Pedigreed Housewife World

We were sitting in my bed watching the Little Einsteins last Sunday night (I’ve been running around this week and haven’t gotten around to writing this up - good thing I take notes with the kids' quotes on them!) when Briana looked up at me and said, “Mommy, aren’t there any girl’s who do the music?”   She was asking if there were any female composers.   My husband, who is an intellectual property attorney, followed up my “yes, of course there are” with “Honey, the reason that the Little Einsteins uses old men composers' songs is that they are off of their copyrights and the show doesn’t have to pay to use them.”   I told the kids that we could look up women composers this week, primarily because I couldn’t pull any names off the top of my head, other than more recent top 40s artists.   As I thought about what additional value we could get from the activity of looking up women composers it struck me that we could do either ‘women’s studies’ or ‘research’. ...

Briana got a set of magnifying glasses for Christmas, and ever since she has spent some time every day looking closely at everything in the house.   Abigail is right now fixated on the idea of “investigating” so all day long she wants to investigate.   Why not go with the flow? This week we were working on paying attention – to Mommy and Daddy, and to our surroundings.   I read recently (I wish I could remember where!) that our world is changing from a world where big picture thinkers are valued to a world where detail is of the utmost importance in success.   I thought about it, and that makes total sense.   Think about the 80s where a big idea was thought to be all you needed to become an instant millionaire versus now where even a missed dot in a url or one wrong character in an email address can derail your ability to find the site you are looking for or send your email to the right person. The other example that came to mind of a shift to detail...