Continued from here ...

Groups like MomRising, with their documentary film "Motherhood Manifesto", are turning the feeling that women are often discriminated against because they are mothers into a movement of 1960's war-ending, civil-rights-victory proportions.

Their numbers are rising, and house parties arranged as viewing sessions for the film, followed by no little discussion... more

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love. ~Mildred B. Vermont

That may be all well and good, but love don't put toast on the table, as good old Granny Gladys used to say. Many of us need to be gainfully employed. Whether we're working hard for the money, or fulfilling needs to express ourselves, fly with our own wings ... whatever ... a lot of mothers have jobs.

As older mothers, it's likely that some of us have established our careers, climbed the ladders we... more

Continued from here ... My children's birth parents were, in one way or another, victims of the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia. No one in that country escaped involvement, every Cambodian was impacted by the horrors of genocide, and the effects continue.

Although I have no information, there is no doubt that Sam and Cj were born into a climate of grinding poverty, hopelessness, hunger and the potential for disease. Thousands... more

Continued from here ... Today, I look forward to my weekend fix, but almost always find myself left wanting. The news spills out in front of me in five-hour wads giving me a slight rush of "What the heck do they think they're up to?", or "Holy Smoke! How can that happen?". I'm following presidential campaigns, and that has me thinking I'm not so out-of-the-loop as I used to be, but I've missed too much to ever completely... more

Weekends provide many a bounty for me ... leisure time, my husband's company, hours at the beach. One that I almost always appreciate is a significant increase in the amount of news on TV provided by our one television channel. Instead of the normal two and a half hours of morning news ... CNN and BBC alternating by the hour ... Saturdays and Sundays have double the coverage.

You see, I'm a news junky. I admit it.

I worked in TV news in a previous life, and made a living out of covering other peoples' dramas for many years.... more

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I'm up to my eyeballs in cute!

The puppies are eleven days old, starting to open their eyes, and getting all rolly-polly and pup-like, although they still wriggle around a bit like giant garden slugs with fur.

I'm happy about this for the moment, as I know what havoc will arise when they're fully mobile and jumping all over the place with big clumsy puppy feet, using their razor sharp puppy teeth to chew on everything... more

Since it's Friday, I'm thinking in terms of conclusion ... of tidying up my week, putting it in a nice neat pile where I can see it in its altogether, look closely, and decide if it's been a good one.

Sticking with my weekly summary formula ... I know I haven't used it in a while, but I keep it handy for just such Fridays ... I'll start out with what I've been reading.

I began the week with a lovely, quiet and gentle old English book ... Gay has a fancy edition the Folio Society puts out ... called "Enchanted April" , written in 1922 by Elizabeth Von Arnim.

Set in the early 1900s, it's the story of a couple of... more

My eldest, a lovely daughter now thirty-seven-years-old ... how the heck did THAT happen? ... is a very busy executive. She has a tough job that demands she be available, and she must respond quickly to questions and demands.

In addition to almost endless phone calls, emails come at her like snowflakes to Minnesota in January, and all need some at least some attention. In her continuing efforts to stay on top of things, she got herself a BlackBerry.

Lucky me!

Her new ability to communicate instantly had made... more

Cj has a new word: puppies!

With uncanny timing, one of our dogs, all female and the rest spayed, Dinah (as in Dinah-saur), gave birth to seven ... count 'em seven ... puppies on Mother's Day.

You may be thinking this is really old news, but in this part of the world Mother's Day was last Sunday ... as in the-day-before-yesterday.

For some reason, British Mother's Day, also called "Mothering Sunday", which is what they follow here, is in March. This has confused me for years, always sneaking up when I so don't... more

Not long ago I wrote about old friends of older adoptive parents and how accepting mine have been of my children since they appeared on the scene.

It wasn't until I thought back to how isolated I was as a twenty-something mom with kids that I fully appreciated how welcoming my friends have been of Sam and Cj, and how enthusiastically so many of them have involved themselves in the lives of rugrats, a species they would never have... more