Mommathon

The Known World

Reading Lolitha in Tehran

Girl Finds God

Mission to America

Other People's Children

Night

The Old Ace in the Hole

Black Swan Green

Miss American Pie

Revenge of the Pasta Eaters

Babyville

Something Blue

How to be Lost

The Right Fit

Tales from the Crib

Vinegar Hill

Bed Rest

Limbo

The Tenth Circle

One Mississippi

Just the title alone gets your attention, doesn't it?  It is the title of book I am currently reading written by Jennifer Weiner.  She has also written In Her Shoes and a couple of other books that I have read, but I can't think of the titles right now.  This book, okay, all of her books, would definitely qualify as beach reads.

This all started when I dragged everything out of the hall closet to clean it. As you can see, I didn't get very far. My cleaning quickly turned into a game of dress up.

I am currently reading The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. It is a memoir. (I am on a memoir kick right now and have read just about everyone recently published and if I haven't read it I am probably on the waiting list at the library for it.) Anyways, it takes place shortly after WWII in Ireland. It is about a boy whose father is Irish and his mother is German and how difficult is was to grow up in Ireland when everyone in Europe was still hating all things German. To make a bad situation worse, his father will only let the family speak Irish (which hardly anyone in Ireland speaks) or German, which no one in Ireland speaks. They are strictly forbidden from reading anything English, listening to English music or playing with children who speak English. And I thought my parents were strict!

My kid is the kid who is kicking, screaming and crying at swim lessons. Yep, that's us. We're the ones you look sadly at and think, "Poor thing, I'm glad my kid's not like that." I never thought I would have a child who was so terrified of swim lessons, but I do. He LOVES the baby pool, but he is 4 and is getting a little too big to be splashing around with the babies. He has not always been this way, though. He loved swim lessons when he was a toddler and he even liked them when he was 3 when he had to get in the pool without me. Then, there was the fateful summer (last summer), when we had a teacher who thought it would be fun to roughhouse with the kids. Liam likes to roughhouse just as much as the next kid, but he completely respects the danger factor of water and realizes that maybe the pool is not the best place to roughhouse especially with a bunch of non-swimmers. She ruined him. THANK GOD we have an awesome swim teacher this year who somehow manages to get him in the pool and then manages to drag him away from the side of the pool so that he can actually be an active participant in the lesson. (She was even bold enough to grab him by the ankles as he tried to bolt on the first day. (Yep, it's that bad.) She was still in the pool and he was on the side. Then there is Colm who gets upset when his swim lessons are over. He loves the pool! Maybe some of it will rub off on his big brother. :) We only have to do this five more times and then lessons will be over for the season.  Phew!

Whether you decide to homeschool your children, send them to public, parochial or private school, families do what they do because it works best for THEIR family. Okay, now to part where I vent. I was speaking to someone today who had enrolled her ten-year old son in a cake decorating class. When they got there he was the only boy and he refused to go in. I would say that is a pretty normal reaction for a boy that age. The mom, on the other hand, got mad at her son and told him he was behaving like a public school kid. WHAT??!!! Like I said before, families choose to school their children in a way that works for THEIR family. We are lucky that we live in a time and a place where we have those choices. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT use your choice to teach your children that your way is better and those other kids are just a bunch of sorry suckers. I have no tolerance for people who teach their children to hate or in any way look down at other people.

This is why everyone needs a sibling. Today was a rainy day and since we couldn't go play outside they spent part of their morning using these blankets to dress up as ghosts, to wrap themselves up like burritos and to wrap each other up to the point where they both would fall over giggling.