The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

My predominant feeling reading this book was a strange mix of boredom and guilt. The middle of the book is very slow, but since you find out early on that there are going to be a bunch of suicides, (surprise, surprise) it dawns on you that the something you are impatiently waiting for to happen will be a pile of girls killing themselves. Then the guilt sets in.

We read this for a book club book, I was not the only one with such feelings nor was I the only one completely befuddled over the narrator, Who? why? What is the context to the narrative? Why?

Would I recommend it? No

“Choices”

After hearing glowing reviews from friends who offered their kids “choices” I thought I’d try it with Ivy. Not to be mistaken for choices, “choices” are more like this:

You can keep eating or you can leave the room.

You can help me or you can play by yourself.

You can pick up your room now or you can go straight to bed.

I phrase the “choices” above in a  friendlier manner and try to involve the word choose, amazingly Ivy thinks she’s getting to decide what happens and responds well to it. Hopefully it will take her awhile to figure out that it is just her manipulative mother calling the shots! Of course there are days when she makes poor choices, I try to go with it and cross my fingers that she’s learning something.

Today was one of those days. Today the choice was: we could go for a walk or get ready for our afternoon rest.

Ivy’s choice: Walk

Ivy being the helpful girl that she often is went and got both of us shoes for our walk. She returned with my flip flops and Johns flip flops. Now I can go anywhere in flip flops, and Ivy has been a good understudy but Ivy in her Dads flip flops is a different story. So it was “you can wear those but I will not carry you, or you can go get your own shoes”

Ivy’s choice: Wear Dad’s flip flops

So off we walked, and it all went swimmingly, if very slowly,there is not much speed to be had in over sized flip flops. Then we left the pasture and there were *gasp* BURRS and PRICKERS!!! Do you want to keep going though the burrs and prickles to the corn field or head home for a rest?

Ivy’s choice: Keep going

Keep going, and crying and screaming.

“MOM, there are prickles!”

“Owie!… Owie!… Owie!”

“MOM THERE ARE BURRS ON MY DRESS!!!”

Clearly a major problem was that I had not realized her dress was actually an extension of her body and therefore burrs caught in her dress would  be causing Ivy pain. This was true even if the burrs were wrapped and tangled in the dress so as not to be touching her skin in anyway.  Sadly this is not a new phenomenon, her pink blanket has the same attribute.  In the car if Piper sits on the end of the blanket it’s all “OWIE! MOM, PIPER IS SITTING ON MY PINK BLANKET! OWIE!” so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but it was a bit disappointing. A pink blanket that feels pain is inconvenient, a dress that has the same problem is downright ridiculous!

Ivy then decided the best thing would be to take off her dress.

“MOM THE SKEETOS ARE GETTIN’ ME!”

Soon after that she got burrs in her hair, and thought flailing around her head and messing up her hair would somehow help. Then just after we reached the corn field (the burr and pricker free cornfield) she decided it was time to turn around and go back home.  All the way back through the 12 yards or so of burrs and prickers I heard pathetic comments like:

“MOM I HAVE BURRS IN MY UNDERWEAR!”

“OWIE!”

“MOM THE SKEETOS ARE GETTIN’ MY BUTT!”

Once we hit the relative “safety” of the pasture things improved until we got home.

Choice: Sleep with burrs in your hair or let me comb them out.

Ivy’s choice: comb them out

“OWIE” — – “Ivy I haven’t touched it yet.” —“BUT IT”S GONNA HURT!” — “Should we leave them in?” —” NO GET THEM OUT!”

Ten minutes later she was deburred, mostly naked, full of mosquito bites, tears, snot and on her way to bed.

While it seems that I may have spent an hour torturing my kid I was hoping she learned something from it, but I wasn’t convinced. When Ivy got up from her nap she came smiling down the stairs in new clothes and said:

“Look Mom I’m wearin’ my long sleeve clothes to keep the prickers off me!”

Then a few minutes later she showed up with some barrettes and said:

“Mom, you put these in my hair so I don’t get burrs in my hair?”

While I’m not counting it a true success until we head out on another walk  it looks like perhaps something sank in!

The one thing I will say for Ivy is through all of her crying about burrs and prickly things, she never once asked me to carry her, even when her flip flops were falling off. I like to think this was because she knew that was the choice she made at the beginning of our walk.  Unfortunately it also could have been because she was too busy saying “Owie!”   Just picture a little girl with pink Care Bear underwear full of burrs walking determinedly, if very vocally though the woods, now tell me that doesn’t bring a smile to your face. I’ll keep giving Ivy “choices” and while I watch her figure things out for herself I’ll try to keep my giggling under control!

Good Dog

Piper makes a great babysitter, she’s part of the reason we were able to finish the workshop roof last night.

Good as she is Piper draws the line at being a carousel horse.

You know, the ones that bounce up and down…

Certain Death

Now that the roof on the house is done, we’ve moved on to the workshop. After coming to “grips” with my fear of heights by emulating a tree frog  John has had me up on the roof of the workshop helping out again.

Reasons I hate the workshop roof:

1) It is only accessible via extension ladders, those are tall and scary.

2)Getting onto the roof from the scary ladder is even scarier.

3)I’m not even going to talk about getting back onto the ladder.

4) Once on top the roof is flat, but very small, falling in any direction would be certain death.

5)Five turkey vultures were soaring and circling, clearly they knew about the certain death.

So up on the roof, far, far out of my- feet on the ground- element I was, shall we say, a little testy. Later with my feet firmly on the ground I apologized to John and explained that I was just having a hard time dealing with the fact that one of us was going to pitch off the roof and die at any moment.

Then I thought about what I said.

I have since resolved to try to make my last moments with my husband friendlier ones.

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

Ivy’s recent quotable Dad comments:

“I don’t ask you nicely and politely I only ask dad nicely and politely”

“You don’t love me, DAD loves me.”

“I’m not your kid. I’m Dad’s kid, Clara is your kid.”

Now I like to think that I take all the snotty three year old comments in stride.  I don’t let them get to me, sometimes I think she’s  funny, and most of all I’m very glad that Ivy loves her Dad so much.  Nor do I feel unloved by my girls. Clearly since I am the one required to read bedtime stories, rock girls to sleep, kiss hurt fingers and wipe dirty butts I am dear to them as well.

But sometimes…

When every night when John gets home he is trampled at the door by the dogs and kids, and the only way for me to get my own kiss hello is to wade in pushing everyone else out of the way.

When Clara lights up when she hears him talk, and Ivy can go from problem child to angle at the drop of her hat on hearing his voice.

When unknowingly John will ask Ivy to do something that I had been waiting her out on, and she’ll jump up and go do it.

When Ivy asks where her Dad is ten times a day.

…it starts to get a bit grating in a  you-rotten-kids-do-you-forget-who-spends-the-whole-freakin-day-with-you sort of way.

So when I was the only one home when the girls came back from spending a night at Grandma and Grandpa’s I basked in my two minutes of fame. I loved the lit up faces, the hugs hello, and hearing how much Ivy missed me…

…right up until I heard, “Where’s Dad?”and Clara threw up on me.

I hear absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I’m planning my next vacation!

Mad Ship by Robin Hobb

Second in The Liveship Traders series I liked this book much better than the first.

Is it because the character set up was done in the first book and now they are actually growing?

Because now I’m hooked in the plot?

Because I can see more and more how this connects to the Tawny Man Trilogy?

Because I love a good nautical adventure?

I have no idea, but I’m requesting the next one from the library tonight.

Would I recommend it? No, I can’t recommend the second if I didn’t like the first even if it was better. Perhaps the third will swing my vote back to a yes we’ll have to see…

While we are on the subject of things that I don’t love I have a question.

Who is in charge of cover art for books?

Don’t they ever worry about the artists actually reading what they attempt to portray? This isn’t the worst example of  an inaccurate cover ever, something like this picture sort of happened. Characters, ships and sea serpents are described to sort of look like that… seriously, I find it to be totally annoying.

More Roofing!

While John and I had been talking hypothetically about re-shingling the roof since last fall it wasn’t until last weekend that we set a date, you may have realized by now that that date was only a week away.

I’d like to dispense a bit of free advice here and mention that if you are planning an epic project like this it would be helpful to set your date more than a week in advance.  I’d also advise you not to have your hot water heater die around 10pm the night before it starts, if that were to happen it’s possible you would spend the weekend without hot water. If you spend your roofing weekend without hot water I hope you have really nice neighbors that will let you shower, you’ll need one!

While our one week of planning was a bit frantic we did manage to make a plan, order supplies, and line up help.   Our help consisted of  a few friends that we were able to convince that what they would really like to do for part of their labor day weekend is give us a hand on our roof, and of course we got my family involved. In addition to the fact that they came with most of the know how (remember Memorial day weekend?) projects seem to be what my family does. I hear other family’s get together and eat, or camp, or golf… mine does things like, take down dead trees, build fences, clean barns, and roof houses.

There they were bright and early Saturday morning  ripping off the old shingles, lovingly working together…

… too much coffee was clearly not good for Tyler or my Dad so we cut them off and by midday my brother  had assumed the stance.

This is the,

“What in the…”

“How on earth…”

“Why did they…”

stance that anyone working on our house gets at one point or another.

This unfortunately brought us to the “Tyler?” part of the project.  At this point Tyler, who was in charging of telling his family what to do so we could ignore him and do it wrong, was being called all over the roof.

“Tyler now what do I do?”

“Tyler how do I put drip edge on here?”

“Tyler how do we fix this hole?”

“Tyler!?”

“Tyler?!”

This slowed down our progress by quite a bit and irritated Tyler,  but by Saturday night we had completely deconstructed the roof and had it sort of put back together.  The shingles were arriving via boom truck Sunday morning, and we were not quite ready for them…

Shingle delivery guys don’t care if you are done prepping the roof  they just show up when they are told. So Sunday morning there came the shingles, and the grey sky, and the evil, evil, weather forecaster who every fifteen minutes on the radio liked to remind us there was a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday night.

More help arrived and with my kids being taken care of and the weather looking iffy I went up on the roof…

Please note that this is not an insignificant thing. I do not like heights, I don’t like them at all.   But, the girls were being watched, and there was nothing to do on the ground so I went up to the shortest roof over the mudroom where there was also nothing to do. Then my brother looked at me and said something really inspirational like, “Shut up, get over here and help me.”

So I did.

I helped out on top of the house for the rest of the weekend.  This is why I have no more pictures of the project to share. I was on the roof, and I was doing it without crying or hyperventilating but I wasn’t about to use one of my hands, that I was really hoping were acquiring sticky tree frog-like properties, to do anything that wasn’t completely necessary, like take  a picture.

By Sunday night we had some shingles on, the rest of the roof was ready for shingles, Tyler went home, only my Mom and Dad were planning on coming back and the rain had started.

Sunday was a bad night.  Sunday evening we made a lot of phone calls.

Monday morning the phone calls had paid off and things were looking up. John’s parents whisked the girls away  first thing in the morning. Then my Dad’s friend saved the day by crawling around like a monkey and doing all sorts of things to shingle the highest of the roofs that I can’t even think about, much less type about, without wanting to sit on the floor. While John helped out on the high roofs, my mom and I finished most of the low with Dad pitching in where he was needed.  As we worked, I studiously avoided looking at anyone crawling around higher than me, walking near the edge or doing anything that looked like slipping. This is because I had learned that watching any of those activities made me really wish I was back on the ground. The problem was as soon as I wanted to be back on the ground the thought of navigating steep slippery roof and rickety ladders was also way too scary.  So instead I would will my toes to also acquire tree frog like properties and stick where I was.

I like to think I was persevering in finishing the job rather than that I was frozen in terror.

Just as we were really starting to get sick of anything that looked like a shingle, we had one last friend show up to help finish things off, and we did just before dark on Monday night!

Thanks to all our helpers. We never ever would have gotten it done without you all!

Tyler for all the work and the question answering.

Jeff, Steve, Stephen, our friends who like us well enough to help shingle a house.

Jessie who came to pick up her puppy Saturday morning and didn’t leave till she had helped do everything from tear off to kid care Saturday night.

Jess, who came along with her own baby and helped watch both of mine as well.

Tom and Chris who let us shower at their house since we had no hot water.

George and Lois who ran to Menard’s, cleaned the kitchen, and helped watch kids.

Mighty and Marcia, who lent us tools and told me what color to pick.

Rick, the man who saved us Monday morning.

Pat and Al, for taking the girls so we had a chance to not only finish the roof but do clean up unencumbered Tuesday morning.

Granny and Grandpa, who not only helped finance the project and sent along food everyday but also came out to help in the house and run to Menard’s on Sunday.

and to Mom and Dad who did it all, all weekend long!

Walking!

Clara is walking!  Sort of, in a three steps at a time kind of way, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Please admire my blue eyed baby who is almost eleven months old (How did that happen?).  To do so you may have to ignore her dirt and food stains, (She’s much cleaner than when I caught her playing in Ivy’s poop earlier in the day!) and ignore the fact that she has no pants and her onesie isn’t even snapped (As near as I can remember that was outfit number four of the day).  Also it’s not that I don’t mow my lawn, it’s that she’s in the pasture, (Which we were in becuase my 15 min. tractor job had at this point taken almost two hours and I had run out of gas and the sky in the background isn’t just to match Clara’s eyes it was a major storm on it’s way in that soaked me while I tried to get the tractor restarted and finish my job. It’s  still not done.) while you can tell from her expression that she’s not super confident with the walking yet, she sure is trying!

If Clara can figure out how to learn to walk I’m sure I can figure out how to cope with one rotten dog and two poopy kids.

Today we were pretty shaky on our feet, I’m betting tomorrow we’ll both be better!

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

Now the problem with this post is that I must publicly admit that not only have I read all the twilight books but that I was interested enough to check out this “eclipse novella.”  Yup, I read them, and I liked them. I did not start until after they were all written and I had a few friends rave about them, but I did eventually cave, and I was addicted, and I read them all back to back, and my husband has teased me about it ever since. I have not however gone to see any of the movies. How you can make a movie out of a book where the main character just talks about how beautiful her vampire boyfriend is and then not have that beautiful of a guy acting as the vampire is beyond me, but I digress…

This book takes one very minor character from Eclipse and gives you her whole story.  I think I can do no better than what Stephenie Meyer says in the forward:

“I hope you end up caring about Bree as much as I do, though that’s kind of a cruel wish. You know this: it doesn’t end well for her. But at least you will know the whole story. And that no perspective is ever really trivial.”

I think it exemplifies the part of authors that awes me. To create and know your characters so well that you have all these back stories in your head, to not only choose what goes in a book  and what doesn’t, but to have enough knowledge of your creation that everyone no matter how small a part acts accordingly, whether we as readers know it the first time we meet them or not. It amazes me.

Would I recommend it? Now I feel sort of silly, and maybe I’m not making any sense tonight, but my answer to this is no. This isn’t really a book to pick up just to read, if you have read the rest of them then sure, its a fun (OK,well not super fun it is a very short life) read. But I didn’t think it was awesome in itself or a necessary addendum to the books.  It is what it stands for that amazes me, the actual book not so much.

There is no picture, becuase the book is black and shiny which I find mostly impossible to photograph. Not only that it is highly recognizable from afar as a Stephenie Meyer book, you don’t need my poor picture to find this one on a shelf!