Saturday, January 28, 2006

READING

As I race on to finish these ½ read books by the end of January Mike is finding occasion to tease me. I tend to DEVOUR my books. The non-fiction, however, I often mark quite liberally. The most recent books to receive this attention are “Men in Black”, “Third Culture Kids” and “Experiencing God in Prayer”. I highlight, I make asterisks, I fold down pages and I even write comments in the pages. It’s not uncommon to pick up a book after I’ve read it and see comments like these in the margin: “Great comment!!!”; “Whoa – bias showing”; “WHAT – big leap”; “NO WAY” or references to other books on the topic, Scripture references that either support or refute what the author said, and BIG QUESTION marks on issues I want to study further. This has advantages and disadvantages….Mike can read the highlights and get the gist of a book that interests him after I read (so can the boys and I must remember this when pre-reading school books LOL); on the other hand there have been books I’ve not wanted to loan out after reading because my comments made me vulnerable to that person.

I don’t mark library books. I am very careful with books I borrow. If I find the urge to mark a book heavily I often buy it so I can do that. {g} Mike looked over last night and said “You’re really marking that up”. This a.m. I followed a link from Laura’s blog and found an article by Mortimer J Adler titled “How to Mark a Book”. And I quote: “I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours.” This whole article was great. Here’s the link if you want to read it in full. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/adler.html What a timely post on Laura's blog. {G}

I can barely refrain from waking Mike to show him this article – or at least have him read this blog entry. I will continue to happily read with my highlighter and pen. I’ve been vindicated by a “great one”.

Friday – 27 January

I remembered the camera today but forgot the memory stick! What a total bust. I will get this right next week.

Melody, who you may remember is a homeschooling Mom whose husband works with Mike, and I had made plans to take her children and mine bowling on Monday. She now has piano students (Go Melody!) and so needed a day other than Monday. We settled on today – Friday. She gave me the freedom to invite some others with children the ages of my older boys. I did that at park day yesterday.

What a blast we had at the base bowling ally. We stayed much longer than I’d anticipated and the day got long for Zander. At one point I calmly told him that if I had to talk to him about his behavior again I would take him home. He acted up again. He’d already bowled 2 games. Jamin was at home because he wanted to finish school work (he’s got his hands full with Algebra 1 and Biology). I decided since we’d been gone over 2 ½ hours he was probably done with school and so I took Zander home. Poor boy. BUT he is learning that though he’s louder than I – my word is to be trusted and there are consequences to misbehaving. In other words he may be a screamer and I’m not – but I’m the mom. {g} When I got back to the base to pick up the other kids some of the families had decided to go down to Kids Kingdom. I phoned Mike and he said that he had a couple of hours left at work so we joined them.

We got to discussing that it’d been 24 days since we met these families at this very park. I’m reading “Third Culture Kids” and seeing that in the phase of transition I’m moving into the “entry” stage. This is good…shortly I may feel “involved” again.

Stacia’s been on this “new” funky formula for a week. We’ve now tried them all EXCEPT the new Sam’s Club has a generic that is cheaper and I’m trying it before going back to the original formula. None of them have seen to make much difference in the amount of her spitting (though I won’t discuss the finer points of consistency, smell and bowel movements here {vbg}).

We got a late start on our Pizza and Movie night – but we are pressing ahead….