Sometimes simpler is just better.
This seems to be the lesson that I've learned from reading Betsy-Tacy with Frances. The book is old, and it feels that way. It simply lacks the intrigue, intensity, and self-focused issues that are so common in children's books today. No trailer parks, 12-step meetings, mothers in rehab who didn't tell that's why they left. These are just simple stories about two little girls, 5 or 6 years old in the first book, who go for picnics up the hill near their house, who care for each other when there is sadness in the family, and who think of imaginative ways to spend their days.
I didn't realize Frances was so interested. It turns out to have been not only interesting, but inspiring. First, yesterday she woke up and announced that she wanted to go calling. "Do people still go calling? Will people know what I'm doing?" she asked. Would they invite her in to sit their living room and sip tea? I told her I doubted that, but that it might be nice to go calling, make some cards to leave to say she had been there, and perhaps bake some cookies to bring to the people she visited. It's unfortunate that most people aren't home on a Thursday morning to receive callers, so she mostly left cookies on doorsteps with a calling card. But she did talk to one person. Both she and Rutledge had worn their finest: she in a tiger striped leotard, fluffy jazz skirt, and knit boa, and he in a cape and sunglasses.
Unfortunately, partway through her calling she decided that maybe it would be even more fun to make a little money with the cookies, and she came home with $2. I was not all happy that she had gone door to door as a saleswoman. So the money had to go back. Then she set up a stand with her cookies, but given the extreme heat and humidity and the early daytime hour when people were at work or shut up in their houses escaping the heat, there were no customers.
Then today she made paper dolls with people she cut from magazines. This was another chapter in the Betsy-Tacy book. The girls cut out families from magazines and then cut out clothes and household items. I remember how much I used to love to do this with the Sears catalog when I was growing up. I'd choose the cutest babies to paste into notebooks that were supposed scrapbooks of my imaginary family, a family filled with boys under 2. Funny how one day our imaginary musings can kind of come true.
Her paper dolls ranged from cute to monstrous--little heads on giant bodies, grown women in onesies and snap-up pajamas. Then she used the box that the Rock Band 2 guitar came in to make a house with many rooms and pictures on the walls. I love seeing so much non-battery, imaginative fun, as well as seeing how she makes books her own. Right now we're also living with a giant clubhouse refrigerator box--with a skylight--in the middle of our garage after we had many nights of reading one of my favorite childhood books, _Christina Katerina and the Box_. These are the kinds of days that I wish could go on forever for her, free from self-consciousness, free from outside ideas about what she maybe "should" be doing, and just reveling in being 7.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The boys and I just finished reading _When Zachary Beaver Came to Town_, which was an outstanding book, though I'll admit, just a little too early for Walter and Ollie to really be able to get the most out of it. We and they have been reading more young adult books lately, and there just is a bit of a jump in subject matter that they aren't quite ready for yet in most of them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I can see how much more meaningful and rich some of these books will be at the right time, which isn't quite now. This book deals some with a love interest, but more than that are the themes that layer through the story--loss, betrayal, grace, coming of age, redemption, coming to selflessness, and then there are the obvious Christ figures and the theme of the baptism (by the town drunk), which would be great material for discussing in a literature class.
I'm just really glad that we can still read together, something that I feel strongly about in our family life and as an educational tool. I hear so many places about how one of the best things you can do to help your children intellectually and emotionally is to continue to read long past the time when most parents stop reading to their children, and this has been so true for us. It is just a special time, and not only do we get to share great books together, but we can talk about more challenging topics and I can pick books that I think are going to push them in some way. It allows all of us to reach a little beyond where we might be on our own and it gives us something that we can talk about in common because we've all experienced it together.
In my own reading, I just finished Nic Sheff's _Tweak_. What an intense book. Autobiographical, it is a very unflinching account of his addiction to meth, heroin, cocaine, and a collage of other drugs, both legal and illegal and the incredible challenge of finding lasting recovery. I lost a great amount of sleep staying up because I couldn't put the book down. I cringe a little when I think that originally I picked it up because I thought it might be interesting to Ollie. This is definitely not a book for 11 year olds--male prostitution, sexual addiction, as well as the potentially confusing message about how incredible it feels to shoot up at the same time that the author is describing how his body deteriorates and he can't work or keep relationships with people and ruins his connections with all of the people he cares about. So I'm glad that I chose to read it to myself and then send it right on back to the library. Still, it's one of those books that I know is going to stay with me for a while.
Before this, I finished that darn 3rd Twilight book. Repetitive. So repetitive. I'm wondering how she manages to get 800 pages or whatever of a 4th one when it's a one theme pony, but still, I have to admire how the first book drew me in and had me paying nearly no attention to page numbers, percentage of book read, and all the other extra-literary physical aspects of a book that have always distracted me when I read. I think I'm seeing some changes in my own reading speed as a result of Walter's training--my pace has picked up in a significant way, and I guess I'm more focused or something, but I will notice that 30 pages have gone by without me once looking at a page number lately. I doubt it's just that the books I'm reading are more riveting than in the past. This could be kind of helpful!
I'm just really glad that we can still read together, something that I feel strongly about in our family life and as an educational tool. I hear so many places about how one of the best things you can do to help your children intellectually and emotionally is to continue to read long past the time when most parents stop reading to their children, and this has been so true for us. It is just a special time, and not only do we get to share great books together, but we can talk about more challenging topics and I can pick books that I think are going to push them in some way. It allows all of us to reach a little beyond where we might be on our own and it gives us something that we can talk about in common because we've all experienced it together.
In my own reading, I just finished Nic Sheff's _Tweak_. What an intense book. Autobiographical, it is a very unflinching account of his addiction to meth, heroin, cocaine, and a collage of other drugs, both legal and illegal and the incredible challenge of finding lasting recovery. I lost a great amount of sleep staying up because I couldn't put the book down. I cringe a little when I think that originally I picked it up because I thought it might be interesting to Ollie. This is definitely not a book for 11 year olds--male prostitution, sexual addiction, as well as the potentially confusing message about how incredible it feels to shoot up at the same time that the author is describing how his body deteriorates and he can't work or keep relationships with people and ruins his connections with all of the people he cares about. So I'm glad that I chose to read it to myself and then send it right on back to the library. Still, it's one of those books that I know is going to stay with me for a while.
Before this, I finished that darn 3rd Twilight book. Repetitive. So repetitive. I'm wondering how she manages to get 800 pages or whatever of a 4th one when it's a one theme pony, but still, I have to admire how the first book drew me in and had me paying nearly no attention to page numbers, percentage of book read, and all the other extra-literary physical aspects of a book that have always distracted me when I read. I think I'm seeing some changes in my own reading speed as a result of Walter's training--my pace has picked up in a significant way, and I guess I'm more focused or something, but I will notice that 30 pages have gone by without me once looking at a page number lately. I doubt it's just that the books I'm reading are more riveting than in the past. This could be kind of helpful!
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Whew! I'm back from a crazy week of camping. Almost a week, I should say. The trip originally was to be 10 days, and I lasted 8. It was a hot, hot time. Although we were in Massachusetts, it was during a heat wave during which heat records were being broken, and this was particularly challenging in a scrub pine forest with a lot of black asphalt down the front of the campsites. We had a great time nonetheless.
Our trip started with almost 12 hours in the car. We hit New York City, or the exterior of it, around 4:30 on a Friday, through no real fault of our own. So we decided to spend the night with our neighbors who recently moved to Madison Connecticut. I'll admit, whenever I get on the Merritt Parkway, I instantly have dreams of picking up everything and moving up there immediately. And Madison...what a dream of a little town. It's about 20 minutes out of New Haven, it's right on the Long Island Sound, it's directly adjacent to a lovely state park with a beach, and the town itself is straight from a movie or novel. It's the quintessential New England coastal town, with an adorable Main Street and shopping district, picturesque boats anchored all along the shore, houses so charming you'd swear they were a movie set, and we were there on the perfect day. Sunny, warm, pleasant for the beach but not too hot, Saturday. It was hard to imagine that anything but perfection ever is the case there. What I heard, however, is that before we came, there had been a month of nearly solid rain, so precious few beach days or outdoor activity days. Still...the place had its best foot forward when I was there and therefore will live in infamy (or just plain famy?) in my head as high on my I'd-move-there-if-I-won-the-lottery list.
For the next three days we camped. Notice my conspicuous lack of pictures. That's because Ollie dropped my camera at the Woods Hole Aquarium and broke it. So it's going to take a while to extract what little I had. We stayed at Myles Standish State Forest, right at the mouth of Cape Cod. It's a humongous park that takes about 20-30 minutes to drive across, and it is primarily scrub pine forest, dotted with about 6 ponds. It has me wondering what the difference is between a pond and a lake. Ponds are a very big thing in Massachusetts. I don't know that we label anything on a map of Virginia as a pond. The particular pond our campsite was near was called Charge Pond. It was relatively small--a strong swimmer could easily go across, but it had a cute little roped off swimming area (people were happily swimming all over, though) and a sandy beach, and the water was clear and felt incredible after sweating in the campground. What I found particularly nice was that there were trees around, and you could find a shady spot on the shore and there would be a magical little breeze and the temperature would drop by about 10 degrees when you sat there. The kids, especially Rutledge, found no end of fascination with this swimming hole. We were there for hours a day. Hours and hours. Throwing each other, throwing mud at each other despite numerous warnings, building tunnels through the sand, squeezing the sand until it oozed something that looked like blood, racing each other, knocking each other off rafts, spitting water out of their mouths. Then there were the nightly skit shows around the campfire. They would start out with canned skits of the Girl and Boy Scout type. But then the improv would start. Frances found a medium that was right up her alley. I felt like I needed a shepherd's crook to pull her off the stage after a while! She would spend half the day rounding up girls to participate in her skits and making up sequels to ones from the previous night. The skits these kids made up rarely made sense to adults, but they found them incredibly humorous.
On day 5 of the trip, we decided to go to my friend Nikki's house in Halifax for the night. I was about to have a heat stroke, or at the very least, to start vomiting from the heat. So we had the longest late lunch in the history of lunch at Friendly's and then we went to her house where we had a real dinner and slept in real beds. We were warned that if we went home, it would feel impossible to come back to camping, and sure enough, it was. Now it didn't help that it was 97 degrees the one day and about 95 the next and who knows how hot on the day I threw in the towel, but dealing with the camp stoves and sweltering tents was not a pleasant thought. When more record-breaking heat was expected, as well as two fronts coming from the west that promised some rain and a tropical storm coming up the coast that was supposed to wreck the ideal beach day, I determined that we would be wise to start heading home and try to compose ourselves before the school year starts in about a week or two.
Our trip home was long but somewhat leisurely. We stopped in Mystic, CT to have a look around, and we walked around a bit at Yale. Then we made one final push in the car to get to New Jersey for the night (ack--didn't get to the hotel until 10!). The next morning, we toured Princeton, got ourselves something to eat, and then headed for home, arriving around dinnertime. All in all, it was a great trip, we saw many new places, met some new people, caught up with old friends, and had a whole free weekend to unwind at home as the cherry on top.
Tomorrow is going to be our first day of schoolwork. The public schools don't go back for a little over 2 more weeks, but I'm ready for us to get on track, especially since we're going to South Carolina right after Labor Day. I don't feel completely organized in terms of location of items, but I have things laid out fairly well for at least tomorrow. I think it's going to be challenging combining that agenda with the summer that is still going on and its obligations, but I'm ready for a return to routine. Even if we're not running at full capacity right now, we'll at least be accomplishing something.
Our trip started with almost 12 hours in the car. We hit New York City, or the exterior of it, around 4:30 on a Friday, through no real fault of our own. So we decided to spend the night with our neighbors who recently moved to Madison Connecticut. I'll admit, whenever I get on the Merritt Parkway, I instantly have dreams of picking up everything and moving up there immediately. And Madison...what a dream of a little town. It's about 20 minutes out of New Haven, it's right on the Long Island Sound, it's directly adjacent to a lovely state park with a beach, and the town itself is straight from a movie or novel. It's the quintessential New England coastal town, with an adorable Main Street and shopping district, picturesque boats anchored all along the shore, houses so charming you'd swear they were a movie set, and we were there on the perfect day. Sunny, warm, pleasant for the beach but not too hot, Saturday. It was hard to imagine that anything but perfection ever is the case there. What I heard, however, is that before we came, there had been a month of nearly solid rain, so precious few beach days or outdoor activity days. Still...the place had its best foot forward when I was there and therefore will live in infamy (or just plain famy?) in my head as high on my I'd-move-there-if-I-won-the-lottery list.
For the next three days we camped. Notice my conspicuous lack of pictures. That's because Ollie dropped my camera at the Woods Hole Aquarium and broke it. So it's going to take a while to extract what little I had. We stayed at Myles Standish State Forest, right at the mouth of Cape Cod. It's a humongous park that takes about 20-30 minutes to drive across, and it is primarily scrub pine forest, dotted with about 6 ponds. It has me wondering what the difference is between a pond and a lake. Ponds are a very big thing in Massachusetts. I don't know that we label anything on a map of Virginia as a pond. The particular pond our campsite was near was called Charge Pond. It was relatively small--a strong swimmer could easily go across, but it had a cute little roped off swimming area (people were happily swimming all over, though) and a sandy beach, and the water was clear and felt incredible after sweating in the campground. What I found particularly nice was that there were trees around, and you could find a shady spot on the shore and there would be a magical little breeze and the temperature would drop by about 10 degrees when you sat there. The kids, especially Rutledge, found no end of fascination with this swimming hole. We were there for hours a day. Hours and hours. Throwing each other, throwing mud at each other despite numerous warnings, building tunnels through the sand, squeezing the sand until it oozed something that looked like blood, racing each other, knocking each other off rafts, spitting water out of their mouths. Then there were the nightly skit shows around the campfire. They would start out with canned skits of the Girl and Boy Scout type. But then the improv would start. Frances found a medium that was right up her alley. I felt like I needed a shepherd's crook to pull her off the stage after a while! She would spend half the day rounding up girls to participate in her skits and making up sequels to ones from the previous night. The skits these kids made up rarely made sense to adults, but they found them incredibly humorous.
On day 5 of the trip, we decided to go to my friend Nikki's house in Halifax for the night. I was about to have a heat stroke, or at the very least, to start vomiting from the heat. So we had the longest late lunch in the history of lunch at Friendly's and then we went to her house where we had a real dinner and slept in real beds. We were warned that if we went home, it would feel impossible to come back to camping, and sure enough, it was. Now it didn't help that it was 97 degrees the one day and about 95 the next and who knows how hot on the day I threw in the towel, but dealing with the camp stoves and sweltering tents was not a pleasant thought. When more record-breaking heat was expected, as well as two fronts coming from the west that promised some rain and a tropical storm coming up the coast that was supposed to wreck the ideal beach day, I determined that we would be wise to start heading home and try to compose ourselves before the school year starts in about a week or two.
Our trip home was long but somewhat leisurely. We stopped in Mystic, CT to have a look around, and we walked around a bit at Yale. Then we made one final push in the car to get to New Jersey for the night (ack--didn't get to the hotel until 10!). The next morning, we toured Princeton, got ourselves something to eat, and then headed for home, arriving around dinnertime. All in all, it was a great trip, we saw many new places, met some new people, caught up with old friends, and had a whole free weekend to unwind at home as the cherry on top.
Tomorrow is going to be our first day of schoolwork. The public schools don't go back for a little over 2 more weeks, but I'm ready for us to get on track, especially since we're going to South Carolina right after Labor Day. I don't feel completely organized in terms of location of items, but I have things laid out fairly well for at least tomorrow. I think it's going to be challenging combining that agenda with the summer that is still going on and its obligations, but I'm ready for a return to routine. Even if we're not running at full capacity right now, we'll at least be accomplishing something.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
My computer is on the blink. Literally blinking with some kind of major problem. My screen is hopping up and down, which is making it very hard to type.
I am off to a wild and crazy camping trip for the next 11 days. I didn't realize how close to Cape Cod the campground is, which I'm suddenly finding very exciting after kind of dreading it for a few months because I was sue we'd be isolated and I'd starve to death.
I doubt that I will be fully GF during this little foray. I have a bunch of things packed, but being in the woods isnt' the easiest place to eat under any circumstances, so I have my doubts. But the canoe is on the car, everything is packed and ready, and we just need to put ourselves in the car in the morning and drive.
I am off to a wild and crazy camping trip for the next 11 days. I didn't realize how close to Cape Cod the campground is, which I'm suddenly finding very exciting after kind of dreading it for a few months because I was sue we'd be isolated and I'd starve to death.
I doubt that I will be fully GF during this little foray. I have a bunch of things packed, but being in the woods isnt' the easiest place to eat under any circumstances, so I have my doubts. But the canoe is on the car, everything is packed and ready, and we just need to put ourselves in the car in the morning and drive.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Hello!
This is my entry for today. I'm writing with some friend and need to see how it's going to look.
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