Catching Up: 4th of July, Growing Things, and a Sparkle Cello Conundrum

I am behind.  On just.... everything.

At least here on my blog I can catch up with one messy post of odds and ends.  This won't be very coherent, but hey, you get what you pay for.

Part of the reason I haven't had time to write is I have been reading.  I finished Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and really enjoyed it.  It didn't feel like it was over 500 pages, but it sucked up time like it was over 500 pages.  From a writer's point of view it looks like it must have been great fun.  Basically the main character starts her life over each time she dies and we get to see lots of variations on her life story.  I found the whole thing very interesting and wish I could have attended our book club discussion on it.  Excellent book if you're looking for something (and you've already read mine!).

4th of July went well.  The parade in the morning was fun, but I miss marching bands.  We have several lazy bands that get driven on the backs of trucks, and among those are a polka band and a live group backing up an Elvis impersonator (which I used to think was weird and now look forward to every summer more than I can say), but no schools marching.  A lot of schools don't even have bands anymore, though, which makes me sad.  The elementary schools all had marching bands when I was a kid and we loved cheering on Roosevelt School in the parades and hearing the group practice around the neighborhood.  This year's parade did not include giant sausages, but did have Milwaukee's mayor, and I got to shake hands with Senator Tammy Baldwin.  My kids got a moderate candy haul, but the whole idea of candy for 4th of July is still odd to me.  (It's another bizarre thing from "back in my day" that I can tell them about.  No candy being thrown at the 4th of July parade, and knobs you had to turn to change the channel on the TV.  Oooooh.)

Mona got honorable mention for her decorated bike in this year's contest.

This worked out fine because the prize was a bunch of sparkly headbands that she loves.  Her bike was not as flashy as the ones that won, but the amount of fine detail work she did was above and beyond.  She even made a special patriotic helmet for her duct tape eagle.  (I told her it reminded me of a Mexican wrestler and she liked that idea.)

Quinn's flag with exactly 50 stars

Quinn had kind of the opposite experience of last year.  Last July he entered his scooter in the boys' coaster division, but was the only entrant, so he received a trophy and a prize when he scootered across the stage as they called his name.  He was really proud and it was adorable.  This year, having recently learned to ride a bike, he wanted to decorate that instead.  But the bike division started at age seven, so they put him in the trike group.  Well, I don't think anyone even pretends the tiny kids in the trike division decorate their own things, but Quinn did, and his bike looked big and messy by comparison.  He was okay about coming in last, but the problem was they somehow lost his name altogether.  They handed out prizes and then never called his name so he could ride across the stage!  I had to flag people down and ask them between other categories of kids coming up to please let Quinn have his chance to ride his bike up there, and they did.  And then the lady offstage with the consolation prizes gave Quinn a hard time since he didn't have an official "place" in the contest, and I had to explain that he didn't win anything so she should please let him have his stupid bag of plastic crap I don't want in my house marvelous prize.

Shameless Book Plug

Buy my book!  How is that for clever self-promotion?

Actually, today seems like a good day to remind people who say they'd like to read my book to go find a copy because the electronic version has become widely available.

The place where you can purchase Almost There in print where I receive the most royalties is at the CreateSpace estore.

My book can also be found in print at Amazon, and is available there in Kindle form as well.

Almost There is on Nook at Barnes and Noble, as well as other sites I'm less familiar with like Scribd. 

I have received some very kind feedback from readers so far, not all of whom are my mom.  If you liked my book would you consider writing a review on Amazon?  There could be pie in it for you.  Unless that violates some sort of code of ethics in which case I should probably disclose that you'd get pie anyway if you come over.

If you are interested reading Almost There for a book club, I'd be happy to participate in discussions and answer questions via Skype or email.  (Or in real live person form if it's convenient!)

Buy my book!  (Okay, pledge break done, back to working on real posts....)

Dragon Day! (Babble)

Just a quick post for anyone who is curious about how the dragons at book club came out.

I thought it was interesting that Mona was the only kid who decided to make her dragon look like the one in the book.  She is annoyed that the paint job isn’t cleaner, but she gets impatient and doesn’t want to wait long enough for something to dry before trying to correct it, so I promised her we could do touch up this week and get it the way she wants it.

She’s also the only kid who chose to leave the weight off the bottom of the dragon so that she could use it as a puppet instead of a mobile.

The others got creative in different ways.

Here are some more dragons from book club:

We talked about the book while we painted and ate Fig Newtons and tangerines and I think it went very well.  I love hearing kids talk excitedly about books!

The one question I had for the kids was about the narrator (after discussing what a narrator was).  The book is called “My Father’s Dragon” and tells the story of Elmer Elevator and his adventures rescuing and befriending a baby dragon.  The story is about Elmer, but obviously told by Elmer’s child.  All of us jumped to the conclusion that the narrator was a boy, but I pointed out that it’s never stated.  It could be told by Elmer’s daughter.  But I think because the protagonist is male, we hear the narrator’s voice as male, but that doesn’t have to be the case.  Just because it’s a children’s book club doesn’t mean there aren’t always interesting things for adults to ponder about the reading too!

In any case, if you are looking for some kind of activity to do with your child and other parents and kids as well, book clubs are fun.  You can make it what you want.  I’m craft heavy and discussion heavy, but other parents put more effort into the food, or something else.  It’s nice to read with your children and stories are a good way to get them talking about something other than what they had for snack at school.  I’m already planning a book club for Quinn.  We’re just waiting for him to have more friends who can, you know, read.

Prepping the Dragons (Babble)

We’re having our first meeting of Mona’s book club this weekend.  I hope it goes well.
 
We read the three book collection of My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett.  It was a book dear to my Great Aunt Dorothy’s heart and she passed it down to my mom and uncles and last summer one of my uncles passed it down to me and my children.  It’s a charming trilogy and my kids loved it.

From a hosting book club point of view, choosing snacks was easy because in the story they eat a lot of tangerines, pink lollipops, and Fig Newtons.  Much easier to pick up at the store than prairie food for pioneers.

The sticking point was coming up with a craft.  The problem is that Mona is too crafty.  She had elaborate ideas for her friends to construct their own dragons, and I had to explain that most people aren’t like her.  I told her that she can see things in her mind and make them real, but that many adults I know can’t even do that.  We didn’t want to make anyone feel inadequate or come up with something that would take days to do.  We had to keep it simple.  I suggested we give everyone a copy of the map of Wild Island from the book and let kids draw what they think might be on the blank end of the island where nothing was filled in.  Mona liked that, but still wanted a more elaborate craft to go with it.

So I started giving it some thought, which is dangerous.  Because Mona’s instinct to make elaborate projects comes straight out of my DNA. I love to build things.  So I’m over the top, too, but at least I know to put the burden of the work onto myself and not expect other people to follow my lead.

I decided what might be cute are little flapping dragon mobiles, like those hanging birds with the counterweight underneath that you pull to make the wings move.  I puzzled out a prototype with my husband and then started the assembly line.  I figured if I made a basic dragon the kids could paint them and tie on the strings and the weight themselves.

Want to see?


Here’s a not so great shot of the prototype:

And here are most of the parts:

The basic pieces of the dragon are cut out of pine, then a piece of felt for the hinge, string, perler beads to knot the string with, hot glue, and a rubber ball cut in half and with a hole drilled in it for the counterweight.  The whole thing will be strung onto a popsicle stick.
My design was probably not the most conventional, but it seems to work.  When I looked up similar things online most people used fishing line or wire for the hinge, but tying up the fishing line got annoying and the wings didn’t flap as well.  I sawed a notch in each wing and glued the felt in there, then glued the felt to the back of the body.

I figure the kids can paint their dragons however they want (I even have a bag of jewels they can glue on if they feel like it), and at the end of book club when everything is dry I can show them how to string their dragons up.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Not that I really had time for any of this.  Today was supposed to be a work at home on violins day, but what’s the fun of having a band saw and a drill press if I can’t use them for something non-work related once in a while?

Besides, I’ve been making real progress lately.  I’ve had to stay up past midnight every night for weeks to get anywhere on my violins so I earned a little dragon prep time.  Proof!  Here’s my finished top plate with the bass bar installed, and this is what a violin with a gabillion lining clamps on it looks like while glue is drying:

Anyway, I think I’m ready for book club.  I just have to make sure the other parents understand that I don’t believe for a second that anyone else has to do a project like this when they host.  Because that’s crazy.  But prepping all those little flapping dragons was fun for me and I loved having an excuse to do it.  I can’t wait to see how the kids decorate them!

I don’t know yet if this little book club will take hold, but I hope so, because we’re already looking forward to the next book.

Eating Our Words at Book Club (Babble)

I love our mom/kid book club.  This weekend was our smallest meeting yet, since one of the boys and his mom couldn’t make it, but we got to discuss one of my all time favorite books: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.  If you’ve never read it, go find it.  It’s fun for little kids even if they don’t understand much of it, perfect for upper elementary kids who will learn a lot, and frankly, it always leaves me inspired.  Every time I read that book I get excited about the idea of doing everything, even math problems.  (And trust me, I’m not normally a fan of math problems, so that’s some effective writing.)

For anyone not familiar with the book, basically it’s about a boy named Milo who wastes his time and finds nothing interesting until he comes home from school one day to discover a mysterious tollbooth in his room.  He travels through the tollbooth into a strange new world where he finds companions and embarks on a mission to rescue a pair of princesses.  The whole book is designed around clever word play with the larger goal of making learning exciting.  Milo visits Dictionopolis (the land of words), and Digitopolis (the land of numbers), and many unexpected places in between.  The princesses he’s trying to rescue are Rhyme and Reason, who have been banished into the Mountains of Ignorance, and nothing has gone well in the land since they left.

The kids all asked great questions about the book: What was your favorite place in it? Was it all in Milo’s imagination or not? Which demon was the scariest?  And one girl made a big list of all the expressions she didn’t understand which turned out to be a lot of fun to explain, such as “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” and “Make hay while the sun shines.”

The funny part about hosting book club, though, is that I end up reading the book with a different sort of attention.  When you have to come up with a snack and a craft related to the book, any mention of food becomes important.  There is a character in the book who passes around a box of sugar coated punctuation marks at one point, and Aden and I looked at each other and said, “Hey!  Snack!”  We made ours out of chocolate shortbread.  Periods and commas were the easiest, Aden did the exclamation points, and I reshaped dough cut from a ‘5’ cookie cutter that we happened to have into question marks.

The other obvious snack was the half-baked ideas served at a Dictionopolis banquet.  Those were pastries with phrases written on them like “The World is Flat” (which, as the book says, people swallowed for years).  I picked up some long doughnuts with white icing on them from our local bakery and let the kids write their own words on them.  In Dictionopolis people must think about what they say because they have to eat their words.
My kids had other elaborate ideas for food, like subtraction stew and all the letters of the alphabet made from different foods starting with each of those letters, but there’s a limit.

For the craft we decided to make rocks to chip apart.  In the book people get numbers by mining for them.  They also tend to find jewels as they dig, but those just get tossed onto a big pile.  So I went to Home Depot and asked someone there what the worst and weakest plaster-like compound was that they carry, because encasing numbers inside plaster of Paris could take the kids forever to chip out.  I was directed toward some drywall compound that sets in five minutes and that worked great.  Aden and I mixed some up in disposable cups and added in handfuls of fake jewels and a few plastic numbers (which we found in the clock-making section of a craft store), and then the next morning cut away the cups.

It was more of a destructive craft than a constructive one, but the kids enjoyed it.  And the funny thing was since they were intent on finding the few numbers hidden in their rocks they wound up dismissively tossing the little jewels off to the side as they chiseled away, just the way the characters in the book did.

Ian took Mona and Quinn off to Bug Day at the local nature center during Aden’s book club, but we saved them a couple of Digitopolis rocks:

I’m glad our book club is still running.  It’s hard to make time for ongoing events like that, but it makes me so happy to see my daughter and her friends excited about books.  Aden’s not an avid reader the way I was at her age, but the book club creates such a positive association with reading and books in general that I think it helps.

It’s so good, in fact, we’ve decided to start a book club for Mona now.  She’s been worming her way into the last few meetings with Aden’s group, much to Aden’s chagrin, so I asked Mona if we should invite some of her own friends over to talk about books and she was thrilled.   She’s already decided on “How to Train Your Dragon” for our first read so I need to start talking with some other parents soon.  I love Mona’s enthusiasm.

Now if I can just find a book club for ME.  I don’t even need a craft and a snack!  I just miss serious reading and discussions.  I’ve been making myself find time to just sit quietly and read again like I did before I had children and I’m glad I have.  Because there is no other satisfaction quite like that of a good book.  I’m glad my kids are learning that, too.

Tough Enough (Babble)

Aden and I got to pick the next book for our mother/child book club meeting in April.  I suggested Little House on the Prairie because my taste in children’s literature tends toward old classics.  I got Aden reading The Boxcar Children recently, I’m looking forward to reading The Secret Garden with her someday, and down the road maybe Jane Eyre.  I don’t think I’ve read Little House on the Prairie since I was about nine myself, and from what I could remember of it I thought Aden would enjoy it.  She was excited about the book–until we actually started reading it.

The first chapter seemed to leave Aden rather bored.  From her perspective the descriptions of selling a house and packing up to move elsewhere probably looked like grownups dealing with grownup problems and dragging the kids along for the ride.  I, however, was left dumbstruck.  They packed up to move from Wisconsin in the WINTER because the rivers and lakes would be easier to cross while frozen.  (We have trouble traveling in the winter here in Wisconsin and we have roads.  And heat.  And salt trucks plowing the way ahead of us.)  They traveled in their covered wagon over the Mississippi and down into Iowa and Missouri all the way to Kansas with two little girls and a baby.  A BABY!  How did they do that?  Why did they do that?  (Actually, I looked it up and found out in real life the baby was born while they were living on the prairie, but that doesn’t sound much better to me, and I don’t doubt for a minute that someone didn’t attempt something similar anyway so it’s still incredible to ponder.) 

They purposely wanted to go where there weren’t any people and start from nothing.  I can’t imagine doing that no matter how hard I try.  I’m in awe of what they did, but when I think about how tricky I found it to move from one house to another just across the street during a Wisconsin winter with two little girls and a toddler, I’m amazed all over again.  Pa builds their whole house and somehow makes a door without nails, and Ma cooks and cleans and IRONS THEIR CLOTHES in the middle of nowhere.  (My kids have only seen me use an iron for melting perler beads.  I don’t think they know it’s for clothes.)  It’s absolutely crazy and I was enthralled from the first page.

Now, the book didn’t stay boring for Aden, but unfortunately it got upsetting.  The Ingalls family has a dog named Jack who runs along under the wagon the whole journey (“Mom, why can’t the dog ride in the wagon?”) only to be swept away while they are all crossing a raging river.  Aden fell apart.  Normally when I read to her and something makes her sad or scared she starts repeating over and over “This is a kids’ book, so everything will come out okay in the end.”  But she knew this book was based on a true story, so when her sister tried to reassure her that everything would be fine, Aden said, “But this is a real life story, and real life doesn’t usually turn out okay.”  She wanted me to stop reading.  She cried about Jack the dog and said we never should have picked this book.  She didn’t want me to go on to the next chapter.

Honestly, I couldn’t remember if Jack would be found again or not.  I couldn’t promise Aden that the dog would be fine if we just read a little further.  So I took the opportunity to have a conversation with her about being so sensitive.  I told Aden I was glad she feels things deeply, and of course it’s sad when a dog is lost or dies.  But I also told her that I was starting to worry that I was doing a bad job as her mom in preparing her for the world if she couldn’t make it through a story where anything bad happens.  I’m afraid that if I shield her from too much that I will one day send her out on her own and she will be crushed to pieces.

I told Aden about how her great-great-grandmother here in Milwaukee had to drop out of school and go to work to help support the family at age nine, and that life can be hard.  Our own lives are so easy by comparison that we don’t get the benefit of learning from rough events.  Life usually isn’t fair or easy.  Everything dies, everything ends, and the lesson we must take away from that is to cherish beauty and life all the more because it is fleeting.  If I had only focused on the loss I experienced after my miscarriages I never would have had the strength to try again and we wouldn’t have Quinn.  It’s fine to grieve but not to be incapacitated. Aden looked at me, her face covered in tears, her knees pulled up to her chin.  She shook her head when I told her I was going to read the next chapter.

The truly absurd thing about all of this is that the Ingalls family had to be tough enough to actually live through all of these adventures, and I was only asking my child to find the strength just to hear about it.  I hadn’t appreciated how soft our lives are in general until I realized how simply reading about real hardship was too much for my (not so) little girl.  Because of her dad’s deployments I had no choice but to talk with Aden earlier than I would have liked about war and its consequences, so it seemed right to spare her any additional upsetting ideas if she didn’t feel up to them.  I live in dread of the day I have to explain the holocaust to her and let her know of all the relatives who lost their lives in that unfathomable nightmare.  She is so innocent of true horror and pain, and I wish she could remain that way, but if I don’t help her build a thicker skin reality will break her mind and her heart.  I want her to be able to cope.  I had to start somewhere, so we were going to deal with Jack the dog.

I opened Little House on the Prairie and read to Aden as she peeked out at me from behind her knees, clutching her pink bunny for comfort.  And, of course, by the end of that chapter Jack had returned, having survived being swept downriver and tracking their trail and nearly being shot by Pa who thought he might be a wolf sneaking up on their camp.  Aden was elated.

So what lesson did I teach?  I have no idea now.  Maybe that when in doubt you go ahead and read the next chapter anyway.  That’s a nice one, but probably not closely related to toughening her up.  I could rent Old Yeller but that would probably kill her.  I suppose I’m not really worried because in the long run no one’s life is easy and Aden will have to deal with any number of hardships that will come her way, I just don’t want to leave her completely unprepared for surviving them.  How tough is tough enough?  I suppose somewhere between building a little house in the middle of nothing and being able to read about it.

Book Club (Babble)

The first real event I got to host in my new house was my daughter’s book club meeting last weekend.  I volunteered to host book club because I figured it would give me good incentive to get cleaned up and organized, plus I thought it would be nice for Aden to have so many of her friends over at one time in her new house.  I think everything went well.

The idea of a mother-daughter book club was first suggested to me by a friend years ago when our two oldest girls were both pretty small.  She said she knew people whose kids were in sixth grade, and that they’d meet every month to discuss a book, do a craft and have a snack.  That sounded so sweet to me that I asked her if she wanted to start our own mini book club using picture books.  It was nice, but we were only able to make that happen twice.  My friend and I have schedules that are hard to coordinate, so the little book club faded away although the idea of it stayed with me.

Then recently a different friend with better networking skills than mine asked me if I wanted to participate in a book club for Aden and some other kids in her class.  Most of the other kids in the club are boys so it wasn’t quite the same book club I’d originally envisioned, but I knew it would be fun, so we’ve been meeting about every six weeks since the beginning of the year.  We started out with some of the Magic Treehouse books, but whoever hosts the meeting gets to pick the book, and for this most recent meeting Aden chose The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.


It’s a marvelous book, if a bit dark for second graders.  It has beautiful pencil drawings that function more like sections of a graphic novel rather than illustrations.  I’d read it to Aden last year and she wanted her friends to hear it too.  Since the story takes place in Paris we made crepes for the snack (which is not as elaborate as it sounds because we make crepes at home so often I could do them in my sleep), and since there is a lot in the book about clockworks we painted clocks.  (While looking around online for clock parts for my clock project in the kitchen, I came across a great sale where you could buy a whole unpainted clock kit really really cheap, so it was hard to resist.  Kids do so many crafts that you run out of room for, but a clock you can actually use so it seemed like a good way to go.)

I’m typing this on Mother’s Day, and that combined with thinking about the book club has me reflecting on how many wonderful moms I know.  One of my great regrets in life is that I don’t have the kind of time to devote to cultivating some of these relationships more deeply, but events like the book club at least give me a sense of what remarkable people are out there.  It’s been nice to take turns being in the homes of different families and to get to know some of the kids my daughter spends most of her days with.  All the moms in the book club are warm and talented in different ways, and seem like genuinely supportive people.  Even though I don’t know them as well as I’d like, I honestly believe if I were in a crisis and reached out to any of them, they would respond in a heartbeat.  That’s what good moms do.  Truly good moms have a quality about them that extends past the care of their own children to having a nurturing influence where it’s needed in their greater environment.  Part of how I knew I wanted to be a mom was that I had a protective sense about kids in general, not just a desire to have my own.

The book club provides a lot of good opportunities to talk to our kids about topics that don’t come up in an average day.  I’m always surprised and impressed at what the kids have to say about the books.  The favorite moments in the stories for the moms are invariably different from those of the kids, and that’s interesting too.  I think it’s good to have a forum with an equal number of kids and adults where everyone is listened to, and anyone can lead the discussion. 

Admittedly the adults usually set the pace and ask the questions, but a couple of kids in particular do contribute a great deal.  With The Invention of Hugo Cabret we were even able to explain to our kids a little bit about how they live in a privileged time where people often have kids because they really want them and hope to spend time with them.  The book is set during an earlier part of the twentieth century when many things were harder and the children in the book are not treated tenderly.  We got a chance to explain the word hypocrisy.  And then we got to eat strawberries and yogurt and nutella on crepes and paint clocks.  Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and I feel like the house has been officially broken in for entertaining.

I hope we’re able to keep the book club running for a long time.  You never know how things will work out with people’s lives and scheduling with families, but book club is worth making time for.  It’s always good to make time to read.  (And do a craft and have a snack.)