Yesterday evening, as I was scrolling down the TV programming guide to see what was on the Food Network, the name of a show on the Entertainment Channel caught Jane’s eye. It was called: "E! News."
Asks Jane, "Mom, why is that news show called E Factorial?"
A while back I posted about Beanie’s preference for gripping a writing implement with her whole fist. She was 5 1/2 then, six years old now, and I wanted to let you know that in these past few months, she has made a fairly seamless transition to using the proper pencil grip without much intervention on my part. All I did was continue to give her occasional (and honestly, "occasional" is code for "infrequent") practice sessions with small pieces of chalk or crayons which forced her to grip with her fingers instead of fist, and she played a lot with the Handwriting Without Tears Magna-Doodle thing I mentioned in that post.
I did not do regular daily handwriting lessons or anything like that, in keeping with my convictions about delaying the beginning of formal studies until age six at the very earliest. I let her keep on coloring her pictures with her fist grip, because she adores coloring and I didn’t want that very pleasant pastime to become a source of frustration for her. A couple of times a week, I asked her to practice her "pencil grip" (our name for the correct hand position, as opposed to "fist grip"), and gradually she switched over. Now she uses the pencil grip almost all of the time when coloring, and always when writing words.
Recently, Rose started working on pretty, swirly cursive writing with the Getty-Dubay Italic cursive book (what eight-year-old girl doesn’t leap at the opportunity to learn fancy writing?), and this got Miss Beanie all fired up to have a handwriting book of her own. I’m seizing the moment, therefore, and she’ll be starting the Getty-Dubay Book A pretty soon.
(A side note about handwriting programs: I have taken a pretty unschooly approach to penmanship, allowing my kids to use workbooks when they wished, but not requiring it. So far, all three girls have wished it. I buy Getty-Dubay Italic for the totally self-indulgent reason that I like the way the writing looks.)
Anyway, just wanted to share the news of Bean’s progress in case anyone else out there was worried about a fist grip. There are some helpful suggestions in the comments of that first post, too.
What is your favorite cookbook? Especially in regard to making regular old weekday family dinners?
I like the Leanne Ely books—Saving Dinner
As long as we’re talking recipes, what are your favorite cooking and meal-planning websites? I had a good time playing around at the interactive Robin Miller’s Quick Fix Meals toy at Food Network, but there aren’t many recipes there; you have to click over here to find the archives.
This week’s edition of Carnival of the Recipes is all about slow-cooker meals, hosted by (appropriately enough) the Slow Cooker Recipes blog. I love my crock pot. Speaking of which, I have half a roasted chicken in the fridge awaiting crock-pottish inspiration…I’m envisioning some kind of chili-chicken-corn chowder, but I don’t have a recipe. Winging it in the kitchen is not my special gift, let me tell you! Time to cozy up to my pal Google…
UPDATED: Found this and this. This one looks tasty. This one too, but Rilla can’t tolerate my having cream. (Wah.) Still, between them all I think I can come up with something.
UPDATED AGAIN to add the Loveliness of Baking fair. Yum!
Feb. 12, 2007
Bangkok
Dear Beanie,
Thailand is called "The Land of Smiling Faces." You, my sweetie, would fit in here rather nicely. People do seem happy here. Maybe because the sun is always shining. It shines so hard many people use umbrellas to keep in the shade.
One thing I’ve enjoyed seeing is the folk dancing. The Thai dancers wear beautiful long dresses in vivid red and gold colors. Their head dresses look heavy. They are very graceful and it’s beautiful to watch.
There are many places to shop for food in Thailand, but my favorite has been the Floating Market. This market is not in a store, but it’s on the river! Shop keepers load up long wooden boats with fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers, & seafood. As they float downstream they can stop and sell their goods. You can sit on the river bank and watch everything you need for a delicious dinner float by! I wish you could be with me on that river bank.
Love,
Keri
Another honor for Bonny Glen: the #1 ranking for "how long do walruses stay with their moms?"
(Not that I was any help in answering the question.)
Word has it that Nancy Carpentier Brown’s young- reader adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries will be published in April. The Father Brown Reader, illustrated by Ted Schluenderfritz and published by Hillside Press, will feature four tales about the mystery-solving priest: "The Blue Cross," "The Strange Feet" (originally titled "The Queer Feet"), "The Flying Stars," and "The Absence of Mr. Glass." This is news of great interest to my young Chesterton fans.
Hillside is a small press best known for its literature guides, home education materials, and Cay Gibson‘s popular Catholic Mosaic, a guide to using picture books to celebrate the liturgical year.
Such are the hazards of having more than one blog. This post over at Bonny Glen Up Close (a dopey title, I know, and I keep meaning to change it) is much more on topic for this blog than that one, but it was written in response to a question in the comments over there, so that’s where I put it. Confused yet?
(Up Close is my informal daily-notes journal, of little interest to anyone except homeschooling moms who like to see what other homeschoolers’ real days look like. I use it in lieu of a record book—the blog platform suits me much better than any kind of book I’ve tried. It is a rough, scattershot record, but it works for me. At one point I was playing around with Vox as a platform for the daily learning notes journal instead, but I never did more than play. "Be Like the Bird" is a much better blog title, though.)
That’s right, yours truly is the number #1 Google hit on "mind games to mess with your wife."
P.S.—
Dear Woman Whose Husband Was Looking That Up,
I hope he was kidding.
I have an in-box full of email (again), a file full of posts-in-progress, and a head cluttered with a bunch more post ideas. I think I’ll declare today a cyber-decluttering day and just cram everything into one big messy post.
The Lucky Scrotum Matter, Revisited
I liked Monica Edinger’s post on the subject at educating alice. She told her class of fourth-graders about the controversy and read them the "offending" page.
When I reached the dreaded scrotum passage there was no reaction
whatsoever… no confusion, no giggles, no questioning. I kept going to
“….he killed that snake even though it bit him in the place where it
hurts the worst for a male…” (3) where there might have been a smile or
two, but no more. After a few more paragraphs I stopped. Eager hands
went up. “It is about the drinking, right?” Others nodded. Finally, one
said, “It’s about what happened to the dog?” The two who already knew
and I nodded. And the kids all said they didn’t get it. That they see
dogs with scrota every day after all. That it was no big deal.
She links to another Times piece on the book (this time an editorial) and some letters to the editor.
Chocolately Goodness for the Ears
I pulled into the library parking lot yesterday morning and put the minivan into park, only to be met with an aggrieved "Mommy, how COULD you???" from Rose—who was the child who begged me to take everyone to the library in the first place. My crime? Turning off the ignition, therefore cutting off Eric Idle in midsentence.
See, we are listening to Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
We actually did bail on our library trip yesterday. At the girls’ impassioned request, I just drove around for a while so they could keep on listening to the story. We had about twenty minutes to kill before our next appointment, and it would have been tough to squeeze a library visit into that short span of time anyway.
Speaking of Appointments
Yesterday afternoon, Wonderboy had an appointement with a neurologist. Our new pediatrician wants him to make a new-patient visit to all the subspecialists he was seeing in Virginia. This, on top of his speech therapy and audiology appointments, makes for a dizzying amount of running around. I’m tired of it, and we have barely begun.
At least the children’s hospital (where most of these sub-specialties are located) isn’t too awfully far: it’s about a 20-minute drive on San Diego’s fabulous freeways. I adore the freeways here. Have I mentioned that? There are a million of them, more or less, all over the place, and unless you have the misfortune of needing to travel at rush hour like my poor hubby, driving on these highways is positively zippy. Zip, zip, everywhere. And the road signs say exotic things like "Los Angeles, right lane" or "Mexico, keep left." Zip!
But yesterday, it just so happened that I was running a teensy bit late. Not VERY late, just a little. I suppose I should count my blessings because it’s possible that if I’d been on time, I’d have wound up IN the accident that brought traffic to a standstill on the I-8 just minutes after we zipped onto it. Stand. Still.
I knew I was now going to be late to the neurology appointment. I made a frantic call to Scott to tell him to call the doctor’s office and explain that I was ON MY WAY. He was happy to oblige, except for the tiny complication of his not exactly being in the office at that exact moment. I’d caught him on his lunch break, in line at the grocery store. He promised to hurry back to work and make the call. I’d have done it myself but I didn’t know the number by heart, and digging through my bag for my Wonderboy Medical Records Notebook isn’t something I was in a position to do at that moment. Nor was dialing the phone. I can punch Scott’s speed-dial with my thumb, but more than that I dare not do while driving, even at non-zippy speeds.
I arrived at the neuro’s office 20 minutes late for our appointment. The waiting room was empty and I figured they’d taken the next patient already. No problem, right? Oh so wrong. The receptionist sort of jumped when I gave her Wonderboy’s name.
"You didn’t hear? We canceled your appointment."
"Oh no!" I cried. "My husband called to let you know we were going to be late! Accident on the 8!"
She hadn’t caught the details, just the "going to be late" part. Shrugging apologetically, she informed me that the doctor had already given our slot another patient, and after that he had a meeting, but he could see us at 9 a.m. Monday morning.
I could make this a very long story, but without a nice happy ending, I don’t have the heart. Here’s the nutshell version: the doctor wouldn’t see us. Even though the next patient wasn’t due for another 20 minutes. Even though Dr. Neurologist was sitting alone in his office on the other side of the wall. He needed forty minutes for a new patient app, he insisted, and he’d already moved the 3:40 patient to come in at 3:00 and then he had a meeting at 3:40. My pleas to just squeeze in a quick 20-minute app fell on deaf ears. Well, actually they fell on the receptionist’s fairly sympathetic ears, but I could hear her relaying them to the doctor and HE was certainly not responding in a manner indicative of having heard with compassion or understanding.
I turned down the Monday-at-nine appointment, much to their surprise; I told them I had no more openings in my schedule until April.
"Really?" blinked the receptionist.
"Yup," I said, loudly, assuming that if I could hear the doctor through the wall, he could hear me. I explained that my son sees a number of other subspecialists and has consults stacked up through the end of April. There’s always the possibility the doctor will realize he missed out on the chance to pick up an unusual case, and next time maybe he’ll be a little more open to making creative adjustments for unavoidable delays. Slim possibility, but I’m an optimist.
(Hmm, look at that, I did make it a long story anyway.)
A Much Pleasanter Subject
Wednesday’s mail brought a serendipitous conjunction of treasures: a pile of nice fat letters from our dear friend Keri, who is in the middle of a year-long wandering in the Far East, and a copy of Richard Halliburton’s The Royal Road to Romance. The latter is Halliburton’s engaging account of his own Far-East travels. We savored Keri’s letters over breakfast Thursday morning—they are gems, and I am sharing them over at Lilting House—delighting in the soft, petal-strewn, handpressed paper and the colorful descriptions of Thailand penned in Keri’s friendly handwriting. And then of course we had to dive right into the Halliburton book, skipping directly to his Bangkok chapter and comparing his route to Keri’s on the globe. We’ll go back and start at the beginning when I figure out how to make time for one more book in our daily-reading pile.
I’m in My Junior Year of Blogging Now
GottaBook’s Gregory K., inventor of the poetry form known as the Fib, shares a fib in honor of his blog’s one-year anniversary. This reminded me that I missed my own two-year blog anniversary in January. Here’s what I started with:
"You really have your hands full."
This is what I’m always hearing from people, variations on the
theme. Either I have too many balls in the air or too much food on my
plate, or maybe it’s PLATES I’m supposed to be juggling instead of
balls, and I guess in that case any amount of food would be too much.
And it’s true, I’ve had plenty of days when it seems like the
metaphorical spaghetti is raining down upon my head. Especially this
past year, since the baby was born.But I’m of the mind that a little pasta in the hair can be a good thing, metaphorically speaking.
Full hands are a blessing. Juggling can be exciting. A plate heaped
with food is generally considered something to be thankful for.And oh boy am I thankful. Sometimes I’m dizzy with thanks. Other
times I’m just dizzy—life whirls by so quickly. What’s on the spinning
plates is a blur. So I thought I’d write about what’s on each dish, the
whole savory smorgasbord.
Happy to say nothing has changed (despite everything having changed this year). I’m still dizzy, and thankful, and savoring the feast.
What are your three favorite educational resources, and why?