Book Review: Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen

I'm such a sucker for a gorgeous book cover!  Over the course of 2011, I've heard several times from those also doing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge that Sarah Addison Allen was an author to check out!  I've had her debut novel, Garden Spells, on my radar for a while now and finally settled down just before Christmas to read it.  After whizzing through it in two days, I then followed it up with her second novel, The Sugar Queen.  Her style is very similar to Alice Hoffman and Garden Spells is reminiscent of Hoffman's Practical Magic.

Garden Spells opens on the house of Claire Waverly.  The Waverly family has always been special.  The townspeople have sought potions from their garden to help them with life and love.  Claire owns a catering business and has a special talent of making just the right food to make what her client's desires come true.  Her distant elderly cousin, Evanelle, has the gift of anticipation.  Evanelle is always giving people things she knows they will need down the road.  When Claire's estranged sister Sydney returns to town with her 5 year old daughter Bay, Claire's life is turned upside down.  What magic will happen when the Waverly women reunite?  

In The Sugar Queen, 27 year old Josey is trapped.  She lives with her elderly mother as her glorified errand girl, and she seeks comfort in her treasure trove of sweets, travel magazines, and romance novels she keeps in a secret room attached to her closet.  When Della Lee, a tough talking hard living waitress, takes refuge in her closet, Josey's life starts changing.  Is it for the better?

Both novels have similar plot lines---stifled heroine's life is up heaved when a mysterious person enters her life.  Both novels have love (and a wee bit o' sex), a violent ex-husband or boyfriend, and supernatural forces at work.  Both novels are also pleasant, mindless reads.  After all the heavy reading I've done this year, it's nice to end December on a fluffy, cotton candy like note.  If you need a pleasant book to tuck you in at night, Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen fit the bill.

Starting Oak Meadow Kindergarten with Tom Thumb

Back when I was in my Waldorf phase, I bought on eBay a vintage 1993 set of Oak Meadow Kindergarten curricula (here's a link to their current kindergarten offerings).  I used it in its entirety with Red the year she was four and we really enjoyed it so I dusted it off this week for Tom Thumb.  Although Oak Meadow is not considered "real Waldorf" by Waldorf purists (if you want "real Waldorf", look here or here), it has all the things I liked about the educational philosophy while still leaning mainstream.  The beauty of this curriculum is its simplicity and gentle pace.  For example, here's what they want you to do for language arts for week 1:


-Tell the story of The Magic Spindle to your child from the Fairy Tale book.
-Ask your child to use crayons to draw a picture of a haystack and the letter A in his main lesson book.
-Ask your child to make the letter A in beeswax.
-Help your child gather sticks and tie them in bundles to form an A.
-Ask your child to draw the letter A with a stick in the dirt.
-Help your child find tree branches that fork.  Tie a piece of yarn between the forks to form the letter A.  Find many branches and make many As.
-Teach your child the tongue twister "My Dame."


There are also short fun activities for mathematics, science, art and music.  I'm sure most kids could get all the activities done in one day and all in one shot if you let them.  The idea is to stretch it out and really let it sink in, not to mention have fun!


Tom Thumb has never been an artsy kid.  Red was always using crayons as a preschooler and got in trouble more than once for "decorating" her bedroom furniture.  Tom Thumb, on the other hand, has never shown any interest in drawing.  Even when I've offered to do it with him, he declines.  I was really proud of him yesterday when he gave it a try.  We've read The Magic Spindle three times already this week (he likes it that much!) so I asked him if he wanted to try to draw a picture of the spindle in the haystack with me.  That picture is supposed to resemble a letter A.  Here's the sample I drew back a couple of years ago when I was doing the curriculum with Red:

Tom Thumb picked up his crayons and with a little coaxing he produced his own drawing:

It was nice to see him give something he's not particularly fond of a try.

Then, of course, he was back to doing what he does love:

We're still plugging away at The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.  When I started this book with Red, she was three months shy of being 5 years old.  Tom Thumb just turned 4 in September.  We started sooner so we're going at a much slower pace and my expectations are set right this time.  Doing this book at times was frustrating with Red because my expectations were all wrong.  I thought we could get a lesson completed every day.  That was completely unrealistic.  My goal this time around is 1/3 of lesson per day or finishing one or two lessons each week.  For the 4 year old with a short attention span, this seems to be the sweet spot.  Here's an example of the amount we might get done at one time.  This picture shows the second page of lesson #46.  This is equal to about 1/3 of a daily lesson:

Slow and steady wins the race, right?  

I'm hopeful that we'll be on target to complete the book in June 2013, right before Tom Thumb enters 1st grade.  My mom-in-law arrives tomorrow for a week long holiday visit.  I'm off to do battle with some dirt! :-)

Book Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I fell completely off the horse in terms of my goal of finishing 52 books in 2011.  This last month has been a struggle.  I know it's not technically winter, but it certainly feels like it, and I always struggle with being motivated to do anything once the days get shorter and darker.  I've pumped up my Vitamin D intake and the Cobbler has insisted that I take out my Happy Light so I have an inkling of hope that I can still make it!


Bearing that in mind, I have been wading my way through The Elegance of the Hedgehog over the last month.  It was my book club's pick for our December meeting so needless to say I didn't finish it in time, but the woman who is charge of getting our books back to the library took pity on me and let me keep the book a few extra days.  Thankfully, I completed it today--- my 46th book!


Just so we're clear here---the book is not about a hedgehog.  Well, not literally.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog has two narrators --- Renee, a 50 something concierge for a high end apartment building in Paris, and Paloma, a 12 year old girl who lives in one of the apartments.  Because she finds life to be pretty meaningless, Paloma is planning to kill herself and set her apartment on fire on her 13th birthday.  While the two characters don't have any interaction until mid way through the book, they have much in common.  Renee and Paloma both feel trapped in what they view as a sea of mediocrity.   They both feel they have to hide their intellect from those around them, and they both despise the airs put on by the wealthy people who live in the building.  Renee goes to such extremes to hide her intelligence so that she seems a "normal" concierge that she purchases poor quality food (apparently, a concierge wouldn't eat filet mignon) and rigs her TV to appear that it's on all the time to maintain the facade.  Everything changes when the food critic who lives on the fourth floor succumbs to a heart attack and his apartment is sold to a Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu.  Ozu immediately sees Renee and Paloma as they are and attempts to befriend them.  His actions ultimately change the course of their lives.  


Overall, I was charmed by this book.  Unlike the pretentious 15 year old narrator in the book The Beginners that I read earlier in the year, Paloma's 12 year old voice is actually believable.  She wants to find a reason to live in this world and hunts relentlessly for it.  Renee is also a very sympathetic character and you root for her to come out of her shell as the book progresses.  It's been common in many of the books I've read this year for the authors to have their narrators alternate chapters.  This is the case in this book as well.  One interesting twist though is the use of different fonts.  Renee has a font similar to Times New Roman, while Paloma has a tinier version of what appears to be Arial.

My only complaints with the book (which really are minor) are its long passages about philosophy and its apparent political agenda.  In this book, with the exception of Ozu, if you're rich, you're stupid.  The rich people in the book are educated, but about things that are pointless in Renee's view.  Paloma feels the same way about her entire family, which is justified by how they're portrayed, but it rang a little forced to me.  In addition, there were a few points in the book where the author was trying to make a point about the level of Renee's intelligence by having her go on and on about Kant and a couple other philosophers' theories.  That really made the book drag.  If those passages had been tightened up a bit by the book's editor, this book could have gone beyond charming to amazing.


In the end, The Elegance of the Hedgehog leaves you with a wonderful message --- that there is beauty to be found in our broken world.  And at this time of year, that's something that I needed to hear.

Deck the halls...

...literally.

Here's my grocery list, Mom...

Last night, Red was complaining to me about how I never send money with her to school to buy snacks.  I'm really picky about what I want the kids eating and the "snacks" offered in her school cafeteria include a variety of chips and gummy fruit snacks.  In an effort to compromise, I said that when I make up our next grocery list she could tell me what she wanted me to buy for her lunches.  Our scanner is on the fritz right now so I can't post a photo of the original list, but here is a type written version of the list she emerged with about ten minutes after our conversation.  I have corrected the phonetic spellings for the ease of your reading:


Donuts
Propel Zero Water
Candy and graham crackers
Sun chips flavor cheese
Cheez-its
Purple foot wine for you or another kind
spicy chocolate
yogurt from Yoplait
thing for shoe for the dolls
things for star of the week poster
knitting kit
Puffs Plus tissues
Blanket or things to make blankets
more super friend coloring books
Books like rainbow magic
costumes for me and tom thumb
thing for doll clothes
thing for my wall
patches for my snow pants
decorations for the inside
decorations for fan
jewelry making kit
thing to decorate my closet
princess pink paint from either lowes or home depot
computer for me in my room


What is this?  A grocery list or a Christmas list?!?!?  I was especially amused by the addition of a bottle of wine for me and the thinly veiled request for me to paint her bedroom.  Is she really planning on decorating her ceiling fan and closet?  Only time will tell...

Want to jam out to some Christmas music for free?

Just a quick FYI ---Amazon is giving away a free Christmas song on MP3 everyday through Christmas.  Yay!  You can get such greatest hits as Twisted Sister's Deck the Halls.  I hurt my neck from all the head banging I just did. :-)


There's also some more normal ones too like Mannheim Steamroller's gorgeous rendition of Greensleeves, a pretty version of O Holy Night by someone named Leigh Nash, and Celtic Woman (they're always on PBS!) singing Ave Maria.  


Enjoy!

In the land of obnoxious Christmas letters...

The Cobbler and I in our 2003 Christmas letter photo during the end of my blonde phase.

Do Christmas letters annoy you or do you love them?  I fall into both camps depending on who the letter is coming from.  I have read about literally everything from won horseback riding tournaments and soccer games to a cancer diagnosis.  Yep, I once received a generic Christmas letter from a friend announcing she had cancer.  I debate every year about whether or not I'll write one, but then I look back at all the ones I've written going back to 2003 and think about how much things have changed since then.  Each letter is like a year put on ice for me.  It cracks me up how the letters were initially all about me and the Cobbler and what little we did aside from our jobs to all about the kids today.  Just for kicks, here are some highlights from our letters of the past---


2003:  With both of us working and no kids, I actually devoted an entire paragraph to our job descriptions.  That must have been a thrilling read for the relatives.


2004: We went to Italy for two weeks that fall and found out Red was on the way.  We got our cats too and I described them as "challenging---as baby animals tend to be."  That also was the Christmas that Pumpkin climbed the Christmas tree and took up residence there.


2005: Red is 6 months old when this letter goes out.  Here are my favorite sentences.  This one is regarding Red --- "Her musical tastes range from classical to the great nap inducer Celine Dion to disco.  Her current favorite song is “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen."  And about the cats I write--- "We were initially nervous about how they would react to Red, but we are relieved to report that they have adopted her as one of their own...Oliver is constantly trying to groom her (licking her head would be one of his favorite pastimes if I let him), and Pumpkin watches Red take her bath every night (although it may be just so she can drink the bath water)."


2006: A whole paragraph is devoted in depth to Red's vocabulary (again, probably a snoozer for the relatives), declaring her favorite words to say as "cracker and cookie."


2007: Tom Thumb was born this year.  There's a paragraph gushing about how he "lights up any room with his smile" and Red's room was clearly a fire hazard because "her bed is so jammed with books there is hardly room for her to sleep!"


2008:  My fave passage about Red  is "Her obsession with pirates is entering its eighth month.  She just finally let me remove the skull and cross bones tattoo that she has had on since Halloween."  About Tom Thumb I wrote "He also likes anything that has buttons (e.g. TV remotes, the telephone).  If we didn’t watch him like a hawk, everything would be broken.  We are now convinced that he is either going to be a professional singer (he is constantly making yodeling noises) or the next Olympic gold medalist in swimming."  I wrote about how I was reupholstering our living room furniture and I hoped I would finish before the kids entered high school.  On a good note, that is one unfinished project that has actually been completed since then...but I don't think I actually finished until the following summer.


2009: "The Queen of Mischief has found a perfect minion in her brother.  If there’s crayon on the wall, cookies missing from the jar, or the shampoo bottle is empty even though it was full before their bath, Red's first response is “Tom Thumb did it!”  And he probably did do it, but definitely with some help from his big sister. "


2010: "Red spends her free time singing loudly, interpretive dancing (it’s a hoot), reading, and making art out of anything and I mean anything.  Tom Thumb practices daily to be a future super spy by climbing on counters, discovering new ways to eat peanut butter, stealing bananas then jamming them in his mouth to destroy the evidence, and commandeering any available electronic devices (including the Cobbler’s cell phone, the GPS, etc.) for his own secret missions.  At his side through it all is Blue Blankie, his well worn baby blanket which he loses every single day and then cries until I find it.  I told the Cobbler for Christmas I want a tracking device for it so I don’t lose my mind."


And now we're up to our 2011 Christmas letter.  For those of you among my readers who know you'll be receiving a hard copy of this, you can close your eyes.  As for everyone else, I unveil our very own obnoxious holiday letter---the 2011 edition:

"Red entered first grade this year.  She wishes she could go to school for a couple of hours and then spend the rest of the day at home playing with me and Tom Thumb.  She enjoys taking jazz and Hawaiian dance classes weekly and has joined her school’s Girl Scout troop.  Red spends her spare time singing and dancing in front of the mirror in our living room, reading, drawing fairy castles, and building forts out of couch cushions with Tom Thumb.  At the top of her Christmas list are “minerals and diamonds.”  Obviously, she thinks she’s been extra good this year!

We don’t know how Tom Thumb continues to grow taller when it seems like he never eats!  His latest hobby is disagreeing with everyone about everything.  If he asks us if a stop sign is red and we say yes, he’ll say, “No, it isn’t.”  His other favorite is “No, I willn’t.”  Some days I feel like we’re trapped in a Charles Dickens’ novel with his choice of archaic English.  Tom Thumb started taking tae kwon do in August in a preschool class called “Little Dragons.”  He earned his yellow belt in November and was thrilled since his favorite color is yellow.  When at home and not debating me, Tom Thumb likes playing board games and covering the floor of his room with train tracks.  Tom Thumb is asking Santa for “a yellow dump truck and a yellow gumball.”

The Cobbler completed building his electric car using a 2001 Focus body in the spring.  The Cobbler and his car with its “ELECTRC” vanity plate were the talk of the neighborhood all summer.  My time was spent in an unending battle against dirt and laundry, while running the kids to their classes and volunteering at Red's school.  I had a goal of reading 52 books this year and I’ve finished 44 so I still have a remote shot at making it.  If not, there’s always next year!  My favorite book this year was “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann.  Read it. You’ll like it!

So what do you think?  Obnoxious or just right?  Too late!  It's already printed---ha ha!  

In the end, I like our Christmas letters.  This letter is like my very own time capsule.  Is it gushing?  Yes.  Does it leave out some of the harder moments?  Definitely.  But what do you want to remember most?  I choose the beautiful moments 2011 has given me.

Getting ready to celebrate St. Nicholas Day

Our family has celebrated St. Nicholas day on December 6th since the children were small.  My husband and I LOVE Christmas!  He loves to decorate the outside of the house (I think Clark Griswold is his inspiration), we have a large Department 56 Village that we've collected over the years, and we especially love Santa Claus.  Although I figured out my mother was Santa because they had the same handwriting, the Cobbler was told by a Sunday School teacher that Santa wasn't real when he was in 1st grade.  


I always wanted our kids to grow up knowing that Santa Claus was a real person so they weren't in for a shock when they were older.  Over the years we have emphasized that Santa Claus or St. Nicholas actually lived and that people do kind things for each other or give gifts at Christmas to emulate him.  Every year we read them the same books from the library about Saint Nicholas around this time of year.  


Our first pick is usually The Legend of St. Nicholas by Demi.  This book is the most religious in tone of our three books we read and focuses on St. Nicholas's sainthood.  It covers St. Nicholas's entire life, including his childhood and also some of the more macabre stories like the murder and pickling of the boys who St. Nicholas then resurrects.  Red, who is a kid who really digs church, loves this one.  She even insists on saying the prayer to St. Nicholas that is printed the end of the book---and we're not even Catholic!

Our next pick is a biography by Ann Tompert simply titled St. Nicholas.  This book is in more of a biography format and has some really interesting illustrations that are intended to look like mosaics.  Again, this book covers his life in its entirety and discusses his miracles, but takes a much less religious approach and explains his life in a more "here's the facts ma'am" narrative.

Finally, my favorite is Santa Who? by Gail Gibbons.  It talks about the origins of Christmas and its legends.  The author talks about who St. Nicholas was, how his persona was developed into Sinter Cleas in Holland and then Santa Claus, how December 25 was chosen as the date for Christmas, and how Santa Claus is depicted in America and in other countries.


I so look forward to December 6th.  We usually read all three books, but particularly stress the story of the three impoverished maidens, from which the tradition of hanging stockings comes.  Then, Red and Tom Thumb put their shoes on the fireplace mantel before they go to bed.  We fill their shoes with gold chocolate coins and they get a new Christmas book.  This year's book is The Twelve Days of Christmas in Michigan.

I'm really looking forward to reading it to them!  If you want a treasure trove of information about St. Nicholas and different ways to commemorate his day (December 6), go to The St. Nicholas Center website.  It's fantastic!

Turkey Lurkey! It's time for Thanksgiving books!

Here are our family's picks for fave Thanksgiving books we've read this month---

When a town is reduced to considering shredded wheat as their Thanksgiving dinner, they hatch a plan to catch their "plump and perky turkey" by recruiting a turkey as a model for a turkey tribute art festival.  Hi jinx ensue!

The ugly pumpkin is devastated when he isn't picked to be a jack o' lantern for Halloween, but things start looking up around Thanksgiving when he realizes that he's a SQUASH!

Speaking of turkey, Thanksgiving dinner will be at my parents' house like every year.  And like every year, I must assume that we won't be offered any leftovers.  I know it's shocking, but they like to keep all the leftovers for themselves!  As a result (and by the Cobbler's request), Thanksgiving the Remix will be happening at our house on Friday.  If I was going to cook a turkey, it wasn't going to be one that's jacked up on hormones and antibiotics and raised in the equivalent of a dark room. Amazingly, I was able to find a fresh, free range, organic turkey in the city!  It was a little bit weird having Tom Thumb socialize along the fence with some turkeys that are going to be on someone's dining room table on Thursday, but we had a pretty awesome experience at Roperti's Turkey Farm.  One of the employees even carried our turkey to my car!  As my vegetarian alternative, I'm planning on making this yummy looking veggie streudel on Thursday.  Let the good times roll!

Book Review: Let the Great World Spin

Before I get into my review, I have to share a few images with you---

It always amazes me the variety of covers a book may have depending upon the country of its release.  Why the red-orange line drawing of the New York City skyline topped off by the tightrope walker on the U.S. cover, while Europe gets the guy doing the back bend or the man lying down on the tightrope?


When I first found out my book club was reading Let the Great World Spin for our November meeting, I was under the impression the book was about tightrope walking.  I guess that's a logical conclusion since there's a tightrope walker in all the cover art.  So when I started reading the book and the author opened the book with two Irish brothers Corrigan and Cieran, I kept trying to figure out who was going to end up being the tight rope guy.  It turns out the answer is neither.


Let the Great World Spin is set in Vietnam era New York City.  Corrigan is a member of a monastic order and he lives in the projects trying to help prostitutes.  His brother Cieran comes from Ireland to live with him.  The first seventy pages of the book sets up their relationship and Corrigan's relationship with others.  A tragic incident occurs at the end of the chapter.  I was waiting anxiously to see what happened next, but I didn't get to find out just then because the next chapter was about Claire.


Claire is a woman who lives in a Park Avenue penthouse who lost her son in Vietnam.  She's a member of a group of women who have all lost children to the war who periodically meet for coffee and breakfast.  It really was an abrupt jump for me.  What about Corrigan and Cieran?  What happened to them?  At this point, I was a bit frustrated with the author but decided to read on.  I didn't get to read anymore about Claire though because the third chapter was about Lara and Blaine.


The book continued this way---each chapter from a different character's perspective.  The one thing that seemed to unite them was them all seeing or hearing about a tightrope walker up on a line between the World Trade Center Towers.  The more you read, however, the more you find out that it isn't the tightrope walker who is connecting them all.  They were all already connected.


Let the Great World Spin is one of those books that when you finally realize what's happening (in this case, that all the characters are linked in some way) you can't wait to get to the next chapter.  I was a fan of the TV show Lost when it was airing and it had a similar format as this book.  In each episode, you would get some background on a character and then it would turn out that they're linked to someone else on the island.  It's the same situation here.  The author Colum McCann does an amazing job describing people and locations.  I'm not a person who normally can hear a character's voice in my head.  It's usually my own voice just reading the text.  While reading this book though, I actually felt like I could hear the characters speak.  He described New York City in such a way that the location actually became a character for me.  Because the characters develop more and more in each chapter (some that were mere supporting actors in the beginning get to tell their own story later in the book), you feel like you really know them by the end.  A hardened prostitute named Tillie becomes a grandmother desperate to see her grandchildren.  A rich white woman from the Upper East Side becomes close friends with a black woman from the Bronx.  A man can walk the tightrope between the twin towers and live.  Everything that is impossible is suddenly possible...or is it?  Ultimately, the book's message for me was that there is hope in all things no matter how dark the outlook is at the moment.


Even though it's the 44th book I've read this year, Let the Great World Spin is my favorite book so far.  It hands down beats everything else I've read and I highly recommend it.


I leave you with a line that comes near the end of the book that sums up the book's message for me:


"The world spins.  We stumble on.  It is enough."

Up to my ears in SAGE!---Harvesting and freezing herbs

Tom Thumb poses with the giant sage bush while opening his bag  to collect the herb harvest.

I'm a little tardy for the party this year in terms of harvesting herbs.  We have a small herb garden in our yard that is home to all my favorites --- parsley, basil, rosemary, thyme, chives, mint, oregano, and sage.  Our sage went absolutely BONKERS this year and became a small bush.  I finally cut it back today with Tom Thumb's help and also cut some of the remaining rosemary, thyme and oregano.

Here's the monster sage---

 My baby stick of rosemary...

 A ton of thyme...

I also learned my lesson about oregano---bury the pot it comes in underground with it.  My oregano is now a ground cover in the herb garden!


The real question though is what to do with this overabundance of sage?  I'll probably freeze most of it, but it has also inspired me to try to make my own smudge sticks.  My kitchen certainly could use some purification.  Maybe the kids would complain less about my cooking?  Ha ha!  So I'll hang some to dry as well.  I also found this link to 45 things to do with fresh sage.


After doing my research, here's the skinny on freezing fresh herbs:

First, wash those little stinkers.  Literally!  It smells so good in my kitchen!)

Then, pat dry.

Pick off all the wilted or brown or spotted leaves, if you haven't done it already.

Remove the rest of the leaves off the stems (except for thyme.  Leave those leaves attached).

Bag 'em, tag 'em, and toss 'em in the freezer.  

Voila---fresh herbs to add to recipes in the winter!

I finished the rosemary, thyme and a bit of oregano.  I think I could harvest oregano forever and still not run out.  The sage is resting peacefully on my counter awaiting my next move.

Tonight is Tom Thumb's belt test in karate for yellow belt---woo hoo!  Can't wait to report how that turns out.  

One more quick thing --- if you live near a Kroger grocery store, you must partake in some store brand salted caramel truffle ice cream.  Happiness on a spoon!

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: Katie and the Sunflowers

I love books by James Mayhew!  I heard about them when Red was 3 or 4 and couldn't wait to check them out at the library.  At the time, I was really committed to the Charlotte Mason method and one of the things her philosophy advocates is picture study of great works of art.  Katie and the Sunflowers, along with Mayhew's other books, incorporates the works of famous artists into the book's plot.


I've been reading Katie and the Sunflowers to Tom Thumb this week and he loves it!  He wants to read "the sunflower book" before his nap everyday.  I don't mind because I love the story and the illustrations too.  In this book, Katie goes to the art museum with her grandmother.  She comes upon Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 

reaches out to touch it, and accidentally topples the vase of flowers out of the picture.  She enlists one of the dancing girls from Paul Gauguin's Breton Girls Dancing to help her put things back together.  

Things go from bad to worse when the dancing girl's dog runs off into the museum.  Fun and mayhem ensue with them stepping into more paintings to recover her dog before putting everything right again.  What a great book!  While our library has two of Mayhew's other Katie books (Katie Meets the Impressionists and Katie and the Mona Lisa.  Red especially liked the one with Mona Lisa!), I've been perusing his other Katie titles on Amazon and like what I see.  I think I may have found a Christmas gift or two for Red and Tom Thumb.  Yay!

A new reading practice plan for Red

First grade has turned out to be much more intense than I anticipated.  I really don't remember it being this crazy when I was 6!  Red has homework nearly every night.  In addition, her teacher has requested that she read to me 15-20 minutes each evening.  Before we were only doing read alouds at bedtime.  With everything we already have going on, what's a mama to do?


I finally figured out what we're going to try and we gave it a shot for the first time last night.  I picked out two books for her at the library this week that are at her reading level.  I gave her the choice of Catwings or Sarah Plain and Tall.  She chose Catwings and read me a chapter last night.  I asked her some quick comprehension questions about the story (i.e. What's the name of the kittens' mom?  What's different about the kittens?  Why does their mother want them to leave the neighborhood?).  Then I read her a chapter of Princess Academy, the new read aloud chapter book we just started.  I'm hopeful that this new reading plan will work for us and help her reading improve even more.  


What do you do for reading practice at your house?

Book Review: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Red received The Mysterious Benedict Society as a a birthday gift from my sister Christy earlier in the year.  Christy is the relative who gives books for every occasion (she's notorious for trolling used book stores) and usually makes good selections.  This time she picked another hit.


The book opens with protagonist Reynie Muldoon living at an orphanage.  Reynie is an extremely bright child who longs for more challenges in life.  When his teacher Miss Perumal comes across a curious newspaper advertisement soliciting gifted children looking for "special opportunities" to take a test, Reynie decides to check it out.  Only four brilliant children make the cut after the testing---Reynie, the obsessive compulsive Sticky Washington, the MacGyver-esque Kate Wetherall, and the annoyingly stubborn Constance Contraire.  They come together under the tutelage of the peculiar Mr. Benedict to form "The Mysterious Benedict Society" and begin a dangerous adventure to save the world.


The author's tone had a Roald Dahl feeling to me, which I enjoyed.  As a read aloud, this book was LONG.  It clocks in at 485 pages and the print is on the small side.  Because of the length, the book at times dragged.  Sometimes I felt that the writer could have tightened the plot up a bit and made it clip along a bit faster.  That's from an adult point of view though because Red LOVED it.  She couldn't wait for a new chapter each night.  We took a few nights off here and there to read other things so it actually took us nearly two months to read it.  In fact, she was so into the book that she wants to start the sequel, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey.  I'm pushing for a break to read another Aunt Christy gift, Princess Academy.  It looks right up Red's alley, not to mention it won the Newbery Honor in 2006.


I'm hoping to get back in the swing of things with blogging and life in general this coming week.  Last week was kind of a mess with Halloween (had a great time, but it was a little piece of crazy), jury duty, and being sick.  Yes, jury duty actually made me sick.  After they picked my panel for a trial, the deputy escorted us to a spare court room where we sat for hours with no water.  There were no drinking fountains on the floor and the bathroom was extremely filthy.  I resorted to drinking from the bathroom tap at one point out of desperation.  By the time I got home, my headache was bad from the dehydration that I threw up.  So I can say with confidence, jury duty makes me sick.  In the end, the defendant plead guilty to a lesser charge so they didn't need us anyway.  Sigh...


And Christmas is officially on it's way whether I like it or not.  It drives me batty when the local radio stations start playing Christmas music the day after Halloween.  Grrrrr....  
On a good note, you all will get sneak peeks on all the projects I'm working on for gifts in the coming weeks.  


Cheers!

Learning to read with Tom Thumb

Recently, Tom Thumb expressed a desire to learn how to read.  Not really knowing where he was at in terms of knowing his letter sounds, I whipped out my favorite reading program The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.  The first 26 lessons are about teaching all the vowel and consonant sounds.  I decided instead of doing the lessons I'd see what he knew already by asking him.  Amazingly, Tom Thumb knew all the letter sounds, with the exception of a strange pronunciation of the letter H (when he sees the letter H he says "hill."  I don't get it either).  Because of that, I skipped those lessons and started right in with him on lesson 27.  I figure we'll resolve the "hill" problem as we go along.


In the last week, we've been working through the lessons in the book for 5-10 minutes just before his nap and he seems to be progressing well.  I don't have any expectations for how fast we'll complete a lesson or how long we'll do it per day so it has been really relaxed.  Today we finished up lesson 35 and went on to lesson 36 which covers S sounds like /z/: is, his, as, and has.  I'm hopeful that this program will work as well for him as it did for Red!

Book Review: The City of Ember

As my year of attempting to read 52 books in 52 weeks is rapidly coming to a close, I continue to look for more interesting reads to inspire me, make me think, and bring me some joy.  And of course a little brain candy is good for you!  


Two of my favorite people in my book club offered up the book The City of Ember as a recommendation.  While this is considered a children's book recommended for ages 9-12, its topic is rather serious.  The book opens with some people known as "The Builders" inserting a message for the people of Ember into a box.  The box is to be entrusted to the mayor and will open on its own in 200 years.  When the box comes into the hands of the seventh mayor, he removes the box from its hiding place, takes it home, and attempts to open it in the hope that it will offer some cure for the "coughing sickness" that is afflicting him and many other people in Ember.  He fails to open the box, and dies before returning it to its spot.  The box and its contents remain a mystery and come to rest in the back of a closet.


The book fast forwards to the year 241.  Lina Mayfleet is 12 and has completed her schooling.  She await the mayor's arrival at her classroom where she will receive her job assignment in the city of Ember.  Ember is a city engulfed in complete darkness, only lit by street lights and the lights inside buildings.  There are frequent blackouts, however, because the city's power comes from an old generator that is in ill repair.  The city is gradually deteriorating.  Rumors of food and supply shortages are rampant.  The clothes washing machines that used to clean the clothes now have to be agitated by hand.  Everything is saved so it can be resold.  The one thing Lina wants is to receive the job assignment of "messenger"---the people who run from one person to another delivering messages for money.  Instead of drawing the messenger job, Lina is assigned to the Pipeworks as a water and sewerage repair assistant.  A childhood friend Doon gets her coveted messenger job and offers to trade.  Then the real story begins...


I enjoyed this book and it reminded me a lot of Lois Lowry's The Giver with a smidge of the movie Logan's Run.  There are so many questions that need to be answered in this book.  What's in the box?  Where is Ember?  Can they escape?  Should they even try?


There were some really interesting details that the author included that I enjoyed.  The city's library is filled with books only written by the people who have lived since Ember was founded.  While looking for a book about fire in the library, Doon discovers a book called "Mysterious Words from the Past."  One of the words referenced is "hogwash."  The entry states "means nonsense, though no one knows what a hog is or why one would wash it."  Another passage that I found interesting and touching is when Lina finds out that a store owner has some colored pencils.  Pencils have become rare and colored ones are nearly unheard of.  He's charging $5 for each pencil when it only costs $7 to get a coat.  Lina wants them so bad she buys a blue and green.  She later, coincidentally, uses the blue pencil to color the sky of a picture she's drawing even though she has never seen the sky before.


After reading the book, I discovered that it had been made into a movie starring Bill Murray and Tim Robbins in 2008.  I don't remember hearing of it, but now I'll have to get it from the library.  Here's the trailer:

While clearly written for children, this book definitely posed some questions that are important for adults to think about too.  What would happen if the Earth were no longer inhabitable.  Where would we go?  What would we do?  What can we do to make sure that the future is safe for our children and grandchildren?  I think I smell a future read aloud for Red and I.

Playing Rightstart Math Games with Tom Thumb

With all the math I've been doing with Red, Tom Thumb has been eagerly eyeing the box of math manipulatives.  He begged me today to take them out so reluctantly I gave it a shot.  I really wasn't sure that he was old enough, but he proved me wrong!  


To get started (because I needed a refresher on the preschool stuff), I took out the Rightstart A lesson manual.  I bought Rightstart A starter kit a couple of years ago for Red.  I really appreciate the way Rightstart incorporates lots of manipulatives and games to make math fun!  The lessons sometimes can be lengthy so for the sake of time we switched to Singapore this year for Red.  


The first few lessons involve recognizing quantities using fingers, beads, and tally sticks.  Tom Thumb and I ran threw the first few lessons with no problem, and we were having a great time to boot!  He loves building things with the tally sticks (AKA popscicle sticks) when we're not using them.  We enjoyed playing Memory with the quantity cards the most.  We took the stack of tally stick and bead cards (they go up to 10), laid them all face down, and matched up.  Here's an example of what those cards look like.  I made these myself from card stock by copying some appendix pages in the lesson book.  Each of these cards represent the quantity 9.

  Then, we applied what we learned by entering quantities on the abacus.

Who knew we could have such a great time doing math?  

I'm betting that this won't be a one day thing.  :-)

Book Review: Leap of Faith by Queen Noor

My book club's selection for October was Leap of Faith by Jordan's Queen Noor.  I wasn't really sure what to expect.  I remember hearing her name before, but that's about it.  After finishing up A Tale of Two Cities, I plowed through this book in record time.


Queen Noor (Lisa Halaby was her birth name) was born in the United States.  Her father was the head of the FAA under JFK, and she went on to become part of the first co-ed graduating class at Princeton University.  After graduating with a degree in architecture and urban planning, she went on to work for a firm in Tehran.  Due to her father's government connections, she met many dignitaries including Jordan's King Hussein.  King Hussein's 3rd wife had recently died in a helicopter crash, leaving him with three children under the age of 5.  Their whirlwind courtship included the children, and upon their marriage she took on the name Noor Al Hussein, meaning "the light of Hussein."  A large portion of the book chronicles the political upheaval that occurred in the Middle East during the 1980s and 1990s, including Desert Storm.  The book then takes us through King Hussein's battle with cancer and ultimately his death in 1999.


I enjoyed this book.  I thought it was a good mix of the history of the region and personal anecdotes.  I especially enjoyed hearing the stories that humanized the Queen---like their constant tardiness.  I found a story of them being late for a meeting with the British royal family especially comical.  They were so late that they completely missed lunch and arrived in time for afternoon tea.  Queen Noor was so hungry that she took extra tea sandwiches and then even ate some of the vegetables out of the royals' garden while touring the palace grounds!  There was also a funny tale of how their family dog would often swim in front of their vacation home and have near misses with Israeli gun boats.  The dog would swim close to the Israeli border, and as the gunboats approached the King would speed out in their boat and pick the dog up.


I was most intrigued with the history of the region.  I had no idea that the concept of creating the nation of Israel pre-dated World War II.  I also had very little understanding of the level of bitterness the founding of Israel created in the Palestinians.  I am very sympathetic to the discrimination and the pain the Jews have experienced.  On the other hand, the idea of being forced out of my home and off my land to resettle elsewhere and have someone else move in because some other far off countries decided it was a good idea---wow.  Yes, I think I would be angry.


While I found the book very interesting, the majority of my book club that met last night disliked the book.  The consensus was that they were hoping for more memoir and less political history of the region.  I understood their point of view, but I also understand that Queen Noor is still part of the Jordan political scene (her stepson is the current king) and needs to protect her country's interests and pride.  I guess my expectations for how much would be revealed was lower.  In addition, they felt it was very one sided.  I thought --- of course it is!  She's defending her husband's legacy!


I think I also felt different because I was ignorant about the time period covered because of my age (I was a child and teenager during the events in the book).  I feel by reading the book I really learned quite a bit about the Middle East and why they are so leery of the United States.  One instance that really shocked me was when the U.S. wanted King Hussein to change the location of where he signed their peace agreement with Israel from a city of the border between the two countries to the White House.  King Hussein strongly felt it should be signed in his country.  To get him to sign the peace agreement at the White House, the U.S. forgave a $700 million (you read that right --- $700 MILLION) debt that Jordan owed and gave Jordan a fleet of fighter jets.  The debt forgiveness and jets were passed in the middle of the night attached to an agriculture bill while C-SPAN wasn't filming.  Obviously, the King took the deal.  The whole episode made me feel even more uncomfortable about my country's involvement in Middle Eastern politics.


The bottom line is Leap of Faith is an interesting read.  If you go into it knowing that you're going to get a lot of political history and not so much memoir, you'll be just fine.