If you are a mother, may I suggest a perfect way to celebrate your child’s birthday? Find yourself a friend who has just that week returned from New Mexico where she finished Birthing From Within training. Sit outside with her on a beautiful June day that just happens to be the anniversary of the day you birthed your child, and tell her your birth story. All right, that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Nancy Drew
I took Joey and Lena to see the Nancy Drew movie this afternoon.
Were you a fan of Nancy Drew? Boy, I sure was. In fact, the first chapter book I ever read was The Whispering Statue. I was lucky enough to have an older neighbor girl give me a big box of books she’d outgrown, a box that included umpteen Nancy Drews, some Trixie Beldens, and even a Bobbsey Twins or two. I devoured ‘em all. To this day there are certain words and phrases that still remind me of Nancy Drew: bungalow, titian, hunch (as in I have a hunch), sleuth, and of course “come to.”
A delicious book
Yesterday being the kids’ last day of school, and a half-day at that, we kicked off our summer vacation with — what else? — a trip to the library. We signed up for the summer reading program. Joey, my oldest, is officially a middle-schooler now, which meant that he qualified for the teen program. (“But he’s only 11,” I wailed. The librarian shook her head sympathetically, but insisted that for summer reading program purposes my son was now a teen.)
Anyway, Lena, my second third grader, was in desperate need of Oz books. While she browsed among the Baums I moseyed a little farther down the aisle and happened upon the Babbits, the Natalie Babbits, and among them was The Search for Delicious. I immediately snatched it off the shelf and slipped it in the middle of Lena’s stack. My plan was just to leave it there for her to find and read on her own but as soon as we got home I succumbed to temptation. I sat Daniel down in front of the latest PMK video (remember his obsession?), retrieved the book from Lena’s stack, and finished it in time for dinner.
The voices of children
Voices: Part One
Yesterday afternoon I went up to my kids’ elementary school for an assembly. One by one, each grade took the stage and sang a couple of numbers, starting with the first graders and ending with the about-to-graduate fifth graders.
What is it about children singing? They could be singing, oh, I don’t know, “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and I’d probably cry. And when it’s “The Happy Wanderer,” sung by second graders (including my daughter), who chose that song themselves, well, I’m a goner. Mush ain’t in it.
If the pure innocent sound of seven-year-old voices rising up in song isn’t enough for you, add this to the picture: they sang well. The music teacher at our school is amazing, a jewel in the crown of the Ann Arbor Public Schools. By the time these kids graduate they know the difference between their head voice and their chest voice, they can read music, they can sing in four-part harmony. Yeah, the fifth graders sang a round in four parts, a capella, in a minor key, with large intervals and some dissonance. Sang it beautifully.
But I’m not done, oh no. The assembly finished off with a slide show compiled of the baby pictures and current pictures of the graduating fifth graders (among them, my son). And while the slide show played, the fifth graders sang a medley of tear jerkers that included “School Days” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” The only thing that saved me at all during this was the peals of laughter from the kids as each drooling toothless infant was revealed to be Eddie or Lizzie or, ha ha, the school principal.
All this by way of explanation for why, when my fifth-grader Joey arrived home with two of his buddies in tow and a request that they stay for dinner, all I could say was yes.
A momentary shock
A copy of Jimmy Carter’s recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, landed on our doorstep recently. Idly, I opened it, and had a moment of total shock when I read the dedication page: “To our first great-grandchild, Henry Lewis Carter, with hopes that he will see peace and justice in the Holy Land.”
Another post about Patrick O’Brian
Thought I might as well warn you right in the title. If you’re not of the Patrick O’Brian, uh, persuasion, you might want to skip this post. ;)
So, I finally got around to joining The Gunroom — the Patrick O’Brian fan mailing list that’s been going on for a decade or so. Holy cow! These people are amazing! I thought css-discuss was a high-volume mailing list with its 50 or so messages a day, but The Gunroom easily gets over a hundred. And except when they’re punning and teasing each other (occupations which are also true to the POB spirit, by the way; if you don’t believe me, ask me why the short watches on a ship are called the dog watches, heh heh) — as I say, except when they are joking around, these hundred or so messages a day comprise detailed and deep discussions of every aspect of these books you could possibly think of. Everything from in-depth character analyses with plenty of supporting quotes from the texts, to historical research on how many lieutenants would actually have been allowed aboard a ship of the Surprise‘s size. And the discussion is liberally peppered with POBisms, e.g. beginning sentences with “Which” or “Not as who should say” or ending them with “for all love” or “the creature.” Which I am mostly just lurking in awe over there, and loving every minute.
