Butterfly in the Sky

Take a look! It's in a book!

I read books to Olivia every day. Olivia reads books to Olivia every day. Olivia quite often tries to read a book to Lucy or one of her stuffed animals every day. Or at least to show them the pictures.


And while I am getting extremely sick of "One Fish, Two Fish," and a few others, I do my best to read them in an enchanting fashion. I usually ask myself, "How would LeVar read it?" He definitely would not use a monotone style. (I was very surprised a few months ago when I overheard JB reading this way to Olivia. JB, king of sound effects and silly faces and voices! Perhaps he was just tired. Or perhaps he wanted to make One Fish, Two Fish so dreadfully boring to Olivia that she would never request it again--which unfortunately didn't work.)

Today was my turn to read scripture at church. The text was Daniel 6: Daniel in the Lion's Den!!! One of my favorite stories. Apparently I got a little caught up in the tale, because when I sat down after I read, JB leaned over to me and whispered,

"I can tell you've been reading a lot of stories to Olivia. You used a lot of inflection in your reading."

It takes a lot to embarrass me. I have had several snafus while doing the Scripture reading. Like discovering afterward that my fly was open the whole time. Or walking up and trying to read at the wrong pulpit while the worship leader is whispering loudly at me to move, which everyone else hears and understands, but me. Or walking up and almost starting to read (because the order of service said that I was next) only to be told to sit down again because there was some added thing that I didn't know about that had to happen first.

These things did not embarrass me.

But "children's story hour" left me feeling a little mortified. I never wanted to be one of those Moms who got stuck in kid mode when trying to interact with adults. Yet here I am.

Oh well.

Too bad LeVar wasn't there. He would have understood.

All the cool kids are buying it

I am going to shamelessly promote Grandma and Grandpa Hunt's latest book, "I Do."

BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT

Those of you who know me know that I am very skeptical of devotionals and books on "Christian Living."

It is very hard to find ones that have solid information that seems relevant to me. Too often I have picked up a book that I quickly closed because it was obvious that the author was trying to stretch 50 pages to 150 pages and threw in a lot of senseless repetition and extra words. Maybe it's the journalist in me, but I like when authors make their point once. Not make their point. Then to explain the point with another sentence. Then repeat that point, perhaps with italics. Then repeat it again, this time with a sentence starting with, "It's like," in an effort to further explain the point that we got 4 sentences ago!!

There are only a handful of Christian novels that I can tolerate (thanks Mrs. E!) and about zero devotionals.

Okay, so C.S. Lewis' stuff kicks ass, but I've never finished anything beyond the Narnia series. (I just now decided to try ScrewTape Letters again.) And I've tried Mr. Stott's stuff several times. But he would never use a word like "stuff" so I have to work really hard to understand what his great mind is saying. It's like reading the KJV (actually I find the KJV easier than John Stott--haha!). It's really good, and totally worth it, but it takes a lot of brainpower and will to get through it. And by the end I am so pleased with myself for finally getting it, only to realize that I've just deciphered the first sentence. Maybe one day when I'm smarter I'll try again.

All this to say,

"I Do," is a cool book, and I don't put the cool stamp on many Christian publications.

And it's not just cool because my Grandparent-in-laws penned it. Or because JB and I have the very first, best ever edition (sorry, Austin and Lauren--I am naming yours 2nd edition, so mine is better!), made especially for us before any publisher decided to take it on. Or because it's less than $10, so totally affordable to give as wedding gifts (hint, hint!).

It is cool because it is a great, non-fluff, devotional for any married person, whether a newlywed, or hitched for over 60 years, like the book's authors.

(It JUST came out, but you can get it on Amazon or from the publisher, Discovery House. Or if you're cool like Harry Potter, you can wave your wand and have your owl deliver it to you.)

Bye!

This morning I walked into Olivia's room to check on her and get a Kleenex. She had been playing by herself (well, with Lucy, too) for a while and usually if she doesn't see me for a while she starts calling for me. So I thought I'd anticipate her needs and say Hi.

When I came in she was busy trying to climb into her little wooden rocking chair that had belonged to her Grandpa Mark when he was little. I watched as she climbed into the little rocker all by herself, holding a thick boardbook the whole time. It was a difficult ordeal, not dropping the book and maneuvering into a rocking chair while wearing slippery fleece pajamas. There was a bit of grunting and heavy breathing involved, but she managed it.

As she leaned back in the chair (very chill looking), with book in hand, and looking pleased with herself, I clapped and praised her. Ignoring this, she grabbed my pant leg and pushed it toward the door, saying in her sweet but firm baby voice, "Bye!... Bye!" I was nonplussed but she maintained her stance until I got the clue and started to leave.

Apparently reading time is a solitary activity.

AMENDMENT: I just returned from her room and apparently doing business is a solitary activity.

Read with Me!

Back in 2003 the BBC conducted a poll on reader's favourite books. This list, the BBC Big Read Top 100, has been circulating the internets since it's inception in 2003. As the poll was conducted in Britain, it's no surprise that about 60 of the books are Brittish.

There are scads of "best book" lists out there, but this one had the most titles that I am honestly interested in. Maybe it's because I like British tales.

Apparently the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of these 100 books. When I first received the list, I had read only 14 or 15. I shared the list with JB, who ticked off 35 titles himself. Goody two-shoes!

I am an avid reader but when I tried to read classics in high school, I was BORED. I preferred my detective novels, thank you. So I never gave them another try. I didn't really believe that many people actually liked these stories and that they just raved about them so that they'd look smart and trendy. You know, like people who rave about "classic" black and white movies that in reality have light plotlines and so-so acting (Gone With the Wind excluded!!).

In 7th grade I did read all 1036 pages of Gone With the Wind of my own choosing. I loved it. My English teacher, Mr. Coopes, then assigned me to read To Kill a Mockingbird, believing I'd enjoy another Southern tale. After page 3 I was dreadfully bored and refused to read it. I took an E on the assignment. Nobody tells ME what to read! After that I left everyone else to their classics while I read REAL books, like Nancy Drew.

Then when JB and I were living with Grandma and Grandpa Hunt (during the Calvin restoration) I saw To Kill a Mockingbird on one of their bookshelves. It had a cool cover and I was itching to read, so I cracked it open.

And couldn't put it down.

How had I ever thought that this book was BORING??? Probably because I was a child. I don't think that teenagers can really get most classics.

Ever since then I've been interested in classic books but as there are so many, I never knew where to start.

JB and I are working our way through this BBC list together. Only I'm the only one that has started. Then again, maybe he's just waiting for me to catch up to him.

My sister Annie has graciously lent me several of her classics from this list, dubbing it my "winter reading." Annie, I won't let you down!

Here's the full list, for any of you fellow readers who care to see where you stack up and perhaps even read along with me! (I've bolded the ones I've read. I've started several others, but they don't count until I read the last page!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (JB has read this, but I shall not)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Mitch is too self-important, so I'm not reading this one, either.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Bird Update III

Tonight I was trying to give Olivia dinner while making my own, and the casserole I was making needed a little more attention than I had bargained for. As a result, I kept giving Olivia more and more food in order to keep her at bay while I cooked. I was also curious just how much she would eat as I am always wondering if I feed her enough.

When I put her in the bathtub I realized that she indeed got enough to eat. I really wanted to get a photo of it, but I couldn't convince Lucy to spot Olivia in the tub while I ran downstairs to fetch my camera. Laying in the tub, she looked just like the Saggy Baggy Elephant did when he floated in the water. My baby had a big belly!


Today the Bird is 10 months old and is changing right before my eyes.

She is way more curious, and has discovered the treasures lying behind cupboard doors and in boxes, bins, etc. While her curiosity is strong, it is not intense enough to warrant crawling to such things. She will occasionally do the "wounded soldier" crawl, but mostly just does her precision rolling.

Her first word is "dog." She says Mama and Dada, but not to us. She will point at a dog though and say, "dah!" She jabbers more, especially while "reading" her books. Watching her read her books is one of my favorite things. She points her chubby fingers at a picture on a page and talks to it.


Lucy and Olivia can play together more now. Favorite games: lick the baby on the face and watch the baby laugh; tug-of war; laying near baby to get pets; and one of their favorites: before the Mom yells at the baby, eating baby snacks that baby offers to dog.




The Bird has also gone swimming! The first time was with Daddy, and she wasn't very excited about it. Annie and I took her in the Hunts' pool again on Monday, and she liked it much better. I let her slowly dip into the water, and to get used to it before letting her go down farther. We also let her sit on a floating board and play with some bath toys. She was happy in there for an hour! She even floated on her belly and her back. Here is a shot of her first dip:


Olivia has also started to have baby nightmares. I had nightmares when I was little too, and so did some of JB's family. Last night JB heard her cry out and he went to her. She was still frantic as he held her, but eventually he rocked her back to sleep. Maybe she was having dreams about having to wear this shirt again:


Sorry, guys, I just had to go there! You all should know that I'm not really anti-Michigan, but as a Spartan, I feel it is my duty to put this photo into cyberspace. :)