Bookcase

Posted: December 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book of Sand | 4 Comments

When we moved, I bought a large IKEA Expedit bookcase for the living room. I’ve seen a lot of interior design blogs about “styling” your bookcase and here’s what I have to say: I don’t have knickknacks to display, I have books – hence the bookcase.

So mine is just filled with books. I am ok with that.

I love having all the books right on display – in our basement apartment, I had one shelf in the living room (with the books arranged by color), and four shelves in the bedroom. That meant only colorful hardcover books were lucky enough to be in the living room, and my well-loved paperbacks were all hidden away. Now I have a mini-library, and I’ve already lent a handful of books to friends.

Forgive the bad lighting, I took this late at night when I thought of the post:

Not pictured: the total destruction of my house. And the top of the bookcase, which has become the final (easily accessible) kids-can't-reach-this-even-with-the-stepstool place.

Not pictured: the total destruction of my house. And the top of the bookcase, which has become the final (easily accessible) kids-can’t-reach-this-even-with-the-stepstool place.

The top left cubby is filled with cookbooks, and the rest of the books are arranged alphabetically by author until the bottom left cubby, when I ran out of regular books. Then there are some church manuals, a yearbook, and some cool things.

If you’re curious, here’s a complete listing of the contents of the bookcase, with columns A-D and rows 1-4. (Hey! Late-at-night ideas aren’t necessarily brilliant!)

1A: Hillery family cookbook from the Brian Head reunion
The Pie and Pastry Bible; Bite-Sized Desserts
How to Cook Cookbook
Korean Cooking for Everyone
Party Cakes
The Joy of Cooking
The International Chocolate Cookbook
Food Network Favorites
Spices of the World Cookbook by McCormick
Three & Four Ingredient Cookbook
LDS Hymns

1B: Watership Down
Little Women
The Book of Three; The Black Cauldron; The Castle of Llyr; Taran Wanderer; The High King; The Founding and Other Tales of Prydain
Tuck Everlasting
The Wizard of Oz
Chasing Vermeer
A Witness and a Warning
The Best of Betjeman; Coming Home
A Man for All Seasons
Collected Fictions

1C: Fahrenheit 451
The Secret Garden
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Pathfinder; Ender’s Game (these should be reversed to be correct alphabetically AND chronologically, but Pathfinder and Graceling were exactly the same height, and I wanted to break them up)
Graceling
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Over Sea, Under Stone, Silver on the Tree
Sharing Nature with Children
Walk Two Moons
Jurassic Park and The Lost World
*ON LOAN: The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Matilda

1D: The Twits; The Roald Dahl Treasury
The Confucian Transformation of Korea
Because of Winn-Dixie; The Tale of Desperaux
Oliver Twist; Sherlock Holmes
The Count of Monte Cristo
Nickle and Dimed
Magician: Apprentice; Magician: Master; Silverthorn

2A: Krondor the Betrayal
Inkheart; Inkspell
The Perry Mason Casebook
Julie of the Wolves
The Wind in the Willows
The Meaning of Life
The Client
The Other Side of Heaven
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong
Princess Academy
The Last Laborer

2B: The Dark Wind; Listening Woman; The Leaphorn and Chee Novels
Standing for Something; Go Forward with Faith
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Lotta Prints
Howl’s Moving Castle
George Shrinks
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Scarlet Slipper Mystery; The Secret of Red Gate Farm
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Education of a Wandering Man

2C: Still Life with Rice
A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; A Ring of Endless Light; Troubling a Star
Ella Enchanted
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Last Battle; The Great Divorce
The Princess and the Goblin (I am amused that C.S. Lewis ended up right next to George MacDonald)
Adventures of Perrine
Judy Moody
Moccasin Trail
Moby Dick
Anne of Green Gables

2D: Anne of Avonlea; Anne of the Island; Anne of Windy Poplars; Anne’s House of Dreams; Anne of Ingleside; Rainbow Valley; Rilla of Ingleside
Fablehaven 1-5

3A: The Candy Shop War; Beyonders 1-2
Abhorsen
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Nineteen Eighty Four
The Holy Temple; Mine Errand from the Lord
Bridge to Terabithia
Cry, the Beloved Country; Too Late the Phalarope
A Long Way from Chicago

3B: The Twenty-One Balloons
A Treasury of Bunny Stories
Summer of the Monkeys
*ON LOAN: The Name of the Wind; The Wise Man’s Fear
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

3C: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The Little Prince
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
Print Workshop
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Hamlet; King Lear; Shakespeare Collection
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
The Grapes of Wrath
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
The Amulet of Samarkand

3D: The Golem’s Eye; Ptolemy’s Gate
Gulliver’s Travels
*MISSING: Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same; Hatched
Mary Poppins
The Chronicles of Harris Burdick
The Everything Book
*ON LOAN: Cutting for Stone (2 copies!)
Super Completely and Totally the Messiest
Candide
H.G. Wells: Seven Novels

4A: Behemoth
Stuart Little
The Picture of Dorian Gray
On the Banks of Plum Creek
The Castle in the Attic
The Virginian
Dealing with Dragons
The Paper-Bag Princess (pocket-sized)
The Secret Garden (pocket-sized)
The Velveteen Rabbit (pocket-sized)
Selma
I Like You
Stories and Fables

4B: dictionary
thesaurus
Hillery family history
The Arabian Nights

4C: Jarom’s mission photos
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

4D: Korean books

P.S. If you’re still reading, I’ll treat you to this factoid: I keep a little tool behind cubby 1B to measure the distance from the front edge of the bookcase to the edge of the books, so they all line up nicely. Every so often (because June likes to attack the books) I realign everything. Obsessive? Maybe slightly. But it keeps the bookcase looking nice, even if it’s only filled with books!

Keepsakes

Posted: December 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Secret Garden | 12 Comments

This is the first in a series of sporadic blog posts about items I have in my keepsake box. If you think I’m not sentimental, this should prove otherwise.

In third grade, we did a unit on the human skeleton. At the beginning of the unit our teacher, Mrs. Van Putten, had us draw and label the skeleton – so we could compare it to what we learned later. Here’s my charming drawing.

Including: brain skull, skull, elbow, ribs, finger bones, toe bones, and leg bones.

Including: brain skull, skull, elbow, ribs, finger bones, toe bones, and leg bones.

Thankfully, I also kept the end-of-unit drawing, for at least some slight redemption. I swear I am not an idiot, regardless of what the previous drawing might indicate. Proof that I learned something, at one point in my life:

Including: brain case, eye socket, humerus, rib cage, radius, ulna, carples, metacarples, vertebrae (or something like that), tibia, fibula, ankle bones, and metatarsles.

Including: brain case, eye socket, humerus, rib cage, radius, ulna, carples, metacarples, vertebrae (or something like that), tibia, fibula, ankle bones, and metatarsles.

Forgive my 8-year-old spelling. I did go on to become a pretty great speller. More or less.

I don’t actually remember the skeleton unit from third grade. I do remember the Native American unit, which I’m fairly certain we called the Indian unit. We all had Indian names – if I looked through all my papers, I might be able to find mine – and Renee and I (and another classmate, I can’t remember who – maybe Ashley Mitchell?) made an Indian hideout under the class steps. We went on a field trip where we learned how to grind acorns, and afterward we used broken bits of concrete under the class steps as rocks to grind grass and leaves. Or something like that. My memory is getting a little rusty at this point. Any help, Renee?

One of my other distinct memories from third grade is meeting a girl who was as small as I was – Samantha Herrera. Because I was in a special program for Extra Smart People (it’s my blog, so let me brag), most of my classmates didn’t live nearby; Samantha lived in Lawler Ranch, which I’ve never visited as an adult, so I can’t really say how far away it was. But it was far enough away that I always had to be driven to her house. Samantha was best friends with Soleil, who I now realize got her French name via her Vietnamese mother. But at age 8, I didn’t know anything about world history.

The last thing I’ll share is that I loved math until third grade. Because I entered GATE (the awesome thing I got to do for being an Extra Smart Person) in third grade, I went from second-grade math – which I loved – to fourth-grade math and had a LOT of trouble with it. I remember struggling with multiplying two 2-digit numbers. The jelly-bean explanation confused me. A few of the other students were so good at math that they went up to the fourth grade GATE class for math, which really put them at a fifth-grade level. I think they were mostly boys (Brad Handel, Andrew Gemmer, Jason-whose-last-name-I’ve-forgotten. Counihan?), and I felt like maybe that meant something. But by fifth grade I was in the advanced math group, and most of us were girls. So I guess it was just chance.

What do you remember from third grade?

Santa

Posted: December 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Dangerous Book for Boys | 14 Comments

Where do you stand on telling kids about Santa? Evan knows all about Santa, has “seen him in real life” a few times (he loves talking about it), and understands the idea that Santa brings Christmas presents.

Over the past while, Evan has asked a lot of questions about whether certain things are real. I think it started when we watched Monsters Inc. and I let him know that monsters are pretend, since he was a little scared of his closet. He’s asked if the following are real: firefighters, volcanoes, hippos, fairies, snowmen, and reindeer. When I said that reindeer are real but that they don’t really fly, he insisted, “They do fly, using magic!” Fair enough, I guess…

In response to the question, “Is Santa real?” I said no. If you’re offended by that, I don’t really care. My kid – not yours. I explained that Santa is a really fun idea of a nice man who brings presents at Christmas, but what actually happens is that we give gifts to each other (as I mentioned here). I also said that even though Santa is pretend, Evan should NOT go around telling other kids. I’m a decent enough person for that.

Last week I brought Evan with me to a doctor’s appointment where I had blood drawn. As the nurse was getting everything set up, she asked Evan what he wanted Santa to bring him for Christmas, to which he promptly responded, “Santa isn’t real.” Oh my heavens, the Look that nurse gave me – like I was the worst mother ever! I defended myself, pretty much the way I have here: Evan wanted to know what was real and what wasn’t.

Do you see benefits to pretending that Santa is real? Or do you draw a distinction between reality and imagination? I don’t remember ever thinking that the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy were real, but I may have just grown out of it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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