My Moment of Feminism...just one!
by Juliana

I’ve never really been a feminist at all, but I do have one little complaint to make about modern culture. Why is it that people always assume my husband takes care of all the finances? In reality, I write the bills, balance the checkbook, etc. Yet when the tenants of our apartment write out the monthly rent check, they always write it out to my husband!
Another example of this is with our construction loan. I spent hours and hours calling lenders and finding the best rates, closing costs, etc. I slaved over finding a program that would work for us, getting the down payment together, putting together the documents, etc. But every time they send us a check for reimbursement, who is the check written out to? My husband!!
Just a little heads-up to those in the world of finance: if the men are out there working nine to five every day, who do you think is going to be spending time with the budget and bills? Who’s going to be getting checks in the mail and wanting to deposit them? Probably the one who stays at home, the wife!

My Titanic Singing
by Juliana

My husband comes from a very musical family; I do not. In my family, just singing “Happy Birthday to You” is a pitiful event. Nonetheless, we all enjoy and love music.
I have tried to develop my singing voice so that it would be more pleasant to my husband, but I still haven’t been too successful. This was obvious the other day as I was singing along to the Titanic theme song. As I started the line, “And I know that my heart will go on…” my husband chimed in loudly, singing, “And I know that this song will go on and on and on and on!”
This is kind of like all the times he says to me, “Yes, Juliana, of course I love to hear you sing. It means that you’re trying to develop your musical talents!” That’s the only reason!

Children are geniuses
by Juliana

I held open the box of crackers for my son, Joseph. He immediately grabbed a huge handful, delight in his eyes. After removing his overflowing hand from the box, he looked down and saw one more cracker on the floor. I immediately thought of the movie Cinderella, where the little mouse Gus painstakingly gathers every last morsel of food, ignorant of the approaching cat.
There was no approaching cat here, but my little Joseph was equally determined to not let one piece of food be left out. With his free hand, he carefully took one cracker from the full hand. Then he reached his full hand down to the floor and picked up the spare cracker. Does it make sense to me? No… I would have used the empty hand to pick up the cracker from the floor. Did it make sense to Joseph? Of course! He knew his hand was already full, so he made space to get the last cracker! What a genius!
On the next round of crackers, he reached in and pulled out a hand that was overflowing. No fewer than five crackers fell to the floor. He looked at them for a moment, then shook his full fist to drop another one there. Then, peacefully, he sat down and started eating!