Just 3 must-haves for the car

Every good driver carries tricks in the car

Water doesn’t count. Everyone knows that almost as important as keeping enough gas in the tank is carrying water in the car at all times. But beyond that, we all have things we can’t live without when we drive. Even though I’m down to just one child, I’m still driving a minivan, and the two of us have become quite attached; in fact, it has become a sort of home on wheels. So, over time I’ve personalized what I keep inside. I can get along without some things, but others are must-haves for the car. Here are just three:

Beyond glue guns and kitschy crafts

Everyone is better off with a woman in his or her life

I wanted to throw it away. It was just another failed craft project I did at a women’s church meeting, but being newly married with very few Christmas decorations, I really wanted at least one nice ornament for our tree. Besides, this project seemed so easy. Instead, I was impatient and tried to hurry along the glass etching then quickly glue-gunned the ribbon around it, with the end product resulting in a very homemade-looking ornament.

Robin Hood is back in town

Let capitalism be the hero

Sadly, even some of the best political gaffes are lost on those who don’t understand the difference between capitalism and socialism, so I keep trying to explain the economy to my children in light of the presidential candidates’ platforms. To help me, I turned to my son’s 11th-grade Social Studies textbook, whose sum total definition of socialism is “the idea that the government should own and operate industry for the community as a whole.”

Rediscovering parenting tools

One of my all-time favorite parenting books

Growing up, vacuuming was a real chore. Our industrial-strength canister vacuum looked like R2D2 minus the cool lights and funny voice, and hauling that clunky thing around was as much work as the vacuuming itself. We’d bang it against walls and furniture just moving from room to room, and going up and down stairs was out of the question. Dust mopping, in comparison, was efficient. Four times as wide as any broom we had in the house, our dust mop with its nifty little swivel device in the center made it easy to turn at the end of every pass across our hardwood floors. Good tools just make life easier.

Just three reasons I love being 50

Halfway to 100, and life looks good

When my mom turned 50, I thought she was ancient. After all, half a century sounds pretty old to an eight-year-old. (Who knew she’d almost double those years of living?) But now that I stand where she once did, I think this is a vibrant age! In fact, if I knew 50 was going to be this good, I might have looked forward to my birthday a little more. It turns out the fifties are great for lots of reasons, but here are just three:

Just give me a sign!

Should vs. Want

Yesterday I drove through the state of Idaho. After dropping Grant off at college, Ken and I followed our Google Maps directions as carefully as we could, working our way across wide-open spaces crisscrossed by highways. Considering neither of us had ever made the trip before, we did pretty well until we got a little off track in Twin Falls, where we had to ask directions from the lone worker at the Reeder Flying Service (airport). “Just go back across the canal, turn left at the first intersection,” she said flatly, “then drive about five miles, and you’ll catch 93.”

Surrounded by old friends

It's healthy to keep friends nearby

I was only half kidding when I said Mom might love her furniture more than her own children. When it came time to downsize, she was torn up for months about having to part with her precious pieces. “Some people just need their things around them,” my sister tried to explain. (She would know.) Hearing that helped me appreciate Mom’s dilemma better, and I realized, of course, that she’d invested decades collecting and refinishing her antiques, but it wasn’t until I pressed Mom a little more that I finally understood why she was so attached to her possessions.

That’s where you live!

Where we live is more than a place

Our son Grant gives wonderful bear hugs. He often pulls me in close to his over-six-foot frame and croons, “That’s where you live!”

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, but you can also tell a lot by knowing where they live—and I don’t just mean which city or house they live in. In college, I tired quickly of the standard trio of introductory questions: “What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your major?” I have to admit that knowing where people were from provided at least a small dot on my mental map and it did tell me something about them—if they had cold winters, if they grew up by the ocean, or if they were city people or country folks. What it did not explain, though, is what kind of home they lived in. Even a photo of their home and family couldn’t really tell me where they were from.

Timing is everything

Alex Morgan, USA Women's Soccer player

From sports to humor, from health to happiness, timing is everything.  You can throw a zinger to first base, but it doesn’t do a bit of good if the runner beats you there, and who cares if you have a killer swing if you’ve already missed the pitch? In these Summer Olympics, over and over again we’ve seen split-second timing make all the difference. Suppose the women’s water polo coach hadn’t called a timeout with one second left in the game against Australia; no nail-biting overtime would have ensued. On the other hand, what if the most recent women’s soccer game hadn’t gone into overtime? We would have missed Alex Morgan’s spectacular header, the game-winning goal over Canada that sent the U.S. team to the gold-medal round. And half the art of telling a good joke is timing, too. Even with a great punch line, you won’t get any laughs if you deliver it too early or too late.

Just one daughter

My daughter KaRynn surprises and delights me

I’m the mother of four sons and only one daughter. Growing up a tomboy surrounded mostly by brothers, I was well prepared to be a tough-and-tumble kind of mom—the kind that could play catch, rollerblade, and wrestle with boys, and my sons would probably agree that I have, indeed, been that kind of a mom. Raising boys has been mostly a “What-you-see-is-what-you-get” experience—very fun, sometimes funny, and often very physical. No big surprises there. On the other hand, being a mom of just one girl has been full of surprises.