For those of you who are blind or silly, our baby is the most beautiful thing in the world.  Of course, you probably read at Josh's that Daniel can pull himself to standing now.  It's the most amazing thing.  Our little boy went from a helpless little thing that did little more than lie about like a pooping sack of flour to a wide-eyed, bright little boy.  I read a blog that another woman writes, which is mainly about her son.  Today she talked about how easy it is to mention all the bad things the baby does, such vomit everywhere, poop on everything, cry unceasingly, etc, but it somehow manages to slip your mind to mention all the wonderful things about him, like his smile, his laugh, his wide eyes when he sees something new, or the surprise on his face when he feels grass under his toes.  Despite my lamentations, I love that little boy, and I would not trade him for anything in the world.

On a less serious note, I've been told that I'm too neurotic because I make people wash their hands before touching the baby.  Now, I don't think it's a bad idea at all, but lest you think that I am too neurotic, know this: I let the baby play in the grass not even just once, but twice now!  He was so fascinated!  I drew the line at letting him eat the grass, though.  Plenty of time for that and mud pies later.

And now for school.  Let me begin by saying that I have had some phenomenal teachers.  I also know some education students who are intelligent, dedicated people whom I believe will one day make wonderful teachers.  And then there are the rest of them.  So many people at Tech choose education as a major because it's easy.  They can't succeed at engineering? They go to education.  Business classes too hard?  Switch to education.  Math major too difficult?  Teach math instead.  It's disheartening.  It doesn't help that in my group for one of my education classes, there is a girl who fits the ditzy sorority girl education major stereotype to a T.  Now, I am by no means a genius at grammar, but I can recognize the parts of speech.  So why is it that this girl, let's call her Katie, can't tell the difference between an adverb and an adjective?  That's not so bad, you say.  Well, it might not be if she weren't planning to teach high school English classes.  Even better, she was wearing a t-shirt with her sorority's Greek letters on it, and when questioned about the meaning of "Kappa," she did not know that it was a letter of the Greek alphabet!  If you're going to join an organization and plaster their name across your clothing, shouldn't you have some idea what the name of the organization stands for? 

Today, in the aforementioned education class, we were having presentations, done in groups based on our majors.  (I'm in a group with English teachers, because English and French are "close enough.")  A History group presented on the Civil War, gave us a list of important names and locations, and asked us to make a "creative" graphic organizer.  The terms were things like "President Lincoln," "President Jefferson Davis," "Confederacy," "Union," "General U.S. Grant," and "General Robert E. Lee," so they weren't very hard terms.  I was grudgingly drawing away when "Katie" asked the other girl in our group whose side Lincoln was on.  As if that were not bad enough, the response she received was, "I think he was somewhere in the middle."  It was not isolated.  So many people were asking which side was which and which president went with which side.  As with grammar, I'm no history genius, but I do have a basic grasp of it, thanks to the American History requirement in both high school AND college.  The only people who don't have to take American History are engineers, so this bunch has no excuse.  It just strikes me as very ignorant.  Even if you don't know who Jefferson Davis is, if there are only two presidents, I think you can safely surmise that Lincoln was on the winning side, given the penny and his monument.  Some people's kids...