July, you kept me busy. While SG was at camp, Mr. B helped me set up our office as my art space. He works upstairs now and says he doesn’t mind. I am so grateful. I’m still setting it up how I want to use it, but it’s just about there. Of course I will show you soon. Now I just need time to start creating!
We went to Napa for a few days and then SG came home! Ooooh weee did I have trouble adjusting back to being a momma full time. 🙂 But… she did come home much more independent and “older” somehow. I have definitely been enjoying being with her the past few weeks. Only 3 more weeks of summer left. Craziness.
I’m pretty much full-time working on the house. I’ve been busy studying the plans to see what needs to change before framing starts next week, selecting tile, lighting, and external materials. It’s truly always something. We are going to scatter good wishes pennies in about a week so they are in place before the foundation gets poured. If you have any wishes, you can just write them to me (no pennies necessary). Update coming soon.
10 Conversations You Need to Have with Your Children by Shmuley Boteach
“Everything that happens in life provides an opportunity for conversation with your children… It’s about reacting to life, and it’s about showing our kids that, if one looks, opportunities for reflection and inspiration are everywhere. The trick is not to let these moments pass us by.”
Our very behavior and example is very important and openly interacting and communicating with kids is our responsibility, not theirs. Some of Boteach’s themes: imparting dignity on every individual, valuing women, fostering curiosity and learning, encouraging forgiveness, etc. The chapter about imparting dignity on each and every individual no matter their job or appearance works itself into a conversation with SG every day, but I would read this book even if I didn’t have a child!
If you work on motivating your child to hear that inner voice, the voice of conscience, you will inspire him to become a better person. There is simply no greater motivator than to have a child develop a commitment to himself, to who he wants to be, rather than to his parents, who are telling him what he should be. When misbehaving, a child should never be made to feel as if he has betrayed his parents of his teachers; it is much more effective if he feels he has betrayed himself. That is why we ask the question, and why we must never stop asking it: Who do you want to be?
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler
This one is a confused jumble of stories that aren’t really connected to each other. I can see that Bowler is trying to write a memoir exactly like some of the recent “facing immortality” books that are very popular, for good reason, but this one falls short. First we hear about a Christian movement called the “American prosperity gospel,” in which fortune is a blessing from God and misfortune signals there must be some personal failure (a la Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and financial fraud, etc). Who wouldn’t want certainty in the face of a cancer diagnosis? It’s difficult, of course, to have no control …
“There is something so American about the ‘show-and-tell’ of our daily lives. A big house means you work hard… A subscription to the NYT shows you must be smart. And when you’re not sure, there will always be bumper stickers to point out who has the honor roll student and who finished a marathon. America likes its shopping malls big and its churches even bigger, and every Starbucks in every lobby proves that Jesus cares about brewing the best.”
Bowler, a young divinity professor, first has some unexplained arm pain and lack of sensation there, which leads her to many doctors and no answers, before we learn it’s some sort of nerve damage. Then all of a sudden she is pregnant for 3 hours and immediately loses the baby. How is this relevant to her story?
Bowler writes that the book is “about befores and afters and how people in the midst of pain make up their minds about the eternal questions: Why? Why is this happening to me? What could I have done differently? Does everything happen for a reason? If I accept that what is happening is something I cannot change, can I learn how to let go?”
In the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant
I will read anything Sarah Dunant writes, even her grocery lists. I read Machiavelli’s The Prince in a college symposium and enjoyed delving into the world of renaissance politics. This could be the prequel. It’s 1502 and the Borgia Family stories continue. Here, a Florentine diplomat (and we) gets a glimpse into secret deliberations behind Italy’s wars and how the Church makes decisions. Excellent story.
The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play and Much More by Bruce Feiler
Feiler shares hundreds of suggestions for managing family dynamics drawn from the business world’s ideas for team-building, problem-solving, and work flow. I learned some ideas for better family communication, managing projects and tasks, and for having more fun.
He asks, what do happy families do right?, and gives 200 ideas to improve your family, lower stress, and increase communication and productivity. The goal: create responsible, self-reliant, creative people in a much simpler, calmer way.
We are using Feiler’s suggestion of creating a Family Value Statement, determining what it is we most care about, writing it down, and making it visible in the home. So far the process itself is helpful.
“Far more important to any aspect of family life is to worry less about eliminating the negatives and focus more on maximizing the positives. One easy way to do that: put away your phone, get down on your kids’ level, and play.”
Negotiation is the stuff of life. My favorite sentence (which is hard to say in this book!): “Remember, [Kahneman] said, even though you may think you’re doing more than your fair share, your partner is thinking the exact same thing.” I am using this one!
Hurricane Season: The Unforgettable Story of the 2017 Houston Astros and the Resilience of a City by Joe Holley
Behind-the-scenes stories are so fun to read, don’t you think? This tells how owner Jim Crate formed the 2017 World Series Champs team with strong data and NASA analytics over a period of years. Alternate chapters tell the (still unbelievable) devastating story of Hurricane Harvey and the disaster and damage that befell so much of Houston. The Astros became symbolic of strength, resilience, and victory over devastation, for me and for so many. We also learn more about the likable guys who make up the team and how they personally helped and inspired so many Houstonians.
Holley is a Houston Chronicle writer who knows the history of the city and shares just enough of it to tie it in to the this story of true grit and resilience. He includes some Harvey statistics and personal narratives that I hadn’t heard, mixed in with detailed inning-by-inning counts of the Division, Championship series, and finally the WS.
“An Astros World Series win doesn’t clear the mold out of someone’s house, or restore their lost belongings, or put a roof over anyone’s head. But it tells us that difficult things are possible, no matter how stacked the odds seem.”
“The Houston Astros weren’t the first sports team to inspire their city during a time of crisis… but it’s safe to say that no city took a team to its heart during great difficulty the way Houston embraced the Astros. And vice versa.”
One of my favorite paragraphs that literally had me laugh out loud entailed a storm victim who had left his house, waded through chest-high water to safety, and was watching the game a few days later on a lawn chair in someone’s living room with beer sitting on ice in a nearby cooler. Exhausted and hopeless, he threw up his hands and essentially said “F… it… let’s watch the Astros.”
Houston Strong indeed.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Then You Think by Hans Rosling
At a time in our culture when it seems like all we hear is bad news, this is a hugely refreshing book! Rosling begins with a self-test to expose our ignorance about future population growth, vaccination rates, life expectancy, extreme poverty, health care, etc. He exposes our systematically wrong worldviews. It turns out that only 9% of the world now lives in poverty, and low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. Most of the world’s population lives in the middle of the income scale, children get vaccinated, girls go to school. Rosling suggests that rather than divide the world into “developed” and “developing,” we use his scale of 4 income levels, with the majority of people in the middle. The bottom line: the world is improving every year. So we need to develop factful ways of thinking and change our worldview!
Do you worry about population growth, public health care, or terrorism? Part of the issue comes from the way our brains work. Then there’s the media’s sensationalism and it’s distorted reporting of all things negative. Add in our own fears, our tendency to generalize and look for blame, and a few other human instincts, and you have ignorance of basic facts on a global level. No need to be stressed over imaginary problems in an overdramatic world. Let’s be more aware of the real problems and how to solve those.
The idea is to reduce your stress by only having opinions or a worldview for which you have supporting data. This book is confirmation that things might be bad, but at least they are improving. And a helpful idea: rather than celebrate other cultures by their (only-what-tourists-wear, stereotypical) dress (like large sombreros for Mexico), go to dollarstreet.org to look for difference and the many similarities between cultures. A fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life and more comfortable in terms of less stress, drama, and negative worldview. Not only is the world is not as bad as it seems, but we can look at data to see exactly how to keep improving it.
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
Having read a few others by Wolitzer, I didn’t want to miss this new one (and I think it’s soon becoming a movie). It deals with a young, shy college girl who meets and finds inspiration in a feminist trailblazer who becomes her mentor. The entire book focuses on being a woman and striving for equality. We observe the changes in various relationships as the story unfolds: a long-term romantic relationship, a life-long friendship, and various parent/child relationships.
I found the story generally interesting, but not interesting enough to love it or to learn anything, which is what I ask of novels. However, I did like that the main character was flawed, not perfect, which gave her a human dimension that was approachable. I also loved one of the other characters and his story much, much more, which usually doesn’t happen. If you read it, I’d be very interested to hear what you think of it.
“You made my head crack open in college, she’d tell her. Then, for years, I watched you take whatever you had – your strength, your opinions, your generosity, your influence, and of course your indignation at injustice; all of that-and pour it into other people, usually into women… the big, long story of women pouring what they had into one another. A reflex, maybe, or sometimes an obligation, but always a necessity.”
