{"id":6743,"date":"2006-07-21T00:37:28","date_gmt":"2006-07-21T00:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/worst-mother-of-the-year-award.html"},"modified":"2006-07-21T00:37:28","modified_gmt":"2006-07-21T00:37:28","slug":"worst-mother-of-the-year-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/worst-mother-of-the-year-award.html","title":{"rendered":"Worst mother of the year award"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all have our philosophies about entertaining children in the car. Mine is: Low Expectations.<\/p>\n

Not mine. Theirs.<\/p>\n

You see, I think if that you embark on a trip having informed the children that we must take lots<\/em> of stuff so we will be entertained and not bored, and first we’ll do this, and then we’ll open this bag and do that, and then we’ll open this secret surprise box if we’re all very good, and we’ll get to do this very special thing…you end up with children who will expect a 3-ring circus in the confines of your vehicle.<\/p>\n

So, I say, take a minimal amount of stuff and ignore them unless it gets ugly back there. <\/p>\n

That said, I suppose we’ve reached some extreme point of wretchedness when your traveling child amuses himself by tearing off the leftover white parts in a sticker book (because the stickers were mostly gone when you put it in the Travel Bag) and very carefully placing them on his arm.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m thinking we could do better. Really. That’s pretty sad, don’t you think?<\/p>\n

(And no, we don’t do video games – there are no such machines in our house – and we don’t own a vehicle with a built-in DVD player or some such. I just prayerfully wait for the day they learn to read. Worked for me riding three days from Kansas to Maine, and however many days it took to get to Oklahoma from where we lived at the time every summer. It did.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all have our philosophies about entertaining children in the car. Mine is: Low Expectations. Not mine. Theirs. You see, I think if that you embark on a trip having informed the children that we must take lots of stuff so we will be entertained and not bored, and first we’ll do this, and then…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWorst mother of the year award - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/worst-mother-of-the-year-award.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Worst mother of the year award - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We all have our philosophies about entertaining children in the car. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}