Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

First of all, there’s never enough time to try and do all the things, especially when you’re also trying to play catchup on laundry. We did spend Wednesday down in Provo, though, where we took my nephew for an early lunch and my niece (his sister) for a late lunch, as their schedules did not intersect. Other than a bathroom stop and a carsick incident on the way down, it was a nice day (if exhausting). Yesterday I spent doing laundry and tidying and such, and today is the last official day of spring break (and I’ve already taken my middles to the temple). My least favorite part about having all my kids home? Lunch. Hands down. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy it rather than not.

In the meantime, my hubby’s feeling better (he had a rough few days early in the week), but my 15-year-old is scared half out of her mind about speaking in stake conference this Sunday. Send her prayers and good vibes!

For Christmas, I promised my 15-year-old one more book when I found the right one; I also promised my (now) 10-year-old one more graphic novel when I found the right one. I’m still working on the one for the 15-year-old, but I finished Jing Jing Tsong’s Fake Chinese Sounds on Thursday and decided it would be the perfect graphic novel to join our household collection. (I’d consider it for my 15-year-old’s birthday, only she’s getting increasingly picky about the art in such cases, and I don’t think this would so much appeal to her.)

Fake Chinese Sounds is two things, really; it’s a novel about generational female relationships, despite language barriers, and it’s a novel about speaking up and dealing with racism. Mei Ying’s relationship with her Nai Nai is fantastic, and the way their relationship influences their interactions with Mei Ying’s mother is also a positive thing. The kind of racism Mei Ying deals with in school, on the other hand, is made even more frustrating by Mei Ying’s teacher’s reaction, and when you add the innocently-meant-but-still-racist comments she deals with in life’s everyday passing encounters, you have a 5th grader with a serious weight on her shoulders. How she finds her voice–and how it plays out with the kids who are bothering her–makes for great reading.

I will say that the color scheme and artistic style Tsong uses is less friendly to 45-year-old eyes; the font is sometimes awfully small, and the pages with less defined panels are sometimes slightly confusing. The art works with the story, however, and you can’t have everything, right? If you’re looking for a good graphic novel for upper elementary school through high school, you should definitely check this one out.

Yesterday morning I announced at our PTA meeting that I was willing to be president next year, which is a little terrifying (a lot terrifying?); I went straight from the PTA relo to my Red Cross appointment at the library, and when I was done there, I ate and exercised and went to pick up my youngest. The rest of the day was full as well, it being my hubby’s 50th birthday, and today was all about watching General Conference and doing chores in between times. In case you didn’t watch it today, here’s the link:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/broadcasts/watch-sunday-live-sessions-including-music-amp-the-spoken-word?lang=eng

Here’s looking forward to tomorrow!

I mean that about Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ruby in two ways, actually. First of all, the plot was not quite what I expected; whereas The One and Only Ivan and The One and Only Bob take place in the US, more in the animals’ nows, so to speak, The One and Only Ruby has much more of Ruby’s life in Africa, before she met the other animals that we’ve come to know and love. This wasn’t a bad surprise at all, and the book was every bit as moving as I anticipated it being; I just wasn’t quite expecting that direction. (It isn’t all about Africa, by the way. Ruby’s reminiscences directly relate to the part of the plot that’s happening in the present day.)

The second thing that surprised me about the book, on the other hand, is also my only real criticism of it. Ruby’s story is told gently, but it still tugs at your heartstrings. The art, however, is a little bit too–sweet. Sure, some of it should be, but I remember looking at an illustration of Ruby on a page that specifically talks about Ruby being sad and wondering why she didn’t look sad in the picture. To be honest, the illustrations just seemed like a series of cute pictures of Ruby looking, well, cute, and not the story-enhancing images I was expecting. The text, however, is certainly more than good enough to compensate for what I found lacking in the art.

In short, don’t miss this one either.

In other news, I took my youngest to the debate tournament at Cyprus High yesterday, and she and her partner did very nicely. It was a long afternoon, but hey, we survived! There’s no dance or piano this week, since it’s Jordan School District’s spring break, and I’m appreciating that. I wish I were getting more done today, since I was gone so much of yesterday–I ran errands in the morning before the tournament–but I had one child not feeling well at 4-something and another child with an eye appointment at 8, and the combination of the two left me more tired than I was expecting. Maybe tomorrow…

I finished reading Cary Fagan’s Hans Christian Andersen Lives Next Door aloud to my 10-year-old on Saturday (I started reading it to her while she was doing her sock chore, and she didn’t want to stop), and I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it. If I thought Fagan was going for realistic fiction, I’d be irritated, but I can’t quite believe he is; the idea of real people and fairy tales and how they might come together feels a little meta. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that?) Still, Andie’s fantasy feels a little off for the 21st century. (On the other hand, her poems are a hoot, so there’s that.) This story of a girl who feels her new neighbor might be the famous Hans Christian Andersen has a splash of Roald Dahl, a splash of Daniel Pinkwater, and a splash of someone else that my memory isn’t producing for me at the moment. The illustrations aren’t so much my style, but they’re fun, and the messages on friendship and people and their motivations are absolutely real. If you’re a fan of subversively fresh takes on fairy tales, give this short, quirky novel a try.

Just be ready to suspend healthy amounts of disbelief.

In other news, my oldest is over her flu but my youngest has a bad case of the coughs, so she’s home today. We did have fun playing games last night, however, and it was honestly a nice weekend all around. Cross your fingers that my girlie won’t be coughing up a lung during her debate tournament tomorrow!

My poor 18-year-old seems to have caught the terrible, awful, no good, very bad stomach flu that the other kids and I suffered through in December; add to that my littles doing all the coughing (is it allergies and colds combined? because you never can tell this time of year) and my youngest, especially, with the froggy voice and stuffy nose, and I ended up canceling piano lessons today. (Our teacher is over 80, so I’m a lot more careful than I was when it was another mom with school-aged kids.) Having kids home more than usual, however, means that multiple books were finished by multiple kids, which means that multiple books then got to go back to the library. Huzzah! Not that I’ve done so much finishing of books, mind you, but I’ve been reading aloud with kids, so there’s that. And if I follow through on my plans for tonight, it’s possible I’ll have turned off my light and phone before midnight every night this week. Wish me luck!!!!!

So. I didn’t manage a post on Friday because (among other things) I was dealing with a massive ten-year-old tantrum about piano practicing AND we packed up and spent the night in Clearfield to get a jump on the drive to our niece’s wedding in Logan Saturday morning. It was lovely, the wedding luncheon was nice, we hit the Lazy Ones outlet on the way home, and then–after the reception–we ended up going to watch the BYU game with family. And seriously, folks–what a game! I’m not going to offer up any analysis of it, since my knowledge of basketball barely extends beyond the basics, but it got awfully close at the end. (We were watching it delayed on my sister- and brother-in-law’s TV, but I couldn’t handle the uncertainty, so you can bet I was checking the latest scores on my phone all through the second half. On the down-low, of course.)

Anyway. Staying in Davis County to watch the game meant a late night and a later start to our morning on Sunday; we were JUST getting ready to set up for Family Scripture Time when my aunt called to tell me that my mother (did I mention my parents were in town?) had fainted in her sacrament meeting and was heading to the hospital with a concerningly low heartrate. I left my family to do scripture time without me and headed up to the hospital, where I stayed until my mom was discharged. (She’s healthy, but they want her to do a heart monitor when she gets back to Idaho.) Add that to the chaos my house had become during such a busy weekend, and a LONG doctor’s appointment for my oldest on Monday, and you have a general picture of why I haven’t managed a post before now. (Yesterday involved the library and a whole heckuva lot of laundry.) Here I am, however, and while I’m not going to manage much of the organizing I was thinking I’d do today, I managed some unplanned organizing instead. We’ll see how I do posting this Friday…

Kelly Yang’s Front Desk has been on my radar for ages and my shelf ever since my second girlie picked it as her free book for–something. (It’s been long enough that I don’t remember exactly what.) When I finally started listening to it three weeks or so ago, however, I was honestly worried at first. Was this going to be the sort of immigrant story that I needed a healthy dose of emotional resilience to read? (My supply of that, you understand, depends a great deal on how each of my kiddos–and my husband–is doing and how much sleep I’ve gotten recently.) I quickly realized, however, that Yang is a genius at blending the undeniably hard with both the humorous and the heartwarming. She and her parents are living incredibly difficult lives as immigrants–were doing so long before the events at the start of the story–and yet, over the course of the book, they manage to find both their people and a way forward, however unexpected it may be. Mia’s growing confidence is lovely to see, and I loved finding out from the author’s note that one of the aspects of the story I thought the least realistic was (like many of the events of the book) based on Yang’s real life experience. In following Mia and her family as they become hotel managers and deal with crises both large and small, Front Desk is a poignant picture of the ups and downs of the American dream–and how modest that dream often is for the first generation of immigrants. If you haven’t already, go read this one!

In the meantime, it snowed yesterday and I have a pot of apples cooking down on the stove. (Not the last of the apples, but I’m down to half a box!) After I switch my laundry, I’m thinking a cup of hot chocolate might be in order…

On Saturday night my youngest and I found ourselves alone after dinner; my hubby drove my 15-year-old to the temple (and then took her and a friend to a region dance), my oldest was working, and my son was playing neighborhood football with friends. Since we had less than 50 pages left of the book we’ve been reading together, it seemed like the perfect time to finish it out, and so we snuggled up on the love seat and got to it. And it was fun–the ending offered plenty of excitement–but yowsers. By the time we hit the last 5-10 pages, I was desperate for ALL the water.

Gordon Korman’s The Superteacher Project was on our elementary school’s ‘Battle of the Books’ list this year, which is why my girlie picked it in the first place. I’ve read at least eight of Korman’s books by now, and while they’ve all been some level of entertaining, some have worked better than others; I was pleased to find that Superteacher is definitely one of his finer efforts. Korman’s plots and writing style are intentionally a bit farfetched and over the top, and that works exceptionally well for a book about a government project involving an experimental robot teacher in a middle school. (The principal and teachers know he’s a robot, but they can’t tell the students or their parents.) The school joker (he uses the term ‘rule wrecker’) dislikes him at first–how does Mr. Aidact keep figuring out that he’s behind this and that mischief?–but eventually grows intrigued. The PTA president’s determinedly ambitious daughter finds him to be an amazing coach, especially since she only joined the field hockey team to pad her resume (college applications?). And the king of detention sees his regular after school experience transformed unrecognizably. What happens, however, when the kids find out that Mr. Aidact’s a robot?

I shan’t give any more of the plot away, since it’s completely worth experiencing on your own, but I promise you it’s worth the ride. As improbable as the concept of Superteacher is, it’s improbable in a highly successful way; it should appeal to avid, regular, and reluctant readers alike. Give this one a shot when you get a chance!

One of my nieces is currently playing Katherine of Aragon in Six: Teen Edition at ‘Broadway on the Side’ in Ogden, so last night my 15-year-old and I trekked up to see her. (My hubby was going to come, too, but he had a rough week, what with the MRI and a power outage rendering him CPAP-less for part of a night.) I knew one song beforehand–my hubby likes “Heart of Stone”–and didn’t actually realize that the six queens are the only roles; on the other hand, being an English major and a Shakespeare fan did give me a fair amount of background, so there’s that.

It was a fabulous time.

The girls were talented and hilarious, the premise entertaining, and I’ve never shied away from a certain morbidity of humor. It was a full-length adaptation made cleaner for its teen performers, so I don’t know how differently I’d feel about the un-adapted version, but still. Thumbs up from me!