You know you're having a bad day when...

1. OK, so your kid tells you there's a wasp in the bathroom. What would you do?

You probably don't want to do this.

2. So you notice your boys need haircuts?

You probably don't want to call Larry Miller. (Although, of course, one hopes he's learned a few things about what not to do...)

Boys and work

To continue the theme of On the care and feeding of boys, I offer Sparrow's post at Intent which begins:

One of the driving factors in our decision to move to the country was the reality of raising three boys. Boys need room and space to play, sure - but more importantly, they need room to WORK...

Time well spent, quietly

Sometimes, a person should just sit back and ponder, don't you think? Karen Edmisten suggests that there's much to be said for some Masterly inactivity in people's lives.

Here in the Bonny Glen: How Do the Seasons Affect Your Reading Habits?

There has been a fair amount of talk in some circles lately about how long a book "stays read". Something about that concept has been nagging at me, but I hadn't been able to put my finger on it until I read this post by Melissa Wiley, in which (among other things) she says it suddenly struck her that she didn't necessarily want a book to stay read.

I think perhaps she's on to something. Why don't you go on over and let her explain what she means?

Putting climate change into perspective

Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, who is engaged in paleoclimate research, says There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998. (UK Telegraph, April 9, 2006)

In the article, Carter looks at the temperature curve for the last six million years, at the data from recent years, and at the difficulties in presenting scientific information in a political and cultural climate that rewards people who jump on the global warming bandwagon.

hat tip: Rush Limbaugh

Our gremlins turn out to be larger than anticipated

Yesterday evening, fixing supper, I heard a noise. I couldn't really identify it: voices but not voices, owl hoots but not owl hoots, with an underlay of clacking, none of it loud, and none of it clearly identifiable as anything I knew. I turned to my husband and asked, "What was that?"

He didn't know either, and was equally unable to describe it to his satisfaction. We agreed that it seemed to be one of those noises you think you've heard, but aren't sure you've heard. We tiptoed to the bathroom window, which seemed to be closest to the noise-that-maybe-we-heard-and-maybe-we-didn't, and looked out. (Yes, I know. When two people are not sure whether they've heard something at the same time, it's a good clue that there was a noise. But this noise was so odd, it was hard to believe I'd heard it, even with the evidence.)

Off and on all evening, we kept thinking we heard noises, sometimes like the first batch of noises, sometimes different. My husband, working in his home office after dinner, kept thinking he heard something walking around in the laundry room, and kept getting up to check. He couldn't find anything, and neither could I.

Finally, after four this morning, we had another set of odd noises, louder, that seemed to be concentrated on the back porch. My husband went to look out the window that overlooks the porch. He found himself face to face with two mule deer, who proceeded to whistle and snort and coo at him through the window. I had no idea mule deer had such a vocabulary, or that they can sound like they're holding actual conversations. It was definitely the noises we'd been hearing. On top of that, the back porch bumps up against the laundry room, and both have floors made of old lumber. When the deer walked around on the back porch, it sounded like something was walking in the laundry room. Mysteries solved, all of them.

We knew we had mule deer around here. We have seen herds of them in both the front yard and the back, sometimes seven or so of them, sometimes twice that. We would have known, without seeing them, because of all the droppings they've left behind this winter. I can only hope that the 'conversations' we heard yesterday were serious discussions about whether it was about time to leave town and go back into the hills for the summer. They are beautiful animals, but I do want my yard back.

Eaking-Spay Ussian-Ray

Priceless.

Oh What a Beautiful Morning

Today, as I was walking around town, almost everyone I greeted couldn't resist gushing about what a wonderful morning it was. The forecast has threats of snow in it yet, possibly tonight or tomorrow, but this morning was Spring Writ Large. The weather was glorious, spring flowers are popping up all over, and people were overflowing with good spirits.

Nobody, however, was belting out one of the great belting-out songs of all time, in honor of the season. But some radio stations in France are... :-)

A hundred years ago April 18...

We're coming up on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. The USGS has info on the earthquake, its aftermath, and on activities related to the centennial.

WaterWatch -- Maps and graphs of current water resources conditions

The local creeks and rivers seemed a little high for this time of year to me. So I went looking for data that might tell me whether my hunch was right or not.

And that's how I found this wonderful resource for streamflows in the United States. You can click on the map for particulars for an area.

And, yes, I was right (for a change). Our streamflows in this part of Oregon are higher than normal right now.

But, yikes, the Eastern seaboard looks dry, overall. And California, for the most part, looks quite wet indeed...

Person First, Disability Later

Robin A. Meltzer, writing at aish.com, a Jewish site, gives us Person First, Disability Later, a heartfelt article which begins:

It is Yom Kippur, one-thirty in the morning. A young Jewish couple is in a hospital delivery room, minutes away from becoming first-time parents. Anticipation mixes with the holiness of the night. This child will be another link in the unbroken tradition leading all the way back to Sinai. And then she is born. The parents are elated. But the nurses fall silent; the doctors look uncomfortably at the floor. Because the baby has Down Syndrome. And that young Jewish couple is informed that their daughter, their precious first-born child, is some sort of mistake.

I was the mother on that delivery table. And on that Yom Kippur, in the middle of the night, I learned that being Julia's mother meant being her advocate. My job started immediately. My basic philosophy has remained constant over the past nine years: Julia is a unique individual, not a diagnosis. She must be given every opportunity to develop her capabilities. She is a full member of the Jewish community, entitled to the birthright of Torah and a Jewish education.

After the reception she got at the hospital, I hoped that the Jewish community would be more welcoming. And generally it was. But there is a lot of fear and misinformation.

This, from later in the article, tore my heart out:

To our great dismay, we also discovered that some confused and frightened parents are advised by their rabbis to abandon their babies with Down Syndrome in the hospital. While it is true that not all parents are capable of raising a child with special needs and that placing a child for adoption is sometimes the only choice, many more parents would take their baby home if their rabbi did not inveigh against it. Too often, these misguided assessments are viewed as a merciful response to the family's fear and misinformation about people with Down Syndrome, and not based on true Torah principles. New parents need support to work through the initial shock of diagnosis. They need time to get to know their baby, to hold her and rock her and sing some lullabies. If given the chance, most parents will realize that they love their baby very much and are quite able to raise her.

Read the whole post. It's got some Jewish terminology, etc., that I don't understand, but the plea to accept people with disabilities as individual people first and foremost comes through loud and clear. Be sure and look at the comments. The author seems to have hit a nerve.

Previous related post: Children with extra challenges, and the parents who love them

New blog: Blog of Virtues

A Catholic homeschooling mom started Blog of Virtues March 21, 2006. In her first post, she says:

Welcome to my new blog, where I will be sharing all the resources I find on teaching virtues and character building.

A roundabout hat tip to Melissa, who steered me to here, where I looked at the sidebar...

More Phyllis McGinley fans surface

Denny Hartford at the Book Den seems to have started something...

He wrote about poet and author Phyllis McGinley. I picked it up with Remembering Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978). This is how I found out that two fairly regular commenters here on my blog are McGinley fans (see the comments for that post).

Carmon at Buried Treasure ran across the same Book Den post, didn't know about McGinley, thought she sounded interesting, so ran with it in the post Domestic and Accomplished. Headmistress at The Common Room, who is a McGinley fan, picked up on Carmon's post and came up with one of her own, Poetry for Domestic Divas, Redux, in which she rather avidly recommends Phyllis McGinley's works.

I missed The Common Room's post last year on McGinley, which, among other things, mentions a children's book McGinley wrote called The Plain Princess, which sounds rather good, but which I didn't know about. (This is not to be confused with the book The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye.) Sadly, The Plain Princess seems to be currently out of print, and fairly scarce. Rats. It sounds like a book I'd like to read, if I can find a copy at the library or otherwise within my budget.

Anyway, I had thought that perhaps Phyllis McGinley was being lost to the mists of time, and I'm glad to see she isn't.

Joust The Facts: Look Before You Leap

I was working on a post on what I thought about heedless potshots in the blogosphere regarding journalist Jill Carroll, but I see that Giacomo has already covered it, and probably better than I was going to.

Recognizing a baby in the womb

The baby in the following story is about 19 weeks along:

[...]

In the car on the way home, a funny thing happened. The tech had given me printouts of both kinds of image [2-D and 3-D]. We were driving away from the hospital before I had a chance to look at the pictures. Puzzled, I stared at the 3-D closeup of the baby's face. It seemed ridiculous to say so, but this didn't look like the right baby. It was a different face, one I did not recognize.

Scott noticed my bewildered scrutiny. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said uncertainly. "It's just...this doesn't look like our baby."

"Um, honey," he said, glancing at my belly, "I'm pretty sure it's impossible for someone else's baby to be in there."

"I know it sounds crazy," I said. That's when I noticed the name printed in the upper corner of the image. It wasn't my name...

Read the whole post at Here in the Bonny Glen, by Melissa Wiley.

Exploring Scotland with Martha Morse

Author Melissa Wiley, hostess of the Here in the Bonny Glen blog, is compiling a list of kid-level books and other resources for families who want to know more about 'things Scottish' after reading in her Martha Morse books.

Subject areas covered so far are Spinning and Weaving, Music, Poetry and Literature, and Useful Websites.

Martha Morse was Laura Ingall Wilder's great-grandmother. Wiley has written several books about her for the "Little House" series. For more information from Barnes & Noble on Little House in the Highlands or other books in the series, click on the book cover below.


The Little House in the Highlands: (Little House Series: The Martha Years)

Remembering being ten

In Dewey's Treehouse: Ten-year-old you, Mama Squirrel looks back at when she was ten, and invites others to do the same.

The Common Room suggests some books for the under-six crowd

The Common Room: Poetry with Pictures lists several of their family's favorite books to read to the very young.

Isn't it funny what gets missed sometimes?

I don't care what you do, there are always going to be gaps in a child's upbringing. Luckily, the mom at A Picturesque Life turned a surprising discovery into a wonderful post about a simple joy she didn't know was missing in her daughter's life.

It brought a smile to my face. I hope you enjoy it.

The Third Carnival of Children's Literature

Sherry at the Semicolon blog took a different approach for the Third Carnival of Children's Literature -- she broke it into almost-daily doses for the entire month of April. With sidenotes. This is what I believe is called a tough act to follow ;-).