Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

June 24, 2008 @ 5:52 am | Filed under: Uncategorized

This month, author Susan Taylor Brown is the host, and in honor of Father’s Day, she has put together a carnival of posts about fathers in literature. Check it out!

June 20, 2008 @ 7:43 am | Filed under: Special Needs Children, Uncategorized, Wonderboy

When I mentioned yesterday how many specialists my son sees at the children’s hospital, commenter Anna marveled,

Melissa, ELEVEN specialists? Next time I grouse about two specialists, I’ll shut up.

Oh no, please don’t shut up. Grouse along with me! Medical appointments expand to fill the space around them, don’t they, so that I’m guessing your two specialists suck up massive amounts of time just like our eleven.

Eleven is only the number of departments Wonderboy visits at the Children’s Hospital. Then there’s his pediatric ophthamologist at the university hospital, and the speech therapist and audiologist in the school district. Oh, and also the regular pediatrician, his primary care doctor. If you add in his dentist, and since the child managed to knock out four of his teeth in the past year, I think we may certainly add the pediatric dentist to the roster, that’s (gulp) 16 doctors and therapists my little guy sees on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Yes, it’s a little nuts.

One of the hardest parts of juggling this caseload is keeping all these folks on the same page: namely, the page that is all about the whole picture of this kid, not the tiny piece Dr. Specialist is focusing on. I often compare my role as having to hold tight to the leashes of a bunch of big dogs all pulling in opposite directions. And sometimes it seems like the doctors communicate with each other about as well as dogs do.

In Virginia, we had some personal connections with a few doctors in a way that meant I had another set of hands helping me hold on to the leashes. You may remember how I pined for our Dr. Lily when we left, wished I could bring her with me. (She actually did offer to fly out to California with me and the children when she heard I was going to drive them out here all by myself. Now that’s dedication. But I was more afraid of five hours on an airplane with Wonderboy than two weeks in the minivan, even sans other adults.)

Here in San Diego, we have excellent doctors, absolutely. But none who have taken that step past the detached professional relationship toward a more familiar, I’m-your-ally-let-me- help-you-with-those-Huskies rapport. I’ve had to come up with some strategies for making sure all the boy’s doctors take the time to at least glimpse at the whole picture of him, not just their individual pieces of the puzzle.

The biggest help has been the Doctor Roster. I typed up a list of all the people Wonderboy sees. Four columns. First column: doctor’s name and phone number. Second column: doctor’s specialty or department. Third column: date of most recent appointment. Fourth column: Notes on the last appt, tests ordered, recommendations made, etc.

I’m saying doctor, but this also includes his PT, speech therapist, etc. Everyone involved in his treatment.

I carry several of these lists with me to every appointment. It’s the first thing I hand a doctor when he or she walks into the room. Always, the eyebrows go up: the complexity of the big picture is immediately apparent from the length of the list.

I’ve begun to notice some major improvements in communication between departments since I began handing out this list, and I have definitely found that the individual specialists spend more time asking me questions about his history and his overall treatment plan.

Of course, if only the kid had one global diagnosis, that would help so much! One peg for the docs to hang their hats on; one road map to follow. But that, we know by now, isn’t likely to happen. There is no syndrome that fits, no other case in history that contains this specific bizarre amalgam of issues. Someday, some savvy doctor is going to write a paper on the kid and there’ll maybe be a new syndrome in the books. It’ll be named after the doc, but we’ll know it’s Wonderboy Syndrome, won’t we?

Tags: doctors, pediatrics, Special Needs Children, Wonderboy

June 10, 2008 @ 7:07 am | Filed under: Uncategorized

I’m getting a lot of mail this week about a post I wrote two years ago which was recently reprinted in a homeschooling newsletter. Thought I might as well repost it here too for newcomers to Bonny Glen.

Home Education: Delicious and Nutritious

originally posted March 26, 2006

Homeschoolers talk a lot about the reactions and comments they get (so often negative) from people who don’t know much about homeschooling. Nearly everyone has encountered a critic in the extended family, a naysayer in the neighborhood, a cross-examiner in the grocery store. Then there are the articles and editorials, a handful every week, in which some “expert” wags a warning finger about the shortcomings of home education.

This fascinates me. Ten years ago, when we decided to tread this path, people’s negative reactions often upset me. Now I am simply amused and somewhat perplexed. It puts me in mind of the stern admonishments I used to get from the little old ladies in my Queens neighborhood who were appalled that I wore baby Jane in a sling. “It’s not good for her to be squished up like that!” they would scold. “She can’t be comfortable!” And I’d look down at my contentedly snoozing child and have to stifle a laugh. Babies are really, really good at letting you know when they’re uncomfortable. Discomfort generally evokes a different reaction than the blissful slumber Jane slipped into when I walked around the neighborhood wearing her in that sling.

At first the old ladies’ disapproval bothered me, but eventually I decided it was an interference borne of good intentions. They genuinely cared about the well-being of every random baby on the street, including mine.

And over the years I’ve decided that it’s that same genuine concern that prompts a lot of the negative responses people have about homeschooling. I just wish these folks would stop and think about what is REALLY bothering them, what their concerns really are. Usually, their objections are based on assumptions they have never seriously analyzed.

Like this one. If I had a nickel for every time someone has said to me, “But you’re not a scientist. How are you going to teach them biology, chemistry, trigonometry?” I could pay my mortgage and have change left over. I always answer, quite seriously, “Well, I took those classes in high school. Didn’t you?”

“Of course,” the skeptic will say, “but it’s not like I REMEMBER any of it.”

This cracks me up. Sometimes I’ll say, if I’m feeling snarky, “Then surely I can do a better job than your teacher did!”

But I’m not really slamming the teachers. I’m slamming the skeptic’s ill-considered argument. You can have the best teacher in the world, but if you don’t have a reason to use the knowledge, ten or twenty years later you’re probably going to have forgotten it. Since none of us can predict exactly WHAT knowledge our children will need in their lives to come, many homeschoolers approach education not from the perspective of “What do our children need to know?” but rather “How can we help our children retain the love of learning they were born
with?” There’s a reason that Yeats quote about education being “not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire” is so popular with the homeschool crowd.

The skeptic’s question presumes I’m going to be teaching in the textbook-and-test style that has been deemed most efficient for classrooms full of many students at various ability levels. I think most people who come at homeschoolers with the “are you qualified” argument are imagining a scenario in which Person With Knowledge imparts said knowledge to Student Without Knowledge (Yet). And that’s just so different from how home education really seems to work—no matter what method, philosophy, or curriculum is applied. We’re working one-on-one—an unbeatable student/teacher ratio—with a teacher who knows the student intimately, knows his interests, abilities, moods, sense of humor, learning style, sleep patterns, and diet, a teacher who has the strongest possible attachment to the student. This creates a whole different kind of learning environment. School vs. homeschool becomes apples vs. oranges. They are such very different experiences that it becomes nearly impossible to compare them. But I think that when the skeptic says, “Are you qualified to teach subject x,” he’s looking at my orange and thinking what a misshapen apple it is.

Rarely in these encounters is there an opportunity to explain in glorious depth what home education is REALLY like: the freedom to explore, the excitement of following rabbit trails, the lack of testing or administrative pressure, the absence of certain social pressures, the luxury of time in which to immerse in a subject, the spontaneity, the opportunities for hands-on learning, the lightheartedness. It’s a really delicious orange, see. But if you’re expecting it to taste like apple, then of course you’re going to look askance at it.

Other critics will allow for the academic advantages of a low student/teacher ratio. After all, there are all those statistics about high test scores among homeschooled students, all those geography and spelling bee winners, all those dazzling science fair projects. “But,” comes the objection—that persistent, prevalent, popular “disadvantage” you see in almost every single editorial about home education—”what about socialization?”

Honestly, I’m amazed that people are still beating this particular dead horse. Homeschoolers packed it off to the glue factory a long time ago. (That’s how we stick together all those sugar cubes for our model Egyptian pyramids.)

When I hear this question, I always want to ask right back, “What exactly do you MEAN by socialization?” Because I don’t think most people who toss the word around are really thinking about what they do mean by it.

Do they mean, “How will your kids learn to get along with other people if they’re holed up in your house with only YOU all the time?” Because if that’s their question, they’re leaping to the assumption that most homeschooled children ARE “holed up at home” all the time. I have yet to meet one family for whom this is the case—and between real life and online, I’ve met thousands of homeschooling families. The person who harbors this concern could lay his fears to rest by doing a quick bit of investigation. Homeschooling blogs, websites, books, and magazines are jam-packed with examples of kids getting out in the world and encountering other people in all sorts of situations: co-ops, clubs, sports teams, orchestras, drama groups, church groups, animal shelters, internships, apprenticeships, gym classes, volunteer groups, museums, nursing homes, playgroups, and on and on and on. We can hardly walk for tripping over opportunities for social interaction, both in peer groups and mixed-age groups. Two minutes of conversation with my kids, and the person who was worried they were stuck with just MY company all day, poor things, can breathe a sigh of relief. Good luck catching my kids to ask them the question, though, because they’re out playing with the neighborhood schoolchildren who flock to our yard every afternoon. (The neighbor kids must not realize how unsocialized my children are.)

But maybe the Socialization Worrier meant something else. Maybe she meant, “See, I know this family who homeschools, and their kids are just plain weird/socially awkward/obnoxious/wild/[insert unpleasant adjective of choice].”

To which I must respond: And you’re saying that there are no weird/socially awkward/obnoxious/wild/etc. kids in schools? Because, um, I beg to differ. They were there when I was in school, and I know they’re there now because I hear about them (or read about them in the news) all the time. Some of the weird ones—the nerdy guys in the computer club—grew up to become multimillionaires (and usually really nice people—but then, they were nice all along, just weird). Some of the obnoxious ones now draw huge crowds at the comedy club. Others are in jail.

Maybe, dear critic, that family you know does have some really weird kids, total Napoleon Dynamite types. Are you saying those kids would be better off in a school situation, where their awkwardness will be rubbed in their faces all day long? As for the obnoxious/wild/rowdy/ hooligan kids—are you saying you’d PREFER to have them in your kid’s classroom, causing disruptions? Do you really think they’d be less obnoxious in a school setting?

That’s what I’d like to ask the “I know a homeschooling family and I don’t like them” skeptics. Because I don’t believe that if they really thought the matter through, they would believe that the problem with those kids would have been avoided by “socialization” in a school setting. The obnoxious kids would almost certainly be just as obnoxious (what our skeptic is really objecting to is probably a parenting issue, not an educational one), and the weird kids would be just as weird and probably a whole lot more miserable. After all, “weird” in this context just means “different,” doesn’t it? Kids who just don’t fit in? How many times have we seen the school misfit blossom and thrive as soon as he finishes school or college and is finally freed of the pressure to squeeze into a mold that doesn’t fit him? Heck, how many of us experienced this ourselves?

Sometimes people say, “Look, everyone has to learn to deal with unpleasant people sometime. One of the things you learn in school is how to put up with difficult personalities.” To which I am tempted to respond, “And you think my kids aren’t learning that at home? Have you met my husband?”

KIDDING, honey! But really. Does anyone truly believe that home educated children are growing up completely free from exposure to “unpleasant people”? Because if there are kids like this, I’d love to know where they live so I can move there too.

The “you might as well get used to putting up with bad stuff now” argument is perhaps the weakest homeschooling criticism there is. I don’t think anyone who utters it really means it, not REALLY, not for their own kids. No one wants his child bullied. No mother tucks a lunch in her son’s backpack, zips up his windbreaker, and thinks, “I hope he gets picked on today because that’ll make it easier for him to put up with jerks in the office he’ll work in someday.” No father watches his daughter climb on the bus and hopes she’ll be called names all the way to school in order to accustom her to receiving verbal abuse so that it won’t come as such a shock when her future husband inflicts it upon her later in life.

Mind you, I’m not saying that every kid who goes to school will be bullied or abused (or that no homeschooler ever will). I’m not saying anything about school at all—I’m just saying that the “learning to deal with unpleasant people” argument against homeschooling doesn’t hold water.

As for “learning to deal with unpleasant experiences“—surely life outside school affords plenty of practice at that, whether we want it or not? The dentist’s office, the doctor’s office, the death of a pet, the stomach flu…Again, I don’t believe any parent sends a child off to school actually hoping he’ll have an unpleasant experience that day in order to toughen him up for future adversity. And I don’t think the people who offer this glib statement as a criticism of home education are really thinking about what they’re saying.

What else do people mean by socialization? I’ve actually heard some people say, “How will homeschooled kids learn how to stand in line and take turns?” That one is my absolute favorite. Um, ever been to the post office? The grocery store? Or, gee, how about the line we stand in for Holy Communion every Sunday at Mass? I have to say, despite the lack of institutional training, my kids have picked up that skill just fine. As for taking turns, well: one mom, four kids—yup, plenty of turn-taking opportunities here. Then there’s the Common Room family, who until this week shared one bathroom between nine people. I bet those kids are REALLY good at taking turns and waiting in line.

I’m not out to convince the world that homeschooling is for everyone. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe it is. I have plenty of friends who have no interest in living this lifestyle themselves—and it is definitely a lifestyle choice. Mind you, I’d love to see schools enjoy the educational freedom we homeschoolers have; I think schools would work much better if they were giant resource centers where kids went because they wanted to know about stuff. I’m against grades and standardized testing; I think those things form a barrier between the student and knowledge, and most of the teachers I know (including some very close friends) spend a lot of time and energy working darned hard to get around that wall. I most earnestly wish those hardworking teachers had the freedom to spend their time lighting fires instead of filling buckets.

But modern American institutional education is what it is, and it doesn’t happen to be the choice I’ve made for my kids. Happily, the state acknowledges my right to make that choice. The grocery-store skeptics and the newspaper editorial writers, on the other hand, are uncomfortable about the choice I’ve made. If just once they expressed a concern that actually held water, I would relish the discussion. Until then, I’m savoring every juicy bite of this orange.

June 3, 2008 @ 9:01 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures, Uncategorized

It is always interesting to see what odds and ends have accumulated on my bed by the end of the day. My bedroom is a favorite spot for reading, playing Polly Pockets, destroying bedsprings acrobatics, and sundry other activities. Often, at the tired end of a day, I’ll find a pair of dice, a toy frog, a candy wrapper, a sprinkling of buttons: flotsam and jetsam suggesting that perhaps Beaver Cleaver has wandered in and emptied his overalls pockets on my comforter sometime between his after-school milk and cookies and his slingshot attack on Eddie Haskell.

Tonight I find: two hair barrettes (it’s not the Beaver, then); two small sun visors, one pink, one white; a Sandra Boynton book; the decapitated head of a coreopsis; a crumpled tissue, presumably used (ew); and a book I distinctly remember leaving on the nightstand: Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight, a surprise birthday gift from a darling friend, which I have been treating myself to, one delicious essay at a time, over the past six months. What’s especially intriguing is that this morning, the book’s cover was papered with small pink Post-Its: the evidence of a previous day’s fun-in-Mom’s-room hijinks. I had been keeping a small chunk of Post-Its on the aforementioned bedside table for the handy flagging of quotes to savor later. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the small chunk of notes had been systematically dismantled, one satisfying shhhnk after another, no doubt, and reassembled mosaic fashion upon Mr. Perrin’s fine tome.

Now, today, all the little pink stickies are gone. Vanished. I’ve looked under my pillows. I wonder where I’ll find them?

***

Beanie and I bawled in each other’s arms today. It was awfully sweet. She had picked up an Illustrated Classics version of Jack London’s White Fang at the library earlier in the day. An adaptation, yes, but the kid is seven. Adaptation or no, this was still a hefty volume. She also checked out Dracula, but I told her I should preview that one for her, might be a little scary. She doesn’t like scary. When we got home from the library, all three girls scattered with their armloads of treasure. Beanie reappeared about 45 minutes later, her finger holding her place in White Fang.

“I think you’re right, Mom,” she said. “Dracula might be a bit much for me right now. White Fang is about a REAL wolf and it is so scary! But I love it. You’ve GOT to read it.”

She remained glued to the book all afternoon. When she finished, with a happy sigh, she turned to me and told me all about it. White Fang’s numerous escapes from peril, his brave acts, his poor mother whom he never saw again.

I tried to think of other wolf/dog books she might like, and Stone Fox came to mind. But oh, that heartbreaker of an ending. I told her I knew a wonderful book about a dog similar to White Fang—a Husky, not a wolf—but that it had a sad ending. She likes forewarning of these things.

“Does the dog die?”

(Spoiler alert.)

“Yes. It makes a brave sacrifice for a little boy. Do you think you’d like to read it?”

“Mmm, no, not yet. Will you tell me the story?”

And so I did, the two of us perched on bar stools at the living-room side of the kitchen counter. How the little boy’s grandpa can’t pay his back taxes, loses heart, gets sick. How the little boy hears about the sled-dog race, the prize money in just the right amount. How he practices with his faithful old dog, Searchlight. How everyone knows the race will be run by the big silent Indian, Stone Fox, with his team of five champion dogs. How the boy is determined to try anyway because it’s his last hope. How Searchlight holds her own against the dog-pack surprisingly well, running neck and neck with Stone Fox’s lead dog. How, yards from the finish line, her old heart bursts, and she falls down dead. How the little boy stares down at her in stunned disbelief and grief. How Stone Fox halts his dogs, leaves his sled, picks up the fallen Searchlight and carries her, pulling the boy on his ramshackle sled, across the finish line.

Both of us were bawling by this point. How could we not? My voice was cracking as I tried to finish; tears were streaming from Beanie’s big eyes. She lunged forward, tipping her stool, throwing her arms around me.

“Oh, Mommy. That’s so sad.”

“I know, sweetie, it really is.”

“But it’s…” She paused, seeking the right word. “It’s noble, too. Isn’t it?” Another pause. “White Fang did some noble things too. But it’s a very happy ending. It’s the best book I ever read, Mom.”

***

I’m in my bedroom, writing this post, when I hear the following sequence of events: Scott walking down the hall. Scott suddenly bursting out in an incoherent shout: “GAAH!” Scott bellowing for Rose, speaking to her softly. Rose murmuring a reply. Scott calling the other girls. Pattering feet. Shrieks, squeals, commotion. Paper rattling. A door slamming.

A little while later, Scott IMs me from the other computer. Wants to know if I’m still awake: a joke, because even if I weren’t working, who could sleep through all that shouting? What on earth, I ask him. He explains, but you’ll need a bit of backstory. See, Rose has this toy snake that looks completely realistic. And sometimes she plays a joke on me: coils it in a box of diapers or a laundry basket, somewhere I’ll come upon it unsuspectingly and scream my head off because THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE BOX OF DIAPERS. Then everybody comes running and laughs and laughs. Oh, isn’t it hilarious, Mom just lost another ten years off her life. Ha ha.

I live with a pack of smart alecks; have I mentioned that?

So what happened was, Scott was walking down the hall to the laundry room and at the bottom of the two-step staircase, he almost stepped on a big old lizard. (That was the GAAH.) Looking twice at the hideous, motionless thing, he realized it wasn’t real. Must be one of Rose’s little jokes on Mom, which hmm, seems my hubby finds those a lot funnier when I’m the hapless victim. Thus the bellow for Rose, presumably to tell her to save her jokes for when Mom is sure to be the patsy.

“That’s real, Daddy,” says Rose. And then it moved.

It was this thing. Eek. No wonder he shouted.

Is a transcript too dorky?

Scott: It was about eight or nine inches long
I love it
Bit the hell out of me, though.
Understandably

me: It bit you????

Scott: Yeah.
Doesn’t have much in the way of teeth, fortunately

me: no way!!!! baby!!!!
how?
where?

Scott: Um. Put its mouth on my finger and closed?

me: You offered it your finger?

Scott: Yes.
Yes.
I thought it might be hungry.
Apparently so.

me: Seriously. Did it really bite you?

me: And more importantly, where is it now?

Scott: It started running, but had trouble getting traction on the floor. So it started to go into a paper bag, which was good.

me: Hooray for lousy housekeeping!

Scott: But the bag was ripped, so it ran out the hole. Which was bad.

me: Boo for lousy housekeeping.

Scott: So I picked it up.
And it bit me.
So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again.

me: Buddy.

Scott: And it bit me again.

me: Honey!!!

Scott: So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again and tried to throw it outside.
But it was biting me again so I dropped it again.
Finally, I threw it.
And the last I saw it was running under our bedroom door.

(At this point I emit a piercing shriek of my own. I am a long way from Scott’s computer, but evidently the sound carries.)

Scott: Thank you.
That was very gratifying

me: I HATE YOU.

Scott: It landed between the garbage can and the recycling can.

me: I am never taking out the trash again.

Scott: I love it and wicked regret tossing it out of the house.

me: It will never be your friend now.

Scott: Sometimes I act without thinking

me: You?
Really?

Scott: I know!
I think this might really hurt our long term relationship, Liz and me.

me: That’s the same kind of lizard who freaked me out that time in the watering can.
hanging out in there, looking like a rattler.

Scott: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1285/534174395_b6bfe60133_o.jpg

me: Gah.

I do not want to know how that thing got into my house. Nor do I desire to know, any longer, what happened to my little pink Post-Its. It ate them, I just know it.

May 31, 2008 @ 1:42 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized

UPDATE: Eek!! I just went to the BlogCarnival site to enter the info for this post, and I discovered EIGHTEEN MORE SUBMISSIONS that must have come in after the deadline this morning. That means BlogCarnival automatically began forwarding them to next month’s host instead. Bear with me while I figure out what to do. Meanwhile, enjoy the posts below.

UPDATED UPDATE. I know what we’ll do. I’m out of time for this endeavor, so if you missed the deadline and want your post to be included, you may submit the link in a comment below. But listen, folks, on-topic posts only, please. I’m seeing an awful lot of spam there, or self-promotional pieces that are merely book promos, and a bunch of posts that have nothing at all to do with children’s books. If I spot links like that in the comments, I’ll delete them because I don’t want to waste my readers’ time. For the sake of the substantive and relevant posts in the bunch, I’m allowing this means of making late entries.

Tags: Books, carnival of children's literature, children's books

May 29, 2008 @ 8:03 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized

Am I up to this, I ask myself? It’s been a crazy week here. Ah, what the heck.

Our very kind volunteer host for this month’s Carnival of Children’s Literature had a scheduling conflict arise, and she had to reluctantly pass on the fun. She gave me plenty of notice to line up an alternate host, but we had Stuff happening here, and I failed to solicit a substitute. And here we are at the end of the month, with no carnival planned.

Well, who needs planning? I don’t promise a clever theme this time, but I’m quite sure I can promise some fun reading. So: pick your best post about children’s books from the past month, and send it my way. No, scratch that—submit it via the BlogCarnival site. That way I won’t have to fiddle with links and code. Make it easy on me!

As always, submission does not guarantee inclusion. I’ll take submissions until 8a.m. Pacific time Saturday morning, and I’ll get the carnival posted sometime that day. I know, the pressure’s on. Move, move, move!

As for upcoming carnivals, there is fun ahead this summer. Author Susan Taylor Brown (Hugging the Rock) will host on June 23rd, with a theme just right for Father’s Day: Fathers in Literature. And in July, Jenny Rich of Read Imagine Talk will be our host. Love that blog name: sounds like our way of life.

To explore past kidlitosphere carnivals, visit the archives.

May 28, 2008 @ 7:38 pm | Filed under: Books, Uncategorized

The good:

Betsy-Tacy has been reissued in a spiffy new edition. Nice big trim size, appealing to young readers. The beloved Lois Lenski art inside. Quite a beautiful painting on the cover—you may recognize it from the previous edition, which featured the same art peeking through a cutout on the front cover. And a nice bonus: in back is a big chunk of interesting biographical material about Maud Hart Lovelace. My young B-T fans (and their mother) were delighted.

The bad:

This doesn’t necessarily mean the entire series is being reissued. As you may recall from posts last year, many people have lamented the gradual going-out-of-print of this series, which is one of the best children’s serieseses of all time (she says authoritatively). If you’re a fan, now’s the time to show you want books like this in print…I for one will be stockpiling enough copies for my brood.

(P.S. Pardon the lack of wrapped text around the picture above. WordPress is being persnickety with me. Can’t remember the HTML do wrap it manually. Tried float=”left”. Didn’t work, obviously. Too lazy to google it. Too lazy even to capitalize google. Almost too lazy to close my parenthesis here, but…will…muster…the…strength.)

May 20, 2008 @ 6:17 am | Filed under: Houseplants, Uncategorized

The radiator tragedy and, six months later, Jane’s arrival, put the brakes on my houseplant mania somewhat, but there was still a good bit of greenery filling up the sills and corners of our new, slightly bigger apartment down the block. We even made a field trip to Logee’s Greenhouse, that wonder-of-the-world Becky and I have been discussing in the comments. I remember Scott patiently entertaining a toddling Jane while I explored the rooms and rooms of beauties—though I think I only bought three little bitty cuttings. Oh, brave restraint.

Well, of course you know what happened next, and it’s no surprise that most of my plants perished from neglect the following year. Jane and I lived in the hospital almost nonstop for nine months, and Scott was dashing home from work only long enough to bring in the mail and pick up the car so he could drive out to spend the evenings with us. But in the early months of 1998, with high-dose chemo behind us and Jane’s curls beginning to sprout once more, we had a little renaissance of greenery in the apartment. Jane’s immune system was still almost non-existent and her platelets dangerously low. The playground was forbidden to us, and contact with other toddlers strongly discouraged. For a little while I fretted about my three-year-old living in isolation, even if it was only temporary, in a city apartment with no balcony, no backyard. Then it struck me that if I could not get her outside, I’d have to bring the outside in.

The front room of our apartment had windows on three sides, a small but lovely space with lots of light. I used our small tax refund to transform it to a mini-conservatory/playroom. Low white shelves (the cheap kind from Costco) under all the windows, for toys and puzzles and books. A blue plastic Fisher Price table with two little green chairs, a present from Jane’s aunt and uncle. (This table is still with us: currently residing in our backyard.) In every window, a hanging basket of flowers. Good old gesneriads, blossoming liberally in a warm, dry place. Plants atop every set of shelves: all the flowering varieties I could coax into bloom. It really was a small wonderland. We spent most of our day there, the two of us, or sprawled on the sofa in the next room, reading. Scott would come home to a flat stack of picture books literally as high as the seat of the couch.

We got a hydroponic growing kit and tried our hand at herbs and vegetables. Mostly we raised whiteflies. No matter; I wasn’t cooking much, anyway.

I really loved that little garden. By the time Rose was born the following summer, Jane’s counts were back to reasonable levels and we began, at last, to see our old playmates again. But our sunroom, as we called it, remained a favorite place to play. That was the only part of the apartment I missed when we finally moved to a bigger place with a (gasp) yard in the fall of 1999. We brought all the houseplants with us, of course, but I’ve never been quite the fanatic—nor green thumb—that I was in the apartment years. The garden mania moved outside, of course. Our next move, to Virginia in January of ‘02, was the first and only house we’ve owned, i.e. the only place I could really put things in the ground. Here in San Diego, we’ve done most of our outdoor planting in pots.

But there are a few varieties of indoor plants I’ve kept up with, sort of. I mean, we’ve always had, in every house, the standard tropical non-flowering greenery. Ficus (the little one I bought was getting quite big when I said goodbye to it in Virginia); always a prayer plant or rabbit tracks named Thor, long story; Chinese umbrella plant, pothos, ivy, jade tree, peace lily. Homey and forgiving sorts, the lot of them.

But my favorites, the things I don’t like ever to do without, are African violets and scented geraniums. My parents gave me a set of violets for my birthday last year, because I think I enthused about them here on the blog and they are incredibly sweet that way. (Wicked daughter pauses as thoughts of other things she might enthuse about flash through her mind. Ignore me, indugent parents.) I use my mom’s trick of keeping African violets in nearly continuous bloom by breaking Jobe’s Flowering Houseplant Fertilizer Spikes in half and burying a half in each pot. Works with geraniums too, but I only do that for the Martha Washington kind with the big showy blossoms, not the scented varieties where the flowers are rather nondescript and what you really want are the leaves.

So I grow African violets for the color and scented geraniums for the smell. But only a few of each, because somewhere around baby number three I lost my fastidiousness about tending to plants. Now everything green that survives in this house must be able to thrive upon benign neglect. Which is why only one of my birthday violets is in bloom right now. Where’d I put those fertilizer spikes again?

May 17, 2008 @ 8:24 pm | Filed under: Houseplants, Uncategorized

Subtitled: Ah, Aeschynanthus Lobbianus, How I Loved You

Things have changed on my windowsill since I wrote yesterday’s post. I couldn’t find the red plastic cup the other nasturtiums had looked so pretty in, so I filled the cream cow with water and put the new nasturtiums there. They look so cheerful. And an idea struck me and I transplanted the little bulbous cactus into the empty blue-and-white watering-can-shaped miniature flowerpot (it once held a mini African violet). That was probably not the brightest idea, since the flowerpot is a little small for the cactus. But it looks cute.

And then I took a cutting from a geranium in my backyard and started that rooting in a little glass vase, so that’s in the window now too.

Years ago, I used to be a houseplant fanatic. It started in graduate school. I brought a few plants to North Carolina with me, cuttings rooted by my dear auntie in Northern Virginia, whom I visited every couple of weekends during college (undergrad). My mother (this aunt was her older sister) has an amazingly green thumb, and there are gorgeous plants all over the house back home in Colorado. Aunt Genia had the same talent, and her apartment was crammed full of greenery. She couldn’t conceive of sending me off to grad school without a few neatly potted houseplants of my own.

I didn’t know their names, then, beyond the cutesy nicknames I gave them. (Look, Anne of Green Gables did it—surely you remember Bonny the Geranium?—so it was good enough for me.) But a thing about me is that I always, eventually, need to know the names of things. And, if possible, the stories behind the names.

So I scoured the local used book store and found this book, which I have probably read three hundred times over the years, if you add up all the times I’ve pored over a certain page or section. Crockett’s Indoor Garden, and I don’t know that it’s any better than other houseplant books out there, or information now available for free all over the internet, but it was exactly the book I wanted at the time. Of course it awoke a hunger to raise more varieties, grow flowering plants, seek out rare species, learn more about everything, everything, everything.

Moderation is not my strong point.

Budget constraints (read: grad-school poverty) provided their own moderating influence, however. I begged cuttings when I could, bought a few very small, very cheap plants from a corner store, and mostly just read. I learned a lot. I grew African violets from leaf cuttings rooted in sand. I transplanted a four-dollar ficus frequently so that it grew bigger and bigger, almost magically fast. I repotted a hapless gesneriad a dozen times because my cat would keep knocking it over, no matter where I moved it. She was not a very bright cat, but so determined.

The thing about plants is that they grow and multiply, so that even with a tight budget you can fill up a small apartment quite rapidly. At the end of two years I must have had two dozen little plants, and a few big ones. I have an old notebook somewhere with all of them listed by name. After graduation I gave a bunch away (along with my dear kitty, who would not have looked happily upon the new life awaiting me in New York City—gave her to my friend Kelly Link, the now esteemed science fiction writer, if you’re interested) and carted many more up to Queens, where I struggled to find room for them in my tiny apartment.

And then, oh dear, came Weird Things You Can Grow. I was an editorial assistant at Random House Children’s Books, and one of the books my boss was editing was this book. Its target audience was ten-year-olds, but I ate it right up. I wanted to grow every one of those weird things. The way I got to know my way around New York was by trekking uptown and downtown to obscure nurseries and flower shops, on quests for papyrus and string-of-beads and passionflower. I found them, too, a good many of them, and nurtured them on the broad windowsill of my hallway cubicle, an inglorious workspace rendered glorious by the view of the East River, with Queens and Brooklyn sprawling on the other side.

Not every acquisition was a success. Scott gave me a bonsai for my 23rd birthday, and I am sorry to say I failed the bonny wee thing, and it became a dry stick sometime during the first year of our marriage.

What I was best at was gesneriads. You probably know some varieties of this family: lipstick plant and goldfish plant are two common varieties in the indoor section of nurseries. African violets, of course. Cape primrose. Flame violet. Gloxinia. I went mad for them all. Even joined a Gesneriad society in Manhattan. At the monthly meetings I was the only member under 35, and one of perhaps three members under 60.

I joined a couple of houseplant round robins, too, a charming means of correspondence which I suspect has completely died out in the internet age. You added your name to a smallish list of addresses, and people would write long letters about their gesneriads, and send the packet on to the next person on the list, and when it came to you, you eagerly caught up on all the news—Millie’s episcia finally bloomed! what joy!—and shared the latest on your collection. I will now confess for the record that I was just as slow in keeping up my end of that correspondence as I am now at email, and after about three rounds of holding up the queue with my delay, I meekly resigned from the group. I do not think they missed me.

By then I had fifty or sixty plants. In a three-room apartment: I know, it was ridiculous. Scott and I got married, and he moved in, and I wonder now how he put up with it? Card tables in front of every window (we only had three), Aeschynanthus grabbing at his hair every time he walked past the dresser? People don’t know about Scott that he is a little bit of a saint, when it comes to exhibiting tolerance for his wife’s enthusiasms.

And then: tragedy struck. Six months after our marriage, we went away to spend Thanksgiving with his parents. While we were gone, a cold wave hit New York. Our landlady quite naturally cranked up the radiator heat. The radiators were by the windows, directly under the plant tables. My plants—they roasted. Baked. Were smited by the dry and the hot and the vicious desert conditions. Not all of them succumbed; sturdy old devil’s ivy (pothos) scoffed at danger and thrived on oven life. But the gesneriads, oh dear. They were crackly and grey when we returned home. It was a dreadful sight. I had carefully set them up with wicking and capillary mats so they would stay watered in my absence, but those tender measures had been insufficient to save them.

Thus ended my tenure as an amateur gesneriad specialist. The loss would have been much harder to bear had I not, by then, already become captivated by a new enthusiasm, a new subject on which to read obsessively and constantly.

Jane was on the way.

I did not mean for this post to get so out of hand. It has grown like a variegated philodendron under compact florescent lighting. There is more to the story, if it is a story, but my battery is almost dead and I have small Enthusiasms to tuck in bed.

May 14, 2008 @ 8:15 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized

My father saw my anniversary post and set immediately to work scanning my wedding photos! Isn’t he a peach?

Here’s one:

Somebody seriously needed to talk to me about those bangs. But isn’t my dress gorgeous? It was my mother-in-law’s. She wore it in 1960, Scott’s sister wore it in 1986 (in that very same church!), and they were so kind and offered it to me in 1994. I loved it. But I loved that boy even more.