Three for Thursday: Chopsticks, Junie B. and Flex-Time

Item #1: Chopsticks. Everywhere.

If you asked any one of my three children why nearly all of the chopsticks in our house are scattered all over the place – on the garage floor, under the picnic table on the back deck, and underfoot in the family room – you would get a very simple response: “They’re not CHOPSTICKS! (*eyes rolling*) They’re magic WANDS!” (As in Harry Potter magic wands.)

To which my fruitless response has been: “Then make them MAGICALLY disappear!”

Item #2: Defending Junie B. Jones

Its parents like this, complaining in the New York Times, that just don’t get that the Junie B. Jones books is not s’posed to be grammaticly right. They are meant to be funny. And to make kids wanna read books ‘bout some real kid, like them.

Jeez.

Lie-ten up.

Item #3: Part-Time Shouldn’t Mean Sub-Standard

Citing a recent Pew Research Center study which found that 60 percent of working mothers would prefer to work part-time, “Perfect Madness” author Judith Warner asked in a New York Times op/ed this week why the American workplace doesn’t afford parents the ability to work part-time or flexible schedules without penalizing them with substantial pay and benefit
reductions.
“Only 24 percent of working mothers now work part-time,” Warner wrote. “The reason so few do isn’t complicated: most women can’t afford to. Part-time work doesn’t pay.”

“Feminists have long been leery of part-time work policies, which tend to be disproportionately used by women, mommy-tracking them and placing them at an economic disadvantage within their marriages and in society,” she said, adding that women have tried to forge their own work-family balances, but that this individualistic approach is simply not working.

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(Image from the Barnes & Noble web site.)