Archive for September, 2006
If you decide to hire a cleaning lady to do the floors and bathrooms during your last two weeks in the house, so that you may devote even more of your time to the joys of purging and packing, two things are bound to happen.
1) Five minutes after she departs, leaving a sparkling floor behind, a small child will spill a cup of juice upon it. (Juice sparkles too, you know.)
2) Five minutes after she finishes cleaning the bathroom, a small child will bump his nose (poor little guy) and get a nosebleed of the type that spatters all over the room with every sob. ALL OVER. The clean bathroom.
(But at least it wasn’t the carpet.)
(And he’s fine now, whew.)
You never realize how many books you have until you start packing.
(This is but the tip of the iceberg.)
While we are thus occupied, Rilla suggests you go check out Karen Edmisten’s latest post, which quotes our favorite passage from one of our favorite books.
Also, it’s Crock Pot Week at Cooking With Whine.
Oh, and don’t miss the new Edge of the Forest!
September 23, 2006 @ 5:28 pm | Filed under:
Television Now you can relive the joie de Pepper all over again. Courtesy of my husband, a YouTube link to that old Dr. Pepper commercial. Oh, the giddy exuberance! The feathered hair, the charming smile! The children agog with admiration over the soda and the dancing! The ripoff of homage to An American in Paris! This is possibly television’s finest achievement.
Except maybe for this.
(Okay, now I’m actually thinking about it. What IS television’s finest moment?)
September 23, 2006 @ 4:54 pm | Filed under:
Carnivals It’s time for another Carnival of Children’s Literature, hosted this time by Wands & Worlds. Drop by for a bountiful harvest of great posts! (And also one from me.) (Oh I just crack myself up.)
(Speaking of autumn themes, look at this beautiful craft at Bountiful Blessings: stained-glass autumn leaves. Gorgeous.)
(And speaking of carnivals, don’t miss this week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Median Sib.)
(And also! It’s almost time for another Field Day (a carnival of nature study posts) at By Sun and Candlelight! Submissions are due by Monday. Or maybe Tuesday, because Dawn is so very nice.)
We have a move date. This is really happening. In less! than! two! weeks!
This week was a blur of packing, tossing, sorting, taping, head-shaking, nail-biting, laughing, crying, neighbor-thanking, baby-kissing, Dr.-Pepper-drinking, mover-interviewing, medical-records-getting, trash-hauling, and (no surprise here) chocolate-eating.
About the Dr. Pepper. See, officially? I don’t drink soda. Except in restaurants, because that’s different. Or at someone’s house if they offer, because that’s polite. Or if Scott opens a soda and doesn’t finish it, because that’s thrifty.
Conveniently, Scott just happens to open a soda at least once a day and then suddenly decide he doesn’t want it after all. Conveniently, this soda always happens to be a Dr. Pepper, which is my favorite, instead of Coke, which is his. Conveniently, he opens this soda (which he will suddenly decide not to drink) at EXACTLY the moment when I am sitting down to lunch every day.
At least, that’s how it was when he lived here.
Since he left for the new job in July, I’ve been forced to (horrors!) put my own sodas in the fridge, and take them out, and open them and everything. In short, I’ve had to admit that I really am a soda drinker. In fact, it seems I have quite the little Dr. Pepper addiction going on. I mean, only one a day, but still. Soda. Sugar, caffeine. Nursing mom and all that.
Hmm.
But okay, fine, I admit it. I drink Dr. Pepper. Wait. I mean: I drink Dr. Pepper and I’m proud!
But I’ll fall off my high horse only so far and no farther: the whole time Scott has been gone, I haven’t BOUGHT any sodas myself. Nor have I put them on the list for the nice neighbors who have helped me with my shopping. Somehow that has seemed to be a line I wouldn’t cross. Scott stocked up on DP before he left for California, and I told myself that when it was gone, it was gone. And then WHEW, he came back in August just in time to restock before I got the DP DTs.
But that supply ran out three days ago.
By yesterday, my craving for the bubbly goodness of Fizzy Pepper, M.D., was powerful strong. My body needed carbs, and by that I mean carbonation. As an official out-of-the-closet Pepper and Part of an Original Crowd, I am supposed to be PROUD, right? But I’m not too proud to admit that I actually called my neighbor, Jenn, to ask if she had any Dr. Pepper. (I would have settled for a Coke. Or an Orange Crush. Or, what the heck, Pop Rocks in cherry Kool-Aid. Anything for that fiiiiizzzz.)
(But preferably the Dr. Pepper. And not diet. Because I am HEALTHY! I do not consume aspartame! Only real sugar! And corn syrup and caramel coloring!)
Alas, Jenn had no soda, diet or otherwise. Because SHE is really healthy instead of just pretend healthy. But she offered to pick me up some when she ran to the grocery store. For a moment, I hesitated. But she offered, right? That’s different from my asking for it, right?
So I said yes, please. And then a little while later, a DIFFERENT friend, Sarah, appeared before me with a 12-pack of Dr. Pepper in her hands.
"How did you know?" I asked, restraining myself from lunging at the box and opening a can with my teeth.
"A little bird told me you were out," she said, her eyes twinkling.
"Jenn?"
"No—your husband. He emailed me."
(Pardon the delay while I give the Internet a great big hug. Oh, email! How I love you!)
And yes, yes, this means I am so pathetic that I actually lamented to Scott on the phone that I was out of Dr. Pepper but was stubbornly refusing to just go buy some, and it also means that I am totally clueless, because even after the chocolate thing IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME that he would take matters into his own keyboarding fingers to solve my completely ridiculous non-problem. Because he is THAT sweet a guy.
And Sarah is that swell a friend. And when Jenn (also a swell friend) dropped by later with another 12-pack, I could only laugh in chagrin (between delirious gulps of fizzy, vaguely-cherry- flavored-or-do-I-only-think-that-because-I-read-somewhere- that-Dr.-Pepper-is-supposed-to-be-black-cherry-flavored-and-at- the-time-I-was-shocked-because-I-had-no-idea-I-just-thought- it-was-Dr.-Pepper-flavored goodness).
And now I have twenty-four whole sodas mine mine all mine. Except that I drank TWO today. Which leaves twenty-two. (See how good I am at math? Now you can rest easy that I am qualified to teach it to my children.)
Twenty-two. And it just hit me that I will only be here twelve more days.
I will be here for just one more package of Dr. Pepper.
It’s all happening very quickly now.
At least I know what to give as parting gifts to my ten best friends* in the neighborhood. Don’t you know? It’s the original taste that I love so.
*If you are one of my neighborhood friends and I leave without giving you one of my Dr. Peppers, don’t think I was dissing you. I am probably definitely going to keep them all for myself, for the trip.
September 22, 2006 @ 11:25 am | Filed under:
Poetry I wish I could post this Randall Jarrell poem in its entirety, but it is of course under copyright, and I can’t find it anywhere online. If you want to see the rest, you’ll have to look it up at the library, I guess. It would be well worth your time. I’ve never read anything that more poignantly captures the emotional wrench of moving. In this case, we’re experiencing the move through the eyes of a very young girl who knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
Moving
by Randall Jarrell
Some of the sky is grey and some of it is white.
The leaves have lost their heads
And are dancing round the tree in circles, dead;
The cat is in it.
A smeared, banged, tow-headed
Girl in a flowered, flour-sack print
Sniffles and holds up her last bite
Of bread and butter and brown sugar to the wind.
Butter the cat’s paws
And bread the wind. We are moving.
I shall never again sing
Good morning, Dear Teacher, to my own dear teacher.
Never again
Will Augusta be the capital of Maine.
The dew has rusted the catch of the strap of my satchel
And the sun has fallen from the place where it was chained
With a blue construction-paper chain…
***
There is so much more. When the girl thinks about how someone else must draw the Thanksgiving decorations for her classroom, your heart might break.
Even more moving are the lines:
Never again will Orion
Fall on my speller through the star
Taped on the broken window by my cot.
This is what makes Jarrell a master, this ability to capture with perfect clarity the point of view of his speaker. The little girl obviously lives in poverty, and for all we know she is going to a better house, a better life. The poem doesn’t tell us whether this is an upward move or a downward one.
What the girl knows is that everything she knows is changing. A child, like a poet, clings to small pieces of beauty wherever she finds them, and this child has found a piece in the cracked glass of a window. The tape covering the glass makes a star, and stars shine through it.
She studies her speller by starlight, and her strongest attachments are to her school and her teacher. Wherever she is going, for better or worse, she is leaving those things behind, and we can only hope that the stars will continue to shine on her efforts.
September 22, 2006 @ 6:57 am | Filed under:
Writing While going through boxes in the basement, I found my baby book. My mother had tucked this piece of paper inside:
I don’t know how old I was, but I had to have been pretty young. (Mom, do you remember?)
If you click to enlarge, you can just barely make out that: 1) I had yet to master the lower-case a; 2) the spelling of the word “cousin” had me completely flummoxed; and 3) my understanding of story structure has come a long way. “Look! Look! A bird nest. We will have to take care of it. If we don’t it will die.” “OK. Let’s go to the store and buy a big Ice-Cream.” “OK. A big big big one!”
So much for the poor little bird. But, I mean, come on! Ice cream!
At the bottom of the page, my mom wrote: “She wrote this story completely by herself. Maybe we have a budding author on our hands.”
Aw, Mom! Sniffle…
No, it has nothing to do with the move. Remember when I wrote about Hank? Well, he’s home.
The other day I mentioned that I’m an advocate of a non-academic early childhood. In the comments, Betsy wrote:
I have a question about your relaxed approach. I have been relying
on this for years and every one has looked at me like I have three
heads. I got into quite the discussion after Mass on day when two moms
were playing the competition game of what they were going to home
school their soon to be 3 year olds. I chimed in talking about waiting
until the child is ready and being relaxed…you should have seen the
look of horror on their face!!! How do you handle the "neglectful"
response that people seem to give me all the time.
You know, I really love it when people give me an opening like those looks of horror, Betsy. I enthusiastically grab all opportunities to jump up on my soapbox!
In my experience, if you answer skepticism with an eager flood of information, people will nearly always reframe their initial response. Quite often, the are-you-crazy looks are a gut reaction, but when the skeptic hears that you have actually put some thought and research into the issue, her response changes. She may still disagree, but at least she acknowledges that your point of view is an informed one.
So, for example, if someone said, "Are you nuts? Everyone knows that you’ve got to give kids a strong start from an early age or they’ll be behind their peers and never catch up," I’d say, "Actually, there are many educators and scholars who believe just the opposite. Have you read the works of Charlotte Mason? No? John Holt? John Taylor Gatto? Montessori? No? Oh." (Brief pause to digest this astonishing fact.) "Well, if you’re interested in how children learn, you’d probably find them quite fascinating, especially Mason; I know I do."—And then I’d launch into a brief but fact-packed description of Charlotte Mason’s vision for children under seven, emphasizing the richness of a young life filled with storytelling, nature study, cheerful housework, and song.
I have never, ever presented that picture of early childhood to someone without having the person respond positively. "Oh, that sounds so nice!" is a typical response. I really think people—especially mothers of little ones—recognize the beauty of that vision, even if they remain in disagreement over the issue of early instruction in reading and math.
You know, that touches on an important point. In such conversations (and they occur with surprising frequency), I’m truly not out to convert anyone. I don’t initiate them; but if someone opens the door I will jump through it as if there were chocolate on the other side. My aim in this kind of discourse is simply to show that there is thought behind my opinion. It’s amazing how much that relaxes people and shifts the tone of the conversation from confrontation to exchange of ideas.
What happens is that people begin to ask questions—specific questions like, "But what about math?" or "So when do you start teaching reading?" Which means I can respond with specific answers, and suddenly, instead of being on opposite sides of an abyss, we’re two interested parties discussing learning strategies. It’s a whole different kind of conversation, because it naturally leads to book and idea recommendations. ("Oh, gosh, my kids have learned so much math just from playing store or cooking. You learn a ton about fractions from making cookies!")
And that kind of conversation is just FUN.
