Owenisms

When Owen and I go for a walk, we often cross a bridge going over a little brook, so I started telling him about the three billy goats gruff and the troll under the bridge.  When we were at my parents’ house in Maine, my mother had a picture book of the tale, which apparently is Norwegian.  Owen was very interested in the book and the tale, and so then we started incorporating it into our playdough play.  We made a bridge out of the playdough cans and Owen made a troll and then I would make animals that would then cross the bridge at their peril.  Owen’s troll almost always let them pass with a gruff, “Be off with you!”  At one point, though, I realized that Owen was calling it a Control instead of a troll.  Ha!  So we played the control under the bridge.  Rather fitting.

My father is named Leighton, and my mother was calling to him one day and Owen leaned over to me and whispered:  “Why does Gee keep calling Pa ‘Plankton?’”

I am finding that four is a pretty enthusiastic age, although one has to do some maneuvering every now and then.  We can never be sure how he will react to something.  One day in Maine when we were going to the beach, we stopped at two stores that we wanted to check out, and told Owen – afraid he would have a fit – that we were just going to peek into two stores on the way.  Owen unexpectedly exclaimed, “Two stores!! That’s AMAZING!!”  Well okay then.

We found a yellow plastic construction hat of Owen’s that had been missing for long enough that he had forgotten about it.  Sean gave it to him and said he could wear it while he was using his tools and doing construction.  Owen replied:  “Yes!  I can wear it when I’m using my tools and I want to look fancy!”  J  As construction workers are wont to do.

Owen and Sean got a pair of walkie talkies to use when they are playing space ship, and it has taken Owen awhile to learn that he needs to hold it up to his ear when he is listening and to his mouth when he is talking.  He tends to do the opposite.  And then he also has to push the button on it when he talks, which is also a bit difficult to remember.  Sean’s been teaching him walkie talkie jargon, like ten four, and Owen, playing a game of one-upmanship, always responds with a ten five.

Back To School

Owen started his 4-Day 4’s class this week, after attending orientation last week.  Here he is before attending orientation:

His class is in the mornings Monday through Thursday, and he seems to have a very nice and very organized teacher!  He also has seven out of twenty kids in the class who were in his class last year, so there are many familiar faces.  Next week we have to bring in 6 red delicious (ugh) apples for Fruit & Veggie Tuesday (it actually has a name that is more clever than that, but I can’t remember it.)  Anyway on Tuesdays one child will bring in assigned fruit or veggies and then as a class they will learn about the fruit/veggie and learn how to prepare it.  I’m hoping this will get Owen to eat vegetables!  My only success so far has been with the occasional sugar snap pea.

They are also focusing on one letter per week, and this week of course it is A.  Owen is just beginning to be interested in trying to write his letters, and he was very, very proud of these two A’s he wrote:

After those two, however, he started going down up instead of up down, so his A’s were like little sleeping vampire bats.  After writing two upside-down A’s he said, “womp, womp.”  I laughed and asked him where he had learned to say that?  And he told me, “Womp womp is what you say when you make a mistake, Mom.”  Indeed.

Book Reviews August 2016

Truly, Madly, Guilty by Liane Moriarty.  Liane Moriarty is one of my favorite novelists writing today, and her newest novel does not disappoint.  She’s such a good story teller, and what always impresses me the most about her books is that all of the characters are interesting and multi-dimensional.  She never just has a character that serves to advance the plot; rather, she is able to reveal usually through small but pertinent details just what makes that character tick.  There is no one completely bad or completely good or wrong or right—they are people who you inevitably become quite fond of.  This novel focuses on three couples, and we know right from the beginning that something horrible happens to them at a barbecue.  Indeed the chapters are labeled, one day before the barbecue, two days after the barbecue, etc., so the reader is immediately aware of – and rather dreading – that event.  Clementine is a cellist who is married with two young daughters, Holly and Ruby.  She has a childhood friend, Erika, who was raised by a hoarder and neglectful mother, and so Clementine’s mother took Erika in and sort of forced  Clementine to be friends with her.  Their friendship is rather fraught, and made more so by the fact that Erika is more or less on the spectrum.  Erika and her husband, Oliver, live next door to another couple, the wonderful Tiffany and Vid.  The first half of the book is spent leading up to the reveal of what happened at the barbecue, and I do admit to wondering from time to time if it wasn’t too manipulative.  At some point I just wanted to know what happened and be done with it.  Once we find out what happened, however, Moriarty does an excellent job of showing how all the characters work through it.  It’s a really good, compassionate read and I think one of her best novels.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott.  I think Megan Abbott is a good writer, but I also think her books are not for me.  This is the second one I have read, and whereas I can recognize as I read that what she is doing is skillfull, I still end up feeling claustrophobic and stressed.  Like in her mystery, The Fever, Abbott takes a small group of people and has something run amok – in this case it’s a group of elite gymnasts and one of the coaches boyfriend gets killed by a hit and run driver.  The main character here is Kate, the mother of the best gymnast at the gym, Devon Knox.  The problem I have is that Kate doesn’t get much of what is going on, and her viewpoint is mainly the only one we experience.  So as a reader, we can see and sense that so much is happening that Kate isn’t privy to, yet we are forced to remain in the dark with Kate.   It’s the kind of scenario that stresses me out as I read and isn’t enjoyable to me.  I don’t generally mind a character with limitations, but it just is tiresome to be so closely tethered to a limited viewpoint.  Anyway, Kate begins to suspect that her daughter and her husband and one of the other gymnast’s mother knows much more about what is going on than she does, and starts piecing things together.  It was an interesting peek into the world of intense gymnastics, and Abbott also does a good job of raising questions about the pressures and restraints of having a whole family hitch to the star of one child.  I don’t think I will be in a hurry to read her other books, however.

We’ll Always Have Paris: Trying and Failing to be French by Emma Beddington.  This is an excellent memoir – funny and sad and well written and full of fine cake.  What more can one ask for?  It was so good that once I was a third of the way into it, I started reading it slowly and doling out a chapter a night so I wouldn’t reach the end of it too soon.  Beddington, who is the blogger Belgian Waffle, grew up in York, England while loving everything French.  She went to Normandy after high school and started dating while there a Frenchman, Olivier.  She writes a lot of how her conceptions of France via movies and literature collided with the real place while there.  She then attends Oxford while still dating Olivier long distance.  Cut to when she is in her mid-twenties and living with Olivier in London with one small son and another on the way:  she learns that her mother, to whom she is very close, has been killed in a freak accident in Rome.  Her grief proceeds to take many forms and all entertwined with her experience of Paris.  Beddington is very smart and witty and does a really good job of writing about weighty topics while not taking herself too seriously.  She and her family leave Paris and eventually end up settling in Brussels, where the whirlwind of her grief finally catches up with her.  Whether you have francophone leadings or not (I don’t, particularly, but I do have cake leanings), her memoir is superb.

City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin.  This is the third book in his vampire (of sorts) trilogy that began with The Passage and continued with The Twelve.  I really liked the first book, and liked the second until its ending, which I thought veered towards the silly.  This third book is a bit of a mishmash.  He is a good story teller, and I really liked reading about how people had continued to survive what was basically an apocalypse that ended life as we know it.  However, when you finally find out some of the main impetus for what has ended the world, it just is a bit ridiculous and thin.  Without giving too much away, there is a kind of evil genius who continues the evil just because the woman whom he loved died while he was awaiting her arrival at Grand Central Station via train.  Although a painful experience, it seems a rather flimsy reason to end the world – especially since the rest of the three books have been so serious.  It just came across as being too cartoony or superhero villainy to me.  However, it IS possible to just sort of ignore that part of the plot and still enjoy all that is going on with the characters and the descendants of the characters that we got to know in the first two books.  And much of the accompanying mythology is interesting and well done.  I’m glad I read the trilogy, but feel like it didn’t quite hold up to the promise of the first book.

Still Midnight by Denise Mina.  This is the first book in Mina's "Alex Morrow" series, and it was as good as I was expecting.  Like with her Paddy Meehan series, Mina's writing is excellent and her main character nuanced and strong.  She very much hits the ground running -- it almost seems like it's the second book in a series, as she doesn't load the beginning with any obvious back-story.  This is a good thing:  you learn things here and there about detective Alex Morrow as she works to solve a case that has been taken away from her control and given to her career-savvy partner.  We switch back and forth from Alex's point of view to the point of view of Pat, a man who against his better judgment gets caught up in a kidnapping for ransom.  Pat knows better, and knows that his partners are volatile, and from the beginning tries to get out of what is going on, albeit ineptly.  It takes place in Glasgow and seems like a good first mystery in a series, in that we are introduced to many items of interest that I imagine will appear in future books -- the crime family Tait, Alex's background, her half-brother, who has problems with the law, etc.  I shall read on.