April 4

And now I am a prisoner in a bad lecture nightmare.

1965

I sat at church for 2 hours today. Since it was confirmation Sunday, there were a lot of people there. There must have been 25 kids - most of them 3 or 4 years old. I had my hands full running around after them. What a cute bunch, though! They were shy but warmed up quickly. I had to keep telling one girl why her mommy wasn't there. I guess all she wanted was attention.

Comment 2006

For some reason, many churches (then and now) think it is a good idea to ask their teenaged members to babysit for free. As an adult, I know that it is the sort of thing that church boards think will appeal to and suit teenagers. But consider that at 13, most teenagers in many traditions have "come of age" through confirmation or some other rite, and are supposedly young adults. What other age or identity group is "volunteered" categorically for some kind of duty?

Remembering the chagrin I felt at been the constant babysitter at my church (and thereby missing half the services, especially the big ones), I have argued against this practice in my own church. If you need volunteers for a task, issue an open invitation.

Oh my, where did that rant come from?

1983

A very busy and absorbing two weeks since I last wrote. We got the information about Hawaii and spend over a week discussing the trip. Before finally deciding to go ahead as planned, we went from not going at all to going just as far as California instead. Jim can be so indecisive, and sometimes it’s contagious.

Kiddo is taking a few steps now, though she prefers to crawl when she wants to get there in a hurry.

The garden is started, crocus have come and gone, and hay fever season is on its way. Ah, spring!

Comment 2024

And then we decided that flying from DC to Hawaii with a one-year-old was crazy, and spent the money on an Apple IIe instead.

1997

Took a day off yesterday bring woozy and sick. Maybe a migraine, maybe a virus. I am still feeling a little odd, but more myself. Playing tug of war with the kids, problems to solve on campus - lots of stress. TGIF! I need time to think, time to exercise, time to catch up. Time

It is also, for what it’s worth, a beautiful day, promising to be in the 70s!

1998

My task today is to gather together the threads of my research and figure out where I am and where I must go with each project. There are four, in all. • The Book (the ball is in the publisher’s court)

• Unisex (dormant, may start up in the summer if Becky gets her grant)

• Hair (starting to look interesting, but is it an article or a book?)

• “Stitch in time” (just starting to take shape)

I also need to sort out the house a bit and prepare for AYS tomorrow. It is a cool, rainy day. Everything is turning green all of a sudden, and the grass needs cutting. Lots of yards have tulips blooming - not ours! I am watching for the irises I planted last year.

Comment 2023

Honestly, how did I survive being a full-time professor/researcher and a mother of two? Now that I am doing these day-by-day core samples of my life, it is also a mystery why I didn’t figure out my seasonal allergies sooner? 

Bits and pieces of explanation:

Was I alone in the church nursery with all those kids? If so, YIKES!

The Book (A history of American children’s clothing) was moved to a back burner on a stove on another planet, but eventually saw the light of day as Pink and Blue (fourteen years later)

Unisex became my second book, Sex and Unisex  (2015) and I have no idea who Becky is.

Hair became a chapter in a Sex and Unisex (seventeen years later)

Stitch in Time became "Home Sewing in Early Greenbelt”, an article in Maryland Humanities (2000)

AYS = About Your Sexuality, a comprehensive sex ed course offer by our church to middle school students. Jim and taught it once; Kiddo 1 now teaches OWL (Our Whole Lives), the successor to AYS. (Proud mama here!)

2003

It is 4:45 pm, I have been up since six and I am exhausted. Yet I still have one more session to attend, then a reception, dinner and THEN my poster session. May I say, ugh.

And now I am a prisoner in a bad lecture nightmare. I had hoped this would e a discussion about multiculturalism, but no. I am having PowerPoint slides read to me, by neddy jingo.

2024

I am reading Life is Short by Dean Rickles. The audiobook is not quite three hours long, delivering on the promise of the subtitle: “An appropriately brief guide to making it more meaningful”. The narrator has a British accent, which makes me wonder how I would react if it was done in a different dialect. My favorite sleep meditation is recorded by a Scot with a lovely baritone voice. Are there rules about accents on audio recordings, like the readability measures of various fonts?

At any rate, it is an interesting book about life and time and how we relate to our past, present and future selves. Seems relevant to this project.