Mommy Brain

The Adventures of Ratman by Ellen Weiss
The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet by Tony Abbott

The Adventure Bible for Young Readers
Iggie’s House by Judy Blume
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

Egermeier’s Bible Story Book: A Complete Narration from Genesis to Revelation for Young and Old by Elsie E. Egermeier
Favorite Poems Old and New selected by Helen Ferris
Wonders of Nature
Virgie Goes to School With Us Boys by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
For You Are a Kenyan Child by Kelly Cunnane
Edward and the Pirates by David McPhail
The Little Fish That Got Away by Bernadine Cook
Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London
Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs
Sweet Dream Pie by Audrey Wood and Mark Teague
Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran
The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowery
Weslandia by Paul Fleischmann
Bea and Mr. Jones by Amy Schwartz
The Rag Coat by Lauren A. Mills

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a woman with a long reading list must be in want of more books to read.”

Found this wonderful little gem at Staci‘s place. It fits me so well!

My bio page is up at 5 Minutes for Mom. This is really a great service, you should check it out if you’d like more exposure for your blog and a way to find other mom blogs. Be sure to scroll down and click on the interview link.

I finished Good Grief by Lolly Winston today. I started it Thursday night, wanting something new to read when waiting at the doctor’s office Friday. This is not the book to take into a waiting room if you are at all embarrassed by crying or laughing out loud over a book in public. I picked this up on a whim at Barnes and Noble and I’m so glad.

Good Grief tells the story of Sophie Stanton, widowed at age 36.

How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweaters that smell like mothballs and have crepe-paper skin and names like Gladys or Midge and meet with their other widow friends once a week to play pinochle. I’m only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my husband for three years: My husband and I, my husband and I… after all that time being single!

I think we all have an idea in our heads of what grieving looks like. I know that as Christians we have the hope of eternal life, and yet grieving is still a very real process. For some reason, people like to put a time limit on mourning: “It’s been a year now, shouldn’t she be moving on?” But grief is messy – no one moves through each stage in a neat little progression like the books would have us think.

On my way home from work that night, I get in an accident: I’m broadsided by the holidays. It happens when I stroll into Safeway and see the rows of tables by the door stacked high with Halloween candy: Milky Way, Kit Kat, Butterfinger. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Stop, turn, run! I try to shove my cart toward produce, but it won’t go. One stubborn wheel tugs like an undertow toward the candy. I kick the cart and focus on my shopping list: eggs, milk, ice cream.

I make it safely to produce, but there the pumpkins lurk. Look! they shout. The holidays are coming! I spot the bunches of brown corn you can hang on your door and the tiny gourds – the bumpy acne ones and the clown-striped green-and-yellow ones. I lean into the cart for support. How can a place called Safeway seem so dangerous?…

…”Miss?” A clerk clutching a bunch of basil stands beside me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” He said miss and not ma’am. Sweet. There are streaks of cranberry red spots on his cheeks, and his nose shines. I try to think of something to say, a vegetable to inquire after. Instead I blurt: “My husband died.” Maybe this is the first time I’ve said this. I’m not sure. I think it is. Suddenly I’m crying, that little-kid gulping kind of crying, where you can’t catch your breath. The morning after Ethan died, I resented the mourners collecting in my living room. How could they fall into the role and accept Ethan’s death so readily? While they wept and carried on, I cleaned the house. Scrubbed the shower grout with a toothbrush and Clorox. Now I’m one of the howling mourners. But they’ve wrapped it up already, moved on.

Sophie knows how she’s supposed to act, what everyone expects of her:

I want to be a classy widow – a Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Slim and composed, elegant and graceful. White gloves and a string of pearls. But I seem to be more the Jack Daniel’s kind of widow – wailing in the supermarket and mowing through the salad bar, hair all crazy like an unmade bed.

Lately, life requires so much self-discipline. While most people have a to-do list, I have a don’t-do list. Don’t eat Oreos until your gums bleed. Don’t sleep in your clothes. Don’t grab the produce boy’s teenage wrists and sob.

I am amazed that this is Ms. Winston’s first novel. It is well-written and poignant and funny and wrenching – sometimes all on the same page.

Isn’t there some way out of this? I wake up thinking in the middle of the night, desperate to negotiate a deal. Isn’t there some way around having to start this new life without my husband?

Maybe there’s been a mistake. A clerical error. Maybe the angel of death is a bumbling bureaucrat who took the wrong Ethan. “Oh, your Ethan,” the sweet volunteer in the daffodil-colored uniform behind the front desk at the hospital lobby would say if I called the hospital to check. “He didn’t die. He went home.” Then I’d climb into the Honda, drive back down to San Jose, and find Ethan in our kitchen waiting for me.

“I’ve been at the hardware store,” he’d say, shrugging and holding out a tiny brown bag of drill bits.

That’s it: My husband went to the hardware store for seven months. You know how men are!

During the first year after her husband dies, Sophie fights her way out of depression and finds comfort in reaching out to a young girl in need of someone to believe in her. She finds a new vocation and deals with the perils of being single again and she takes us along for every hilarious, crazy moment. Four stars.

Janice and Susan at Five Minutes for Mom have a free blog-listing service for mom blogs. You can find the details here.

Publishers acknowledge having buckled since the early 1980s to so-called multicultural “bias guidelines” demanded by interest groups and elected state boards of education that require censorship of textbook content to accommodate feminist, homosexual and racial demands.

The California State Board of Education was the first to adopt such guidelines in 1982, according to New York University education research professor Diane Ravitch in her latest book, “The Language Police.”

The California guidelines instruct textbook publishers and teachers: “Do not cast adverse reflection on any gender, race, ethnicity, religion or cultural group.” The board had informal “social-content standards” going back to the 1970s.

Publishers followed with their own editorial anti-bias guidelines, which banned words, phrases, images, and depictions of people deemed unacceptable — such as “man,” “mankind,” “manpower,” “men,” said to be sexist. Also banned are “able-bodied,” “aged,” “babe,” “backward,” “chick,” “fairy,” “geezer,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” “Redskin,” “sissy,” “suffragette” and “waitress.”

A team of 16 academic reviewers in Texas, the second-largest state market for textbooks behind California, last year found 533 factual and interpretive errors in 28 social studies texts submitted for adoption by the state board of education.

“Almost all of the books have deficient treatments of religion in general or of particular religious traditions, with the Christian tradition being almost uniformly the least well developed in all of the books.

“There is in all the texts a general tendency to see religion as just one trait among many cultural traits, rather than as a primary foundation of culture,” Mr. Gorman said. “In my own study of history and in my own personal experience, I have encountered many who are willing to give up their lives to keep or defend their religious faith, but rarely anyone who is willing to die for the right to eat pizza or dance the rumba.”

Historian David McCullough, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman, also calls school history and social studies textbooks “deadly dull.”

“It is as if they were designed to kill anyone’s interest in history,” he said in an interview. “A child made to read these books would ask, ‘What did I do wrong today that I am being so punished?’”

Okay, I keep finding more passages I want to quote, so I’m going to quit before I post the whole thing. Just click over and read the article.

Hat tip: The Homeschool Cafe

I’ve decided to join the Summer Reading Challenge. I’ve made less progress on my reading list than I’d like, so my goal is to read at least 18 books from my list between June 1st and August 31st. If you’re interested in joining the challenge, check out the details here.