I think this has been the single busiest week we’ve had in our eight years of parenting.  Whew!  We have been reading, though.  Since this is our last week of official school before our summer break, I am attempting to finish up at least one of our chapter book read-alouds before we change gears for the break.  A few picture books have captured our imaginations, too.  This is one we’ve particularly enjoyed.

Eve Bunting is one of those authors whose name is so ubiquitous that honestly sometimes I don’t give her books a second glance any more after reading so many of her titles.  (I’ve highlighted her books about immigration, sunflowers, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, butterflies, Thanksgiving, and even an ancient Egyptian mummy here at Hope Is the Word, but that’s just a small handful of the 250 books she has written.)    However, when I saw that this 2012 picture book pairs her storytelling with the illustrations of Emily Arnold McCully, I knew we had to read it, and what a story it is!  Set in Ireland, Ballywhinney Girl is the story of a young girl named Maeve who is out with her grandfather on the bog when he unearths something very surprising and unusual:  a mummified girl!  The story then details what happens to the mummy–how Grandpa calls the authorities and how word spreads in their little town and how the archaeologists and scientists cart the mummy off and inspect, catalog, and turn her into a spectacle.  What it does most, though, is remind the reader of the humanity of the mummy, mostly through Maeve’s marked reactions.  She can’t help thinking about the girl, even after she has been removed from the bog.  Maeve thinks and thinks and thinks about her, and in the end she does something very touching:  she places a big rock over the place in the bog where the girl once lay to mark her existence.  If this sounds creepy and morbid, maybe it is a little.  Mostly, though, it’s touching, and it offers something that every other mummy story we read lacks (and we read a few last year when we we studied ancient Egypt)–a reminder that these were real people, as real as you and I, and that we, too, will one day be history.  It’s a reminder of both humanity and mortality.  This story does end with a slight hint of a ghost story at the end, but nothing that put me off from it–more of a reminder of the girl’s life than anything.  I was somewhat disappointed to read the author’s note and learn that this book is a work of fiction, but Bunting points out that many such mummies have been found in bogs in Ireland and other places.  My girls and I both really enjoyed this story.  It would make an excellent addition to a study of any ancient culture, but especially to a study of mummies.  The only thing that could’ve made it better is if I could’ve suddenly added an Irish brogue to my paltry repertoire of voices.  Highly Recommended.  (Clarion, 2012)

I’m marking this title to remember it for this year’s Cybils, but I wonder how it might fare against much lighter subject matter in the fiction picture books category. 

I have quite a few more pictures I hope to share, but those will come another day. 

Have a great one!

It’s sort of anticlimactic, I suppose, to begin a week with a post about the previous week.  However, this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and write about last week and I’ve sort of gotten into the habit of wrapping up our school weeks here, so here we go.  It was an especially good week, and I don’t want to forget it! 

We went on a nature walk/color scavenger hunt first thing last Monday morning.  I challenged the girls to take pictures of orange or yellow things.  We saw a lot of daylilies. 

Life has been interesting the past few months, to say the least.  We’ve had our share of sickness and convalescence, including but not limited to the DLM’s bout with the flu and his fractured tibia.  Of course, life and homeschooling with a toddler isn’t usually easy, anyway, but his limited mobility has made things just a bit trickier and more tiring than usual.  Last Monday afternoon he was sitting in my lap while I was teaching Lulu her spelling lesson.  I have our AAS cards in a tightly-packed file box, and he was really determined to pull some of them out.  He yanked a little too hard on one, and his little hand flew back and smacked me in the eye, pushing the lens out of my glasses in the process.  {Sigh.}  I really didn’t have time to make a trip to the eyeglasses place to have it fixed.  About the time this happened, the girls ran out to the mailbox to check the mail.  Lo and behold, Stephanie had sent me a sweet, sweet “thinking of you” card and a bit of scrapbooking goodness just because she’s such a kind and thoughtful friend.  This really made my day and seemed like a little hug from heaven that came just when I needed it most.  Oh, and Steady Eddie was able to fix my glasses, so we didn’t have to make a trip to have them fixed, after all. 

So, Monday got off to a good start.  I determined before last week ever began to make it as simple as possible because Steady Eddie had to go out of town for part of the week.  I have a lot of help, but still, I’m pretty spoiled to handing the DLM over to him about 4:30 every afternoon.   

Our week in bullet points:

• We read a lot.  This makes me happy.  You can see our towering stack o’ books here. 
• Louise continues to amuse herself with her homemade mermaid paper dolls.  Just when I thought she had forgotten about them, she pulled them out of their tissue box home and strung them up by their tails on the blind cords in the school room.  This girl generally has little trouble occupying herself while I’m working with her sister, but she is ready for more work and more intellectual engagement.  The question is, am I ready for it? 
• The DLM enjoyed going head-first off our mini-trampoline over and over again.  {Sigh.}  At least he was staying busy, right?
• The girls began a Chinese language and culture class throug the continuing education department at our local university (the one where Steady Eddie and I both work).  Taught by a native speaker, this class has already been so much fun and such a blessing here at the end of school.  The girls have already learned to say and write several phrases.  It has been interesting sitting in the back of the room and observing the girls participate in a traditional classroom setting. The only challenging part has been getting the DLM down for his nap early enough to get there on time.

Our lessons:

• Math:  RS C lessons 107-110 for Lulu and RS B lessons 26-27 for Louise, plus a bunch of games for both girls.  Louise continues to work on multiplication, and in a serendipitous turn of events for this tired mama’s brain, both girls were introduced to the commutative property (of addition and multiplication) this week!
• For language, Lulu finished up her parts of speech book.  I hope to share more about this later.
• Writing:  Lulu has now completed through week 30 in WWE 2.  It is pretty tough now!  Louise is showing a lot of interest in writing now, too.  She composed and mailed several cards and letters on her own this week. 
• Spelling:  Lulu has completed through step 14 in AAS 2.  This will be it for this year, too, because I hope to catch Louise up to Lulu over the summer (I’m pretty sure she can do it!) so that they can do at least one subject together next year.
• We read about knights and samurai in SotW 2 this week.  Lulu read a couple of extra books about them and did a couple of good notebooking pages to add to her history notebook.
• Louise completed lessons 155-157 in OPGtTR.    We also finished reading together Wedding Flowers from The Cobble Street Cousins series.  As I’ve already mentioned, both girls did a bunch of reading.
• We also worked on memory work and handwriting.
• What continues to be a struggle for us is science (really just in terms of fitting it in), but we’re looking to change that next year.

On Friday we took a field trip to the Huntsville Botanical Gardens since it was National Public Gardens Day and admission was free. My mom went with us and we all had a great time.  (She loves flowers and her yard looks a bit like a public garden!)  Really, from the weather to the picnic lunch to the butterfly pavilion to the children’s garden, it couldn’t have been nicer.  I hope to share more pictures from our trip later.

We then plunged into a very busy weekend.  Lulu’s eighth birthday was on Mother’s Day, so the whole weekend was about celebrating our eight year old crafty bookworm and mothers.  Lulu received a sewing machine (!!!), lots of crafty stuff, and books for her birthday, as well as a lot of other stuff.  I’m sure I’ll share more about our sewing adventures here later. 

It was a fabulous week, and of course, I left a lot out.  This week is super duper busy, with three separate recitals, as well as the DLM’s cast removal.  Add dress rehearsals and practice to that, as well as the wrapping up of school, and it’s going to be a great week!

I hope you have one, too!

Julie Zilkie on May 4, 2012 at 1:57 pm said: 

These are lovely! Tlhank you for hosting the give away!

That’s a leaning tower of books.  Whoa. 

• Lulu’s assigned books:  Castle Diary:  The Journal of Tobias Burgess by Richard Platt (similar to his Egyptian Diary and Roman Diary, both of which we have enjoyed) and How to Be a Samurai Warrior, a National Geographic book by Fiona McDonald. 
• The Boxcar Children obsession continues.
• Louise’s assigned book, which we read together, was finally completed this week:  Wedding Flowers, a Cobble Street Cousins book by Cynthia Rylant.
• They’ve also rediscovered The Berenstain Bears.  Sigh.
• I’ve made progress in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer this week and I am enjoying it. 
• I’ve come to accept that Lulu is a dabbler.  She loves to dip into books she’s read before.  See These Happy Golden Years on the stack?  She has read it before, but this week she just re-read bits of it–her favorite parts, I guess.  The same could be said for several of the Boxcar Children books, I’m sure.  That bothers me a bit, but you know what?  I do the same thing.  How many times did I run across an old favorite while I was supposed to be cleaning my room as a kid, find a familiar and beloved passage, and sit on my bed and get lost in it for thirty minutes or an hour? 
• Louise is a reading machine!  In fact, she spent about fifteen minutes yesterday working on one of Lulu’s Boxcar Childrens.  I think we may have another fan. 

Some ten-plus years and three children later, I appreciate Frances even more.  Life with little children can be difficult, no doubt about it. 
They have an agenda, and sometimes we don’t even have an inkling what it is.  Other times we do have an idea, but their desires and goals don’t always mesh with ours.  Like Frances, they want bread and jam when what we offer is a hardboiled egg.  Actually,though, for me the real stars of the stories are Frances’ parents.  I admire them so for their calm, their wit, and their patient forbearance: Frances gets out of bed a total of six times before finally settling down to sleep in Bedtime for Frances.  Father finally does issue an ultimatum, but that’s after he and the longsuffering Mrs. Badger (do they have a last name?) have

• given Frances a glass of milk
• carried Frances piggyback-style to bed (Father)
• kissed Frances three times
• given Frances her teddy bear (Father) and doll (Mother)
• opened Frances’ door
• reassured Frances that the tiger in her room is a friendly tiger
• denied Frances the privilege of watching TV
• given Frances a piece of cake
• advised Frances how to deal with the giant in her room
• checked on a crack in the ceiling in Frances’ bedroom whiles she brushes her teeth (this, after having been sent to bed with apparently dirty teeth three times)
• advised Frances how to deal with the crack in her room, the possible home of many scary creatures
• been awakened from a dead sleep by Frances staring at him (Father)
•  advised Frances why the curtains in her room are blowing
• sent Frances back to her bedroom four times.

While there’s no denying that Frances is anything but obedient, there’s also no denying that this scenario is entirely realistic.  I can see it happening at our house, though to be honest neither Steady Eddie nor I am as longsuffering as Frances’ parents.  Still, it’s a such a pithy, true vignette that I love reading it.  It tickles me.  

Russell Hoban wrote five Frances stories, with a sixth, Egg Thoughts and Frances Songs, being a collection of previously unrecorded songs (save the one delightful egg song) that Frances composed about her life.  Apparently this one is out of print, and I’d give a stack of Boxcar Childrens to own a copy.  Russell Hoban‘s first wife (whom he eventually divorced), Lillian Hoban, was the illustrator responsible for the very expressive badgers in five of the six books; Garth Williams (yes, the same one you’re thinking of) illustrated Bedtime for Frances.  Another notable thing about Russell Hoban is that he is the brother of the author/illustrator Tana Hoban. (I wrote about a few of her books here.) 

I love reading aloud to my children.  I love sharing books I personally enjoy with them.  When the two converge–perfection! 

Which author’s books do you particularly enjoy reading aloud to your children?

Related links:

• The Head of Orpheus:  A Russell Hoban Reference Page
• Russell Hoban’s Frances Books (at The Head of Orpheus)
• “Lessons from a badger” at Across the Page
• Russell Hoban’s obituary
  
  

City of Tranquil Light is fiction based on the lives of Bo Caldwell‘s grandparents, missionaries to China and Taiwan from 1906 to 1961.  In the book, Will and Katherine Kiehn are Mennonite missionaries in China until the 1930s when the political situation in China makes it imperative for them to return to the U.S.  The years in China, though, are the joy, delight, the very essence, of their lives.  An elderly Will says this:

A strange sort of arithmetic is at work in my life.  While the calendar tells me that Katherine and I spent twenty-seven years in China, that thirty-three years have passed since we left [. . .], these numbers do not ring true.  I feel instead like a man who lived nearly all his life in China, with a few of his later years in America [. . .] Also, the longer I am away from Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, the more my mind dwells there.  My room here is on the west side of the building, the one closest to China, something that perhaps sounds foolish but that nevertheless pleases me.  Each morning when I begin my daily walk, I start out by heading west, toward China.  At times my life there seems almost imagined; bandits and soldiers and magistrates, floods and droughts and  famines and war, seem as distant as the moon.  On other days it is the present that feels imagined and Kuang P’ing Ch’eng that seems more real than the poached egg and toast I ate for breakfast.  Certain smells make China instantly real to me: anything cooked with garlic, freshly cut wood, antiseptic, the crispness of the air on the first autumn day.  These scents stop me in my tracks.  (280)

 

This reminds me of Genesis 29:20, the story of Jacob and Rachel:

And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.

 

This is both a love song to China and a love sing about Will and Katherine.  Their relationship is very realistically drawn, with natural ups and downs and real-life griefs and disappointments.  Through it all–the grief of losing a child, the years of want and danger in China, homesickness and old age back in the U.S.–their love for and faithfulness to God and to each other simply glows.  (I started to write shines or sparkles, but that’s the wrong word for their quiet and humble story.)  Their Christian lives are marked by a gentle faith and simply knowing that God is trustworthy, not because their lives are easy and work out tidily, but just because He is.

As usual, I find myself rambling because I love this book so very much.  How about a few quotes?

About Will, an excerpt from Katherine’s journal before they are married:

I have studied night after night, sitting late into the evening, my lessons spread out in front of me and Will patiently tutoring me.  The language comes much more easily to him than it does to me but he is also diligent, and I am the beneficiary of his hard work.  He has a gentle spirit that I admire, probably all the more so because of my own impetuousness and impatience.  At times I see my opposite in him, and being with him is like taking a cool drink of water.  He calms me, and when I am with him I feel hopeful and refreshed. (59)

 

I love this because it reminds me of how I came to love my own dear husband.  No, we didn’t learn Mandarin Chinese together, but he just steadily kept on loving me, even when my own timidity and fear would’ve dealt our blossoming relationship a death blow.  After almost thirteen years of marriage (not many, I know, but certainly a respectable number, and enough time to begin to know each other) I can see our relationship growing into this, a true thing of beauty:

I want to grow old with my husband, who becomes more precious to me each year.  I would have thought younger love was the stronger force, but my feelings for Will have put down roots whose depth I’m only beginning to sense, and while I think of our marriage as still young–nearly twenty-four years does not seem possible–I see it’s not a sapling but a sturdy old oak.

{snip}

The term “middle age” fits where we are, for I see in him both the young man I fell in love with and the old one he will be.  I see my own dear husband and I am struck by how deeply I love him, by how many times I have nearly lost him–and by how lost I would be without him.  (225-26)

From Katherine’s journal, during a time she and Will are separated from one another and the outcome is unknown:

I want to help.  I want someone to go looking for my husband, I want to send out the cavalry, I want good news, I want him home.  But there is nothing:  no action to take, no one to send, no news–no Will.  All I can do is wait and pray, and hwen I have ranted and raved in my mind and worn myself out, I ask God to receive me again.

My faith feels tattered and threadbare and I am ashamed.  What good is it if it does not see me through pain?  But a scrap of faith is better than nothing, so I cling to it tightly.  With as much trust as I can muster, I ask Him for the thousandth time to keep my dear one safe.  Somehow the day passes and I am able to be useful, and at night He lets me sleep.  In the morning we begin again.  (144)

 

I love this because it reminds me so much of friends and people within my circle of acquaintance who have been through so much–my pastor who remains faithful and hopeful, even in the face of his wife’s suffering and death; a couple in my area whose young son has a brain tumor; a young woman in her twenties from my church who just finished her last round of chemotherapy for breast cancer–and yet still hold onto faith and trust in Jesus. What are my small troubles in the face of all that?  Surely I can trust, too.

I could truly go on and on with quotes I love, and I’ve actually not even touched the part of the story that affected me the most:  I was sobbing when I read of their leaving China.  Caldwell writes about their life’s work with such love and dignity that I love China, too, after seeing it through Will’s and Katherine’s eyes.  Although this book is a love song about Will and Katherine (though it really isn’t a romance at all, but a real-life depiction of a good marriage), it’s equally as much a love song from Will and Katherine to China and the life God ordained them to live there, the pure, unexpected, joyful miracle of it:

As I lay in bed each night thinking of leaving Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, I also found myself remembering our arrival there–the day we came to the city, our small storefront on Hsiao Chieh, our tentative beginnings–and as I did, I was amazed at what God had done, sometimes through me, sometimes with me, frequently in spite of me.  I could not exactly reconstruct how it had all come to pass–where we had found the money and the knowledge and the perseverance to do what we’d done.  It didn’t add up; it made no more sense than it did to have leftovers after feeding five thousand with a few loves and fishes.  But I had stopped trying to explain it.  Mysterious abundance was not the exception but the rule.  It was who God was, when we gave Him half a chance.  (233)

 

Read those last two sentences again.  Beautiful.

I suppose this quote from Katherine’s journal sums up both the theme and the tone of this story the best:

I believe I could write a book about the goodness of God. (265)

That’s what Bo Caldwell has done in City of Tranquil Light.

If I were to choose a soundtrack to accompany this beautiful and powerful novel, I would choose Matt Redman’s “Never Once.”  It captures the essence of this novel.

I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction because I find it a bit too saccharine for my taste (or the opposite, gritty for the sake of destroying the stereotype), but this one is a must-read.  (Notice, too, that it isn’t published by a Christian publishing company.)  I give City of Tranquil Light a Highly, Highly Recommended.  (Henry Holt, 2010)

Many thanks to Sherry for placing this book on my radar to begin with and to Alice for writing the review that nudged me to actually buy a copy of the book and read it.  Truly, it was one of the best $10 I’ve ever spent.  I’m submitting this review (if it can be called that) to this month’s Award Winning Books Challenge database because it won the 2011 INSPY award for general fiction.

We went to the Huntsville Botanical Garden last year on National Public Gardens Day and had a fabulous time.  The only problem with this time of year is that most Fridays in May offer too many wonderful possibilities.  If you have this Friday free, consider participating in National Public Gardens Day.  You can find out more here.

The Princess and the Pizza by Mary Jane and Herm Auch is a twisted or fractured fairy tale, a takeoff on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea.”  It’s the story of Princess Paulina, lately dethroned due to her father’s penchant for woodcarving over reigning.  Princess Paulina needs a job, but the sum total of her skills involve only things that a princess does–walking the peacock in the royal garden, surveying the kingdom from the tower, and princess-waving.  When she hears that Queen Zelda of Blom is looking for a bride for her son, Prince Drupert, Paulina decides to apply for the job.  Predictably, the first task Queen Zelda sets before the hopefuls is the old stack of mattresses.  In the words of Paulina:  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.  The old princess-and-the-pea trick.  That’s so once-upon-a-time.”  After several more tasks are given and accomplished, the final gauntlet is thrown down:  make a feast with only the ingredients provided.  When Paulina is left with only flour, yeast, water, tomatoes, and cheese, what does she make?  Pizza, of course!  Her pizza wins the prize, but Paulina has other plans:  instead of marrying, she opens Princess Paulina’s Pizza Palace where she serves fifty different kinds of pizza.

My girls love this story, though admittedly it’s not one that I’d pick out.  The fonts used on the cover and in the text of the story are a turn-off to me, sort of comic-sans-ish, and yes, I occasionally do judge a book by its cover.  It also gets pretty close to being a little too girl-power–rah! rah!  for my taste.  However, there’s much to like about it, too–it’s slightly irreverent in a fun way that my girls find humorous, it contains lots and lots of alliteration, and it’s just plain old fun to read aloud.  My girls definitely give it a Highly Recommended.  (Holiday House, 2002)

Books 4 Learning and Literary Transgressions has kicked off a fun, new meme called Fairy Tale Friday.  I’ll be adding this post on Friday.