Rough review

Kortney Columbus                                                                                       Columbus 1

Professor Maltman

ENG 1101-03

February 17, 2017

An Apple a Day…. Or PC

            It’s Friday. The end of a long week for all of us! With everyone’s schedules there is hardly any downtime until Friday. The kids rush in the front door like a hurricane force wind- loud and fierce. Backpacks and coats are flying everywhere! “How was your day,” I shout over the ruckus. “Good! Can I have tablet time??” This is a very common first sentence from my younger son who is seven and a half (don’t forget the half!). He beams this huge smile at me with his big blue eyes. “Please Mom, I have no homework and nobody can play outside until five?!” After a few more random questions about their days just to soak up as much information and communication as I can before they settle in, I agree to thirty minutes of screen time each. I feel this is fair. They get what they desire in the moment and I still feel like “a good parent”.

            Why is it that putting a time limit on something my kids enjoy makes me feel like “a good parent”? My kids are very active in sports and outdoor/indoor free play. They are good students, both reading above average and excelling in math. Both have friends galore and communicate very well with elders and peer a like. These things should make me feel like “a good parent” too! There has been so much emphasis put on the amount of screen time children have and what kind of people they will grow up to be from media, parenting groups and even the Pediatrician’s office. It is one of the questions on the long list I receive when I check in for my

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child’s well-child exam among “Is there a gun in your home” and “does he/she get five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day” and “how much sleep does your child get”. All very important things for a healthy and safe kid!

            So why does the amount of screen time my kids have important to their doctor? Research suggests that kids that have too much screen time lack the ability to recognize real emotions in people’s facial expressions. One study was completed by researchers at UCLA of the ability of two groups of sixth graders to recognize emotions in 50 pictures of facial expression. One group of students went to camp for five days completely “unplugged” from devices and the other maintained normal habits. After the five days, the same images were shown again to each group. The students that went to camp had significant improvements in their ability to recognize the emotions in the pictures over the other group of students. This was only after FIVE days! (NPR 8/28/14) The theory is that children become disconnected from reality when they are constantly in a virtual world. It was once suggested that kids two years and older should only be allowed two hours of screen time per day by the American Association of Pediatricians. I found myself thinking that this is not realistic for today. Most of my kid’s screen time is at school now!

            Schools, public and private, are switching to a digital classroom. Technology is becoming commonplace. When I was in elementary school we were lucky to see the computer lab once a month! Now kids are 1:1 with devices all day every day. Not in every school, but every school year the trend is increasing. First graders are teaching their parents how to use programs. They are creating their own codes for computer programs. They are being given the responsibility of a Chromebook or I Pad to take back and forth to home from school for homework. In a school

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district near to us, the students have remote school days. On these days, the students access their learning activities from their teacher completely online from home or daycare. Should this count against their screen time allotment? Kids around America shout in unison “No Way”! Well, the AAP may finally be on their and our side.

            In late 2016 the AAP had a conference and this was a topic of discussion. Dr. Yolanda Reid Chassiakos, a professor at UCLA and lead author of the “Children and Adolescents and Digital Media Technical Report” stated, “It doesn’t make sense to make a blanket statement [of two hours] of screen time anymore.” (CNN 10/21/16) The new guidelines are as follows:

Screen time is identified as use of digital media for entertainment. Other uses such as online homework doesn’t count.  

            Two years of age to Five years of age = One hour per day

            Six years of age and up = parent’s discretion

            Eighteen months and younger = NO SCREEN TIME AT ALL

These guidelines are set to reflect the changing roles of technology in our everyday lives. I appreciate that the AAP is allowing parents discretion on screen time for children over the age of six years. This allows for my kids to get the free-time they want with screen time including TV and I still get to feel like I am doing something right! This also reflects that each child has different needs.

      

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The study I mentioned earlier that was conducted by UCLA should serve as reminder to parents and schools alike. Not all students are going to thrive with additional exposure to devices. It is very important to monitor a child’s progress both academically and socially. It is reported that an average of fifty-four percent of students say they are more actively involved in school work that uses technology. (Lauren Moffett , Sep, 26, 2012 Novadesk.com) But at what cost? We need to be fully functioning members of society. A child should be able to recognize if their peer is hurt or happy. They should know the difference between fresh country air and forest air. See a lunar eclipse in person. Know how to read a trail map. They also should know how to communicate their needs to a person face to face and cope with conflict. Resolve conflict! Are we holding up to the gold standard with an Apple a day or a PC, tablet, game system or TV?

All things in moderation. Technology awareness is extremely important for the future generation to be comfortable. The result of my review of technology in schools proves that it can surely be beneficial for students. It enables them to get homework they miss because of an illness or a teacher to continue instruction that would be interrupted due to a snow storm. Access to information or learning techniques at their fingertips can be helpful since, let’s face it, our kids are out-teaching us earlier and earlier.  Although, it is a big responsibility on the student and the parents to ensure safe use. Having increased exposure opens increase potential for cyberbullying which can be harder to safeguard against then traditional face-to-face bullying since it isn’t always seen and is rarely heard. Be “a good parent” and monitor screen time in your home and adjust to your child’s needs. Technology is the way of the future and we don’t want to stand in the way of it, just help guide it. An Apple a day is still sound advice.

the final product!

The Unsung Hero

            I catch a glimpse of my Mom. I can see she is slightly unsettled, she is not used to being the center of attention and doesn’t desire the limelight in any form- ever. She fiddles with the afghan on her lap from my couch. She crocheted that afghan over twenty years ago, for her Mom. I love this Afghan with its burnt orange, yellow and white yarn in a diamond-like pattern. The colors scream the 70’s! Her face, remarkably youthful looking, resembles another I know very well. The point of her nose, the curve of her mouth, her eyes of green sparkling from behind her purple wire-rimmed glasses. Her straight hair hits just above her shoulders, dirty blond in color only a very few silver hairs shimmering in the window light like highlights. I can see the lines around her mouth from a life of joy. The furrows in her brow from years of strength and worry for her loved ones. She catches my stare and smiles her goofy smile that shows she is slightly uncomfortable and uncertain of what I am looking for today.

            Debra K. Soderberg was born in a hospital in Wadena, MN on November 2, 1952. She was the third and final girl born to a farmer and his wife. They brought her home to Bluffton, MN were her two sisters, Sharon the oldest by 6 years and Vickie only about a year older, were waiting for them. It was a 2-story house with 3 bedrooms. No indoor plumbing so you know what that means- outhouse! “It was a Two-Holer,” she says with the pride of someone with a name brand purse or shoes. I guess that was a big deal. They had electricity and a “party-line”

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phone system. The phone line was attached to 2 or 3 houses along the country road. Each house had their own ring. When you heard your ring, you answered. They had some very talkative neighbors so occasionally if Grandpa needed to call the vet for one of the livestock, he would have to pick up the phone and verbally interrupt the other conversation to open the line. I giggled, “So like when you or Dad would pick up the phone when Ashley or I were on it to tell us to free up the line?” “Yeah, but these people were miles up or down the road, not anywhere near the house!” On the farm, they had several animals: cows, pigs, chickens, 2 work-horses (emphasis was put on work- no riding allowed). They had their own Bull, ducks/geese, and of course a couple dogs and LOTS of barn cats. The infamous “Billy” the pet sheep was there too. I will tell that story soon.

            As girls on the farm, their chores were mostly in the house. Dusting, Sweeping, and eventually vacuuming when vacuums became commonplace in homes. In the spring, they would help pick rocks out of the fields by hand before the crops could be planted. Pulling weeds in the household garden was a big job. Grandma had a HUGE garden! She planted peas, carrots, squash, corn, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini, rhubarb and much more. They did a lot of canning. They grew alfalfa in the fields.

            Deb attended a one room school house until Junior High. She loved to read and spell. In fifth grade, she went to a spelling bee with her teacher Mrs. Hagraty. The night before the event she spent overnight at her teacher’s house studying how to spell some of the tricky words. “The trick she taught me to spell Lieutenant- “lie-U-ten-ant”. That always stuck with me!” She didn’t make it past the preliminaries but it is still one of her fondest memories of her childhood. “I was just a kid from a little old one room school house without a lot of in-house competition to be the

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best speller, but it meant a lot to me to have my teacher believe in me. I was sad to think I may have let her down.” Spelling was her favorite subject in school and English. She however never really cared for literature comprehension- yet ironically LOVED to read!  “I just wanted to enjoy it, not analyze it!”

That was her favorite thing to do in her free time, next to riding bikes, swinging, and playing pretend in the hay mounds. They would also play with the dogs and hunt for the kittens. I can remember one Thanksgiving at my Aunt’s house. All the ladies were gathered around the kitchen table cackling and telling stories. Grandma recalled when she would send my Mom and her sisters out into the corn fields to find the kittens. She got a gazing looking on her face as though she was looking longingly into the simpler past getting sentimental, “All three of them always came back with ALL those kittens.”  We laughed so hard over the tone of her sentiment. As if she had hoped maybe one or more of either may just get lost in the corn field. The men watching the football game were very irritated with our loud, bursting laughter drowning out the calls of the game.

Back to the farm. They weren’t allowed to have many pets that didn’t serve a purpose on the farm but there was “Billy” the sheep. They had gotten Billy from a neighbor. He wasn’t used for wool or food- as far as my Mom knows anyway. Mom was about 10yrs old when they had Billy and she enjoyed taunting him. Giggling she recalls, “Billy was tied up to a leash so he wouldn’t run away or get in the fields. I would run up to him and stand just outside of his reach.  I bent over and would shake my butt at him calling ‘Buck Billy, Buck’. Well, one time I just wasn’t far enough away and Billy bucked! I fell face first into the mud covering my clothing!” She never taunted Ol’ Billy again! This was a very humbling experience for my hero.

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As she got older, fun was dragging main street and hanging out with friends. She had her own car when she got her license. A two-toned Chevy Malibu stick shift. In High school, she went to school for half the day and then went to work at the Todd-Wadena Electrical Co-Op. There she learned clerical skills and customer service. The income she made there was hers to keep. She used it for gas in the car, clothing and entertainment. Her heart was fond of Davy Jones in the Monkees, and Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

 In 1970 she graduated from Wadena High School. She continued to work at the electrical Co-Op for a couple more years. She remembers making great money there, more than some of the men in town were making at their various jobs. “Back then”, she starts, “It was thought that work experience was just as valuable as further education, so college wasn’t really a serious thought!” If she would have gone to college, she thinks she would have majored in English to be an English teacher- “Not Literature”, she is sure to mention, “but sentence structure, verb and nouns, spelling and so on.” Or she thought of being a Nurse, she enjoyed helping people. A couple years after graduation she decided to leave her solid job and move to the Cities due to an increase in emotional stress at her job caused by her “creepy” boss. Life on the farm had prepared her for the adversity and hard work ahead for her.

In Minneapolis, she moved to an all-girls boarding house, she believes the name was “Paige Manor for Girls”. It was a dormitory style complex with common living, kitchen and   bathroom areas. The rooms were single or double- she had a double with a roommate name Judy Rooney.  “She loved popcorn, always had big brown paper bag of popcorn!” Her job was at the IDS Tower downtown. She worked at IDS Leasing putting her clerical skills to use.

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She worked a few other clerical jobs in the Cities and then settled in at Benson-Quinn Grain Exchange. Working there for several years while living at Polynesian Village in New Brighton, MN and selling Avon on the side to residents. That is where she met her future husband, Ron Payne. “He was goofy and talkative. We had a lot of fun together!” They got engaged and started to not only plan a wedding but build a house in Apple Valley, MN simultaneously. A combination some would shy away from but they handled with ease!

 They married on October 29^th, 1977 on a Saturday. “The weather was crappy,” she recalls. Her dress was everything she wanted it to be- she knew the moment she saw it in a Bridal magazine! Her mom was not as impressed stating, “Well it certainly doesn’t make you look slim.” Mom smiles and chuckles a little. I can remember looking at their wedding album as a kid. She was the most beautiful bride in the world to me! Her gown was a soft white with a cathedral length train and the veil went just past the end of the train with lace appliques that matched the lace on her dress. It had full length sleeves with lace at the fitted cuffs and shoulders. It had an Empress waist and flowing satin dress. The Bridesmaids were wearing burnt orange gowns. Dad’s tuxedo was brown with a peach colored dress shirt the had understated ruffles at the cuffs and along the buttons. He wore a brown bowtie. It was all very trendy for the times. The most memorable moment was at the end when they were leaving the church to head to the car. They had guests throwing rice in the air and a distant relative ran up and stuffed a handful down the front of her dress. “It was very irritating and uncomfortable”, she recalls.

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They settled in Apple Valley and started a family a few years later. The first daughter was born August of 1981 after many hours of labor naturally with no meds. Another example of her superhero strength. They were expecting a boy, “Ultrasounds were not common in the early 1980’s so we did the Draino test at home. It was thought to be very accurate!” The Draino test required you to collect your first morning urine and add it to a glass jar with Crystal Draino. This needed to be done outside. The extremely caustic and smelly concoction is supposed to change to a brownish color if it’s a bouncing baby boy or have no color change for a baby girl. “Ha, proved that theory wrong!”

 In 1983, they decided they wanted to expand the family again so they set out to build a house in Burnsville. They moved there in the fall of 1983. In the summer of 1984 they were blessed with another little girl. “This time she was supposed to be a boy per the ultrasound! When Ashley was born, the doctor laughed, ‘This one is too pretty to be a boy’. Thankfully we were prepared with a girl name!” The highlight of Deb’s life is being a Mom. She bravely stayed home to raise us until 1994. She loved helping her girls grow and learn new things. “Watching you girls play and discover was amazing.” It was all she wanted it to be and more. It was still hard to leave the financial stability of working and progressing in her career. She made that sacrifice without looking back, no major regrets. Until it came to deciding what she could do for work thirteen years later.

In 1994, she fearlessly applied for a job as a Health Assistant/Educational Assistant in school district #191. She was very excited about this because it meant finally being able to nearly have her dream job of being a nurse and a teacher all in one! It was also a confidence booster when not one but two junior highs wanted her and where willing to fight for her. Also of appeal,

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the hours where very like her kids’ school hours. She would be home when they were and still able to be “Taxi Mom” for their bustling social lives. At her job, she works with students that have physical and mental disabilities. Again, doing what she enjoys most- watching kids learn to do things for their selves for the first time. She finds this very rewarding and physically exhausting at the same time.  “Every little thing you can help these kids achieve is amazing! They may have no voice or are unable to walk but their brains are surely working!” Her face lights up like the sun when talking about this or the growth of her own children. It is obvious this is a driving force in her life and one she finds very rewarding. This is her super power.

Along with becoming a Mother herself, finding out she was going to be a Nana has been one of the most pivotal moments in her life. Just like her job- teaching and watching these babies grow into “humans” is so inspiring for her. She would do anything for anyone of her Grandsons-four of them so far in total, a fifth is due this coming July (gender unknown at this point but you can tell Deb is itching for a granddaughter!)

This small-town farm girl appears to have achieved all she set out to do! As our interview concludes, I can see her face start to relax a little bit. She looks to me, “That wasn’t so bad!” She is very happy to have been a “Taxi Mom” carting her children and their friends to wherever their hearts desire. Her children ARE her heart and life and their success and happiness is her hero song. The strength she gained from hard work on the farm helped her overcome the odds against her rejoining the workforce after so many years of absence.  All the nursing, teaching, and loving has paid off! Mom this is your song- the laughter and the cries, the screams and the silence, the slamming doors and hugs and kisses galore! You are my hero, Mom

profile essay rough draft- Unsung Hero

The Unsung Hero

            As I settle in to start this interview, I catch a glimpse of my Mom. I can see she is slightly unsettled, she is not used to being the center of attention and doesn’t desire the limelight in any form- ever. She fiddles with the afghan on her lap from my couch. She crocheted that afghan over twenty years ago, for her Mom, Grandma gave it to me when she moved into her nursing home. I love this Afghan with its burnt orange, yellow and white yarn in a diamond-like pattern. The colors scream 70’s! Her face, remarkably youthful looking, resembles another I know very well. The point of her nose, the curve of her mouth, her eyes of green sparkling from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. Her straight hair hits just above her shoulders, dirty blond in color only a very few silver hairs shimmering in the window light like highlights. She catches my stare and smiles her goofy smile that shows she is slightly uncomfortable and uncertain of what I am looking for today.

            Debra K. Soderberg was born in a hospital in Wadena, MN on November 2, 1952. She was the third and final girl born to a farmer and his wife. They brought her home to Bluffton, MN were her two sisters, Sharon the oldest by 6 years and Vickie only about a year older, were waiting for them. It was a 2-story house with 3 bedrooms. No indoor plumbing so you know what that means- outhouse! “It was a Two-Holer,” she says with the pride of someone with a name brand purse or shoes! I guess that was a big deal. They had electricity and a “party-line”

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phone system. The phone line was attached to 2 or 3 house along the country road. Each house had their own ring, when you heard your ring you answered. They had some very talkative neighbors so occasionally if Grandpa needed to call the vet for one of the livestock, he would have to pick up the phone and verbally interrupt the other conversation to open up the line. I giggled, “So like when you or Dad would pick up the phone when Ashley or I were on it to tell us to free up the line?” “Yeah but these people were miles up or down the road, not anywhere near the house!” On the farm, they had several animals: cows, pigs, chickens, 2 work-horses (emphasis was put on work- no riding allowed). They had their own Bull, ducks/geese, and of course a couple dogs and LOTS of barn cats. The infamous “Billy” the pet sheep was there too. I will tell that story soon.

            As girls on the farm, their chores were mostly in the house. Dusting, Sweeping, eventually vacuuming when vacuums became common place in homes. In the Spring, they would help pick rocks out of the fields by hand before the crops could be planted. Pull weeds in the household garden. Grandma had a HUGE garden! She planted peas, carrots, squash, corn, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini, rhubarb and much more. They did a lot of canning. They grew alfalfa in the fields.

            Deb attended a one room school house until Junior High. She loved to read and spell. In fifth grade, she went to a spelling bee with her teacher Mrs. Hagraty. The night before the event she spent over night at her teacher’s house studying how to spell some of the tricky words. “The trick she taught me to spell Lieutenant- “lie-U-ten-ant”. That always stuck with me!” She didn’t make it pass the preliminaries but it is still one of her fondest memories of her childhood. “I was just a kid from a little old one room school house without a lot of in-house competition to be the

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best speller, but it meant a lot to me to have my teacher believe in me. I was sad to think I may have let her down.” Spelling was her favorite subject in school and English. She however never really cared for literature comprehension- yet ironically LOVED to read!  “I just wanted to enjoy it, not analyze it!” That was her favorite thing to do in her free time, next to riding bikes and swinging, playing pretend in the hay mounds. They would also play with the dogs and hunt for the kittens. I can remember one Thanksgiving at my Aunt’s house. All the ladies were gathered around the kitchen table cackling and telling stories. Grandma recalled when she would send my Mom and her sisters out into the corn fields to find the kittens. She got a gazing looking on her face as though she was looking longingly into the simpler past getting sentimental, “All three of them always came back with ALL those kittens.”  We laughed so hard over the tone of her sentiment, like she had hoped maybe one or more of either may just get lost in the corn field. The men watching the football game were very irritated with our loud, bursting laughter drowning out the calls of the game. Back to the farm. They weren’t allowed to have many pets that didn’t serve a purpose on the farm but there was “Billy” the sheep. They had gotten Billy from a neighbor. He wasn’t used for wool or food- as far as my Mom knows anyway. Mom was about 10yrs old when they had Billy and she enjoyed taunting him. Giggling she recalls , “Billy was tied up to leash so he wouldn’t run away or get in the fields. I would run up to him and stand just outside of his reach. Turning my back to him I bent over and would shake my butt at him calling ‘Buck Billy, Buck’. Well one time I just wasn’t far enough away and Billy bucked! I fell face first into the mud covering my clothing!” She never taunted Ol’ Billy again! She recalls Billy was gone shortly after that but isn’t sure if it was because of his actions or because they were

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moving to a different farm, also isn’t sure if Billy went to another farm or to the big farm in the sky.

As she got older, fun was dragging main street and hanging out with friends. She had her own car when she got her license. A two-toned Chevy Malibu stick shift. In High school, she went to school for half the day and then went to work at the Todd-Wadena Electrical Co-Op. There she learned clerical skills and customer service. The income she made there was hers to keep. She used it for gas in the car, clothing and entertainment. Her heart was fond of Davy jones in the Monkees, and Paul McCartney of the Beatles. In 1970 she graduated from Wadena High School. She continues to work at the electrical Co-Op for a couple more years. She remembers making great money there, more than some of the men in town were making at their various jobs. “Back then”, she starts, “It was thought that work experience was just as valuable as further education, so college wasn’t really a serious thought!” If she would have gone to college, she thinks she would have majored in English to be an English teacher- “Not Literature”, she is sure to mention, “but sentence structure, verb and nouns, spelling and so on.” Or she thought of being a Nurse, she enjoyed helping people. A couple years after graduation she decided to leave her solid job and move to the cities due to an increase in emotional stress at her job caused by her “creepy” boss.

In Minneapolis, she moved to an All-Girls boarding house, she believes the name was “ Paige Manor for Girls. It was a dormitory style complex with a common living and kitchen area, and bathrooms. The rooms were single or double- she had a double with a roommate name Judy Rooney.  “She loved popcorn, always had big brown paper bag of popcorn!” Her job was at the IDS Tower downtown. She worked at IDS Leasing doing clerical work.

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            She worked a few other clerical jobs in the Cities and then settled in at Benson-Quinn Grain Exchange. Working there for several years while living at Polynesian Village in New Brighton, MN and selling Avon on the side to residents. That is where she met her future Husband, Ron Payne. She saw him as a goofy, talkative and kind person. They had lots of fun together. They got engaged and started to not only plan a wedding but build a house in Apple Valley, MN simultaneously. They married on October 29^th, 1977 on a Saturday. “The weather was crappy,” she recalls. Her dress was everything she wanted it to be- she knew the moment she saw it in a Bridal magazine! Her mom was not as impressed stating, “ Well it certainly doesn’t make you look slim.” Mom smiles and chuckles a little. I can remember looking at their wedding album as a kid and being in awe of her dress. It was a soft white with a cathedral length train and the vail went just pass the end of the train with lace applicates that matched the lace on her dress. It had full length sleeves with lace at the fitted cuffs and shoulder. It was and Empress waist and flowing satin dress. The Bridesmaids were wearing burnt orange gowns. My Dad’s tuxedo was brown with a peach colored dress shirt the had understated ruffles at the cuffs and along the buttons. He wore a brown bowtie. It was all very trendy for the times. The most memorable moment was at the end when they were leaving the church to head to the car. They had guests throwing rice in the air and a distant relative ran up and stuffed a handful down the front of her dress. “It was very irritating and uncomfortable”, she recalls.

They settled in Apple Valley and started a family a few years later. First daughter was born August of 1981 after many hours of labor naturally with no meds. They were expecting a boy, “Ultrasounds were not common in the early 1980’s so we did the Draino test at home. It was thought to be very accurate!” Ha, proved that theory wrong!  In 1983, they decided they

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wanted to expand the family again so they set out to build a house in Burnsville. They moved there in the Fall of 1983. In summer of 1984 they were blessed with another little girl. “This time she was supposed to be a boy by ultrasound! When Ashley was born the doctor laughed, ‘This one is too pretty to be a boy’ thankfully we were prepared with a girl name!” The highlight of Deb’s life is being a Mom. She stayed home to raise us until 1994. She loved helping her girls grow and learn new things. Watching them play and discover was amazing. It was all she wanted it to be and more. But it was still hard to leave the financial stability of working and progressing in her career. She made that sacrifice without looking back, no major regrets. Until it came to deciding what she could do for work 13yrs later.

In 1994, she applied for a job as a Health Assistant/Educational Assistant in school district #191. She was very excited about this because it meant finally being able to nearly have her dream job of being a nurse and a teacher all in one! It was also a confidence booster when not one but two Junior Highs wanted her and where willing to fight for her. Also of appeal, the hours where very similar to her kids school hours so she would be home when they were and still able to be “Taxi Mom” for their bustling social lives. At her job, she works with students that have physical and mental disabilities. Again doing what she enjoys most- watching kids learn to do things for their selves for the first time. She finds this very rewarding and exhausting at the same time.  “Every little thing you can help these kids achieve. They may have no voice or can’t walk but their brains are surely working!” Her face lights up like the sun when talking about this or the growth of her own children. It is obvious this is a driving force in her life and one she finds very rewarding.

Columbus 7

Along with becoming a Mother herself, finding out she was going to be a Nana has been one of the most pivotal moments in her life. Just like her job- teaching and watching these babies grow into “humans” is so inspiring for her. She would do anything for anyone of her Grandsons-four of them so far in total, a fifth is due this coming July (gender unknown at this point but you can tell Deb is itching for a granddaughter!)

This small-town farm girl appears to have achieved all she set out to do! As our interview concludes, I can see her face start to relax a little bit. She looks to me, “That wasn’t so bad!” She is very happy to have been a “taxi mom” carting her children and their friends to wherever their hearts desire. Her children ARE her heart and life and their success and happiness is her hero song. All the nursing, teaching, and loving has paid off! Mom this is your song- the laughter and the cries, the screams and the silence, the slamming doors and hugs and kisses galore! You are my hero, Mom!

Profile excercise

Fastwriting prompt

The one word I would use to describe Deb Payne would be reliable. Ever since her first job she has been reliable to a fault. As long as I have know her, she needs to be next to her death bed to call in sick or not follow through on an obligation. As a small kid, I knew I could count on her for everything I needed. When life was hard, she was there to make it better. When I was sick or injured , she would take the time to make my toast the exact way I wanted it- very light to the point it was just warm bread, butter had to completely melt and jelly( MUST be strawberry) spread so thin you can see through it. She was happy to  make me happy even if it was bound to just come back up minutes later.

The one thing that most people fail to notice about Mom is her strength. She works a very mentally tough job as an educational assistant. The kids she works with have kicked her, bit her, hit and ran away from her. She keeps going back for more, she knows she is making a difference in these children's lives. Just has a Mother with young kids, when these kids learn something new whether it be something simple as trying a new food or sorting laundry, she beams with pride. She is resilient!