Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

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4. CHANGING FAMILIES
Gosh, when I fi rst came to the United States: one black-
and-white TV about this big, uh. Both my parents 
worked, so in that sense, I didn’t go through a period 
where my mother didn’t work and that kind of 1950s, 
1960s sort of thing. I’d have to say that parents are a 
whole lot busier today than my parents. I mean, when 
work ended, work ended. And today, with e-mail and, uh, 
electronic communication, work doesn’t really have the 
kind of boundaries.
5. SIBLINGS
So, I’m one of six. Um, in my family, it-it’s three girls and 
then three boys. And I’m the middle girl. So I have an 
older sister, and she is a mother of four girls herself, uh, 
in Minnesota, um, and then I’m here in D.C. And then 
my younger sister is, uh, back in Minnesota. She is an 
attorney-editor at West Th
ompson Publishing, and she 
has a daughter who will be a year in April. Um, so it’s very, 
it’s interesting because my older sister is more a stay-at-
home mom. She-she does, like, work in a preschool or 
whatever, but she doesn’t have like a full profession, um, 
and, but she’s like an experienced mom because she’s 
the mother of four daughters, but I actually fi nd myself 
have more in common with my younger sister, who’s just 
this new mom because she has this other component of 
working full-time, and so we have a lot more in common 
in the mothering aspect because of that, I think. Which 
is, that’s interesting to me. Th
en, um, so Kathy, myself, 
Lisa, then Tom is the oldest son and he is, he lives in, uh, 
Minnesota as well. He works for an, he-he’s a fi nancial 
accountant in an agricultural company. Um, sort of the 

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