Posted in 52 Books in 52 Weeks 2009

A few weeks ago, I reached my goal for the year of reading 52 books.  I would have reached it earlier, but this summer I went through a period of being brain dead and really didn't read too much. Or blog, as you may have noticed. After that lull, I have now read ten or so in the last few weeks.  It feels good to be me again!

My last update about the 52 books challenge was July 10, and I had read forty books.  Since then I have read five fiction books: three romances, a Danielle Steel novel, and The Scarlet Letter.  I had to reread The Scarlet Letter after hearing that both my sister and my oldest son hated it, because I remembered liking it.  Well, I still liked it, but I think I can understand why others might not.  It is much more a description of the action.  In other words, instead of feeling like you are there, you feel like somebody who was there is telling you about it.  It's also a rich source of vocabulary words.

For non-fiction, I divided the book into Catholic, History/Current Events, and General Non-Fiction.  The Catholic books were The Rule of Saint Benedict and The Catholic Book of Character and Success by Fr. Edward F. Garesché, a phenomenal book that I plan to work back through and then use in our homeschool.

For History/Current Events, I read:

1. Under Siege: Three children at the Civil War Battle for Vicksburg.  I happened to see this in the children's section at the library.  While I was pregnant with the twins, I did a lot of reading on the Civil War, so I was interested in this.  Two of the children are on the Southern side, and the other child was General Grant's oldest son, who actually was present at the battle and was wounded.
2. After Etan: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive by Lisa Cohen.  Etan Patz, age 6, disappeared May 25, 1979, while walking the two blocks to the bus stop by himself for the very first time.  His parents did not know he was missing until he did not come home from school.  When you read this book, it's almost unthinkable how cavalier society used to be about children's safety.  Missing pictures on milk cartons, Amber Alerts, beginning the search for a lost child immediately instead of waiting 72 hours, etc - these are all developments that happened after this case.  Today there is a tendency in the other direction, but in my opinion, many of these changes were good.  This book is hard to read, but I don't regret reading it. 
3. Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-talking Brokers, and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream by Mary Elizabeth Williams. Why anyone would want to live in New York City escapes me completely, especially after reading this book about a family's three year search for a home to buy.  And then finally, they had the privilege of spending nearly $400,000 on a dinky little two bedroom apartment that wasn't even anywhere near the neighborhood they wanted to live in.  The book is part memoir, part commentary on the housing bubble, part someone trying to explain why she and her husband would choose to live in NYC.  I still don't get it, and I honestly, really, don't need to know when you and your husband "christened" your new apartment.
4. So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser. Normally I would not read a book with profanity in the title, but this I could not resist.  The title comes from a quote in the book.  This book carefully outlines the horrible influence lobbying has on our government.  I truly think the only way out of this mess is to outlaw raising campaign money and give all candidates public money.  The scariest story in the book was when the President of Taiwan indirectly hired American lobbyists to try to get him a visa to enter the country (he attended Cornell as a young man and wanted to give a speech there).  The State Department, for fear of angering China, had refused him a visa.  The lobbying was successful and he got his visa.  Now, on the surface, I'm fine with that.  Why is China deciding who can enter our country?  But when you really think about what just happened, a foreign entity lobbied our government and got what they wanted!  That is really scary!  It's really a toss-up which book made me want to throw up more - this one or the Etan Patz one.

General Non-Fiction

1. Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.  My husband wanted me to read this book.  On the whole, this style of eating makes total sense to me, but it is really expensive.

2. The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.  This is a really interesting book if you do anything creative or if you are interested in dance, since she talks a lot about the dances she has choreographed.  She really makes it clear that being creative is a habit and hard work.  There are lots of exercises and ideas to get your creativity flowing! I will definitely be rereading this one.

3. America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right On the Money by Steve and Annette Economides.  I think I may have read this before, since some of it seemed really familiar, like the pages-long explanation of the minute details of attending the state fair cheaply...zzzz...oh ,wait, did I fall asleep there? Sorry!  You can get the same information that's in this book from The Tightwad Gazette, a lot more enjoyably.  I did like the way they calculated what your emergency fund should be, though, and their suggestions for budgeting for house maintenance.

4. I already ripped apart, uh, reviewed The New Global Student.

5. Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  I guess this is the year I read the books I associate with my mother - Love Story was the first.  My mom had a copy of Gift From the Sea that she really liked.  It's pretty much essays about relationships that she wrote while on a two week beach vacation.  Very thought-provoking reflections on marriage and motherhood.

6. The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka.  While in general I agree with a lot of the principles in this book, I don't like many of the houses or rooms she shows.  I guess I'm a more traditional architecture sort of person. 

And that's it for now!

Posted in Me

For a while, I've been struggling with how to successfully integrate the computer into my daily life.  I've tried different things, prayed about it, thought about it, and scheduled it.  And finally it seems as though I have come to the right solution for me.

While the computer is a valuable source of information and a way to connect with my friends, it's also a big time vacuum.  Sitting down "just to quickly check something" is the equivalent of going into the supermarket for "just a couple of things." Even if it does only take a few minutes, it contributes to the scattered feeling I already have as a mom of four children six and under, plus two more at home.  

And checking something quickly multiple times a day adds up.  I started thinking, if I didn't sit down to check the computer, what could I do instead? Pray, read a child a book, clean something, speak a little German, play with the baby? In other words, something productive.  Something that would contribute to a good feeling at the end of a day, instead of the constant wondering, "Where did the day go and why didn't I get anything done???"  I considered getting on the computer as my break time, but it wasn't refreshing to me.  It just left me feeling more frazzled as I was pulled between my real world and the virtual world.  While it's true that we all need breaks, we need to be sure that the break refreshes instead of drains.

On the other hand, I am extremely limited in my ability to go out and to see my friends right now.  A friend and I have discussed how the feeling of isolation stay at home moms can experience can be very negative, and when I mentioned limiting computer time to my husband, he warned me not to cut off contact with the outside world.  A computer is a blessing in this circumstance.

So what to do?  Well, as I said at the beginning, after much prayer I have finally received the answer.  The computer stays off from the time I get up in the morning until the little ones are in bed, unless needed for urgent business like checking what is overdue at the library.  At that point (usually around 8 PM), I turn it on and catch up with my friends.  It feels like a good balance, and already I am feeling happier, calmer, and less scattered.  Thank You, Lord!

My friend Katherine is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling, and she has included my post about my favorite children's books! Check it out!

Posted in German with the Kinder

Posted in Me

Well, I may be crazy, but I just signed up to do National Novel Writing Month again.  Last year I wrote 30,000 words in November.  This year I will try to actually win and write 50,000.  Oh, and I have no idea what I will write about yet.  And I haven't finished last year's yet.

But I will.

Posted in book reviews

The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education by Maya Frost is quite possibly the most annoying book I ever completely read.  If the subject matter weren’t right up my alley, I would have thrown it out the window (well, actually, it’s a library book, so I probably would have just put it in the book drop, but I would have banged the door extra hard).

I read about the book on The Simple Dollar blog in a pretty glowing review, so I was excited when my library had it.  By page 70, my excitement was gone and I was wondering if I could make it through.  My sister advised me to skip ahead, but I don’t really like to do that with books.  The author spends nearly the first 100 pages trying to explain why the test-taking machine that is American education is flawed.  Perhaps if I hadn’t spent the last ten years of my life reading about alternate forms of education, this would have been more revolutionary to me.  I actually began talking to the book, saying things like, “Get on with it already!” and “Give me some details!”

Her writing style was also a major turn-off.  Take this sentence for example: “Our primo parental up-and-out strategy should be to help our kids understand their talents and to teach them to generate ideas, research the heck out of  ‘em, and follow through in order to find great opportunities.”  Now, I don’t actually disagree with that sentence, but the way it’s written is the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me.  In addition, the summaries at the end of each section which contrasted “Old School” and “Bold School” also got on my nerves.

Another big issue for me was her constant harping on “fego” which is her made-up word for the combination of parental “fear” and “ego” that prevents us from letting our children study abroad.  I don’t think I’ve ever read something written by a parent that was so down on parents!  She glosses over the myriad other reasons that parents could have about being hesitant to send a fifteen year old half a world away for a year, and offers no reassurance except to point out that they’ll be in less danger of being shot or of being in a car accident than they would in the United States.  Ridiculing a person’s fears is not, in my opinion, the best way to help them overcome the fears.  A long, well-researched, carefully argued chapter would help much more than a casual, “Well, we took our 4 blond daughters to India, Mexico, and Argentina, and nothing ever happened to them!”

I kept waiting for details on how they took their family abroad, and she never gave them to me.  Apparently, they decided to move abroad, somehow made their businesses work online in a week or two, and left for Mexico.  The only detail she gives is how the girls found them a better place to live right after they arrived.  Oh, and also, somehow their mothers were better off because they moved abroad. Then there’s a whole section where her husband catalogs the money they saved living in Mexico, and his casual estimate is $3000 a month while living a better lifestyle.  Does that mean we could live for free in Mexico?  Oh, and also somehow, his sales doubled the first year they lived abroad. She also keeps talking about savings thousands off of college tuition, but again, never really crunches the numbers for us.  It seems (although doesn’t actually say) that they were able to pay for college out of pocket by the money they saved.

I wanted to like this book, but when I had made it through the whole thing and she never even addressed my biggest question, I gave up trying.  See, you can’t just decide to go live in another country.  They have to give you permission.  She never details the necessary preparations or even explains what they did.  She does give us a “Ten Commandments for Families Heading Abroad.”  Have I ever mentioned on here that this is one of my biggest pet peeves? I do not like fake ten commandment lists.  I don’t find it amusing or cute or trendy or whatever to make up a list and call it a “Ten Commandments.” 

The best part of the book was the ten pages or so that were the stories of eleven young people who went abroad through Rotary Youth Exchange (which is definitely a program I will be checking out) for a year either during high school or in a gap year after.  Not only were the stories fascinating, but we also got a break from the author’s annoying voice!  I can save you the several hours you might spend reading this book: study abroad is beneficial, it doesn’t have to be expensive, families might want to go abroad together, either for a short time or for longer, check out Rotary and the website Transitions Abroad.  There.

And I have no idea why she ended the book with an epilogue about the lady who wrote the Not So Big house books.  She’s not recommending a “not so big” education; she’s recommending a global education in the largest sense of the word. 

Remind me never to read anything by this author ever again.

Posted in book reviews

Since this blog is called Books and Brownies, I thought it would be fun to share a list of my favorite childhood books.  We lived near the library, and my mom would take me at least once a week.  I would check out a huge stack of books and read until she told me to stop reading and go outside and play!

1. Heidi by Johanna Spyri

This has to be first on the list because it is possibly my all-time favorite.  It has a wonderful message and may be why I love (looking at) mountains.  Grandfather's hut seemed like the nicest place on earth to me, and I still think of Heidi when I eat bread and cheese.

2. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Again, this book has a very positive message: with a good attitude, imagination, and perseverance, you can overcome any hardship.  I like both movie versions as well.

3. Lisa and Lottie by Erich Kaestner

I may have mentioned this book before, because last summer I read the original German version.  This is the book that the movie "The Parent Trap" is based on: two girls meet at summer camp, realize they are identical twins, and switch places so they each can get to know the other parent. Now, is it coincidence that two of my favorite children's books were originally written in German and then I went on to study German? You be the judge!

4. The Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I read these many times as a child, except for The Long Winter.  I read that once and didn't ever want to again!  I enjoyed reading the adventures, but I know that I was never cut out to be a pioneer.

5. The Great Brain Books by John Dennis Fitzgerald

My sister and I especially enjoyed reading all about the exploits of the Great Brain, although we didn't try many of them.  I distinctly remember where these books were in our library (a building that doesn't exist anymore) and me running over to them with her to see which ones were in.

6. Richard Scarry's Busytown books

I loved reading all the little captions on the pages and looking at the amusing pictures.

7. Fairy Tales

The Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, ethnic fairy tales, it didn't matter. I loved reading them.

8. Dog books

Since I love dogs, I also liked reading about them.  Jean Little had several dog stories I really liked.

9.  Books by Marilyn Sachs

I haven't read any of these in years, so my memory is hazy, but I remember looking on the shelf for her books at the library as well.  Looking at amazon.com, I remember reading The Truth About Mary Rose, the Amy and Laura trilogy, and others.  I may need to search these out as presents for my daughters!

10.  Calico Captive

This dramatic story, based on true events, captured my imagination.  I recently read it to my daughters and they loved it as well!

I hope you find something great to share with your children on my list!

Is the writing on the wall?  Has German lost out to Spanish in my house?

Except for my oldest child, all the ones who are old enough to talk don't want to learn German.  And the oldest one probably only likes German because he was exposed to it for a month in Germany at a formative age.  Both my daughters express dislike for German.  I tried to force them to learn it anyway by studying it at home and taking classes, and then surreptitiously by speaking to their younger siblings in German. Nothing doing. Although, they did tell me that they understood the German in a MacGyver episode they watched.

Our speech therapist speaks Spanish (as well as Finnish, Swedish, French, some Estonian and Portuguese, and of course English) and she has brought over a few books to use with the boys that have Spanish in them.  So Ryan has started becoming interested in Spanish words.  He will tell you if you ask, "Mommy speaks German and Spanish and a little bit of French."  I asked him yesterday which he liked, German or Spanish, and he said Spanish.

Studying Spanish as a family would be so much easier.  There are tons of free and inexpensive resources in Spanish.  We can go to Mass at our own church in Spanish.  We could find storytimes and playgroups and classes for homeschoolers just twenty minutes from our house.  I could find tons of support.  So why won't I just do the easier option?

Roger thinks I should do both.  He thinks I should make the children study German if that's what I want.  The problem is that I have been brain-dead since earlier this summer (hence why I haven't really been reading, writing, or blogging), and I don't think I can handle trying to do two languages with my children.  Although I have to keep working on my German anyway because I am scheduled to start teaching it again this spring!

Posted in Me

As I was driving into town today, I was pondering my blog post from last night.  Specifically, I wondered why I felt guilty for being overwhelmed.  And then it came to me - it's because if I were more organized and more together, I wouldn't be overwhelmed.  So then it is MY FAULT that I'm overwhelmed, because if I were just better, I wouldn't be.

I don't agree with these statements.  I think being overwhelmed is a function of having four children under the age of six.  No matter how organized I am, I still couldn't account for all the variables they can come up with.  And being overwhelmed is also about not having time for myself, time to accomplish some of my goals.  So at the end of the day, no matter how much I've gotten done, there's always other things I should have also somehow gotten done.  It's not possible.

I'm going to try to let go of the guilt now.

Posted in Me

So, lately, I've been feeling a little surrounded and overwhelmed.  Okay, a lot.  I'm trying to give three children an education, keep up with the twin hurricanes, keep the household running, get all children to their various and sundry lessons, appointments, and therapies, and I'm doing all this while having my life revolve around what a thirteen-month-old decides I can do.  And he's getting pretty good, with the twins as role models, at being a destructive force himself.  It's like he's thinking, "I don't need a twin; I can do it all by myself!"

I really have needed some time alone.  Over the last few days I actually got a little bit.  Tonight I went out for myself for the first time since I went to the Mojo Mom author signing back in April.  Amy Tiemann, the author of Mojo Mom, was speaking to my Mothers of Multiples group, and since we just changed the hours of my daughter's tutoring, thus freeing up Monday nights, I decided to go.

I'm glad I did.  I wanted to go to hear how other moms of twins talked about the idea of mojo and the other themes of the book.  Despite being 25 minutes late because I transposed two numbers in the address of the meeting place, I found it interesting.  As I listened to the other moms talk about struggles with their children, I realized that I had a child of each of the ages they were mentioning, plus others.

And that made me realize - it's okay to be overwhelmed!  It really is!  I think I have been feeling guilty about feeling overwhelmed.

I keep trying to remind myself that, while it is my job to see that the children's needs are met, my needs also have to be met, and they come before the children's wants.  Everybody's needs should be met before anybody's wants. The situation, though, is that meeting the needs of the six children still at home is taking up a whole lot of my morning, afternoon, evening, and night.  I have been fighting the guilty feeling of not being able to fulfill some of my children's wants.  But my husband and I spend so much time just meeting the basics!  For example, if our lawn is mowed, we're happy.  We're not out there improving the landscape.  I am working on getting the house decluttered and organized, but at this point, that is a need and not a want.  Some of the areas in our house were not even functional from having been ignored so long.

I can feel myself getting burned out, so I know that I have to make a few changes.  I'm going to start taking mini-breaks during the day and just go in my room, lock the door, and be alone for a few minutes.  I'm going to have the girls watch the baby in the evening so I can have uninterrupted prayer time that isn't at 1 AM.  I'm going to try to get enough sleep.  Through my cleaning and organizing, I finally found my 10 minute workout DVD, and I'm doing that in the mornings when I first get up.  Even though I am woefully out of shape, I am enjoying it.

So that's my plan - that, and realizing that it really is okay to be overwhelmed.

Last year, one of my homeschooling goals was to meet more homeschoolers so my daughters would hopefully make some more friends.  Between our chaotic lives of the last few years and friends moving away, they each have only one friend.  Thankfully, Gabrielle's friend lives only five minutes away, so they can see each other pretty frequently.

Well, that goal fell by the wayside as we confronted life without a babysitter (our oldest son, who had the nerve to grow up and go away to college), with tutoring and speech therapy multiple times a week, with a new baby, and with non-napping twins.  We didn't manage to do anything extra by which anyone might have made friends.  However, we still regularly saw our friends who also have seven children of roughly the same ages.

Unfortunately, they moved to Florida this summer.  And Mary's one friend is away until Christmas.  And then this happened.

Ryan and I were doing math.  The instructions said to make a tally mark chart. "On the drawing board write some of the child's friends' names along the left side.  Choose an appropriate question, such as the number of people living in their home, number of animals they have, or how many letters in their names." And the example shows five children's names.

I sat there, trying to think of who we could put on this chart.  Immediately I thought of our friends who moved to Florida.  And then I thought, "Well, there's ...um....uh.... NOBODY!!!!"  My child, who will be six next week, doesn't really know any other families well enough to make this sort of a chart.

Something has to change.

Gabrielle, Mary, Ryan and I all watched The Sound of Music this weekend.  It's the first time I've seen it since I've had seven children, and let me tell you, it's a lot of fun to imitate Maria saying when asked if she liked children, "Well, yes, but SEVEN?!"  My husband and I amused ourselves by saying things like, "Can you imagine, seven children in one family!" and "Who would be crazy enough to have seven children in this day and age?"

Watching the movie was nostalgic for me, because I visited Salzburg back in 1994 with my friend Cathy.  We wanted to go on a day trip from Munich, so we went to the train station and looked at various destinations and then said, "Let's go to Salzburg!"  Neither of us remembered until we got there and saw the inevitable tourist stuff in the train station that the Sound of Music was filmed in Salzburg.  We loved finding places that had appeared in the movie. 

The Sound of Music is my father's favorite movie, and so I wanted to go back with him some day and do the whole Sound of Music tour.  I had to face the fact this weekend that this is unlikely to happen.  Even if I could go now, he can't, and in five to ten years when I could go, who knows if he will be able to.  It seems to me as though everyone is aging faster.  I think maybe a midlife crisis is when you go from thinking "Someday I will..." to "It's now or never!" 

This was Ryan's first viewing of the movie and I made him go to bed at the intermission.  The next day he asked to watch the rest and I asked him where he had stopped.  He said, "The lady who taught the seven children to sing had just left the house."  I was impressed, both with his grammar and his description, because I knew exactly where he meant.

Another thing that struck me about the movie was how Liesl, the one who is "16 going on 17," is the only one who is portrayed as an adolescent or almost grownup.  Louisa is 13 and she is seen as still being a little girl.  How I wish things were still like that today!  I was also wondering how exactly they made Julie Andrews look different after the wedding.  Is it her makeup, her style of clothing, or is she just that good of an actress?  Before the wedding she is still so naive and unsure, and then after the wedding she is more mature and confident.  Of course, by then she is sure of the Captain's love, and that makes a big difference.

I still like the movie even though I know that there are all sorts of things wrong with it.  The von Trapps didn't make really any money from it, they didn't walk over the mountains to escape the Nazis, the children's names were different, etc, etc.  And folks, look at a map of Europe - you cannot walk over the Alps to Switzerland from Salzburg.  But despite all that, it's still a great movie.

Which brings me to my most controversial point.  For years I have been alone in admiring Baroness Schrader.  I really like her character.  I think she's witty and charming and dresses impeccably.  Everyone thinks she's evil because she comes between the Captain and Maria.  But she really may have been trying to do the best for everybody.  For the Captain, who was a noble and a decorated war hero, to marry an orphaned nobody would have been shocking.  And Maria was supposed to be a nun.  How was the Baroness to know that it wasn't just an infatuation? Once Maria came back and it was clear that the Captain really loved her, the Baroness bowed out gracefully instead of scheming.  As for sending the children to boarding school, that certainly was very common among the upper classes in those days.

My dad used to say that he liked getting older because he could do so many things again for the first time.  Watching the Sound of Music again proves that because life is always changing, what you can get out of a movie is always changing too!

As a child, I wasn't ever taught anything about money.  If I had it, I spent it. And so I've made many, many mistakes.  I started thinking about the lessons I have learned and what I would like to teach my own children, and then decided to put it together in a blog post.

The big number one rule is to NEVER SPEND MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE!  If you don't have it today, you don't have it.  Don't spend future income, because you have no idea what the future holds.  Obviously, if this rule is followed, it will prevent trouble with credit cards. 

The corollary to this rule is to NEVER SPEND ALL THE MONEY YOU DO HAVE!  This is where I made the biggest mistakes in my early adult years.  I had no experience with what kind of things can and do go wrong, and I never even thought of saving any money that I earned. Looking back now, that seems insane, but it's true.  I also had no real long-term goals that I thought it necessary to save for. I could have easily saved $10,000 before I got married, but instead I had a negative net worth.

The one exception to spending money you don't have is getting a mortgage.  But I think this should be done the old-fashioned way: save up 20% as a down payment and make sure the payment is not much more than 25% of your income.  We finally are at that point of 25% and it really is so much more comfortable.  Also, make sure you still have some money in savings for inevitable repairs.

There are also two general principles I have learned over the years.  One, it takes a lot of money just to maintain the status quo.  In my youth, I never realized this.  Money to make sure your appliances work, money to make your car go, money so that the roof doesn't leak, money to replace a cracked windshield, money to replace the toilet that the twins have messed up...all of those expenditures do nothing but give you what you already had!  How frustrating, not to mention expensive!

The other principle is that EVERYTHING will take longer than you thought and cost more than you thought.  Just plan for this and always give yourself wiggle room.  I could give many, many, many examples of this from my own life. Here's one: our house was supposed to be ready long before Mary was born, and we moved in when she was two months old.

Some closing thoughts: I think, in general, that never having saved up for anything did make me less appreciative of what I had.  It would have hurt a lot more to sink money that I had saved up into something silly than to charge it.  It also devalued hard work, because I had never really worked to get anything. 

I wish we had realized a long time ago that it was not sustainable over the long term to have so little income.  It seemed like we could make do for a while and bail ourselves out with credit when necessary.  As I've said before, I don't know why I thought not caring about money exempted me from having any!

I think my children are doing better than me so far.  I have tried to be more transparent about money than my parents were (which isn't hard).  My oldest son is very good at budgeting and economizing, but I do worry that he spends money a bit too freely.  Gabrielle is already saving all her money for a trip to Scotland, and both girls saved up for their American Girl dolls.  So saving is not a foreign concept to them as it was to me.  Ryan even saves his money in a piggy bank.

My husband and I will spend probably the next decade reversing the damage we have done to our finances.  I hope that through that time, I will be able to teach my children better approaches to money, and then someday actually have the money to help them out in their lives, whatever God calls them to do.

Posted in Me

If you have read this blog at all, you know that I like football.  OK, so it's more that I love football! As I was telling my older daughter this week, fate filled the void in my life by having the Carolina Panthers become a team right around when I moved to the south.  There you go - Panthers fan!

Robert was nearly six when the Panthers began, and he started watching football with me.  The first couple of years were a little bumpy, as he had the one season when all he did was ask me constant questions about what was going on (which isn't very relaxing), and then also suffered from nearly incurable optimism.  The Panthers could be losing 45-14 with 3 minutes left in the game, and he would be outlining what they had to do to win.  Which would be OK, if he wasn't then crushed when it didn't happen.  He never saw the loss coming, and then I would be dealing with a devastated, inconsolable child.  At least once I threatened to not let him watch anymore.

So Robert and I have watched football together for years, and it was emotional for me last year when he went away to college because I had to watch football alone.  It's just not as much fun.  Gabrielle roots for Indianapolis, but she didn't want to watch other games.  Mary had no interest.  Ryan had a little interest, but really only for about twenty seconds and then he would run off and play.

This year promised to be a better football year because I finally have ESPN and the NFL network.  A few weeks ago I checked the preseason schedule and loved going through the list and naming all the games I could now watch!  I was very excited for the preseason to start, because it's been a really long off-season.  As I have watched the games this week, Ryan has been showing more interest and looks like he'll be having that season where he asks me fifty thousand questions.  Hopefully I will have patience!

Ryan has a comforter on his bed that used to be Robert's.  It has all the NFL team helmets on a blue background.  From this Ryan decided he liked the Miami Dolphins (and the Carolina Panthers, so I told him he could stay).  What I didn't realize was that the twins had also chosen their favorites.  So today while Robert and I were watching the Buffalo Bills against the Chicago Bears, they recognized their favorite helmets and were watching the screen.  Christopher would even answer, when asked his favorite team, "The Bears." (I don't mind this, as the closest I ever came to rooting for a team before the Panthers was the 1985 Bears.)  And Alexander liked the Bills helmet (they do have nice uniforms - patriotic without being, well, the Patriots).

Gabrielle was also watching the game and rolling yarn into a ball.  Mary was also in the living room, having emerged after taking a nap (she's sick, well, actually, we all are.)  Ryan was watching (same deal as Mary).  And the twins were even watching.  It was really fun!  It felt like a party. It's like I had a glimpse of what it will be like when the children are a bit older. I'm so happy that now I don't have to worry about watching football alone again until Brogan leaves for college in seventeen years.

But let's not think about that now.

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging lately - my brain has been feeling dead.  I haven't even really been reading very much.  I've started a lot of books but haven't finished most of them yet.  I am very close to the 52 book goal though.  Anyway, so I was thinking about this story that I posted on my Twin Tales blog two and a half years ago, and decided to post it here.  While life has gotten a bit easier since then, I still suffer from unrealistic plans and I am still very tired!

February 24, 2007:

After a disastrous attempt to take the twins with me to see a special exhibit at the Museum of Art last fall, I should have known better than to do what I did yesterday morning.  I had to drop my oldest son off to meet his math tutor on campus, so I decided to take the five younger children to the university's art museum while waiting.  I had this picture in my mind that the twins would happily ride in their stroller, Ryan would be awed by the artwork, and the girls would have a perfect educational field trip. I of course would beam like the Madonna with all my beautiful young children in tow.

Here's what really happened.  We had a half hour to kill before the museum opened, so we walked to the bagel store.  For some funny reason, campus eateries are not built with double strollers in mind, and especially not with two strollers being in the store at the same time.  After finding out that buying four bagels with cream cheese would require another mortgage on my house, I decided we would have plain bagels.  The store was empty so I let the babies out of their stroller. While doing that, I noticed the bags of day old bagels that were half the price I had just paid.  Grrr!  Neither baby wanted any bagel; they just wanted to cry.  So I nursed them.  Ryan didn't want his bagel because it was hot.  We sat for about five minutes and then I decided we would leave so I could go put more change in the meter.  This required putting coats back on and strapping 3 children back in their strollers.  Just before I put Christopher in, he grabbed half a bagel so I let him keep it.  Then we had to coordinate with military precision our exodus from the store.

Back to the van to put money in the meter.  Where's my purse? Oh, it must be back at the store.  Wonderful!  We turn around and go back to the bagel store.  Thankfully it was still where we had been sitting, contents intact.  Back again to the van.  Finally, we walk to the museum.

The museum employee who helped me get the double stroller through the doors politely asked me to put Christopher's bagel away.  Here's a multiple choice quiz for you:

A baby whose bagel is taken away from him for no good reason in his opinion will:

A. Accept it and be perfectly happy.

B. Sublimate his suffering into a deep affection for art.

C. Scream and make his twin brother upset too.

I think it's pretty obvious that C is the correct answer.  However, he got over his screaming pretty quickly and let Alexander be the unhappy one.  I quickly decided to take Alexander out of the stroller and carry him in the sling, but that didn’t help either.  We walked into a room with a lot of religious art and the girls began walking around looking at it.  The security guard, not very surreptitiously, followed us.  I was embarrassed when he told Mary not to put her hand on the wall, but then realized that I had not given them ANY instruction on what to do and how to behave in the museum, and after all, they are only 10 and 8!  Alexander was still screaming so I sat down to try nursing him, even though he had just nursed in the bagel store.  I looked around to check on Ryan and discovered that he was going under a bench instead of admiring artwork.  At this point, I was started to wish the floor would open up and swallow us all! 

Christopher began fussing because the stroller wasn’t moving.  I realized that Gabrielle was pushing the empty stroller around and asked her to switch and push Christopher around while she looked at the paintings.  She did, but every time she came back to where I was, she would stop the stroller right in front of me.  Time for another quiz question:

A baby whose bagel has been taken away from him and whose twin brother is being held and nursed by mama will:

A.       Accept it and be perfectly happy.

B.       Begin a discourse on European religious art.

C.       Scream.

Again, C is the correct answer.  At this point, I glanced over to check on Ryan and saw him moving very quickly toward a sculpture that had caught his eye.  He probably thought it looked like a knight.  I began to panic, having visions of him crashing into the sculpture and knocking the whole thing down and breaking it.  Then I really would need that additional mortgage on the house!  Or does homeowners’ insurance cover the instances when you have totally lost your mind and let 3 year olds loose in a museum while trying to keep toddler twins happy?  Thankfully, we didn’t have to find out.  Ryan stopped short of the sculpture and very nicely pointed it out to Mary. Alexander finished nursing, and I decided, “WE ARE LEAVING!”  Alexander began screaming again because I was putting him back in the stroller, Christopher was screaming to get out, and Ryan didn’t want to put his coat back on or get back in his stroller. 

Now other people had come into the museum.  I saw two women with clipboards and pencils looking like they were getting ready to do some serious studying.  Yikes!  How fast can I get out of here with all these children????  Finally, we were ready and I pushed a stroller filled with screaming babies out through very narrow double doors and sighed in relief.  On my way out, I said to the security guard, “It obviously wasn’t the morning for this!”  He very nicely agreed.

We did salvage this field trip by walking around campus and seeing a few historical sites.  Also, there are lots of low brick walls for the children to walk on, which they loved.  So if you happened to be driving through campus and saw a woman pushing a double stroller with one hand and pulling a single stroller with the other so the children wouldn’t fight over who got to walk on the wall and who had to push the single stroller, I hope you said a prayer for her.  She’s very tired!

Well, OK, maybe there is. Yes, this blog has been sadly neglected as of late.  I have not been spending as much time on the computer, plus I went on vacation and I've been working on a new project, in addition to working on the house and homeschooling, and taking care of the children.  Yesterday I overhauled the laundry room to incorporate my new IKEA drying racks.  Before my trip, I organized the storage area in the den.  I'm thinking of tackling the hall closet today or tomorrow, and while I was gone, my oldest son figured out a new place for the microwave that makes the kitchen seem much larger.  So, my blog might not look that great, but my house is looking much better!

Posted in 52 Books in 52 Weeks 2009

Since the year is half over, I thought I would do an update on my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.  In the first six months of this year, I read forty books.  I am completely behind on my goal to write a review of each book on this blog. I guess I read faster than I write!  So the reviews aren't going to happen, but I do make comments on the books I haven't reviewed in this post, and I have linked the reviews I did write.

I decided to go back over the books I have read and categorize them to see what that revealed.  I was surprised to see that the top category was fiction - I thought I mainly read non-fiction.  Most of the fiction was not terribly difficult or intelligent reading. 

Fiction

Endless Night by Agatha Christie

The Settlers and Last Letter Home by Vilhelm Moberg

The Princess Diaries and Princess in the Spotlight by Meg Cabot

Love Story and Oliver's Story by Erich Segal

Calico Captive by Elizabeth George Speare (One of my favorites from childhood.  I read it and then read it out loud to my daughters.)

Jess by Mary Casanova (An American Girl book that I enjoyed in about a half hour.)

Harlequin Romances: Crescendo and Fiancé for Christmas

and a few short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, an author I just discovered and really like.

Education

The largest non-fiction category is books about education.  Is this shocking for a homeschool mom/language teacher? Not really.

I Learn Better By Teaching Myself by Agnes Leistico

Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius by Angeline Stoll Lillard (wonderful, incredible, fascinating book for anyone interested in education!)

Boys Adrift by Dr. Leonard Sax

The Secret Life of the Dyslexic Child by Robert Frank (really good and helpful)

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (fascinating and gets a real thumbs up from me, because it made me happy to live where I live, which I haven't been happy about for a really long time)

Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education with or Without Schooling by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver (not worth reading)

How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way by Tim Seldin (this book also could go under the upcoming parenting section, but since I read it more as an education book than a parenting advice book, I put it here)

The Well Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (review coming up soon)

Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, A Memoir by Barbara Feinberg (I admit it, I really just skimmed this book.  Parts are really interesting; the rest, ugh. It talks about new young adult fiction and how it is focused on tragedies and problems.)

10 Days to a Less Distracted Child (a most unhelpful book)

History

1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth

A Home on the Field by Paul Cuadros (very interesting book about how a group of Hispanics overcame prejudice and started a high school soccer team)

The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor by A.N. Wilson (an interesting analysis of the state of the British monarchy)

The Scandinavian-American Family Album

The next four categories are all tied with three books apiece.  

Biography

Know Your Power by Nancy Pelosi

Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever by Judge Judy (ok, I admit it, I walked past this book in the library and couldn't resist.  It took me like 45 minutes to read it!)

Inside the Kingdom by Carmen Bin Laden (Carmen is the ex-wife of one of Osama Bin Laden's many brothers.  This was a fascinating look at a Western woman's descent into the insanity that is Saudi Arabia.  I did a lot of reading on this subject a few years back and saw this in the bookstore, so I wanted to read it.  Note to any woman considering marrying a Middle Eastern man: DON'T!)

Parenting

Sleeping with Your Baby: A Guide to Co-sleeping by James McKenna (This book was written in response to public health campaigns that demonize sleeping with your baby.  Instead of saying, "If you are going to do this, here are the safe ways to do it" and educating the public, they say, "DON'T DO IT! IT'S HORRIBLY UNSAFE AND MAY KILL YOUR BABY!" My oldest son pointed out that it's interesting that the exact opposite approach is taken with sex education.)

The Attachment Connection: Parenting a Secure and Confident Child Using the Science of Attachment Theory by Ruth P. Newton, Ph.D.

Mojo Mom by Amy Tiemann (This is loosely put here - it could also go in my general non-fiction category coming up.)

Organizing

Organizing Magic by Sandra Felton (I had read this before, but figured I would reread it. Nothing earth-shattering contained within!)

Mission: Organization (My sister gave me this for my birthday.  It's based on the show that was on HGTV about organizing your house and clearing up clutter.)

A Mother's Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot (Again, this book could go in a different category, but since I reread it mainly to consider the organizational aspects, I put it here.  I have never really reviewed this book although I have mentioned it several times, so I'll have to get to that someday!)

General Non-Fiction

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom (An interesting look at marketing and its effect on our brains. I didn't get the pun in the title until my husband pointed it out! I just thought, "Buy-ology: the study of buying.")

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (I enjoyed this book so much I am rereading it.  Look for a review soon!)

Languages

Language Logic: Practical and Effective Techniques to Learn Any Foreign Language by Robyn Matthew

Doing Foreign Language: Bringing Concordia Language Villages into Language Classrooms (I love these Concordia Language Villages and hope to have my children participate in them someday.  This book gave me ideas to incorporate their style of teaching into my homeschool and teaching.)

Isn't it ironic that languages is the smallest category?

Posted in My languages

It was not inevitable that I ended up studying languages.  Or maybe it was.

I grew up in a monolingual English-speaking family.  Both sides had been in the US since the time of the Revolutionary War (one part from 1640 or so), and my distant ancestors came from England and Ireland. So I have no heritage language, really.

As a young child, I loved looking at maps and making up songs about the countries I saw on them.  In second grade, we must have done a unit about other countries, because my teacher wrote phrases in different languages on the board.  I copied them down and kept that notebook for a long time.  I still remember that one phrase was "Takk for maten" (Norwegian for "Thanks for the meal").

As I got older, I loved writing stories and poems and noticing things about language.  I kept a list of adjectives that had two opposites; for example, the opposite of "light" can be either "heavy" or "dark."  I understood grammar and was good at it.

At the end of seventh grade, I had to choose either French or Spanish for the following school year.  Since my aunt had been a French teacher and all my older sisters had taken French, I chose French, figuring that if it ended up being hard for me, I would have lots of help available.  I'm sure that my French teachers, if they even remembered me, would tell you that I showed no special promise in French.

The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I had an interesting experience that is still affecting my life.  One night I had a dream about an unknown boy.  While thinking about the dream the next day, I heard a song on the radio.  It was Menudo's first single in English, called If You're Not Here.  That evening at the mall, I found their album and discovered that one of the boys in the group looked just like the boy in my dream.  I bought the album, of course!

I really started liking Menudo, and that was their only album in English so far.  So I started buying their Spanish albums.  I withstood some ridicule from my sisters for that, because they couldn't understand why I would want to listen to songs I couldn't understand.  For two years I listened to those Spanish albums, and then in my sophomore year of high school, I took both French 3 and Spanish 1.

Spanish was my favorite class, because I loved the language and because my next older sister took it with me.  We would study together for the tests, and due to that, I finished the year with a final average of 96.  I remember at one point telling my teacher that I had been listening to Menudo albums for several years, and she exclaimed, "That's why you have such a good accent!"  It was during that year that I realized that I really liked languages, and I wanted to take French 4, Spanish 2, and Italian 1 in my junior year (I would have preferred German, but Italian was the only other language my school offered) , but my school would not let me, so I ended up only taking Spanish.

I went to college early, after my junior year.  I didn't study any languages right away. I finished the credits I needed for high school and wasn't sure what to do next.  While looking at the college catalog, I became intrigued with the idea of majoring in International Business. So then I started studying German.  By this point, studying a language was not hard for me at all, and I excelled in German.  But the class was only offered Wednesday nights, and I decided I wanted to attend a Bible study group that night, so I didn't take the second semester.

By that time, I had realized that I wasn't really a businesswoman type, and under the influence of my father, had decided to major in math (I'm sure if my high school math teachers remember me, they would be hysterical about now.)  The normal progression of courses led to my taking calculus in the summer.  In case you didn't already know this, that's a bad idea.  Summer course plus bad teacher equalled Jeanne studying calculus all summer, trying to make it make sense.

One evening after a test, I drove the half hour home in tears.  I had done really badly on it. (As it ended up, I actually got an A, because he graded on a curve and everyone else had done really badly too.  I seem to recall that just finishing two problems on the test was an A.)  As I drove home, I thought, "I don't even really like math!"  So then I asked myself, "What do I like?"  And the answer was - languages.

I summoned up the courage to call my dad on the phone (even though I lived in the same house, I couldn't summon up THAT much courage!) and tell him that I needed a break from math and was going to concentrate on languages for a while.  I sat down with my college catalog and figured out that I could graduate the following May with an AA in Liberal Arts.  I contacted my German professor and asked for his permission to study the second semester material on my own and enroll in Intermediate German that fall, which he happily gave.  I enrolled in Intermediate Spanish, after three years of no formal Spanish.  And I was happy!

After graduating from the two-year college, I transferred to a four year college and continued studying both languages.  I ended up majoring in German and minoring in Spanish (a double major would have taken another semester) and deciding to go on to graduate school to get my doctoral degree and become a professor.  What happened after that is another story.  The point is that it wasn't until the summer of 1991 that I realized, at age 20, what had been written on the wall since I was a child.  I loved languages!

Posted in Me

Tonight I told my husband about the conclusion I had reached in this post that this year just ending was the hardest homeschooling year ever.  I told him, "I don't know what I was thinking.  I thought that this school year we would do tons of schoolwork, join activities, make friends, do a science coop, and basically be perfect homeschoolers, WHEN I HAD JUST HAD A BABY!"

He just rolled his eyes and said, "What am I going to do with you?"

This gap between my expectations and my reality is very hard to deal with, because I waste time feeling bad that I haven't met my incredibly unrealistic goals, and that energy could go toward actually working on them!  As an even more dramatic example, I could share the list of goals I made up for last summer.

Keep in mind that I was in my third trimester and had a four year old and two year old twins, and somehow I thought I was going to accomplish twenty-one goals in six different areas. In two months. Hugely pregnant. With my oldest preparing to leave for college.

I'm insane.  But I can only see it in retrospect!  How can I bring my expectations in line with what I can truly accomplish?  Maybe I don't understand goal-setting?

And I find myself, yet again, working on a schedule.  Is it a good idea? I don't know.  I just reread A Mother's Rule of Life and I noticed something I never had before, a critical couple of lines that I had overlooked.  "A Rule of Life is not just a schedule, not just a collection of activities organized into a set pattern for efficient repetition.  A Rule is an organization of everything that has to do with your vocation, based on a hierarchy of the priorities that define the vocation and done with the intent to please God.  It deals with the essential responsibilities of your state of life, organized to ensure their fulfillment.  The activities worked into the Rule are determined by the specific calling, charism, and apostolate of the person living the Rule." (emphasis added)

I think that before I was confused and thought that, because Holly Pierlot was a Catholic homeschooling mother, and because I was a Catholic homeschooling mother, my rule would look like hers, perhaps with minor variations.  I thought that her vocation was my vocation, but it's not.  *I* am called to do things she is not, and she is called to do things I am not.  At this point I almost wish she had not put her example in the book, and had put more examples of religious life in the book.

I started to realize that, even though all nuns have similar-looking vocations, the orders are different.  The Rules are different.    They have different callings and charisms.  Making my own rule is not just a matter of plugging my specifics into Holly's framework - *I* need to sit down and understand what *my* vocation is and how best to fulfill it.  I need to discern what *my* daily duties are. Then I need to develop self-discipline to do what God has called me to do. 

When I am goal-setting or schedule-making, I need to know that God has called me to do those things, not that I am making some crazy list of 21 things I'll never get to that He didn't want me to do anyway.