Mommy Brain

Remember that secret project I told you Andrea was working on for me? Well, what do you think of the new look? Be sure to scroll down to the very bottom of the page for the cool image in the footer. There are a couple of wonky things in the sidebar, but they’ll be figured out soon. Thanks, Andrea! It’s perfect – just what I imagined.

Josiah: Noah, I read two of the Frog and Toad books, and I’m not even allowed!

Noah: What do you mean?

Josiah: It says right on the book: “Grades 1 through 3.” I’m only in kindergarten!

Later, he came downstairs and announced to Kevin and I that he couldn’t play Stratego anymore, that it was against the rules. I said, “What rules?” His response? “The box says ages 8 and up!”

He also created some sort of booby-trap in the bathroom, involving piles of books covered with unrolled toilet paper. Then he came and confessed it to me, prefacing it with, “Mommy, don’t be mad, but…” Can you guess what TV show we’ve been watching on DVD? Yep, Macgyver!

I saw this at Quoth the Maven, and thought it would be a good way to continue my week of meaningless posts.

Full name: Carrie Eileen Kitzmiller.
What are you most afraid of?: Biggie: losing a child. Not-so-biggie: Spiders.
What is the most recent movie that you have seen on bootlet?: I don’t know what bootlet is. If they mean “bootleg” – I don’t.
Place of birth: Bellingham, Washington
Favorite food: Pizza.
Natural hair color: Brown. With more and more grey every day.
Ever been a Neat Freak?: I can hear my mom laughing all the way from her house. Um, no.
Ever been skinny dipping?: Mom, close your eyes – yes.
Love someone so much it made you cry?: Yes.
Ever been in a car accident?: Yes – and it was completely my fault. Thank God, no one was hurt. Except me – but only minor bruises and sore muscles.
Croutons or bacon bits?: Can I have both, please?
Favorite day of the week?: Friday.
Favorite restaurant?: Stefani’s Oak Street Grill. After years of only mediocre restaurants in our little town, we now have a restaurant with delicious food and wonderful atmosphere.
Favorite flower?: Dutch Iris.
Favorite sport to watch?: Football.
Favorite drink?: Non-alcoholic: Pepsi. Alcoholic: Colorado Bulldog.
Favorite ice cream?: Cherry Garcia or Chubby Hubby.
Warner Bros. or Disney?: Either – I love movies.
Ever been on a ship?: Does a ferry count?
What color is your bedroom carpet?: Don’t have a carpet in the bedroom – hardwood floors.
How many times did you fail your driver’s test?: None.
Before this one, from whom did you get your last e-mail?: Andrea, who’s working on a little secret project for me.
What do you do when you’re bored?: Read.
Bedtime?: 10:30 or 11:00.
Favorite TV shows?: House, Bones, Lost, Heroes, Jericho, and Life. If there are any other TV shows with one-word titles, chances are, I’ll like them.
Last person you went to dinner with?: Kevin – last Wednesday as an early Valentine’s Day celebration.
Park or zoo?: Parks are better for sitting in the sun and reading while the kids play – and I’ve never been much of an animal person.
Favorite colors?: Purple and dark green.
How many tattoos do you have:? None.
How many pets do you have?: None.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?: The chicken, of course.
What do you want to do before you die?: Visit Ireland. Write a book.
Have you ever been to Hawaii?: No.
Have you been to countries outside the U.S.?: Canada and Mexico.

Let me know if you play along.

Lisa at Kentucky Woman tagged me for a Hoopla. I don’t think I’ve ever done a Hoopla before.

(1) Post the rules on your post before you answer the questions.

(2) List one fact about yourself using each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name use your maiden name instead.

(3) When finished answering, tag one person for each letter of your name.

My middle name is Eileen.

E – Education – I homeschool my kids.
I – Ireland – I will visit there before I die.
L – Latin – The kids and I are learning Latin together.
E – Evergreen – I live in Washington, the Evergreen State.
E – Eggplant – I hate it.
N – Nephews – I have six.

Whew – that’s a lot of “E”s! If you are looking for something to post because you can’t think of anything else, consider yourself tagged.

So, I can’t think of anything interesting or deep to write. All I want to do is count the hours until Thursday! So I thought I’d tell you about the books I’m currently reading, and ask you to return the favor in the comments.

~Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Okay, I know my sidebar says I’m reading this, but I’m not. I read 42 pages, but I was also in the middle of Vanity Fair, and that one won out. Then, when I finished VF, I had four books lined up that I had committed to read – one for the MotherTalk Book Club and Salon, and three others I committed to reviewing here. And, I must admit, I haven’t been too anxious to get back to it. I will, though. And since – technically – I am still in the middle of it, it stays on the sidebar. Also, to remind me that I don’t want to let so much time go by that I have to start it all over.

~Winter Haven by Athol Dickson (ARC)

This is one of the books I committed to reviewing. Athol Dickson is quickly becoming one of my very favorite Christian authors. In Winter Haven, Vera Gamble is called to the island of Winter Haven, Maine, to identify her brother’s body. She hasn’t seen him for thirteen years, when he disappeared at age 14. When she sees his body, which washed up on the beach at Winter Haven, he hasn’t aged a day. And so the mystery begins… Dickson’s books remind me of M. Night Shyalaman’s movies – just when you think you’ve figured out where the plot is going, it makes a turn that you didn’t see coming. And underneath the page-turning story are deeper meanings that will leave you thinking. I’m only about halfway through this one, but I’m enjoying it very much.

~Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick

I am learning so much from this book! I’m not very far along yet, but I am amazed at how much I didn’t know about the Pilgrims. Highly recommended.

~The Oxford Book of American Poetry

This is an ongoing project – it will probably not be over by the end of this year. It’s arranged chronologically, and I’m up to Edgar Allan Poe.

~An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn’t by Judy Jones & William Wilson

This book is full of information, and it is presented in a dry, humorous style that I appreciate. There are sections on Literature, Philosophy, American History, World History, Political Science, Economics, Science, Religion, Music, and Art. The Economics section was worth the price of the book in itself, since it explained basic economics in a way I could understand. I’m in the middle of the Political Science section.

~The Intellectual Devotional by David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim

I had seen this book mentioned on a couple of blogs last year, and decided to get it for myself this year. I gave Michelle a copy for Christmas, and it’s fun to be able to talk about what we’ve read during the past week. It is arranged in sections by the day of the week: Monday is History, Tuesday is Literature, etc.

~The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller (audiobook)

I just started listening to this, and I’m not quite sure if I like it or not. The last audiobook I listened to was The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz, which was very suspenseful and moved right along. This one is more of a character study, so it’s not very fast-paced. I enjoy Blair Brown’s reading style, though, so I’m going to give it a bit longer before I give up.

I also just finished reading The Spiderwick Chronicles Books 1 – 5 aloud to the kids. We saw the movie on Saturday. Eh. I read online that the authors were happy with it, but I was bummed. I don’t understand why movie producers don’t use the Harry Potter movies and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie as their examples. I understand cutting small plot points for the sake of time, but I hate it when they change things significantly. The two youngest really liked it; Noah and Natalie said it was just okay, but there were specific scenes they were looking forward to that weren’t there. Natalie, however, thought Freddie Highmore made a very cute Jared.

So, that’s what I’ve been reading. How about you?

(The Chronicles of Narnia: Movie Tie-In Edition was provided to me by Special Ops Media for the purpose of review.)

This is not going to be a review of The Chronicles of Narnia – there’s no need for one! Most everyone already knows that the Narnia series is an all-time classic of children’s fantasy. And not just children – my mom read the entire series last year for the first time and enjoyed them.

Prince Caspian (click on the link for the trailer) will release in theaters on May 16th, and to help promote the film, there is a new edition of The Chronicles of Narnia available. This book would be the perfect introduction to Narnia for anyone who hasn’t read about the Pevensie children’s adventures before. It’s a trade paperback version that contains all of the novels in order. The really cool thing is the fold-out Narnia timeline in the center of the book. It’s illustrated beautifully, and has all the major events of Narnia and where they fit into the grand scheme of things. It’s a nicely done edition, and in spite of including all of the novels, it’s in an easiliy handled size.

…until I get a four-day, three-night weekend of grown-up time – one day with my best friend, three days with my husband. Not that I’m counting.

The people at Amazon.com are very smart. That whole “Free shipping on orders over $25″ gets me every time. I found this wonderful little chapter book series called Andrew Lost that Jonathan is devouring. Since this is the first series that has really grabbed him, I wanted to make sure and keep them coming, but the library only has a couple of titles. Fortunately, the books are paperback and only $3.99 apiece. Which brings me back to the $25/free shipping thing. When I order a few books for Jonathan, and a new handwriting book for Natalie, and I’m still slightly under that $25 mark, I can’t let it go. I have to add something from my wish list to get that free shipping. This time, it was The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, which has turned out to be a gem of a book.

I’ve read a lot of books that are love letters to reading or to books themselves, but this book is a love letter to bookstores. Buzbee worked for several years as a sales employee in various bookstores, then moved on to work as a sales rep for several publishing houses. He loves books – and he is addicted to bookstores. Buzbee talks about his own experience as a bookseller and rhapsodizes on how the bookstore is basically the perfect retail destination. Along the way, he also talks about the history of the bookshop, beginning with the bookseller’s stalls outside the library of Alexandria and taking the reader up to the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, whose owner published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no British publishing houses would touch it. This book is just full of little nuggets that will stick with me for a while.

Four out of five stars.

“The invitation of the bookstore occurs on so many levels that it seems we must take our time. We peruse the shelves, weaving around the other customers, feeling a cold gust of rain from the open door, not really knowing what we want. Then there! on that heaped table, or hidden on the lowest, dustiest shelf, we stumble on it. A common thing, this volume. There may be five thousand copies of this particular book in the world, or fifty thousand, or half a million, all exactly alike, but this one is as rare as if it had been made solely for us. We open to the first page, and the universe unfolds, once upon a time.” p. 8-9

“The deepest connections with customers usually come at the front counter, precisely because that island of counter between customer and bookseller creates an imaginative space for the two to occupy. There’s the safety of the physical barrier, which allows both sides to be a little freer; you are close to each other, face to face, but a barrier remains. Both parties are free to leave at any moment, the clerk to her duties, the customer to the world.

But finally, it’s the cash register that holds sway, for it implies the exchange of goods for money, and it’s during these transactions that a bookseller learns the most about a customer. Out on the floor, it’s all possibility, what a customer might choose to purchase, but at the counter, once the register starts ringing, that’s where the revelations are. These are the books the customer will take home to read or stack up or offer as a gift, and each book, in some way, represents a part of that person’s life. It’s not a mere tally of reading tastes, who likes what authors, it’s a gauge of what concerns people, what occupies them. There, face to face over the elbow-polished wood of the counter, bookseller and customer share a silent but telling moment. Travel guides, cookbooks, a book on divorce, one about ailing parents, a book of baby names, one about the horrifying spread of war in the new century, maybe the vampire novel that will take your mind off everything else, if only for twenty minutes at a time. It’s a little like looking into another person’s heart.” p. 106-107

“By the sixteenth century, the use of coffee had become commonplace in the Middle East, and the Arabic coffeehouse was a long-established cultural fixture. Patrons of early European coffeehouses would have recognized the style and intent of the Arabic coffeehouse. Customers were invited to stay for a long time and to engage in impassioned literary, political, and theological debates. One European observer of the Arabic coffeehouse called it a “theatre for the exercise of profane eloquence,” And Ralph Hattox in his Coffee and Coffeehouses has referred to it as “an excuse for sociable procrastination.” Same as it ever was.” p. 111-112

“A bookseller frequently hears the same dismaying comment, “Well, I’d like to read it, but books are just too expensive.” Considering that books might have cost 50 cents when you were a child, or that you might be able to find the same book for free in a library, then I suppose that a $25.00 hardcover novel does seem extravagant. But a little comparison shopping might help the recalcitrant customer rethink the book’s long-term value.

Today a San Francisco movie ticket will set you back $10.00. Two hours later, give or take, and poof, that money is nothing but your memory, at least until you pony up another $20.00 for the DVD. A 400-page novel will probably take at least 8 hours to read. Once you buy a book, it’s yours, and you can mark and look up at your leisure that one terrific paragraph that keeps floating through your head.

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion. Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there’s an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader’s active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer’s eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

The same $25.00 you’d spend on a hardcover novel could easily be spent for the entree at a tony restaurant, salad, dessert, and wine not included. A terrific time is had by all, but the meal is quickly a memory. Chef Glenn Groening of Kezar Bar and Restaurant in San Francisco has created a duck breast over risotto – I claim it’s one of the finest meals on the planet – and reasonably priced at $15.00, or roughly the price of a new trade paperbck, but when I’ve finished the duck and want just a few more bites, as I always do, well, I’m out of luck unless I order another entire serving. Books are digested, Francis Bacon reminds us, but never consumed.” p. 131-132

“I buy books when I travel because the bookstores I visit then surprise me with their selections. The new novel by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar may be in my local bookstore, or cheaper on Amazon.com, but I haven’t stumbled across it yet. But if I’m at Square Books in Oxford, Mississipi, where the staff member has read the book or simply liked the cover, it might be displayed to catch my eye. Or it could be something as simple as the light in the Fiction section on that given day and how it strikes the book’s colorful spine and calls out to me. Every bookstore has its own delights, and that’s why we can never have too many. The hard part is getting all those books in the suitcase.” p. 193

“We still prefer that quiet rustle of the pages, and besides, how do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?” p. 202

It’s February. Does anyone else get the mid-winter blahs in February? It always seems to hit me this time of year. I’m sick of winter, I want a break from homeschooling but there isn’t one in sight until Easter week, and the kids are squirrely. We’re done with the it’s-too-cold-to-play-outside days, done (for now) with the snowing-four-to-seven-inches-at-a-time days, and we’re into the it’s-above-freezing-and-the-piles-of-snow-are-melting-and-making-everything-soggy days. The kids play outside, and then come in completely soaked through. They saw the sun shining yesterday and Josiah yelled, “Spring is here!” I hated to burst his bubble, the poor guy.

The great thing is that I know the solution for the mid-winter blahs. It’s something Kevin and I do every year around this time – we head off to the nearest big city (that would be Spokane) for a weekend without our four wonderful children. That’s what’s happening next weekend, and I am SO ready! The cool thing is, I get an extra day of grown-up time this year. Kevin suggested that Michelle and I take next Thursday off, leave the kids with him and Don (they both work out of the home) and head to Spokane. We’ll be eating out, going to the movies, spending (too much) money at Barnes & Noble, and staying over in a hotel. All of that time, completely kid-free! Then Kevin will drop the boys off at her house Friday morning, drop Nan off at her best friend’s house, and come down to join me for the rest of the weekend. Of course, Michelle may need another day of rest and pampering after having my boys for the rest of the weekend, but we will be returning the favor and keeping their boys for a weekend so they can get away very soon.

So, what am I doing while I’m waiting impatiently for some Mommy time? Reading good books:

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

(Yes, I’m supposed to be reading Anna Karenina for the Winter Reading Challenge, but this little gem arrived on Friday, and after Becky Sharpe, I just couldn’t pick up another long novel with a main character who is a ninny.)

I’m also watching good movies, like this one:

Martian Child

Tomorrow is our Friday play date. (I’m writing this Thursday night.) It’s Michelle’s week to host, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will go better than the last two times we had it there. My boys were atrocious! Not to her boys, just to each other. They keep the fighting in the family, at least. But I don’t want her to be secretly wishing she hadn’t agreed to keep them next weekend! I love my kids, but every year around this time, they absolutely drive me nuts.

We thought maybe the kids would have a Tae Kwon Do promotion on Saturday, but our month off due to sickness has put them a little behind. There’s another promotion the first Saturday in March, and they should be ready for that one. Since they aren’t promoting, I am planning to take them to Spokane to see The Spiderwick Chronicles movie. They have been warned that their behavior can lose them this privilege, however. I’m sure Noah will be at his best, since the Spiderwick books are his all-time favorites. He has been waiting and waiting to see this movie. If Jonathan and Josiah continue behaving the way they did tonight at bedtime, it may be just Natalie, Noah, and I!

Well, I’ve rambled on long enough, so here are the links I’ve been saving to share:

~ If you’ve ever wondered what Sawyer would nickname you if you were one of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, wonder no longer. Mine is “Stubby.” Be sure to come back and tell me yours!

~ Every mom will be able to relate to this Baby Blues comic.

~ Check out the trailer for Indianan Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Can’t wait for this one!

~ Carol at Magistramater wrote a wonderful post on nurturing our appetite for beauty, goodness, and truth. After you read it, be sure to click on through to the Wendell Berry interview she links – it’s brilliant.

Have a great weekend!

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

from p. 36-37 of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

(Caillou’s Family Favorites was provided to me by Click Communications for the purpose of review.)

There are a few cartoons that I will always look on with fondness, no matter how old my children get. The stuff they love now, like Yugioh, Pokemon, Sonic? Not so much. The shows I will always remember fondly include Little Bear, Franklin, Kipper, and Caillou. The gentle animation and sweet characters make for peaceful cartoon viewing. No one is battling or playing loud rock music or, generally, driving Mommy crazy.

I’m blessed enough to still have one child in the right age demographic for these gentler shows. Josiah is 6, and he loves Caillou. Funny thing is, when the Caillou’s Family Favorites DVD came to review, he wasn’t the only one watching it.

This DVD has four episodes, each of which has four little adventures. The titles are “Caillou’s Surprise,” “People I Love,” “Captain Caillou,” and “Knowing How.”