Holidays and Holy Days: 7 Quick Takes XI

And speaking of Sunday: I am truly doubly blessed to have you both in my life. Thank you to my mom for teaching me how to be brave and strive for greatness. Thank you for teaching me how to sew and how to be organized (that one's a work in progress). To my mother-in-law, thank you for raising my husband to be a man of honor and integrity. Not to mention loving and faithful and hilarious. Thank you for loving ME from the first day we met (the feeling was mutual!). It's truly an embarrassment of riches. You guys are the best! Her sentiments, as well as those in the comments, are heartbreaking, and even as a woman with many children I can easily put myself in her place. But I would add, that even from over here in plenty o'kids land I fully and absolutely agree that Mass (or any church service) is not the place to be acknowledged for human achievements. Plus, I don't want to be made to stand up in front of everyone (or worse, come up on the altar) any more than Amy wants to be left sitting in the pew. Both are dumb. Neither do I like the all women get a flower thing. Please, let's have Mass be about God. We can celebrate or mourn on Mother's Day on our own time in our own ways. And thanks to Abby for finding Frankie's Capuchin monkey-equivalent: I have to say I took some small satisfaction in seeing someone else getting food winged at her for a change. When we're on long car rides I like to give the kids each a dollar to spend at the gas station, usually for cleaning the windows or something silly like that. It's exciting for them, of course, to be able to shop for treats, but it's also a good lesson for them in how much things actually cost AND in how if they can work together and pool their money and agree on a couple of bigger items instead of each picking something for themselves, they can get a lot more for their money. On our drive up to Northern California for the husband's reunion, we stopped at one of those big gas stations in the middle of nowhere and the kids went in with their dollars. Inside we found all the usual stuff in all the usual places. But not a single price tag. Not on the items, not on the shelves. No prices. And it wasn't a case of Hawaii-style one price for locals one price for you, because the guy was ringing stuff up with a scanner. He suggested that we just bring stuff up and he'd check the price for us. But if you knew the amount of discernment that goes into my kids' road trip treat selection you'd know that that was not going to be practical. Unsurprisingly, everything turned out to be pretty overpriced, but we did find push-up popsicles for a dollar each and got those and got out of there. But the idea of it still really bothers me. The guy at the register seemed to think it was odd that I had a concern about it. It didn't seem to be something that other people had ever brought to his attention. Which means that all those people stopping at this store just pick things up and buy them without particularly caring how much they cost. It's a scary window into a culture of credit cards and consumerism for there to be even one store in the world where people just grab stuff and swipe their cards and walk out the door, never to be bothered by the fact that they just paid $3 for a candy bar.