This weekend I made out with my sewing machine

This weekend I lived at the kitchen table with my sewing machine directly in front of me, a stereo for music and an ironing board on my right holding the iron and all my piecework. It was quite a scene. Family members flowed in & out of my little work station where I put in many, many hours of Holiday cozy creating.

I'm seeing a little cross-eyed today but it was worth it. Here are the first fruits of my labor:

These are listed at my Etsy shop, One In The Hand. More will be there soon!

It was my co-worker's birthday yesterday and her cubicle was decorated accordingly.

HELLO ZAC EFRON!

Is having this poster legal if you're over 18?

Photoshop cake for the birthday girl

to-do list

• learn to make stickers
• learn to make stencils
• learn to make stamps

i have so many ideas for so many things!!

Holy Schnikes! I finally started my ETSY shop!

http://www.oneinthehand.etsy.com/

Small World

How cool – Kathryn Edin-Nelson has been selected as North Park University’s alumnus of the year (2009). NPU is where I’m working on a Non-Profit Management degree.


I recently put a one of Edin-Nelson’s books on my reading list; at the time I had no idea of her connection to my school.


From the NPU website:

When national legislators craft urban policy, they want to hear from Kathryn Edin-Nelson, who is considered one of the nation’s preeminent voices on improving the lives of the urban poor. A native of the small, rural town of Staples, Minn., Edin-Nelson developed this voice when she moved to Chicago to attend North Park University.

“I didn’t even know what sociology was before I came here,” Edin-Nelson told the audience at Saturday’s Homecoming Banquet.

While at North Park, she completed an internship at LaSalle Street Church, which was her first point of contact with the poor families that became the subjects of her life's work. Although she initially balked at the idea of attending graduate school, Edin-Nelson pursued a master’s and Ph.D. at Northwestern University.

She told Saturday’s gathering that North Park gave her “three essential gifts” that prepared her for graduate studies and life’s work— “a passion for Jesus and for faith-infused learning . . . a passion for the city . . . and finally, a passion for diversity.”

During her time as a graduate student, Edin-Nelson also taught sociology at a North Park extension campus in the blighted Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale. Four of the people in her class were minority women on welfare.

“Ironically the first course I was teaching was Minority Cultures, and I was the only non-minority person in the room,” Edin-Nelson said in an interview, laughing. “I was teaching it out of the book, and they were living it.”

The women in her class introduced her to others in similar positions, and their lives became the foundation for Edin-Nelson’s first book, There is a Lot of Month Left at the End of the Money. That led to her award winning book with Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Low Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Employment.

While teaching at Rutgers University, Edin-Nelson collaborated with Urban Promise, an organization started by Tony Campolo, and lived for two and a half years in Camden, N.J. It was considered America’s poorest city at the time and was the nation’s murder capital.

Edin-Nelson’s experiences in Camden, where she investigated why poor women put motherhood ahead of marriage, are chronicled in her third book, Promises I Can Keep, which won the William T. Goode award for the most outstanding contribution for family scholarship. She published her fourth book, on couple dynamics and father involvement in low-income families, in 2007, entitled Unmarried Couples with Children. She is also working on an upcoming book with her husband, Tim Nelson, about the meaning of fatherhood among low-income men.

Edin-Nelson said she values working with “stigmatized populations” and helping to break stereotypes. “You eventually come to the realization that you would have made the same choices had you been in the same situation,” she explained. “These people are not different from me. They have the same desires and motivations and good qualities.”

We went to the library today and I got a ton of books.

The Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook from 2006.

Ancient China from The Nature Company Discoveries Library. The kids and I will look at this together.

Medieval Life from Eyewitness Books (I should say right now that I tried watching The Tudors via Netflix and I just didn’t seem to be in the right mood. Maybe I needed to give it more of a chance, but it got a little old . . . Jonathon Rhys Myers has sex with some chick . . . then he acts arrogant . . . then he has sex with another chick . . . then he makes a big decision, disregarding what his advisors tell him to do. Rinse, repeat. Eh.)

Beginner’s World Atlas from National Geographic

Baby’s very first colors book by Usborne (for Rian)

Counting Kittens and Puppies by ticktock Entertainment. Why do these baby books not have real authors? I mean, I get that it’s kind of easy to photoshop some cute dogs & cats and super-simple one liners . . . but shouldn’t that guy get author credit? Sheesh.

Animal Friends: A Global Celebration of Children and Animals BY MAYA AJMERA & JOHN D. IVANKO – Thank you! Finally a baby book with real people behind it. Those other guys were obviously robots.

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levin, Ph.D. At my library they have parenting books right next to baby books (as well as in adult non-fiction) . . . slick, right? Oh man there were tons, but of course this one caught my eye.

And so did: It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting Is Hurting Our Kids – and What to Do About It. 2^nd Sub-title: Question the Experts, Trust Your Instincts, and Dare to Parent – in a Culture That Tells You Not To by Betsy Hart

The One Minute Cleaner: Plain and Simple with 2^nd Sub-title: 500 Tips for Cleaning Smarter, Not Harder by Donna Smallin

And the kids got their own books, including joke books, American Girl books (oh lawd), SLUMBER PARTY SING-ALONG VOLUME 2 (a cd of the kidz bop genre – all songs are listed like this: “Best of Both Worlds (Made Famous by Hannah Montana)” i.e. there are just random kids singing these songs. Which has led to a fun game we play. “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves comes on the radio and Kori says, “Oh, this lady did this song too?” and I nearly drive off the road, screaming “SHE DID IT FIRST OMG STOP LISTENING TO KIDZ BOP!!!!!!!!!”

Can you tell I’m ready to pack up a U-Haul and head to Montana to live on my ranch on the side of the mountain? I really had to stop myself from checking out books on canning and dehydrating food.

I have to select an area Non-Profit to do my final project on for my current class. I have to meet with their executive director (or someone in a similar position), interview them, tour their location, and then present my project to the class. Tomorrow we have to come to class with 3 possibilities. I chose:

~ Crossroads which is based in the South suburbs and does anti-racism training for organizations.

~ Wings which provides shelter, education, guidance & support to homeless/abused women & children (I knew of them because a thrift store near my house where I shop sometimes is a Wings thrift store – all money supports the org)

~ Roseland Community “Good News” Daycare which has an awesome story . . . it’s run by a lady who was a pregnant teen years ago . . . she began providing childcare for local teens who were likely to drop out of school. She provided free care, food & diapers if the mom couldn’t pay. The daycare has grown into a great organization. My friend Alicia told me about her a while ago.



In related news, last week I sent an email to Leonard Pitts from the Miami Herald (a columnist I’ve read for years), nominating the Roseland Daycare as an organization he should profile for his “What Works” column. What Works is a look at programs around the U.S. that are doing good things for children in need, specifically Black kids. Of course I didn’t bother to read the DATES of the articles that highlighted great organizations, so I didn’t realize that he ran this series of columns a couple years ago (doh!) & they’re just posted as archives.

Anyway – if you’re interested in reading about some great nation-wide organizations that are doing great things, google Leonard Pitts Miami Herald and start reading. You may eventually be asked to create an account to continue reading but it’s free and took me about 30 seconds to do it. You have to opt IN for any newsletters/emails so don’t worry about getting spammed by creating an account.

Here is the text from his final article on the series, dated July 7, 2008. (Also - the Harlem Children's Zone has connections in both curriculum & training to the people where I work who are running an elementary school here on Chicago's West Side, the Garfield Park Preparatory Academy).



We Know What Works – Now Let’s Do It by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

This will be the last What Works column.

I reserve the right to occasionally report on any program I run across that shows results in saving the lives and futures of African-American kids. But this is the last in the series I started 19 months ago to spotlight such programs.

Let me begin by thanking you for your overwhelming response to my request for nominations, and to thank everyone from every program who allowed me to peek behind the scenes. From the Harlem Children's Zone in New York to SEI (Self-Enhancement, Inc.) in Portland, Ore., I have been privileged and uplifted to see dedicated people doing amazing work.

I am often asked whether I've found common denominators in all these successful programs, anything we can use in helping kids at risk. The short answer is, yes. You want to know what works?

Longer school days and longer school years work. Giving principals the power to hire good teachers and fire bad ones works. High expectations work. Giving a teacher freedom to hug a child who needs hugging works. Parental involvement works. Counseling for troubled students and families works. Consistency of effort works. Incentives work. Field trips that expose kids to possibilities you can't see from their broken neighborhoods, work.

Indeed, the most important thing I've learned is that none of this is rocket science. We already know what works. What we lack is the will to do it. Instead, we have a hit-and-miss patchwork of programs achieving stellar results out on the fringes of the larger, failing, system. Why are they the exception and not the rule?

If we know what works, why don't we simply do it?

Nineteen months ago when I started, I asked Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone why anyone should pay to help him help poor kids in crumbling neighborhoods. He told me, "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on 'Alfred.' Alfred is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year."

Amen. Forget the notion of a moral obligation to uplift failing children. Consider the math instead. If that investment of $3,500 per annum creates a functioning adult who pays taxes and otherwise contributes to the system, why would we pass that up in favor of creating, 10 years later, an adult who drains the system to the tune of $60,000 a year for his incarceration alone, to say nothing of the other costs he foists upon society?

How does that make sense? Nineteen months later, I have yet to find a good answer.

Instead, I find passivity. Save The Children, Marvin Gaye exhorted 27 years ago. But we are losing the children in obscene numbers. Losing them to jails, losing them to graves, losing them to illiteracy, teen parenthood, and other dead-ends and cul-de-sacs of life. But I have yet to hear America -- or even African America -- scream about it. Does no one else see a crisis here?

"I don't think that in America, especially in black America, we can arrest this problem unless we understand the urgency of it, " says Tony Hopson, Sr., founder of SEI. "When I say urgency, I'm talking 9/11 urgency, I'm talking Hurricane Katrina urgency, things that stop a nation. I don't think in black America this is urgent enough. Kids are dying every single day. I don't see where the NAACP, the Urban League, the Black Caucus, have decided that the fact that black boys are being locked up at alarming rates, [means] we need to stop the nation and have a discussion about how we're going to eradicate that as a problem. It has not become urgent enough. If black America don't see it as urgent enough, how dare us think white America is going to think it's urgent enough?"

In other words, stand up. Get angry. Stop accepting what is clearly unacceptable. I'll bet you that works, too.