Archive for January, 2009
January 11, 2009 @ 9:40 pm | Filed under:
Books Film critic David Denby, writing of his experience revisiting, in his forties, the Great Books
core courses he had taken as a freshman at Columbia University thirty years earlier:
I was reading seriously, reading Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, all the Greeks. But I needed more time. Life got in the way—a good life, but in the way. I had always known it would, but I was determined not to rope off my school adventure, not to become a hermit, anything medieval or cloistered, but to remain a modern middle-class man, living my life as normally as possible. As if I had any choice! There were days when I wanted to be free just to study, to eat at any hour and sleep whenever I wanted to, unshaven and raw as an eighteen-year-old—and then the little one, Thomas, would take my hand and lead me into his room to show me something he had drawn, pulling me away from Plato, and I was exasperated but grateful, because a child’s hand is like nothing else on earth.
January 11, 2009 @ 12:33 pm | Filed under:
Pregnancy My traffic has been through the roof these past few days, and while I’m sure much of that is due to the magnetic allure of Angelica’s milk-white shoulders, it dawned on me that a sizable number of the hits are from friends dropping by to see if there’s any baby news. This became all the more apparent when I switched the glitchy Twitter widget (which scrolled my tweets in the sidebar) to a just-plain-Twitter-button, and the outclick rate to my Twitter page quadrupled. May I just say it is awfully sweet to know how much y’all care? 🙂
But there’s nothing to report. Great checkup at the OB on Friday. Baby’s got plenty of fluid, excellent heart rate, is a happy camper. If nothing happens before Tuesday, I’ll go back for another round of checking up.
BUT SOMETHING IS BOUND TO HAPPEN BEFORE TUESDAY.
Ahem.
Meanwhile, my mama is spoiling me rotten, doing all my household work PLUS beautifying the backyard in the most magnificent way. She is a treasure, my mother, let me tell you. My daddy is pretty swell too—and it’s nice of him to part with my mom for two weeks so she could come entertain my younguns and do my dishes and fill me full of cornbread and ham.
Anyway, all’s well, and I’m in good hands, and we’re all hoping this little person decides to join the party very soon. As in: today would be nice!
During the long months of this pregnancy, I have been blessed with the companionship of a few special friends. We used to see each other only once a month, but lately we’ve been able to get together once or even twice a week, and how eagerly I have looked forward to these sweet moments of fellowship with women whose joy in motherhood outstrips even my own!
I realized today that our time together is drawing to a close…very soon (very, very soon, do you hear me?) it will be time to go our separate ways, and we shall see each other only once a year or thereabouts. Ah, dear friends, whatever will I do without you? Fortunately I happened to have my camera in my bag at our visit today, so I was able to capture a few treasured snapshots of these fair and tender ladies I have come to know so well.
Here they are all together with their precious infants, the whole beautiful bunch of them. Aren’t they lovely?
So serene, so gentle, so rouged.
I have learned so much from these ladies. For example, here I am about to give birth to my sixth child, and yet until I met Angelica would you believe I had no idea it was advisable to blow-dry one’s hair to a silky sheen, tie back a few glossy locks with a ribbon, don a ruffly off-the-shoulder gown, and apply several coats of blusher before sitting down to breastfeed one’s baby?
This is going to make a real difference in my next post-partum experience, let me tell you. Angelica always looks so calm and well rested. I realize now that my customary get-up of hastily scrunchied ponytail, spit-up-stained T-shirt, and no makeup whatsoever has been at the root of the exhaustion I typically experience during those first weeks with a new baby. LOOK beautiful and you’ll FEEL beautiful is Angelica’s motto.
Elspeth has a similar philosophy about pregnancy. I understand now that in banning white clothing from my wardrobe several sticky-fingered toddlers ago, I have been depriving myself of a kind of delicate radiance that would surely have blessed the child in my womb and all in our presence. And that band of pink ribbon below her bosom—how beautifully it offsets her the rosy glow of her lips. Every word that comes out of a mouth like that is pure honey, I suspect. (I can’t say for sure, because demure Elspeth never utters a word. But you can see just by looking at her that she is full of warm and soothing thoughts.)
As for our ringleted chum Swoozie, I admit I worry a little about her sometimes. Those raw bruises on her cheek…the dark rings around her eyes…her habit of staring off into the distance, lost in thought, absently feeding her infant without even looking at him…I have some concerns about her home life. But she has never uttered a word of complaint, so perhaps I’m mistaken. Possibly she is only thinking about when to get her next perm.
Oh, dear friends, how grateful I am for the many times you have entertained me while I waited for our obstetrician to amble into the exam room! It is very good of you, all of you, to have kept such a patient vigil with me as the long, long minutes ticked by.
You will be sorely missed.
My Twitter widget was being persnickety (seems to be a widespread problem today), so I nixed it from the sidebar. But I know a bunch of you are dropping by to see if I’ve twittered any baby news, which I most likely WILL do when the ball finally gets rolling, so here’s the link to my Twitter page for all my friends on babywatch. 🙂
(And thanks for all the well-wishes!)
Yesterday, during Rose’s piano class, my cell phone buzzed with the information that Alice was IMing me. I thumb-tapped back to her: “Hi! Am sitting in piano,” knowing she’d know that meant I was answering from the phone’s tiny keyboard and she should expect truncated responses to her half of the conversation.
“Of course!” she wrote back. “It’s the only piece of furniture big enough to hold you!”
I laughed so hard it’s a wonder my water didn’t break.
January 8, 2009 @ 12:01 am | Filed under:
Links 
…there’s only one thing to be done.
Sprint for the camera. (Or waddle, as the case may be.)
(more…)
Updated to add: lots of useful links & recommendations for both Latin and Greek materials are popping up in the comments—don’t miss ’em!
Kathy asked,
Wasn’t Jane learning Greek at one point (or maybe she is still)? I searched the archives and didn’t see anything. When you have a moment could you please share what she used? My 11yo daughter is just dying to learn Greek and I’m starting my search for a program/book/guide here. Thanks so much!
It was Rose who was (and remains, in intermittent flares) on fire for Greek a few years back. She made her way through the first two levels of Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek and quite enjoyed them. As I recall, Jane too whipped through the primer to learn the Greek alphabet. Both girls liked the format of the Hey Andrew materials, which were very, very simple and bare bones. (The first levels focused primarily on mastering the alphabet.) Looking at the website now, I see they’ve redesigned the covers but the interior page samples look the same.
I would say that I was happy with Hey Andrew as a gentle introduction to the alphabet, with one large caveat (and this is rather delicate, and I hope won’t sound insensitive—bear in mind that I’m the mother of a five-year-old with only semi-intelligible speech, so I really am sensitive to the challenges of speech impediments): the pronunciation CD that came with the workbooks was voiced by a speaker with a pronounced lisp. And for a foreign language program, that really is a bit of a problem. I had to keep correcting Rose’s pronunciation of “epthilon,” and “thigma,” for example. At first I wondered if the classical Greek S-sound really was meant to be a TH, but the speaker lisped in English as well, so I think it was just an aspect of her manner of speaking.
Jane has so enjoyed Classical Academic Press’s Latin for Children materials that I’m quite eager to get a look at their new Greek for Children series when it comes out. Mind you, CAP’s program is extremely workbooky and therefore quite out of character with our unschooly, loosy-goosy, CM-inspired but not CM-structured atmosphere, but our language studies have been a consistently fun and challenging pursuit over the last several years, and absent an immersion experience (which I cannot provide for Greek or Latin!), a kind of methodical, steady study is pretty much the only way to gain absence [edited: “gain absence”?? I plead preggo brain] master a new language. Our path to Latin works for us. (Rose actually prefers the even-more-schooly structure of Memoria Press’s Latina Christiana program, so that’s what she uses, and Jane uses LFC. Beanie absorbs by exposure to the vocab CDs the other girls listen to. For that matter, so do I!)
Hope this helps at least as a starting point, Kathy. If anyone else has a more substantive review of Greek materials, please do chime in or link to a post!
P.S. Here’s a fun video from Steve Demme: Learn the Greek Alphabet in Ten Minutes.
Related posts:
What the Tide Brought In
All Roads Lead to Greece
January 4, 2009 @ 6:11 pm | Filed under:
Books I didn’t read as many books last year as I usually do, because the lion’s share of my reading time was devoured by matters related to the presidential election. 2009 is already off to a better start: am halfway through my third novel already. (One of them, The Uncommon Reader
—a delightful read, by the way—was very short, a novella really. Also, my mother has arrived to help with the baby, whenever the baby decides to make an appearance, and so as far as my children are concerned, I am chopped liver. It is lovely, sometimes, to be chopped liver.)
Anyway: 2008’s reading list. Several of the books I enjoyed most were the handcrafty sort.
I count these as “books read” because I really did read them, cover to cover, eagerly slurping down every single syllable of text and caption. Maybe this year—in the latter half, because I expect my arms to be happily full for a while—I can put some of this reading into practice.
As for fiction, most of the novels I read were children’s books: some old favorites, read aloud to the kids, and some first-time reads for me, so I could discuss them with Jane. Of the latter, I most enjoyed Beth Hilgartner’s A Murder for Her Majesty
, a middle-grade suspense tale set in Elizabethan times, about a young girl forced to hide in a boys’ choir after her father is murdered by court rivals, and Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth
, another fine piece of historical fiction, this one about a young Spanish mapmaker whose quest for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola leads him into a hornet’s nest of intrigue and danger.
I read some excellent nonfiction this year. I’ve already raved about Alice Gunther’s inspiring Haystack Full of Needles and the transformative Outside Lies Magic by John Stilgoe. Another standout was Neil Perrin’s collection of essays about lesser-known literary gems, A Reader’s Delight
. A sweet friend sent me a copy for my birthday last year, and I savored the essays one by one throughout the year. (I wrote about Perrin’s A Child’s Delight
here.) Both the Perrin books have added a column full of enticing titles to my TBR list. One of my reading plans for 2009 is to treat myself to some of those books.
Another interesting nonfiction book I read in ’08 was Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A Street in Marrakesh
. I met the author at a neighborhood Christmas party a year ago; she was the mother of the host, Laura Fernea, who appears in the book as a thirteen-year-old girl. In the late 70s, the Fernea family lived in Marrakesh for a year. It was Elizabeth’s husband’s work that brought them there, but the book focuses on the domestic scene and Elizabeth’s struggles to get to know her Muslim neighbors. Gradually, awkwardly, connections are formed and Elizabeth is invited into other women’s homes, and her yearning to see the real lives of her neighbors—not just the blank faces presented to tourists—is fulfilled. The book is a fascinating look at a culture so tremendously different from America’s, but it is more than a travel book: it’s a moving, honest account of Elizabeth’s vulnerability and determination. Her efforts to cross the ‘stranger in a strange land’ barrier are sometimes rebuffed, sometimes embarrassing, but she presses on nonetheless. I was hoping for another opportunity to chat with Elizabeth, but the annual Christmas caroling party didn’t happen this year. Maybe next year. (As I write, I’m struck by the irony of my own shyness—here I am waiting for the big neighborhood party rather than making the kind of personal overture Elizabeth herself would never have shrunk from!)
There were other good books on my list in 2008, but I can smell my mother’s good cornbread just about ready to come out of the oven. I’d like to say I’ll write about the rest later, but we all know how unlikely that is. Unless this baby tarries another week, in which case maybe I’ll have all too much time to blog!
