus, the vacations we look forward to, our outfits for the next day, and our dinners for the night. All of this planning makes us feel incredibly comfortable and in control of our lives. The sad fact of the matter is that all of this planning is in vain. We can’t control our lives; in fact, we can’t control anything. This is a diconcerting thought but the book itself is not alltogether disheartening.

When Tom’s new girlfriend finds out that her daughter and a female divorce are engaged in a sexual relationship, she is angered and talks of kicking the two out of her house, screaming at them and forcing them to end the relationship, Tom suggests that she let it go. He tells her that there is nothing that either of them can do about it and that her anger and desire to control the women’s relationship will bring her nothing but heartache and pain. He reveals what he has learned throughout his journey; we do not have control over our lives or the choices that other people make. Attempting to gain control over these things will not end well. Instead, we should deal with whatever the situation is, do what we can with it and move on. This sounds much easier than it probably is but it is good advice nonetheless.

Overall, this is a book that I appreciate and one that, in the end, I would reccomend. It is funny at times and moving at others. Although it is not my favorite, I appreciate it and its messages and I think that others would enjoy it.

Think about it: How has chance affected your life? How has it brought you to where you are at this very moment?

I didn’t believe her at first but she was absolutely right (thank God for good friends). After about 25 minutes of chatting with our eyes glued to the television, our district finally closed.  At that particular moment, as if it were planned, my husband came in from snowblowing the driveway (he is so great) and wished me a happy birthday! In my possible- snowday- suspense I had totally forgotten that today is my bday! Hopefully this is not the first sign of old age…

This very thing actually occurred when I turned twenty four. Snowday on my birthday. It was fanfreakintastic! Well, I’m not twenty four anymore…not even close. But it still rocks to know that I have a day to catch up on work and finish reading my books! I hope all of you enjoy your day and if you do have to go out in this mess, please drive carefully.

“You have to read this,” she implored. “It’s absolutely hysterical.”

The book is a truthful account of Jenny McCarthy’s own pregnancy, and all the nasty details that occurred throughout it. Though I am not pregnant, I know who Jenny McCarthy is, and because my girlfriend and I share a very similar sense of humor, I decided to give the book a try.

It is exactly what she said it would be: funny. McCarthy is totally candid about all of the experiences that she underwent during her pregnancy, whether you are prepared for them or not. She really is very funny and unabashedly honest about what she experienced- the good, the bad, and the embarrassing. It is a very light, easy read and though I’m not finished with it yet, I’ve gotten a few satisfying laughs out of it.

The book was obviously written for women that are pregnant, but you don’t have to be pregnant to enjoy it. It’s fun and it’s funny and if you are looking for something quick and silly about a topic that you may consider in the future, read it and enjoy.