In my continuing bid for the Daughter of the Year award, I went home this weekend to take my mom on an trip to the Amana Colonies. While some may look at it as quality mother/daughter bonding time I look at it as two hours trapped in a car with my mother with nothing but the soundtrack to Mamma Mia to drown her out. I love my mother, but she talks a lot. My mom talks so much that she could easily beat Strom Thurmond's record for filibustering. Despite my damaged ears we had a lovely time in the Amanas that involved lots of shopping (her), wine tasting (me), and eating German food (both of us). As a bonus I found over 20 new ways to use the word schnitzel to entertain me (and only 8 of them are dirty).

While I was home I asked my mom if I could experiment on her. I recently had a discussion with a friend about reading outside of your lifestyle (i.e. single person reading Mommy Lit, senior citizen reading Chick Lit, etc.) and whether or not a book would be enjoyable/work for someone who doesn't have a certain set of experiences to draw upon while reading. I've been conducting my own mini experiment exploring my reactions to books featuring lifestyles different from my own, but I thought it might be more interesting to try this experiment on someone else. So I give you Guinea Pig A: my mother. I used this trip home to convince/blackmail her into doing it, so the experiment won't officially start until Thanksgiving. So that gives me roughly a month to compile some titles that I want her to read. Any suggestions are definitely welcome. :-)

Who knows? Maybe participating in this experiment will be just the thing to turn my mom into a reader. And once I help my mom learn the joy of reading, perhaps I can move on to teaching her the correct way to pronounce Kanye West's name correctly. She keeps calling him Connie West and it is driving me up a fricking wall. Baby steps people. Baby steps.

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