Mud Pies and Other Recipes

As a child this was my favorite book to check out of the library.  It is a collection of doll recipes made from ingredients found outside: dirt, mud, leaves, dandelion fluff.  I loved it and I always remember the pages were stained with others' attempts at doll cookery.

I had forgotten all about it until recently when sitting down to play in the dirt with my daughter.  I did not bother to see if the local library still carried this, I simply went straight to Amazon.  The receipts and pictures are all still there, just as Marjorie Winslow created it.

I can't wait until Tessa is old enough to read and make these timeless recipes on her own.  I hope this copy gets very dirty.

The Hunger Games

Now that Grayson and I have finally packed away Harry Potter, we searched for a new reading adventure that we could read together.  It was hard to pick a Young Adult Book that would appeal to mother and son as much as HP did.  Many, many friends have encouraged me to pick up the Hunger Games by Susanne Collins.  So starting this past Monday night, the kid and I are getting to know Katniss Everdeen.

After three nights, all I can say is it will be hard to read this one chapter at a time (perhaps I'll have to borrow it and sneak ahead)  and it is keeping me up.  Did you all know there's a movie coming out in 2012?  Imagine that a strong female protagonist!  Thanks Suzanne.

Could you be a tiger mom?

After reading tons of articles about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and hearing all the pros and cons and rebuttals about Amy Chua's book on the Chinese way of parenting, I read it fully expecting to get her humor and fall in love with Amy Chua.  Amy was quoted again and again saying that no one understood her and that the WSJ (the publication that first reported on her book) only pulled out the most salacious parts of her book and no one got that she was humbled in the end.  In interviews she kept talking about how funny the book was meant to be.

But I must say I have never read a memoir where I so thoroughly detested the narrator and even when she got her comeuppance and realized the error of her ways she still contended that her way is better and the rest of us western parents are just stupid.  So even after she was humbled she still acted like she was superior.  There were, perhaps, two spots in the narrative where I thought I detected a bit of humorous hyperbole, but it was really overshadowed by her horrible personality.

That being said, this is a well written book with a completely different perspective on culture and parenting and is worth reading simply to have that perspective.  I found Chua's tale to be incredibly riveting and her voice to be clear and compelling.   I don't think I have ever read anything that so concisely summed up the differences between east and west.  It was simply unusual to have such an unsympathetic narrator.

Sad to say, I could never, even in my wildest dreams be a tiger mother.  Poor Miss T will really miss that part of her heritage (though I tend to doubt it).  A better summation of this method of parenting is that it is the best parenting method for raising violin or piano prodigies.  However, if you want your kids to have a sweet carefree child hood where kids can play and discover and create and make friends and learn to navigate the real world, Western parenting seems to be the better route--with some modifications perhaps.

The whole story kept me wondering about three things: 1) Not every kid can be number one.  Pity the kids who have more than one tiger mom in the same town or small school.  2)  How will her kids parent their kids one day?  I may have to wait a few years for Sophia's and Lulu's memoirs.  3)  How munch money will they have to spend on therapy to erase years of stress and psychological abuse heaped upon them by their mother?

There were also a couple of interesting stories within the memoir that were only hinted upon.   Amy's sister makes an appearance at the end. She is very ill and perhaps dying of cancer.  She is also the parent of two small children.  Is she a tiger mom as well?  And in one totally fascinating aspect of the tiger mom phenomenon, Amy's mother, the original tiger mom,  manages to love and raise a Down's Syndrome child (in China disabled children are often killed or abandoned.  It is very un-chinese to show any care or attention to a handicapped child.)  The Down's Syndrome child plays piano!  No doubt owed to the tireless efforts of this method and the mother.  Perhaps in some weird way, this method does show love.

Though I guess I will continue to show my love by taking family hikes and trying my best not to be a yeller and letting my kids choose their hobbies and interests.

How about you?  Love to hear from people who are Tiger Parents...

Cinderella ate My Daughter

I don't particularly care for parenting how-to books.  They always leave me feeling really inadequate.  Amy Chua's Tiger Mother and Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella were both on the hot reads list this winter and surprise! Both were parenting books of sorts.

I'll save Amy Chua for another day, but I just managed to read Orenstein's new book about the princess and pink craze that is sweeping through girlhood these days.  Of course I have an interest in this topic as I am raising a daughter myself and upon finding out that I would be raising a girl, I proclaimed that I would raise her to be a warrior princess.

I was thinking of the idea that it was okay to be a girlie-girl but that she would also be strong and tough and fight battles.  You know, like princess Leia.

Orenstein does a great job of dissecting the new girlie-girl culture of princesses and pinkness and as these girls get older, the whole tween slut craze. Her book is a journalist's account of the troubles of consumer culture for girls.  By the end, any parent raising a girl will be damned if they do and damned if they don't.  Celebrate girl culture and you are reinforcing stereotypes like the mermaid who gives up her voice to be with the prince or the princess who waits around to be kissed and saved.  Blah!  But if we come down to hard against the feminine play, we tell our girls it's bad to be girls--reject what is feminine.  That really isn't great either.

After a thorough examination of horrendous role models for girls, the pink toy craze, the disney princess phenomenon and the dearth of female superheroes, Ms Orenstein concludes it is basically best to turn off the TV and go outside and take a walk with your daughters.

I think Miss T and I will take our light sabers.

Baby We Were Meant for Each Other by Scott Simon

Many thanks to the friends and family who heard the myriad of interviews that Scott Simon did for NPR and alerted me to his new book.  Memoir reader and adoptive parent that I am, I had the book ordered before it was even available for purchase.  I have read so many stories about adoption from China that I was eager to note how he could put a different spin on the story than had already been done.

Jiangxi Province

Simon simply told his own story as a backdrop to tell other adoption stories and make a case for the importance and naturalness of adoption.  He gives a short history of adoption and then interviews and tells stories of friends who were either adopted themselves or adopted children as adults.  Although all the stories were compelling, none were as weepy and lovely as his own.  Perhaps I am a bit biased since we share a very similar story.  His daughters both came from the same province as our lovely girl and we both spent a rainy morning traipsing to the Chinese Bureau for Adoption Affairs in Nanchang, China.

The most interesting part of the book is the  discussion of the ultimate contradiction in my life:  how do I celebrate the culture of my lovely Chinese daugher, but also recognize that it is her culture, because of thier policies and beliefs, that left her on the doorstep of the Yiyang Social Welfare Institute one morning in May?  Simon discusses this part with such passion that I was left breathless.  One day, when she is old enough to understand, I will read her from this book.  By then, we can only hope, the the world's attitudes towards girls will have changed and the orphanges in China are only a footnote in history books. If you are interested in the issue of gendercide, Scott Simon does not reveal anything new, but he states his truth quite eloquently. 

So dear readers, the book was wonderful.  I have written to Mr. Simon and asked him questions about how I can know what is true or not in the vast army of things I hear and am told about China and my daughter.  Since he is a journalist, I hope he has a good sense of the trustworthiness of sources.  I'll let you know if I hear from him.

If you are interested in this topic, the book is a worthwhile Sunday afternoon read.

The Year of Harry Potter

My dear sweet son started the 6th grade yesterday. Deep breath. I can hardly beleive I have an 11 year old son. (Of course my 70 year old mother can hardly beleive she has a 44 year old daughter either.)

My son goes to a special school for kids who struggle with language processing disorders. Grayson has a hard time with something the school psychologists and testing gurus call "fluency". This means that he has a hard time remembering order or remembering what came before and what comes next. Reading is very difficult for him as he often does not remember what happened on the page before the one he is reading now.

He loves story and he loves to be read to. I often re-cap and retell chapters so he can remember them. We still enjoy quiet time in the evening reading together before bed. I love it.

He decided a few weeks ago that he wanted to read all three of the Harry Potter books that he has not read (I have read the first four to him) himself--starting with the biggest and the baddest: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (number 5 in the series) He wants to finish them by the time the last movie comes out in the theaters in November of 2010. Many of you probably have very smart children and reading the Harry Potter series was easy for them, but for my kid, this is a big deal. It will probably take him most of the school year to get through number 5.

Stay tuned for our updates. Perhaps I will get him to blog about the experience. It should be a great party when we finish them.