August Photos Posted

In August, Abby turned 6 months old. To celebrate, we gave her solid food for the first time. Obviously, she was a big fan.

 

Review: Feathers

Title: Feathers
Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 4/5
Summary: 11-year-old Frannie is a girl who's lost hope—she lives on the poor side of the highway, she's seen her mama suffer through miscarriages and now she's pregnant again, and she sees the way girls treat her brother when they find out he's deaf.

Review: Frannie's teacher reads an Emily Dickinson poem that starts "Hope is the thing with feathers..." to her class, which gets Frannie thinking about hope. Then a boy who looks like Jesus shows up as the new kid at school, and Frannie is forced to grapple with her own understanding of hope, faith, and religion.

I finished this yesterday morning—about 36 hours ago—and I've been thinking about it off and on since then. That's rare for me. Usually, I finish one book, then move right on to the next. But this beautiful novel stuck with me. One of my favorite aspects of the story is how Frannie explores the idea of spirituality versus religion.

This would be a great book to read with your child because of all the interesting conversations you could have about the characters and what they go through.

Review: Cicada Summer

Title: Cicada Summer
Author: Andrea Beaty
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 3/5
Summary: 11-year-old Lily has a secret she has to protect at all costs, which is easy because she doesn't talk anymore.

Review: This sweet story tackles heavy topics—guilt, crime, grief—but also has a good dose of humor in some parts. I liked it, but I can't say that anything in particular stood out to me as great.

Review: Breaking Dawn

Title: Breaking Dawn
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Summary: The conclusion to Bella and Edward's love story.

Review: Of all the books in The Twilight Saga, Twilight has been my favorite. But I liked this final book about as much as I did all the others. As with most of Meyer's novels, I liked it but didn't love it. Yet I still had this all-consuming desire to read it in every spare moment of the day. So even though I had to wake up at 5:30 this morning and I knew Abby would be waking up at least once to eat, I stayed up til almost midnight to finish this puppy.

This was another great read, but I did have a couple disappointments. Stop reading here if you don't want me to spoil anything.

About halfway through the book, everything's all fine and dandy with no major conflict on the horizon, which was nice and all but it got pretty boring after a short while. I didn't really feel the impending doom of the Volturi until after this blissed-out section. And this isn't really a disappointment in this book but more in the others: Bella finally, finally, FINALLY saves the day. But she had to become a vampire to do it! That just rubs me the wrong way. I so wish Bella had been given some special quality, talent, skill, SOMETHING that she could have used in a pinch in the other books. She was always being rescued by the Cullens or Jacob.

With Harry Potter, his status as a wizard is unremarkable. What's remarkable and what saves the day time and time again is his character—who he is as a person. So it's easy to identify with Harry, and it's satisfying to read about how he saves the day.

Bella is just not a strong character. Not until she becomes a vampire, that is. And even then she's constantly belittling herself! I think the reason I was able to still get really into this final book is all the description of Bella's feelings for her daughter. Every time I read a passage about Nessie, I had this overwhelming urge to go smother Abby in hugs and kisses. I guess you could argue that the fact that she protected her daughter before birth shows strength. But how did she do that? She went running to a vampire bodyguard and sat back and let other people take care of her and decide the best way for doing so.

It's such a compelling plot and world, it seems such a waste that the main character is so completely and utterly weak.

Review: The Host

Title: The Host
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Category: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
Summary: An alien race has infiltrated Earth by using humans as host bodies. One of the last surviving humans is captured, and a "soul" is inserted into her body. But she's not ready to let go of her body, and she's certainly not going to make it easy on the intruder who's taken it over.

Review: This woman tells a great story, that's for sure. This book hooked a finger in my shirt and yanked me in with no mercy—just like the Twilight series. The difference is when I read the Twilight series, Abby was taking 30-45 minutes to eat every two hours, so I had plenty of time to read. Now she's 5 months old and taking only 10 minutes to eat every 3 hours, so that means much less time to read.

But—and I realize I'm self-nominating for the Bad Mother of the Year award here—I couldn't put this book down when Abby finished eating so I would dangle a rattle in one hand and use the other hand to read just.one.more.paragraph. Of course, that always led to another paragraph, and another, and another.

This story has the perfect love triangle—the host body is in love with one man and the alien living in the host body is in love with another.

With all that said though, some things in this book did disappoint me. Sometimes, I felt like there was too much descriptive text—I found myself skipping over descriptions of how the main character was feeling so I could get to the action. I guess I wanted more showing, less telling in some places.

But my bigger problem with the book is that, just as with the Twilight series, the main character's weakness really annoyed the crap out of me at times. I got a little tired of her getting hurt and being carried around by one of her two love interests. And I don't want to spoil anything, but the ending isn't exactly a stellar example of strength.

On a petty and shallow level, I was hoping to get what we haven't gotten in the Twilight series (yet at least—I haven't read Breaking Dawn), if you know what I mean. This is an adult book, for pete's sake.

But even with all that said, the story was intriguing and I'm glad I read it. It was a great ride.

July Photos Posted

On the docket this month: teeth, elimination communication, and accessories.

But this girl takes accessorizing seriously. You'll see Abby wearing an amber teething necklace in most of the photos. When worn against the skin, the amber heats up and releases minuscule amounts of resin that supposedly has healing properties. Yes, we are hippies. But we figure it can't hurt, and she seems to have less teething-related pain while wearing it.

 

Review: Shelf Monkey

Title: Shelf Monkey
Author: Corey Redekop
Category: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
Summary: A clinically depressed bookworm gets a job at a mega-bookstore.

Review: Witty at every turn. I liked all the book and author references, although I wasn't familiar with a lot of them. (And I thought I was a bookworm!) I didn't really believe the main characters' actions at the climax, but it was still an enjoyable enough read.

Review: The Diaper-Free Baby

Title: The Diaper-Free Baby: The Natural Toilet Training Alternative
Author: Christine Gross-Loh
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: A mother of two shares tools and information you can use to practice elimination communication (EC) with your children.

Review: Out of all the EC books out there, I chose to read this one because it sounded like a more laidback approach. It was, and I'm glad for that. My main hesitation to EC was the idea that I'd have to watch Abby like a hawk 24-7 to catch every elimination. So it was refreshing to read about examples of parents who successfully practice EC only some of the time. The book is organized by age of the child, so there's some repetition, but I didn't mind the reinforcement of the concepts. You could read just the part that applies to your child's age, which is a nice option to have.

If you're interested in EC, this book is a good place to start.

To Catch a Pee

I bought The Diaper-Free Baby: The Natural Toilet Training Alternative before Abby was born, fully intending to read it before she arrived. That didn't happen.

Then right after she was born, I had lots of time to read during her 30- to 45-minute nursing sessions, but I was not in the mood to read about baby stuff. And what's more, the idea of practicing elimination communication (EC) just stressed me out. When I was learning so many new things in those first 3 months, I couldn't fathom adding something that wasn't absolutely necessary. So the book sat on the bookshelf.

The last few weeks, I've finally been feeling ready to read it. The clincher was some friends of ours with a 1-year-old telling me they'd like to us to try it out so they can live vicariously through us and hear how it goes. This week, I started reading the book.

The gist of EC is that babies do not inherently like to sit in their own waste. So you learn your baby's signals for when she's about to eliminate so you can take her to the toilet (or her own little potty), avoiding a situation where she's sitting in her own waste. And by learning to communicate with your baby about her elimination needs, you're creating a valuable foundation for potty-training later. In fact, many EC babies end up potty-trained earlier than other babies. And how much more "green" can you get than avoiding the cloth or disposable debate altogether?

Also, here's something I didn't know that I wish I had before Abby was born: Some parents practice EC 24-7, while others practice it occasionally. Some EC babies go without diapers entirely, some wear them only some of the time, while others still wear diapers all the time. I had this vision in my head that Abby would have to be diaper-free all day every day, and I would have to pay constant attention to her facial expressions so as not to get peed on. But it doesn't have to be like that.

The book says babies typically eliminate at certain times of the day—soon after waking from a nap, during or after a feeding, or soon after being taken out of a sling/wrap or car seat. So a couple days ago, I decided to see if Abby followed those patterns. Each time she woke up from a nap, I took her diaper off and laid her on a clean prefold diaper. And sure enough, she peed within 5-10 minutes of waking up. I removed the prefold and put on a clean diaper, and she didn't have to sit in her own pee for 2 hours before her next diaper change. I was hooked.

My next step was to see if I could get her to pee in the toilet. Yesterday after her morning nap, I took her diaper off and held her over the toilet. And my little 4-month-old daughter peed in the toilet! Then Erik tried later that day and she peed in the toilet again.

If only I had known it would be so easy, I wouldn't have been so overwhelmed with the idea right after she was born.

Now excuse me while I go print this post and get it laminated so it's handy for when Abby's first boyfriend comes to the house...

Review: Me and the Pumpkin Queen

Title: Me and the Pumpkin Queen
Author: Marlane Kennedy
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: 11-year-old Mildred starts growing giant pumpkins as a way to reconnect with her mom who passed away when she was 6.

Review: The best parts of this book were the ones about growing giant pumpkins. It's easy to see the author did her homework on the topic. The story was alright, but a few things bothered me: Mildred didn't always sound 11 years old—saying things like "to no avail," when it wasn't part of her character to be precocious. A few parts weren't really necessary and slowed the story down, like stepping the reader through every single thing Mildred does when she gets home from school one day. And finally, there were a few things that didn't feel resolved, like a mention of how the dad and his co-worker should go on a date but it's never mentioned again.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this unless you're really into pumpkins.