Crisis Averted!!

An incident last night prompted me to make this handy flow chart for our children.  The only question that remains unresolved is why Mommy was laughing so hard.

Adolescent Education

I just read a book written by a home schooling mom of ten children; all of her older kids have started college by age 12 and the rest are on tract to do so. Her three oldest daughters finished an engineering program, an architecture program and medical school, respectively, by around age 20. Their mother writes a lot about paying attention and discovering each child’s passion, then nurturing that passion and, by hook or crook, giving them an appropriate educational jump start on life without any serious pushing. Her oldest was a math genius, learning how to do calculus with her dad for fun while she was in grade school and he was in grad school. Her second daughter loved to draw and design and her third daughter was passionately drawn to medicine. Their mother worked very hard to allow all three girls to realize their full educational potential as swiftly as possible.

I find this idea very appealing for several reasons. I hate wasting time (it is a very finite quantity for us humans!) and skipping/fast forwarding through some of the pointlessness of the later stages of K-12 education sounds like an excellent plan. I enjoyed high school but I certainly was capable of college level coursework and would have benefited from being done with graduate school in my early 20s versus my late 20s.

I also think that we as a culture have developed a very odd relationship with childhood. In many ways we steal childhood away from our kids by erasing the boundaries between children and adults and then exposing little ones to far too much troublesome adult information: the news in general, inappropriate sexual behavior in media, disrespectful attitudes (do I sound like a crotchety old lady yet?), dysfunctional adult relationships in virtual and actual reality… We imprison our children inside our homes out of completely inaccurate fears regarding their safety alone outdoors, and then chronically, toxically expose them to all our inappropriate adult conversations and entertainments.  Under the guise of “respecting” our children we treat them as mini-adults, trampling on the biological realities of the drastically different cognitive processing of immature human brains. Under this well-meaning misperception and in the interest of honestly and openness, we throw off our verbal binders and blithely engage in all sorts of inappropriate dialogue and media in the presence of our big-eared, traumatized little pitchers.  The end result: anxious small children plagued by big adult fears.

On the other end of things, though, we continue to deny the biological realities of the changes happening in adolescent brains that essentially make them nascent adults with surprisingly good decision-making abilities, away from their peers anyway. Instead of fostering their emergent grown up brain, we force them to idle away as dependent children, spinning their wheels for literally years after they are ready to take on adulthood. Consequent of our evolutionary history, teenagers are neurologically ready for “adult” responsibility and “adult” work – once you could reproduce, by God it was time to make that next generation happen!  Allowing teenagers to emerge from the dependency of childhood and start to really use all those mature neuronal connections to benefit their future full-grown adult selves is again simply an acknowledgement of biological reality. I think it’s wonderful we have the abundance to allow our children to be children – we should guard that magical time of childhood and keep it precious. I also think it’s wise to acknowledge that teens are biologically ready to start being adults and, out of that same abundance that allows for true childhood, engineer their nascent adulthood into a more practical exercise of being the grownups they will ultimately become.

Finally, I believe one of the great unanswered questions created by the opportunities feminism has given to us is “Now what do we do about children?”. The choice a lot of women make in order to have a career and the self-sufficiency to care for themselves and their potential children is to delay childbearing, which is what I did.  This gets complicated, unfortunately, because, unlike men who essentially produce unlimited energetic little fertilizing swimmers all life long, we women are at the mercy of our finite supply and release of egg cells from our persnickety, clock-watching ovaries.  Also, as someone who waited until she was almost 30 to have children, I face the reality that I will be an older grandmother than my mother and if my kids wait as long as I did to reproduce, I won’t be able to snuggle grandbabies for as long as my grandmother did.  Biological reality. (Unless, of course, my kids get knocked up/do the knocking up much earlier than I am banking on with all my preventative sex education!)

One solution that doesn’t unequivocally solve the problem, but does work at the edges of it, is to facilitate early completion of higher education and career commencement for young women. Finishing a 5 year long architecture program at age 17 or 4 years of medical school at age 22 definitely gives you five to ten years of leeway during your 20s to establish a career and still have time to relax a little and be a younger mother (which, as an older mother, I think has advantages. Not that I would change anything about my life or childbearing choices, because being an older mother has its advantages too and I like these exact children that I have and and think I am wiser now, but mostly because I can’t change the past – if I could I would probably have even less time for blogging! Or maybe more. Hmmm…  Regardless, there’s no point rehashing my own life when I want to concentrate on the lives and opportunities of my children). 

What got to me about this book (besides the constant references to creation “science” – quotations in lieu of eye roll), was the text of one of the author’s book recommendation:

• Mary Pride’s two books, The Way Home and All The Way Home. These books taught me of the dangers of feminism and the joy and freedom of being a stay-at-home mom.

Reading the above was as gut wrenching as reading about Phyllis Schafly’s work in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s in the fabulous book When Everything Changed. Women working against women, using the gains of feminism to tear down the ideology that lifted them up is always such a sucker punch for me.

The first dictionary definition of feminism is “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men“.

The word feminism means many things to may people (right Tiff?), but this is its heart: Men and women have equal rights. To what? I suppose that’s where the debate arises; I say opportunities, representation, legal status and health care, for starters.

And what do you call a woman with six girls and four boys who devotes her life to seeing each and every child, regardless of sex, achieve her or his full potential?

I would call her a true feminist.

Duck Duck…

We had a staycation this last weekend and, as usual, Joel and I had a fabulous time with each other. This is not surprising because we are both such brilliant, funny, entertaining people who genuinely like each other. And who like to talk to each other.  And who like having sex with each other. Especially without small constant endless interruptions to attempted conversation (luckily so far we have avoided being interrupted directly during sex… whew!).

The afternoon of our last perfect day together Joel wanted to go for a walk to break up the monotony of movies and treats of all kinds so I said yes.  We went out in search of a park the people at the neighborhood association meeting assured us was relatively close.  As we wended through non-through streets, a woman in a blue car pulled out of her driveway, rolled down her window and asked,

“Have you seen any ducklings?”

No. No, we had not. She planned to track them down and rescue them and maybe take them to the zoo or whatever one does with orphaned ducklings. Suddenly I saw a wiggly row of ducklings scooting into the yard just across the street. We momentarily panicked as the puppy in the yard enthusiastically greeted them but then decided perhaps they lived there, as the dog seemed to see them as friends rather than food.

We continued our walk in search of this mysterious park. Suddenly I saw another four ducklings scurrying in their little row down the edge of the street next to the curb and an instant later one! two! three! four! little ducklings sequentially disappeared down a storm drain with frightful speed.

All four ducklings scrambled around, peeping determinedly at the bottom of five feet of rough concrete wall roofed by and almost impossibly heave grate.  We spent quite some time working the grate out as much as we could all the while the four ducklings fixedly scrambled up and up, as far up the nearly vertical wall as their tiny clawed toes could take them.  One intrepid little one finally made it to the ledge we exposed by levering the grate up ever so slightly with sticks under the corners and hopped out. I cornered it by the curb and held its scrambling, determined little body in sweaty hands while Joel continued working at the grate and attempting to strategically place climbable sticks down in the cool, unreachable depths of the drain.

We finally gave up and walked the escaped duckling several circuitous blocks back to what we hoped was its home. It immediately ran under the fence after we gave up pounding on the door surrounded by the plastic toys signifying small children in the house.  We walked all the way back to the fateful hole in the street, passing one very annoyingly full-of-leaves storm drain that would have made for a much easier rescue. We saw one more little one scramble out of the drain right as we got back, but there were still two cheeping ducklings down there.

We walked on. What else could we reasonably do? And where on earth is their mother!?

Fifty percent, however, is not a passing grade.

Yesterday I found the remains of what I am pretty sure was a duckling next to the storage shed, dragged there by one of the many neighborhood cats who sense my hatred for domesticated felines and thus smugly make my backyard their home.

Are these Easter ducklings? Disposable pets?

I cannot comprehend bringing a living animal in your home as a temporary toy.

Well, either I am appalled or it is simply a plague of ducklings, but either way at least the neighborhood cats are happy.

Self Discovery

I just realized today that I like to follow instructions but I do not like to follow rules.

One is useful and the other are arbitrary.

It all goes back to my true religion: I am, and I think will always be, a Utilitarian.

Does this work?

NOT EASILY. *sigh*

Why I Don’t Blog Anymore

1. – 4. All these children. It’s a lot of people to feed and read to and schedule for and do laundry for and clean up after.  And this last baby is a demanding mess who doesn’t let me escape sleep very much during the day. Some of my issue with him is that this is my LAST BABY and sometimes the last bit of anything is the hardest to force oneself to finish.  As you may know, I don’t like babies anyway, and I’ll like this little person more when he is no longer a 15-month-old teething terror who has given up a second nap just to torment me and already manages to say “Mama” accusingly.  And when he says, “wawa, wawa”, it’s not a sweet request that means “I would like my water please, dear Mommy”; no, it is an imperious demand of “Get that drink to me this instant, SLAVE. How dare you disobey me!?! Every cup in this house is MINE to toy with!!!”  I suppose I should be glad he’s so good at emoting and pointing to things, as those are positive developmental signs but I am tired of babies. I like grade schoolers.

Speaking of grade schoolers…

5. Home schooling 2 of 4 said children. I have pondered turning this blog into a record of our activities from the group I host at my house every other week because we do some pretty cool stuff.  Last semester we learned about all the historical figures from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  This spring we are doing various scientists and the major ideas associated with them. So far we’ve done Watson & Crick & Franklin (DNA), Mendel (patterns of inheritance) and Darwin (evolution by natural selection). Next up is Pasteur (Germ Theory of Disease & Manufactured Vaccines) and then Goodall, Curie, Cousteau and Turing.  Our two hour sessions take A LOT of planning and one day maybe I’ll put it all together into some sort of curriculum.  All the activities for each session are all organized neatly into folders on my desktop, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. So, see? That takes a lot of potential blogging time.

6. Neuroanatomy. The updated medical school curriculum kind of ate my lunch for… I don’t even want to think about how long.  Faced with reconciling a serious reduction in the amount of time available to teach the anatomy of the nervous system and the fact that IT’S ALL ON BOARDS, not to mention ALL THERE IN REAL DOCTOR LIFE, I decided to generate tutorials that, ideally, accelerate the rate of student acquisition of this very challenging and very vital information. I think I accomplished that goal, but making pure awesome takes A LOT of potential blogging time.  And a lot of personal time. And a lot of schooling time with the kids and quality time with Joel and time doing anything besides obsessively and painstakingly creating tutorials. Which were entirely extracurricular because I AM CRAZY LIKE THAT.  Oh, and then there were all the brand new lectures and labs to generate that I was actually getting paid for. The only reason my marriage hasn’t suffered serious damage from this black hole of Never Finished is because my husband is an extraordinarily kind, patient and giving person.  Of lasting consequence: I NOW HAVE AN EYE TWITCH. Which made my dad laugh way too hard when I told him about it.

7. TAXES. Taxes don’t care if you are obsessively creating neuroanatomy awesomeness or if you really actually do want to be present for your offsprings’ childhoods.

Those are seven very good reasons for not blogging.

What are some good reasons to blog?

1. I miss my blog friends.

2. I would like to stop thinking only in status updates and have complete thoughts again. Like ones with beginnings, middles and ends and maybe a few side points.

3. WE SOLD THE RENT HOUSES!!! It all went down January 22nd, about three weeks after we decided to sell and listed them on craigslist.  That process, of course, precisely overlapped the first three weeks of the actual nervous systems course, so I got to do all that paperwork and neuro, but… they’re gone! There have been two First Of The Months since we sold them and it is eerily blissful to just not care.  No phone calls, no picking up rent, no deposits, no record keeping. My mail volume is drastically reduced, my bookkeeping is winding down, I don’t internally flinch when the cell phone rings, Joel stays home all weekend (which was good because I was working all weekend for most of the seven weeks of the nervous systems course and the children probably would have gotten in trouble all by themselves for that long).  And we probably won’t have to pay taxes for a few years because we ate an enormous loss and IT’S WORTH EVERY PENNY.  We saved and worked and bought ourselves out of our indentured servitude!

So those were some really good reasons to come back to blogging. But during my hiatus, I sort of gave up deep thinking about anything but the nervous system and whatever topic I have to present for home school group, so what are some blog possibilities?

1. The courtesy of rednecks versus the rest of club going heathens.

2. How four children actually make me a better parent.

3. the role of shame in civilizing children

So, short list, I get it, but it’s a start! I am still catching up with all the things that have dropped by the wayside in the furor of the nervous systems course (have I mentioned that thing was all consuming? I knew it would be insane for students, but did not realize how grueling it would be for instructors). Last weekend I cleaned the house top to bottom. It took about eight hours and I wore my knee pads long enough I got a bruise on one of my shins!  Then on Tuesday I got to clean my van. Thursday I got our little corporation’s taxes done and all our personal and rent house information to the accountant.  Friday I finished one lingering tutorial I wanted to have available before the class even started but didn’t have time to finish in January.  I am slowly shedding my major responsibilities.  I still have the four kids, the home schooling and an ever-renewing list of things to do, but I see some daylight. It’s flickering a little through the eye twitch, but I still believe it is there!

Nicknames

The oddest family nickname I remember was the name my Uncle Jeff called my little sister Cindy: Cinder-binder-flakes.

In contrast, Beeba for Reba and Gabey for Gabe are quite tame.

Tonight Hazel asked why Daddy called her “Schmoo” and he said, “Well, I think it’s because that’s what Mommy calls you.”

Why Schmoo, you ask?

Because her name is Hazelly-bazelly-schmoo, emphasis on the Schmoo, Schmoo for short.

Because she is kind of a Schmoo.

And a Sugar Pie.  And just a simple Hazel-bazel.

I also have an Eowynny-woo (Woo for short) and an Ashy-bashy and Greyggers (alternately Greygrey).

I once knew a girl who adamantly called each of her children by their 3 syllable names with absolutely, indisputably NO ALTERATIONS WHATSOEVER for any reason. No nicknames, because she’d given them those lovely names because those – and only those! – are the names she intended them to have.

Which is kind of cheap, I think.

I think your collection of nicknames is just one more way to show how precious you are to someone. To show that your relationship is so special and unique that you have special and unique names for each other.

Like when my eldest calls me “Momby”.

The more bizarre the nickname, the more intimate the acquaintance.*

Hazelly-Bazelly-Boozelly-Schmoo
(she just looks like a schmoo, doesn’t she?
but you’ll have to come up with your own nickname; that one’s mine)

*Well, except for that one girl in college that I decided to call “Peabody” and she called me “Schwartzie” on the 3 occasions we saw each other socially. We were definitely acquaintances, not friends. Certainly friendly acquaintances, but our bizarre monikers belied our actual relationship status.  I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Peabody.

Family Sunday School

This summer I have been helping host a family Sunday School at Yale Avenue Christian Church. I have been writing the children’s story every week in a format inspired by the Children’s Worship and Wonder curriculum.  I have written eight lessons so far.  I wrote this one about a month ago and I am incredibly proud of it.

It will probably reveal my leftist leanings, but then again I think it also reveals Jesus’ leftist leanings.

Materials:
Tan square of cloth
Jesus figure
Pharisee figure
Picture of bowl of water
cup that is clean outside and dirty inside
Lists of “Rules” and “Sabbath Rules”
Sharing bread picture
Heart picture
Key
Envelope to seal key in
Red pipe cleaner cut in 1/2

Luke 11:37-53 & 13:10-17 Jesus Doesn’t Like Bullies

Spread out the tan cloth, slowly and deliberately.  Then begin.

Once there was someone who said such amazing things and did such wonderful things that people began to follow him.  Crowds followed to hear the amazing things he said and see the wonderful things he did.

But there were some very important people who thought he had bad ideas. One of these very important people, who were called Pharisees, invited Jesus to his house for dinner. Jesus went straight to the table to eat and he didn’t wash his hands.

Place a small rectangle of fabric representing the table in the middle of the cloth.  Place the picture of the bowl of water to one side of the table. Place the Pharisee next to the table. Have the Jesus figure walk past the bowl of water straight to the table.

The Pharisee man was surprised that Jesus didn’t wash his hands.  In the time when Jesus lived, the Pharisees had made many rules about eating and working and sleeping that the Pharisees said were from God.  Washing your hands before you eat was one of these rules.  In fact, they said that if you didn’t wash your hands exactly right before you ate your food, God was very very angry with you.

Place a list of “rules” in the middle of the tan cloth. Point to “The rules” as you continue to speak.

Jesus knew that these rules were not the real rules.  He knew that acting Loving to God and Loving to everyone around you were the only rules God wants us to follow.

Place the heart over the top of the List of Rules.

Jesus didn’t like bullies, so it made him very angry that all these people who thought they were the most important had made up hard rules that caused other people to think that God didn’t love them.  Jesus was angry that these Pharisees used their made up rules to bully everyone else.

Wrap a red pipe cleaner around the Jesus figure.

So Jesus said angry things to this Pharisee man and all his Pharisee friends.  He said, “You keep everything clean outside of you according to your rules, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness!”

Show the outside of the cup and then the dirty inside.  Set it next to the Pharisee figure.

Jesus said, “How can you not see that the outside of a dish of food doesn’t matter? Or how clean your hands are at the table? God doesn’t care how you washed your hands or the outside of a dish of food, my Father cares whether or not you look around you and use your hands to give the food inside the dish to feed someone who was hungrier than you!”

Place pictures of hands sharing bread next to the rules and the heart.

Jesus was very angry now.  He said, “You load people down with rules that are almost impossible for them to follow and you don’t help them one single bit! You have hidden the key to loving and serving God from everyone – you don’t use it and, even worse, you won’t let anyone else use it!”

Show the cut out key and then seal it in an envelope and place it next to the dirty cup.

This made the Pharisees very angry. They knew if everyone started believing Jesus then they wouldn’t get to boss anyone around anymore.

Wrap the red pipe cleaner around the Pharisee figure. Move everything off the tan cloth.

But Jesus knew the truth about God’s love and was going to share it no matter what.

Unwrap the red pipe cleaner from Jesus.

In fact, the next time Jesus was worshiping at God’s house on the Sabbath, God’s special day, a woman came to him who had been crippled for 18 years and he healed her.  Of course, this made the Pharisees angry because they had more rules about what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath day than just about anything else.  They thought healing someone on that day broke those rules.

Place a list of “the Sabbath Rules” in the center of the cloth.

Jesus said to them, “Even by your rules you can untie your thirsty horse and set him free to take a drink on the Sabbath. So how is it against your rules to untie this woman from her pain and set her free from her brokenness on the Sabbath?”

Take the Sabbath Rules and tear them up. Put the heart back in the middle of the cloth.

When Jesus said this, all the Pharisees were angry and embarrassed at how silly their rules sounded, but the rest of the people were delighted with the wonderful things he was doing.

Suggestions for Wonder Questions:

I wonder how often Jesus got mad.…

I wonder if that Pharisee regretted inviting Jesus to dinner…

I wonder if anyone was actually able to follow all those rules perfectly…

—

And that, my friends, is why I never blog; I am writing Sunday School curriculum!

Aunt Flo

If you don’t want to read specifics about menstrual cycles, and specifically MY menstrual cycle, well, STOP NOW.

You’ve been warned. You know I am a big pot of TMI, and I know that some TMI is more palatable to people than others.

I was what you call a “late bloomer”. I got my period when I was 16, I think, after years of wishing and hoping and wondering and feeling incredibly left out and behind and freakish compared to my peers.  Once I got my period, of course, I realized that my friend who’d had her period since 4th grade was right: better to start years of regularly scheduled hemorrhaging later rather than earlier.

For more than a decade, my menstrual cycle was characterized by extreme weepiness the week before and abdominal cramps during the bleeding that were occasionally severe but manageable with OTC anti-inflammatories.  My husband learned early on not to be too nice to me during that fragile period or I would dissolve into tears.  Of course, he is such a sweet man he couldn’t always help it and usually ended up with snot and tears smeared all over the front of his shirt for his efforts. ROMANCE!

Unsuccessfully attempting to get knocked up the first time around brilliantly illustrated the intensity of the mind-body connection. Through sheer psychosis I managed to make a highly regularly 29 day cycle almost TWO WEEKS LATE (without accompanying fertilization and implantation and corpus luteum action), which was interesting from a research perspective, but maddening from an I-want-to-start-a-family perspective. One dingy fertility doctor, subsequent adoption of Taking Charge Of Your Fertility techniques and four children later, I have overcome psychosis with knowledge and reason and made good use of my ovaries, uterus and various cyclical reproductive hormones.

WEIRD THING, though: After every single baby the defining features of my menstrual cycle have reset. Who know THAT would change too?

BABY ONE: When I got my period back, I still had minor abdominal cramping and a normal lighter flow, but no weepy. In fact, about 24 hours before my period would start I would have a day of RAGE where I pretty much just wanted to rip everyone’s face off, including and especially my hapless husband’s.  This was a bit of an adjustment for him, as no amount of “kind” or “nice” on his part could make me cry because the only emotions I seemed to be capable of for that short period were OUT AND OUT RAGE and BARELY SUPPRESSED RAGE. At least his shirts remained snot-free (he only had to deal with puke from the baby).

Luckily for Joel (and me – I do not like anger or conflict or simmering rage AT ALL) that only lasted a few months until I got pregnant again (purposefully and without insanely screwed up menstrual cycles or consulting with the fertility doctor).

BABY TWO: My period returned without rage and seemingly without weepiness either, which was a nice treat! It was very regular, which helped quite a bit conceiving…

BABY THREE: My period returned quietly, sans rage and weepiness (hooray again!), but instead of the abdominal cramps that seemed far more normal to me, I felt menstrual pain in what the weird hippy guy in our old yoga videos referred to as my “sit bone” (aka my ischial tuberosities, aka the part of the pelvis you sit on). Which was weird and more mentally uncomfortable than abdominal cramps, although less painful overall.

BABY FOUR: I awaited the return of my period with some trepidation this time, as THIS IS IT FOR BABIES FOR ME and this is the last roll of this particular die. After three cycles this is apparently what I am stuck with for the rest of my menstruating days (which actually sound more pleasant than menopause – OH THE JOY OF BEING FEMALE):

1. regular cycles like usual
2. very mild referred cramping pain in my “sit bones”
3. very mild irritation before the bleeding starts (although that could be circumstantial as my life has been ridiculously stressful the last few months)
4. very mild weepiness – I decided I can’t read the National Geographic magazine before my period starts because all the Last Frog Alive and We Are Destroying The Planet Through Sheer Maliciousness And Stupidity is just too much to bear on a background of female hormones.
5. RIDICULOUSLY HEAVY FLOW for about a day and a half. Like soaking and overflowing a super sized tampon every two hours for a little more than a day.

WHAT DA HECK. (As we say in North Dakota – or did say before the more experience profanity of oil field workers infiltrated the state).

#5 is REEDICULOUS and I am having all sorts of issues making the mental adjustment so I don’t BLEED ALL OVER EVERYTHING.  I would think I would feel weak with the amount of blood I am losing. I got up three times the night before last to change absorbent devices because otherwise I would have left a nice pool of blood in the hotel bed I was using (I’m sure housekeeping really enjoys cleaning up things like that).

Trying to focus on the positive: no weepiness, no rage, no bad cramps, but GEEZ LOUISE the excessive hemorrhaging is, well, EXCESSIVE.

Yes, yet another reason reproduction is not a zero-sum game for us women, guys. My body will never ever EVER be the same. Trampolines are now a peeing hazard, the front of my torso just generally sags in a less-than-it-used-to-be attractive way, my internal hormonal cycle is forever changed.  My children, of course, are worth it, but the vessel overflowing with life does suffer some permanent dings and cracks in the life-ing process.

Which underlies my theory for why men are more drawn to things that might kill them, like extreme sports and war.

A woman lives in a battlefield: our bodies bring pain to us regularly; we don’t have to go out seeking anything death-defying or difficult because if we wait long enough it will inevitably come to us and, just because that’s the way it is, it may just permanently disable or kill us without us ever even walking out our front door.

Men, on the other hand, have these testosterone-riddled, uterus-free bodies that have to seek out pain to experience its myriad facets. To prove they’re tough, I guess? As tough as women? Okay, I don’t really know why men do this, but I definitely know why women do NOT do this as frequently as men.

This difference, though, is why my husband gleefully chose to spent all last weekend wilderness survival hiking to the edge of his physical abilities, eating bugs and sleeping outside on a pile of grass while I stayed home with the children and ate chocolate, knowing that with no special effort on my part that the pain and bleeding would come to me.

Chicks Dig Musicals

I watched Les Miserables with my older two kids and my mom last week (YES I AM A BAD MOTHER BECAUSE I LET THEM WATCH A MOVIE WITH PROSTITUTES IN IT, but whatever, they don’t go to public school so they’ve got to get their inappropriate exposure to sexual topics somewhere and what better place than a famous musical with historical value?).

During the movie the inherent diametrically opposed relationships of men and women with musicals manifested in my 6 year old girl and her 5 year old brother.

At one point, Eowyn looked at me with a dreamy look on her face and said, “I love that they sing everything!”

A few minutes later, Ash piped up next to me, “Why do they have to sing everything?”

At the end of the movie, Mom and I asked the kids what their favorite part was. Eowyn described a moment when little Cosette, newly discovered by and sheltered under the arm of Valjean, is being emphatically coaxed back to the falsely loving arms of the cruel innkeeper and his wife in hopes of tricking Valjean into paying to take this unwelcome burden away from them.  Cosette shrinks back into Valjean’s embrace and nods a tiny nod “no” and something about that tiny nod captured Eowyn’s imagination and she recounted the moment to us with great precision.

Ash, on the other hand, who had seen a preview for the remastered Jurassic Park just before we started Les Mis and been entirely entranced, said:

“I don’t know. All I can think about is the dinosaur movie.”

…

And just in case you are not convinced that I speak truth, let’s just see what two of the sagest philosophers of our age have to say about men, women and musicals:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e11-broadway-bro-down