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Goodness in the form of books

Dave's been doing a lot of studying lately. I've been reading a lot of books lately. 

I'm sure I've mentioned multiple times that where fiction is concerned I'm all about the Juve-Lit. I like it light, I like it inspiring, I like it (mostly) drama free.

I've come across a couple of goodies lately.

The Kiki Strike series by Kirsten Miller: The name, the name...I know. But that's the worst part for me. I'm a sucker for a "you have secret powers no one knew about until now" story (cause maybe I have secret powers as yet undiscovered!!! It could happen.) In the Kiki Strike series a group of 12 year olds use their super powers to save the city of New York, time and time again. And the best part, their powers are self-made. One girl has an insane knowledge of New York City thanks to parents who never quit going to school and never stop buying books coupled with a lack of friends and things to do. What else is a jr. higher to do? Read everything, obviously. Another comes from a family of chemists who has spent her childhood playing with chemicals and become a brilliant scientist in her own right. Another's parents are costumers for the New York Opera. She of course is a master of disguise as well as a gifted clothing designer. 

The girls are brought together and eventually form a sort of good guys-ninja group, stopping all sorts of conspiratoral crime and mayhem. Love it.

 

Out of my Mind - Sharon Draper: This one is not the sort I usually pick up cause it's one of those feel-good-makes-you-cry sort of stories. Obviously I didn't realize that when I checked it out. I did notice it when I read two pages, but by then it was too late. I'd already started.

Melody is a fifth grade girl with a photographic memory stuck inside a body plagued with Cerebral Palsy. She can't speak. Can you even imagine being physically helpless and remember everything you've ever been exposed to? Read this one and it will be impossible to not want to chat with every person you come across that she reminds you of.

Some light reading...

Ellen's on her second time through the Harry Potter series. She was a little irritated that I won't let her read #7 or watch the movies, so she started over again.

In which I start quoting books again.

I'm reading Don Miller's A Million Miles In A Thousand Years for book group this month. Here's a paragraph I like.

(In this chapter, Don is talking with a friend who's just spent a year studying his own body and the changes it went through in a year for a senior thesis.)

 

People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't.

For instance, Marcos said, "The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February," he told me.

I thought about Marcos's conclusions and wondered how much his education cost his parents. But I also wondered if he wasn't right, that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.

4th of july

We waited for dark to start our fireworks this year.

Ha! Just kidding. Dark doesn't show up until about 10 pm these days and we are not that crazy brave.

Maybe when the kids are teenagers.

We were going for some tame firework fun which meant sparklers, poppers & flowers for us.

With a few baby fountains thrown in for fun.

I had the hardest time getting a good sparkler shot. The kids kept saying something about wanting to wave them around.

Lucky for me we saved a few and I'm going to try to talk Dave into helping me out tonight.

Maybe we'll even be super crazy and wait for dark.

Wooo! We're wild sometimes.

Last night we finally got some dusk light (which I helped along a bit in camera)

Happy Fourth of July!

And now if you'll excuse me for a few days, I was a bit ambitious at the library this week.

In which I completely love Winnie the Pooh.

Here's a bit from The House at Pooh Corner. Pooh is reciting his new poem about Tigger.

************

But whatever his weight in pounds,

    shillings and ounces,

He always seems bigger

    because of his bounces.

"And that's the whole poem," he said. "Do you like it, Piglet?"

"All except the shillings," said Piglet. "I don't think they ought to be there."

"They wanted to come in after the pounds," explained Pooh, "so I let them. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come."

"Oh, I didn't know." said Piglet

In which I like to read

I've been doing a fair amount of reading since this vacation started.

(By the way, I feel I should issue a reassuring word that being on vacation does not mean we aren't doing school. We are. Don't fret.)

Where was I? Reading. Right.

I have a confession.

My favorite thing to read - children's literature.

It's true. I prefer it to almost anything else. Most of the time. Every once in a while a good change-the-way-you-think book is right up my alley. But most of the time? I LOVE books like A Wrinkle in Time, or The Twenty-One Balloons, or Eragon or Harry Potter. One thing a lot of these have in common that just dawned on me a day or so ago? They're fantasy. If anyone asked me I would never have said I like the fantasy genre. Interesting.

I like books like the Anne of Green Gables series, too. The only problem is I always feel lazy when I read those books and end up putting it down after about a page to go start some laundry or bake a pie. So those books are rather slow going.

Those books up above are what's on my shelf right now. I just finished A Hat Full of Sky (which is a sequel to The Wee Free Men). There's something about that series I really like. It's about a girl becoming a witch - which isn't usually up my alley. But the author changes the definition of things and makes it into something I like. I kinda wish he'd just use a different word cause I just hate that word, witch. Beside the obvious connotations it carries, I just hate how it sounds. It's just so ugly. Anyway.

I also recently finished The Book of a Thousand Days, which is about a servant girl who is incredibly faithful and ingenious and it leads her to a life she never could have imagined. Sorta. That's the cheesy description of the sort you'd find on the back of the book, but really that's what it's about. The premise and the story are stuck in my head and keep reappearing over the last few weeks.

And one last one I'll tell you about - The Mysterious Benedict Society. This one is about amazing children geniuses who are wonderful and save the world from a horrible person trying to take over things by brainwashing everyone through subliminal messages he sends out through the television. Little bits about that plot line keep popping up in my thoughts too. It's not that it's so great of a book as it just creeps me out about the limited amount of movies my children already do watch.  

The book(s) I want to permanently borrow.

Now, you guys know I'm kinda a nerd, right? A hippie sort of nerd?

This week, I stumbled upon the perfect, best ever hippie nerd book. Ever.

First off, can I just say I love all these old Reader's Digest Anthology type books? I have one on various kinds of crafts and it is awesome. My sister has one on sewing and needlework things and it is awesome. I have another on fixing things. Again with the awesome. I love these. If you ever see any sort of Readers Digest anthology lying in a thrift store, grab it up for me. I'll love you forever.

Promise.

I digress.

The book! *Reader's Digest Back to Basics - How to learn and enjoy traditional American skills.*

I love it.

Poor Dave could hardly get to sleep last night as I kept flipping pages, and shouting out "Look at this!! and Look at this! Can you believe it has this? Did you know this?"

I should stop taking books to bed.

LOOK at this! Did you know you can tell from the types of plants growing what sort of water is beneath your soil?? Or how deep the water is under there?

If you've got rushes and cattails - you're probably dealing with marshland. Hmm. That might be a given, Reader's Digest. I'm just sayin'.

But - rabbit brush - that's a handy plant to know about. It only grows where there is water no more than 15ft below the ground.

That'd be super useful knowledge if you were ever going to go buy some land in the country and thought about digging a well.

Now you know.

This book tells you about the different natural dye options out there. Dude!! I've actually been wondering about that lately. I have a pile of things I'd like to dye, and I'd rather not use anything toxic. Dude!

This books tells you how to store your mounds of potatoes and apples outside! For long periods of time! Cause sometimes you have more potatoes than space in the house! I've heard that can be a problem.

Maybe not my problem, but now I know what to do if it ever becomes my problem!

This book also tells you how to build a house from rocks,

and how to butcher things.

I skipped those pages. And went back to the one of about pretty flowers dying things pretty colors.

Much better.

Basket weaving!!

I am so weaving a basket this year.

Making cosmetics from the kitchen!

Maybe I'll start wearing cosmetics this year.

So, I confess. I joked with Dave about keeping this book indefinitely.

Do you have any idea how much WORK it would be to try to locate this out of print book online??? And then having it shipped?? Far too much effort. I have to save all my energy for surveying potential property for rabbit brush and foraging for cochineal to dye my clothes red.

There's another book I found this week that's also super awesome. Not quite as hippy-nerdy, but still awesome in it's own way. I'll show it to you Monday.

"everybody's normal till you get to know them" continued.

So we've instituted a silent reading time around here - the first hour that Brennan sleeps the kids and I make our way to the couch and read books or draw quietly. Which means I actually get to read again. Which means I start talking about the books I've been reading. Which means for the second time in two days I post something from the day's book. Which is still "Everybody's Normal Till You Get To Know Them." Two quotes/thoughts today.

(1)

The connection that takes place between a mother and a child is perhaps the clearest picture in our world of what has been called the "human movement."It creates a little circle of life: A mother ceases to think about herself and focuses on her child; she gives love and warmth and blessing the child receives life. At the same moment, the act of giving doesn't empty the mother; she receives the joy of pouring herself out in service and love, and she, too, is given life. The human moment reflects a kind of relational ecosystem in which life becomes greater and richer as it flows back and forth from one person to another. pg 36

This author is obviously male. That may the kind of motherhood we all aspire too, but I don't know any mothers like that. Or at least I'm not that mother. I definitely get emptied. At first I thought he was talking about new mothers and infants. That seemed like a huge joke. No mother I know, certainly not myself, was not emptied during that sleepless, armless time. (what? you didn't think of yourself as armless when you could only use your left arm for child carrying?)

I may be a bit punchy about this today as last night was particularly fun since Brennan didn't really go to sleep for longer than 30 minutes until 4am. He was feeling sick and he and I had many couch sessions last night. And so I'm slightly reminded of how one's brain doesn't fully work when it hasn't experienced sleep. And this was just one night! Nothing like the night after night after weeks after months of sleeplessness during your child's infancy. I'm sure I'll be chipper and feeling full and ready for the little mother-child circle of life tomorrow, but for today this all sounds like a silly male ideal of motherhood.

Whew!

(2) This book is about community as you recall and it talks a lot about accepting people "as-is" - you know the clearance aisle in the store where everything is marked "as-is"? It's not quite perfect in some way so it's discounted. Ortberg says every single person is from that "as-is" shelf. Everyone's got major cracks and missing pieces - especially ourselves. Which means community is messy and hard and not a lot of fun. Community is not sitting around eating donuts and playing bridge. It's about knowing people, knowing what got them to that "as-is" shelf and loving them with it. And letting folks know what got you nominated for "as-is"ness. That can be the hardest part. He quotes a lot of authors, which I rather like. He says,

A Dostoyevsky character said, "In my dreams, I am very often passionately determined to serve humanity...yet I'm quite incapable of living with anyone in one room for two days together, and I know that from experience." pg 56

Dude. Totally.

That's all I have to say about that.

"Everybody's Normal Till You Get To Know Them"

This is one of the books I picked up from the library over Christmas break. It's by John Ortberg.  I'm just starting it now. I honestly picked it up cause the cover and title interested me. I had no clue what it was about. Come to find out it's about community.

Here's a section that jumped out at me:

One of the most thorough research projects on relationships is called the Alameda County Study. Headed by a Harvard social scientist, it tracked the lives of 7,000 people over nine years. Researchers found that the most isolated people were three times more likely to die than those with strong relational connections.

People who had bad health habits (such as smoking, poor eating habits, obesity, or alcohol use) but strong social ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits but were isolated. In other words, it is better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone. Harvard researcher Robert Putnam notes that if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, "you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half."

-pg 33

That's pretty interesting to me - especially with all the raw food I like to eat. It's really hard to do that with people. Folks think you're weird when dinner consists of apples and carrots and almonds. And it's hard to invite people over for that kind of dinner. In fact since going raw almost a year ago, we've invited shockingly few people over for dinner. Something we used to do all the time.

Now I haven't been raw in a bit - it's rather difficult in the winter - especially if you went crazy and totally over scheduled yourself a few months back. So we've been eating pizza. And cooked foods. And eating with people again. Sometimes at restaurants, sometimes at their house, sometimes at ours. It's good to hang out with people again. And yet I have every intention of jumping back into rawness - especially as I've slowed things down again. I wonder what the best way to incorporate the food I wanna eat with the people I wanna hang with is.

Hmmm...what do you think?

More books we're into

Amelia and Eleanor go for a Ride by Pam Munoz Ryan (illustrated by Bryan Selznick)is based on a night that Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt had dinner together and then took a flight in the night sky around the white house (back when night flights weren't the norm).

The cool part about it is of course the illustrations. Actually, initially I wasn't digging the pictures. Where's all the color? I thought. But they're intriguing. All of that detail and texture with only a pencil...? How did the illustrator do that? Every time we read this book (which was just about every day for about two weeks) I wanted to look more closely at them. They kinda draw you in. At least they did for me. They might not for a kid.

Ellen didn't say anything about the pictures, but she did talk quite a bit about the story. A lot. And about aviators. She's become a fan of Amelia Earhart. (Amelia's a cool name she tells me.) She also discovered Charles Lindbergh while we had this book. And last night we were looking through our pictures of the presidents and we talked about FDR as he was related to Eleanor. Kinda interesting to introduce a president through his wife. I like that.

The Big Red Bus by Judy Hindley is one of Isaiah's all time favorites. The illustrations aren't amazing, but they aren't anything to sneeze at either. But it's just fun for him I guess. He looooooves it. We read it several times a day. And we've checked it out multiple times.

How do I love you? by P.K. Hallinan has quickly moved up my list of favorite baby books to quite near the top.

I guess technically it's not a baby book, but we read it to Brennan and he likes it too. He was even the one to put it in the library bag this time. Probably cause he recognized it in the basket, but I'm going with it's one of his favorites. It's just an all over good, kid-affirming book.