I'm still the mom...

This just came to my mind. I was going to make it a facebook  rant, but decided that blogging would be more productive.

I am the mom!  Me! I am the one that makes the decisions.  You can give me all the advice you want. You can be horrified and appalled that my child is still using a bottle, or that he's not potty trained, or that my children have a TV and a blu-ray player(with WiFi) in their room.   But guess what, at the end of the day, I'm the mom. I know my kids are fine. I do not feel guilty  about my decisions.

So, go ahead. Be appalled. Give your unasked for advice.  I'll continue on parenting the way I am, knowing that my kids are doing just fine.

Because Captain Jean Luc Picard wasn't awesome enough..

Right? The man is awesome. Star Trek wouldn't be the same without Captain Jean Luc Picard, played by the amazing, the awesome, the wonderful Patrick Stewart.   Well, the world is a becoming a better place because of him too.  Patrick Stewart is an advocate for Violence Against Women.  He is extremely vocal about stopping, and preventing violence against women. Not just physical violence, but the kind not many people are aware of. The emotional/verbal/sexual abuse that is often hidden in homes so well.

What is abuse?  Below I linked to a blog that was written regarding how the church covers up abuse(often blaming the victim) and how to deal with it. There is also some beautiful videos of Patrick Steward talking about violence against women.

What is abuse?

Here is how the website defines abuse on its home page.

Abuse is fundamentally a mentality. It is a mindset of entitlement. The abuser sees himself as entitled. He is the center of the world, and he demands that his victim make him the center of her world. His goal is power and control over others. For him, power and control are his natural right, and he feels quite justified in using whatever means are necessary to obtain that power and control. The abuser is not hampered in these efforts by the pangs of a healthy conscience and indeed often lacks a conscience.

While this mentality of power and control often expresses itself in various forms of physical abuse, it just as frequently employs tactics of verbal, emotional, financial, social, sexual and spiritual abuse. Thus, an abuser may never actually lay a hand on his wife and yet be very actively terrorizing her in incredibly damaging ways.

Abuse in any of its forms destroys the victim's person. Abuse, in the end, is murder.

I encourage everyone to read the blog I linked to and especially watch those videos of Patrick Stewart..  

Happy 4th of July!!!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July. I know I sure did, despite the intense heat and exhausted 3.5 year old.   It was 109 degrees at 7:30 last night. Thankfully by the time the fireworks started at 9:45, it had cooled off quite a bit.

The whole day was great.  My mom left her house about 9:30 and arrived at ours at about 4.  While she was traveling, the kids and I went to a friends house for a BBQ and some fun.  We spent a couple of hours enjoying water balloon fights, squirt gun fights, good food and wonderful company.  Then my mom arrived in town and we headed home.   Where we hung out, played in the sprinklers,  and BBQ'd the BEST steak and corn-on-the-cob.   Best ever, if I do say so myself.

At 8:00 we headed over to a local park to watch the fireworks from a distance.  We realized that we arrived super early, so we went to Dutch Bros. for smoothies and coffee. When we got back to the park, we found a perfect spot to sit. We tossed down our blankets and chilled out while waiting to watching the fireworks.    That was most definitely the best part of the evening.  My mom, my children and me sitting on a blanket in a park playing and laughing and having more fun than we have had in a long time.   We sat there and watched Samuel run around in circles around the blanket singing a song about how his shirt glowed in the dark.  We took tons of pictures, some of which are below.  By the time the fireworks actually started, it was way past Samuel's bedtime and he was more than ready to go home and sleep.  But I held him and convinced him we would go home soon. He wasn't interested in watching the fireworks, so he lay in my arms as I watched them and rocked him.   Cias turned some music on my phone and was listening to it as he sat with Mima and watched the fireworks.

When the fireworks were over, we headed back to the truck.  As we walked up, Mima told Samuel to turn on the truck lights.  I told him to use his Jedi powers to turn the lights on.  So he put his hands up, wiggled his fingers, and the truck headlights magically came on!  He is now convinced he has Jedi powers and can always turn on the truck lights.  I really wish I had power locks in my car so I could that with him too.  He was so excited.

I wish I could think of the words to express how wonderful last night was. I hope the pictures can express them instead.