Do This Deal

Even if you normally eschew grocery savings for whatever reason, I encourage you to hit Meijer at least once this week! They are running two particularly fantastic deals.

First, Maxwell House coffee is only $1.79. That's nothing to write home about, but if you buy three, you get a free five pound bag of sugar (Pioneer brand, normally $2.49). Even better, if you buy four coffees, you get a coupon for $4 off your next grocery purchase!

Here is what you want to do: purchase four Maxwell House coffees (flavored coffee is included in this deal!) and one five pound bag of Pioneer sugar. You'll pay $7.16 out of pocket and get a $4 coupon back. You can roll that over and over again, so the next time, you only pay $3.16 for the four coffees and bag of sugar, and get another $4 coupon back. And so on for as long as you feel like going back to Meijer. If you are a coffee drinker or sugar eater, this is a good deal. It would be an even better deal if you had some Maxwell House coupons, but I couldn't find any. Let me know if you run across a source.

If you do not drink coffee or eat sugar, you are a gifted ascetic basking in naturalness.

But I assume that even ascetics eat apples, and Meijer is also running a great apple deal this week. Three pound bags of premium Michigan apples are included in the buy 10 for $10 get the 11th free deal. This is unheard of. It makes the apples 30 cents per pound! Stock up; apples keep.

Other notable inclusions in the 10/10/11 deal are 10 oz packages of fresh spinach, 6 oz containers of blackberries, two pound bags of powdered sugar, and boxes of Green Giant frozen vegetables. Note that you have to buy a combination of 11 of the items to get the 11th free and make each item 90 cents.

I originally found out about the coffee deal via Money Saving Mom. Great website, if you don't already check it!

U-G-L-Y- Squash Without An Alibi

This is not a squash for use in elegant harvest decorating schemes. It is the kind of squash you hide in the bottom of a pile at the back of your pantry. It looks like a diseased rodent carcass swelled up to gargantuan proportions. I know I'm hungry, aren't you?

And yet, I purchased two of these bad boys. My aunt told me about a roadside place in Virginia that was selling off the last of its pumpkins and squash for a dollar each to make room for Christmas stuff so while we were out there for Thanksgiving I snagged six of the leftovers. After looking around on various websites I decided that the above is a Hubbard Squash, because of it's two tapered ends and bluish gray color (Hubbards can be several different colors). The information I found indicated that Hubbard Squash is often more pumpkin-y than actual pumpkin, and that most canned pumpkin is actually Hubbard. Who knew? Apparently Hubbard Squash is as sweet and dense as pie pumpkin.

I roasted one of the Hubbards and got a lovely bright orange puree that did indeed lend itself nicely to baking and cooking. We had a delicious dinner of Curried Hubbard Soup and Hubbard Streusel Muffins. With the second squash I might make Hubbard Butter. Heh.

I suppose the take-away is don't judge a squash by its cover or something like that. Let this be a lesson to you.

The Week in Books 2009, No. 48

Cormac McCarthy's book The Road is a riveting and intense novel about what might happen if sudden catastrophe hit our society. I thought the premise was well executed, in that McCarthy imagines a very real threat (if you've never considered how quickly our society could fall apart, think about how much we rely on gasoline transported goods, electricity, city water, and so on. It would not take much to disrupt our grid. Sorry if that freaks you out.) The level of tension McCarthy maintains throughout the story is admirable, especially since he uses language that effectively portrays the spare bleakness of an unplugged world.

Without being heavy-handed, McCarthy gives different characters a variety of viewpoints and philosophies for dealing with the staggering deprivation and tragedy of the situation. Faith, fatalism, pure pragmatism, and the like are explored as the main character, who is only named as The Man or Papa, and his son press on to try to reach a place of safety. The Man says at the beginning of the book that his son is his proof that God exists, and he perseveres because of the hope his son gives him and to protect his son's meager chance for a future. I wish I could go more into the relationships in The Man's family without giving away too much information.

It was fascinating to consider how people would respond to a cataclysmic disaster in our era. In the face of so much deprivation, how would you respond? What lengths would you go to survive? In one scene the man realizes the disaster has happened and he fills up the bathtub with water. It was poignant to think of his pitiful attempt to prepare considering the reader knows he and his family have been surviving for years afterward and that bathtub of water can't have lasted them very long.

I'm supposed to suggest a book for book club in February and I'm tempted to make this the one, because I think there is so much to talk about, but I fear the group might find it a little too heavy. As I said, this is a very intense book, but I would highly recommend it.

As a final note, I saw that they have made a movie of The Road (starring Viggo Mortensen) and I'm skeptical - so much of the story happens internally and on the level of ideas and motivation, not in what you would actually see on screen, so I fear much would be lost in a movie adaptation. That said, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe it's awesome. If anyone sees it, let me know what you think.

The Iconic Christmas Gorilla

On Black Friday my mom and I took the girls to the mall. Hannah has not spent much time in malls so she was beside herself enjoying the crowds and decorations. As we shopped and walked around she kept exclaiming, "This is such a wonderful day! We are having such a wonderful time!"

I wish I had a camera to record her priceless look of amazement when she realized the sparkly white stuff was just a decoration. "MAMA! They have snow here and it's NOT REAL!"

While we waited for my mom to check out in one store I took Hannah and Sarah out to look at the part of the mall decorated like a zoo at Christmas. I pointed out a gorilla climbing up a giraffe's neck.

"Look," I said, "Who ever heard of a gorilla climbing up a giraffe's neck? Isn't that so silly?"

Gravely Hannah replied, "No Mama, it's not silly, it's CHRISTMAS."

Of course, I had somehow forgotten that iconic Christmas image of the gorilla scaling the giraffe. What was I thinking?

Sarah's First Thanksgiving

We spent Sarah's first Thanksgiving with my parents in Virginia. Josh and I were present, although we were not memorialized in the photos. Someone please remind me to be in some pictures at Christmas! My aunt Catherine and uncle Stan were there too. Sarah wore a sweet jumper my mom smocked for Hannah's first Thanksgiving. Hard to believe we have not had Thanksgiving in VA since three years ago!

Sarah thought she would help set the table. Gigi doesn't keep the good china down there, Sarah!

Jack liked drinking his milk out of Uncle Thomas's silver cup. He also got to sleep in Uncle Thomas's bed since my brother was in Charleston for Thanksgiving. He hopes Uncle Thomas doesn't mind sharing.

I meant to take a picture when we were all at the table, but I forgot. Also half the food and stuff wasn't set out yet either but you can at least appreciate the flowers.

Sarah enjoyed her turkey.

And apparently she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

Jack and Gigi

Hannah and Jack reading together

Help! I'm trapped under Gigi's desk!

Hannah put a ring on Grandad's nose so Grandad gave her the bunny ears

Advent

Our family's advent tradition is to center family devotions on the story of God's plan from creation to the birth of Christ using a Jesse Tree. Several years ago I put our Jesse Tree program (ornaments, Scripture, parallels in children's Bibles) on a separate blog. Feel free to check out Our Jesse Tree blog if you are interested.

As an unrelated aside, Blogger informed me that this is my one thousandth post. 1000. That's a lot of blogging.

The Week in Books 2009, No. 47

As a mother of three young children I often find it difficult to strike a balance between being plugged in with other people and getting too busy. The struggle exists because there is no one right answer on how many activities and outings your family needs or can sustain - different people have different needs and tolerance levels for busyness. I find that with a family of little kids, there is so much busyness in our everyday life that adding too much more on top of it quickly becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back, and we pay for too much activity with challenging behavior, tears and tantrums (mostly the kids have the tantrums, but I am not immune!). Because I think a lot about the balance between hurrying up and slowing down, I appreciated Ann Kroeker's thoughtful new book Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families I wouldn't say that our family is frenzied, but I can see how you could easily become frenzied and spend most of your day in your car shuttling people hither and yon but never really enjoying one another. In her book, Kroeker offers thought-provoking suggestions for ways to evaluate your family's level of busyness and how that is working (or not working) for your family. Even if you're currently satisfied with your activities I think you would get something out of the exercise of thinking through your commitments and being deliberate about putting your family ahead of other people's expectations.

A Thanksgiving Poem

In this clip, Hannah and Jack recite their Thanksgiving poem (with one interruption when Jack heard a truck drive by our house).

May all who share these gifts today
Be blessed by Thee, we humbly pray.
What God gives and what we take
'Tis a gift for Christ, His sake;
Be the meal of beans or peas,
God be thanked for those and these;
Have we flesh or have we fish,
All are fragments from His dish.

-Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate

Sunday night after a dinner party we were treated to an impromptu chocolate tasting and it was fascinating! The husband of the couple who were hosting works for Endangered Species Chocolate, a great company that makes natural, fair trade, and organic chocolate. The company is committed to ethical trade and gives 10% of its profits back to the communities where it buys materials - sponsoring medical missions and education, supporting sustainable farming and protecting wildlife.

Before the tasting, I had no idea the taste differences between chocolate from different areas like from the Ivory Coast versus Peru, or the difference between chocolate sweetened with beet sugar versus cane sugar, or organic chocolate versus non-organic. My favorite by far was the All Natural Supreme Dark chocolate, which is the one with the monkey on it, if you are looking for it at the store. It's amazing. Seriously, you must try it. You will thank me, I promise.

You can find Endangered Species chocolate at Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Walgreens and any number of other stores - just type in your zip code on their website and you'll get a list of nearby stores.

Other than the delectable chocolate I sampled at the dinner, I was not paid in any way for this review. I just love chocolate and was impressed with the company's mission and standards. I hope you'll check them out!

Sense of Wonder

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder...he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in."

-Rachel Carson

This is one of the reasons I treasure the opportunity to be home with my kids and just hang out with them. Kids really do have a fantastic appreciation for life and how things work, and I find that it helps my perspective so much just to take time to listen to their funny observations and attempts to classify the world around them. I love holidays so much more now that I'm a parent - just seeing the kids in awe of Christmas or Easter or the fireworks on the 4th of July is so awesome. As the quote above says, it really is like I am rediscovering the world when I take time to see it with them, and that is truly a gift to me as much as to them.

My Top Three Thanksgiving Books for Kids

We have had a number of great Thanksgiving and autumn themed books out from the library this month, and you can read my more detailed list of reviews from last year if you're interested, but I thought I would highlight my top three picks from this fall. I realize it's a bit late to procure Thanksgiving books for this year, but perhaps you could keep an eye out and find them in time for next November!

I love books that are kind of quirky and full of clever rhymes, but that aren't weird or trying too hard. A Plump and Perky Turkey qualifies for that distinction. The book tells the story of the people of Squawk Valley, who were "downhearted and depressed" because they did not have a turkey for Thanksgiving and feared they would be left with only "bowls of Shredded Wheat" for their dinner. In order to avoid this horror, the people put up ads for a craft fair to celebrate turkeys and solicit a turkey to be the model for turkeys made of various mediums including, naturally, oatmeal and soap. The turkey outsmarts them all and takes off for the beach and the townspeople are left to learn their lesson and be thankful for their cereal dinner.

The Very First Thanksgiving Day is a great back and forth rhyming book about the first Thanksgiving, and treats the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians with respect and accuracy while staying totally age appropriate and not letting the details of hardship bog down the theme of thankfulness. The best part of this book are the illustrations, which are wonderful and detailed.






In November has some of the most beautiful illustrations I've seen in a book for children. I love the vibrant autumn colors and the depictions of people and animals full of life and emotion. The text is also great, and is slow paced and thoughtful, as is entirely appropriate for the season.






Those are my top three this year, in no particular order. What are your favorite Thanksgiving books for kids?

The Week in Books 2009, No. 46

This week I had the singular experience of reading a book written by a friend of mine. Dina Nayeri (a good friend from Princeton and a bridesmaid in my wedding) and her brother Daniel cowrote Another Faust, which is a modern Young Adult twist on the original legend of Faust. The idea of a Faustian bargain, as you will doubtless recall, involves selling your soul to the devil in exchange for what you want. Another Faust follows five children who make that deal to get things teens might want, like beauty, brains, athletic ability, etc and examines questions of evil, power, corruption, and the lengths to which people will go to get what they most desire.

Those are heavy subjects, but not out of reach for mature and thoughtful teens. However, here I must enter the caveat that I don't care for the Young Adult genre. I think teens who are thoughtful enough to ponder deep issues and themes should be mature enough to read a book that doesn't have YA elements (by which I mean the Sweet Valley High type formula of cheesy slang, superficial secondary characters, and an "easy to read" feel). I felt like the YA thing was really at war with the meat of Another Faust, and the book would have been better without trying to be YA. I haven't discussed this with Dina, and don't mean any disrespect to her by it, it's just my opinion about YA clashing with my admiration for the more literary aspects of the novel.

Oddly the book is in the subgenre of "horror." Personally I would have put it in the subgenre of "fantasy" because I think of horror as involving things like lots of blood and guts and gore and knife-wielding zombies and sadistic clowns and whatnot, whereas Another Faust is full of things I think of as being more fantasy elements requiring a strong sense of imagination and ability to suspend disbelief. Then again, I'm not in publishing, what do I know.

I found the book a little hard to get in to, but I kept reading because I kept seeing little bits of things and thinking "Aha! Dina put that part in!" I'm not sure how you'd fare if you don't know Dina, but if you like YA or don't mind it, you should keep reading because the second half of the book really picks up speed and more literary elements are woven in, and those elements are where I think the real strength of the book lies. I thought some of the twists at the end were quite original, and I thought the authors did a nice job of keeping the story from being predictable, given that it was based on an existing concept.

Overall I would recommend this book to you if you enjoy YA. I have not read popular YA like Twilight so I can't say for sure, but I would venture to guess that Another Faust has far better writing. If you are not a fan of YA but enjoy reading books based on older concepts but updated to modern times, you might also enjoy the book. I'm not sure what age range the book was targeting, since it seems like lots of adults are into YA (which I totally don't understand, but ok) and the themes are quite a bit heavier than most young teens could absorb. They might still like the book, but I think some of it would go over their heads. I think the Nayeris intent to engage young people enough to spark an interest in literature is admirable, and I hope it works!

Most of all my conclusion is that Dina should throw off the YA shackles and write literary fiction. That is just my selfish opinion. :)

I finally made it to Heather's Knit Night/Book Club this month and enjoyed the discussion on Henry James' Washington Square. I read the book a long time ago (can't remember when - college? high school?) and I remember liking the ending better the first time, perhaps because I was more idealistic and less acquainted with real life. (Insert smile here) In any case I think Washington Square is a much better book than either The Turn of the Screw or Daisy Miller, neither of which grabbed me particularly. The writing in this book is better, but I think what I find off-putting about Henry James is the fact that he seems distant from his subjects and characters, as if he is observing them as social commentary rather than feeling with them and really understanding their foibles. That said, I did like the book and think it's literature worth reading.

A Derivative Project

I have long been eyeing this picture in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. It's very cute, no? It looks 3D. I didn't have any 3D objects d'art to devote to this project, so I made do with canvases and paint I already had, and hot glued some polka dot ribbon to the edges and for hangers.

I'm not sure what was up with the lighting of these pictures. They don't look this lurid in real life. The walls in the girls' room are a nice warm buttery yellow (I believe it's called Baby Bee Yellow) and the colors of the paintings are an exact match to the fabric of the curtain and closet valances you can see in this previous post and the crib bedding and rocking chair upholstery you can see here).
Hannah is very pleased with the pictures. She's been firmly instructed not to touch them or pull them down. Even Jack lectured her when he saw her tempted, "No NO Hannah! Don't touch! Only for ah-dotes!"

Incidentally

This picture makes me laugh.

Jack was having a hard time because the girls kept messing with him and he just wanted to look at books by himself. I told him he could take his book on the wicker chair and told Hannah she was not allowed to touch Jack or anything on the chair. I left the room to change Sarah and when I came back I saw that Jack had ensconced himself with plenty of reinforcements!

The Week in Books 2009, No. 45

A friend of mine who is an actual photographer recommended I read Understanding Exposure to learn how to better use my camera. I thought the book was excellent and informative, but I have to admit that most of it went right over my head. I finished the book and took notes, but then decided to read Nikon D60 for Dummies (I know, I know) first, then once I'm minimally competent I will come back to Understanding Exposure. If you're pretty good at photography and have a basic grasp of shooting in manual modes, this book would probably help you tremendously and I recommend it for advanced beginners and up!


I was talking on the phone with my friend Kim F. and she told me some yummy sounding things she was cooking from $3 Slow-Cooked Meals. I promptly forgot the names of the recipes she mentioned, but the one I tried from the book was all right. I didn't slow cook it though, because to me the real work of cooking is the chopping (I'm the world's slowest chopper) and sauteeing and browning the meat etc so tossing it all in the crock pot to cook is no easier for me than tossing it all in a pot on the stove. If you are gone all day and don't want to risk having your oven on while you're out, slow cooking probably makes more sense. The nice thing about this cookbook is that the author gives instructions for slow cooking OR conventionally cooking each recipe.

Book Update: A while ago I reviewed Family Feasts for $75 a Week and since then I have tried many of the recipes it contains. All of them were GREAT. The recipes are surprisingly good, nutritious, and don't taste too bland/salty/creamy like a lot of "budget" recipes do. I like that she uses mostly whole food ingredients rather than a lot of boxed or canned stuff. If you haven't checked this book out yet, I doubly recommend it now!

Odds and Ends

I think the way the body works is fascinating. Remember EXACTLY a year ago when my arm felt like it kept falling asleep and WebMD helpfully asked if I had been bitten by a wild animal and/or had sustained a debilitating spinal injury? I wrote it off as a pregnancy symptom, but it never went away and actually got worse, to the point where it was waking me up at night. My husband is long-suffering, but there is only so much complaining a man can take before he feels the need to fix the problem. So Josh (bless his heart) said I needed to go to the doctor.

I went to the doctor and had some tests done wherein I was electrocuted repeatedly and stabbed with long needles the size of shishkebab skewers and finally today I saw an orthopedic doctor who diagnosed me with cubital tunnel syndrome. Basically this means a nerve is getting pinched in my elbow and causing pain in my arm and fingers.

While I was getting fitted for the snazzy and alluring splint I get to wear at night now to rest the nerve, I met an older lady who was at the physical therapy place because she nearly got her fingers ripped off by a treadmill. I almost passed out just hearing about it, but get this, she's still playing piano for her church and teaching piano lessons, only using two fingers of her left hand (and presumably all the fingers of her right hand)! She made me feel like weak sauce for complaining about finger pain!

In other news Jack has been sick off and on for about a week. He will throw up, then get a scary rash of welts all over his body, then seem better, then get sick again. Many apologies to the families at Biblestudy last night, we really thought he was better! I took him to the pediatrician about the rash and it turns out his immune system is making too many antibodies to fight off the vomiting viruses, so the leftover antibodies are attacking Jack's skin. They said not to worry, but I have to admit I'm a little concerned because apparently this happened to my little brother too, and he has Crohn's Disease. So we're praying for Jack, poor buddy, and keeping things bleached and so far the girls haven't gotten whatever he keeps getting.

One more end to report: our electric bill went down about $40 a month after we started keeping the computer equipment and TV/sound equipment turned off for most of the night and day. That's not too shabby.

The Week in Books 2009, No. 44

The Fire in Fiction is a helpful book on writing by a literary agent, so it's full of what-not-to-do tips from someone who has seen a lot of bad writing. I made a lot of notes. I found his section on building tension particularly good.

I did find it rather odd that there were so very many typos in this book. Then again, the author is an agent, not an editor, so I'll let it slide.

If you're interested in writing, you might like this book. You might also be interested in this article from the Wall Street Journal wherein authors describe their writing processes.

I don't consider myself a "Messie" per se, but I do verge on it, and I think a lot of my usual coping mechanisms for mess and organization have broken down over the past year as our family size and obligations have changed. I learned some good things from The Messies Manual and I'd recommend it to you if you feel like you need to get some aspects of your homemaking under control so you don't have to spend all day on it.





Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition contains a lot of good information on how diet and nutrition play a role in women's health, and I'd recommend it to you for that reason. There are also sections on how to boost fertility through better nutrition, if you're in a position of needing that sort of help. The book is written by a Catholic author, so that perspective does come through at times, but I think the book would be helpful to a wider audience.

Applesauce for the Busy and Openminded

So far this year I've made applesauce out of nearly four bushels worth of apples. A bushel is 42 pounds, if you're wondering. That's A LOT of apples, but I didn't buy them at once. I got them on sale at various times this fall, and we ate a lot of them out of hand but the rest were sauced the easy way.

If you are busy and openminded about your applesauce, this method may be for you. If you are staunch in your belief that applesauce should not contain peel and should be canned in glass jars, this method is not for you. We love you anyway and will leave you to your labors.

Easy Applesauce
1) Get apples. Wash them.
2) Cut apples in quarters, cut the cores out, cut again (basically just slice the apples like you were going to eat apple slices. Not too thin, not too fat, maybe 8 slices per apple). Don't peel them.
3) Throw the cores away. Throw the slices in a big stock pot.
4) Put a little bit of water in the pot. How much? A little. Like half a cup or something. Just turn on the faucet and count to three or so.
5) Toss a cinnamon stick in there with the apples and water, if you have one. If you don't have a cinnamon stick, that's ok, just sprinkle some powdered cinnamon on top. If you don't have some powdered cinnamon, just skip this part.
6) Bring to a boil and then simmer on low until the apples look sauced up. You can stir if you want, or don't if you don't want. When it looks like applesauce and not chunks of apple, it's done.
7) Add sugar to taste, or don't add sugar if you're not into sugar. If you're not into sugar, wow, you are strong like bull. Just don't add the sugar before you cook the applesauce or it will burn to the bottom of the pan.

Now you have tasty homemade applesauce. Yes, it has peel in it. I like that part, actually. After you eat some of the applesauce for dessert after dinner and have some more for breakfast the next day, you can put the leftovers in a plastic freezer bag and freeze it for later. That way you don't have to can it if you lack pantry space (like I do) or don't have time for all that (like I don't) or are afraid of The Bot (that's short for botulism, and yeah, I fear it).

FYI - apples are 33 cents a pound at Kroger this week (a three pound bag for 99 cents is how you'll find them).

Make a joyful noise

One of our Thanksgiving books is Sarah Morton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Girl, which is a story about a real Pilgrim girl. The illustrations are pictures from the living history museum at Plymouth. In the book, Sarah learns Psalm 100, so that was our song for this week. That is what the kids are singing in the video above (they love to sing with hymnals and Psalm books even though they can't read them).

Psalm 100

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands
Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing.
Know ye that the Lord, He is God.
It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.
We are His people, the sheep of His pasture.
Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise!
Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercies everlasting, His truth endureth to all generations!

The Week in Books 2009, No. 43

Say Yes To No is a thought provoking book about how to make time for things that are truly important in your life, rather than filling up all of your time and spending all of your energy on things that are fine but not great. The author advocates saying "no" to free up space so you can say "yes" to better things.

The author is a pastor who also happens to be widely read, and he does a masterful job of using all sorts of historical and philosophical references to stimulate your thinking and flesh out his arguments, while at the same time relying on the foundation of faith. He's also a good writer, which helped. I found myself challenged to think about some areas of my life where I might need to alter my focus, and areas where I might be sacrificing the best in favor of the good.

I'd recommend this book if you like to think about goals and priorities, or if you ever feel overwhelmed or like you're not sure what you're accomplishing.

Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives disappointed me somewhat because I felt like the author, while clearly knowledgeable and passionate about his topic, needed to tighten up the text. I felt like he said the same thing over and over again, and then tried to cover really complex subtopics with too little information.

One good point I took away from this book is that we have a tendency to let other people tell us what we can handle and guilt us into doing too much. That is definitely true of me - I feel so horrible saying no to things especially when I see other mothers doing tons more than I do and seeming to pull it off with great aplomb. I think I'm getting better and seeing that we all have the same amount of time, but it's ok for us to have different goals and priorities.

Overall I would say you'd be better off reading "Say Yes to No" than "Margin."

20 cans of pumpkin puree for $3.50?

Last weekend I decided to roast a pumpkin. I know some people only cook with the tiny expensive "pie pumpkin" variety, but I figured large cheap pumpkins could be food too. When I saw them for $3.50 each at the grocery store I figured it was worth a try. I selected the largest pumpkin I could find and toted it home. I read that some people soften a pumpkin in the microwave before they roast it, but this pumpkin was twice the size of my microwave (I told you it was large) so that was out. I also heard about people roasting the pumpkin all in one piece, but when I tried to heave the pumpkin into my preheated oven it barely fit and I had so much trouble wedging it in there I wondered how I would ever get it out.

Instead I wound up cutting the pumpkin in half. I took out the seeds but not the stringy part and turned the pumpkin halves upside down on my two largest pans with some water in them and roasted them for one hour each. After I let them cool, I was surprised at how easy it was to just peel the peel off in sheets with my hands. I didn't have to scoop the pumpkin out or use a knife or anything. It was like buttah.

When I cut the pumpkin open I was disappointed by how big the hole was inside. I thought maybe I'd get about 10 cups of puree out of it. Wrong.

I got 40 cups of pumpkin puree out of that bad boy! Woot! I froze the pumpkin in two cup amounts figuring that two cups is roughly equivalent to a can of pumpkin. My $3.50 investment thus yielded me about 20 cans of pumpkin, plus the seeds! I think a can of pumpkin may actually be a bit less than two cups, so maybe it was more like 25 cans worth, but who's counting? It was a great deal and much easier than I expected it would be.

In fact, I plan to do it again!

Edible Decor

Last week I found squash (the edible kind, not those silly decorative ones) on sale for 59 cents a pound. That seemed like a good deal to me, so I got a bunch of different types. I don't really know what they are, but I tried to pick ones that would provide visual interest until we get around to eating them. I've already cooked a few, but here is what's left.

Fret not, we aren't going to eat the pinecones unless things get REALLY desperate.

The only problem is that now I am feeling so attached to the seasonal decor that I fear I might have trouble actually cooking one of these squash. Taking one out would mess up the symmetry and break up the power of three. Perhaps I should buy more squash next time.

Lock Up Your Daughters

The other day Jack was talking on his pretend cell phone and I asked him who was on the phone. I expected him to say he was talking to his grandparents, but instead he said, "I just callin' some gurls."

Watch out, world.

Books About Culture and History for Preschoolers

So many great books for children take place in other countries or time periods, and I think it's great to use living books as a way to talk about how other people lived or live. Even if your lifestyle doesn't include jetting around the globe with your toddlers (and if it does, more power to you!) you can still expose them to other cultures by using books as a starting point. A few of our favorites are below.

The Mitten is a folk tale about the principle of "the straw that breaks the camel's back" but Jan Brett set her version in the Ukraine. I love the pictures in this book, with the great views of how a Ukrainian cottage might have looked, style of dress, carving and tole painting, and the like. This book also comes in a board book if you have very young toddlers.



The Cow Who Fell In The Canal might not be in print in the US. Amazon is only carrying third party copies (see link above) but this book is one of our favorites and well worth having if you can find a copy. My dad brought one back from a business trip he took to the Netherlands. The book tells the story of a cow who dreams of going to town, and how one day she fell in the canal and went floating down into the marketplace. The pictures are bright and fun and show great detail about the canal, windmills, and Dutch architecture.


Honey... Honey... Lion! is another Jan Brett book, this time about Botswana. The story follows a badger who works with a honeyguide bird to find honey, but gets greedy one day. Along the way the book is filled with great pictures of African wildlife and terrain.




The Story of Ferdinand is a fun book about a bull from Spain who doesn't want to be in a bull fight. As Ferdinand is taken to Madrid to be a reluctant performer, the pictures show great detail about bull fights (matadors, picadores etc) and people in traditional dress. The story is great and I love the black and white drawings. The picture at left is in color, but our book is in black and white, so I hope they didn't color it in in the more recent printings, but if they did I'm sure it's still a good book!



Always Room For One More is a Scottish folk song full of all kinds of fun words and phrases like "Och come awa in" and suchlike. If nothing else this book will teach you and your child a lot of interesting Scottish vocabulary! The book also has a good message about showing hospitality and welcome to other people, and the pictures are really fabulous pencil line drawings. If you like to talk about art and drawing with your kids you'll enjoy talking about how the illustrator used the little lines and hatch marks to make the pictures.

The Story about Ping is one of the classic childrens stories of all time and tells a fascinating story about life on the Yangtzee River in China. The pictures are detailed and the story is wonderful. We love Ping. You will too.







Tikki Tikki Tembo is another story about China. This folktale purports to explain why the Chinese do not name their children very long names by telling the story of a hapless little boy whose long name, Tikki Tikki Tembo No-Sa Rembo Hari Bari Ruchi-Pip Peri Pembo nearly got him drowned. It's a funny story and has interesting illustrations that you will enjoy.





Daisy Comes Home is the story of a chicken who gets lost on the Yangtzee River, meets up with all kinds of trouble, and eventually finds her way home. Again, Jan Brett's illustrations are fantastic and detailed, the story is fun to read, and you'll learn about a Chinese market among other things.






Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain is a phenomenal book about Kenya that I remember from my own childhood. If you watched Reading Rainbow maybe you remember James Earl Jones reading this book out loud. Josh still imitates James Earl Jones when he reads it! The story has great rhythym and the pictures show African wildlife with great detail.



Wee Gillis is one of my most favorite childrens books ever. It is the story of a little boy whose mother was from the lowlands and whose father was from the highlands and how his relations fought over where he would live until he decided to live half way and become a fabulously talented bagpipe player. I love the illustrations of the Scottish relations - they are very detailed and animated - and I think the story is funny and unique.




The Paddington Bear books are of course about England, and Paddington is such a loveable bear that you will surely enjoy his stories even if you don't learn a great deal about Great Britain. In any case the stories mention tea and marmelade and I'm sure you can figure out how to stretch that into a culture lesson if you feel a deep seated need to do so.


Madeline is another classic book, and although it doesn't hit you over the head with facts about France, the illustrations do depict quiet a few landmarks that you can point out. I do think it's valuable to point those things out to kids, to help them understand that the world is a big and interesting place to learn about. These little things do sink in and become part of the child's understanding, I think. For example last spring Hannah was over at my in-law's house and my father-in-law was headed out the door. Hannah followed him and asked where he was going. He told her and asked where she was going, "I'm going to Paris!" she said. If you like Madeline, you might also like the rest of the Madeline Books.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World tells about quite a few different countries and the foods they are well known for. You can read more about the book and how we used it as a springboard for other activities in my post about making an apple pie.







The Umbrella is a story about the Costa Rican rainforest and the fascinating animals that live there. This book was illustrated by Jan Brett so you know the pictures are colorful and detailed and worth looking at even if you don't read the story. But of course you WILL read the story, because it's interesting. Once after a long string of too little sleep I attempted to read this book and instead of pronouncing "hola" like the Spanish word meaning hello, I said "holla" like the hip hop shout out. That anecdote is irrelevant to this review, but I thought I would share it anyway, in case you were running low on things to laugh at me about.

Crictor is not really going to teach you a lot about France, but it's such an amusing story about an old French lady and her brilliant and brave pet boa constrictor that I wanted to include it so you might be encouraged to read it. The illustrations are great and the story is really fun. You can read it with an exaggerated French accent if that helps you feel like it's more educational. It will entertain your kids if nothing else.




The Tiger Who Came to Tea was written, I think, by an author from New Zealand, so by some stretch perhaps you can call it a book about another culture. Certainly you can call it a unique and fun story and your kids will probably love it. It's by the same lady who wrote the Mog books, which are also excellent. Also did I mention that it's about a tiger, and as you well know tigers are excellent animals and make the very best team mascots. No offense to people whose team mascots are things like train engines.



The Story of Little Babaji is a cute book about a little Indian boy who outwits a group of tigers. What? Outwit tigers? Never! But perhaps tigers from India are not as bright as tigers from New Jersey. (Ba dum CHA!) In any case, this is one of Jack's favorite books and he likes to sit on the big stuffed animal tiger we have and say, "Yook! I Babaji!"





Under the Cherry Blossom Tree is a folk tale from Japan about a mean landlord who grows a tree out of his head, removes the tree out of spite, raises carp in the hole in his head, and finally jumps in to the pond never to be seen from again. It's a little strange, but makes an interesting story. My mom gets thrown off by the part where the landlord is sitting under a flowering cherry tree and eating cherries, because she says it's not realistic for trees to be flowering AND producing fruit at the same time. I overlook that, because you don't want to get started listing what's unrealistic in a book about a guy who grows a tree out of his head and then raises fish in the hole left after he uproots the tree. I'm just saying.

I promised there would also be history, but this post is getting really long, so I will leave you with Ox-Cart Man , one of our favorite books about early American life. The pictures are great, the story is great, and you'll learn a lot about the way life was in New England two hundred years ago.

Just In Time vs. Just In Case

I don't normally read O Magazine, but while I was stuck waiting for a doctor recently my only options for reading material were O Magazine or the emergency exit procedures posted on the door, so I opted for the magazine. The issue contained a very interesting article about how your outlook can affect your life.

The idea comes from different models of car making - one model, called Just In Time, operates without a lot of stockpiling, on the theory that you can be more efficient if you just buy components as you need them. The other model, called Just In Case, stockpiles all the parts that might be needed in the future, regardless of if they are needed at the moment.

If you're interested in how this idea can be applied to life, you can read the article, but the part that stuck out to me was that the author mentioned people who start applying Just In Time thinking in their business lives often lost weight. It occurred to me that maybe I've been inadvertently doing that. My approach to pregnancy and nursing has been that I'll just eat when I'm hungry. Interestingly, I find I don't overeat much now, because I'm not worried about being hungry later. If I'm hungry, I'll just eat then. I don't think of food or treats as scarce anymore so I don't stockpile them on my hips.

Another analogy is Cadbury Creme Eggs. In the past, you could only find this candy at Easter. It's one of my favorites, so when I would see Cadbury Eggs at Easter on sale three for a dollar, I'd get six because I didn't know when I'd see them again. Nowadays you can find Cadbury Eggs any time under different guises - Cadbury Christmas Eggs, Cadbury Halloween Eggs, Cadbury Secretary's Day Eggs (just kidding!) so I no longer buy them very often. If I want one, I buy one, but if I don't want one, I can pass them by knowing they will be around whenever.

Sometimes it's smart to stockpile - if apples are on sale, it's wise to buy them and can or freeze applesauce or whatnot, and if you see shorts that will fit your kid next summer on sale for a dollar, it's smart to buy them now instead of waiting until spring when you'll spend $14.99 for the same shorts. That said, there's a line somewhere between being prudent and hoarding. It's probably a line that varies from family to family, but it's worth considering carefully.

The Week in Books 2009, No. 42

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is definitely going to be in my Top Ten books for this year. My childhood friend and camp counselor the incomparable Ainsley recommended this book, and her good taste is duly noted. The book chronicles the story of a group of white women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Although the topic is difficult and it would have been easy to wield too hard or too soft of a hammer, Kathryn Stockett did a masterful job of telling the story of the maids in their own voices. I have rarely read a book that handled dialect in a more realistic and respectful manner. I adore books that make me laugh AND cry, and this is one of them.

Stockett somehow managed to capture the pain of inequality and how it coexisted with love - how these black women could love these white families and pour themselves out for them, only to be accused of stealing the silver and told they are too dirty to use the guest bathroom in the house, or how some of the white women bucked society and risked their safety to help the black women or put their maid's kids through college. This is a somewhat difficult book to read, I think because the subject matter is complicated and difficult.

Although my family is from the south and I've studied a lot of history, I always find it startling to read about historical situations from the perspective of a personal narrative. I was shocked while reading this book by the extent of racial prejudice and was struck by the immediacy of slavery in the 1960s. At one point one of the maids is asked if she always knew she would be a maid. She said yes because her mother was a maid and her grandmother was a house slave. That is history you reach out and touch - I thought about my own grandmothers and how I know them and realized that although three generations may have passed, that is not a lot of time for change.

I would highly recommend The Help - it is an excellent, well written book on an important topic.

Same Kind of Different As Me is a double memoir telling the story of a wealthy Texas art dealer and a black homeless man and how their lives were linked and changed by their friendship. I thought the book got off to a slow start, but the sections of the homeless man's story were really fascinating so I kept reading. The homeless man had been born and raised in a share cropping situation in Louisiana and his stories about that life startled me - I could hardly believe that more than 100 years after the end of slavery some people were still living under what was essentially the same system. As the memoir went on, and the lives of the two men were linked by the faith and vision of the art dealer's wife, I felt like the book gained momentum and became much more compelling. I cried at the end. I won't give away the ending, but suffice it to say there was a lot of undeserved suffering borne with inspiring patience and grace.

Books about science and nature for preschoolers

The great thing about books for children is that you can find a huge variety that are educational without being boring textbook style. This year I separated our kids' books into categories to make sure we read a good variety on different topics every day, and I thought I would share some of our favorites in case you're hunting good books on science and nature for your preschoolers too. I found many of these books from the Sonlight lists or in various other lists of recommended books for children - we rotate in several others, but these are the ones we keep coming back to over and over. As with any list, your tastes might differ from mine. These are books that work well for Hannah (who will be four in January) and Jack (nearly two and a half), but Sarah likes looking at them and listening too. If you have other favorites, feel free to share them in the comments section because I'm always looking for more great kids books!

What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew? does a fabulous job of explaining the relative sizes of things, from large animals down to atoms and electrons and quarks. I know, you're like, "Seriously? You're teaching your toddler about quarks, Catherine?" but actually this book is great for explaining how things fit together in a way that small kids can begin to understand. The book has good illustrations and a storytelling style that keeps it from being dry or pushy. It's just a great book that happens to be full of good information.

How Do You Lift a Lion? is an imaginative book about simple machines. The silly questions like how do you lift a lion or how do you get a basket of bananas to a baboon birthday party make this a fun book and engaging for preschoolers, but there is a lot of real science in the answers. The book covers levers, wheels, pulleys, and other simple machines, and gives great information about how they work in terms that are accessible and understandable even for young children. I've been surprised at how Hannah has been able to apply these topics after reading these books. For example, she was trying to get a book to stay on top of the toilet, but it slopes so the book kept sliding off. Hannah declared, "This book won't stay! There's not enough friction!"

How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World is a great book about the layers of the globe. The engaging story imagines what a child would have to do to dig a hole all the way through the earth to come out on the other side. I think it does a great job of teaching without just being a dry recitation of facts. Obviously it's a little fanciful as you wouldn't really be able to dig through the world, but it's a good vehicle for learning about all sorts of things from lava to fossils.




The Berenstain Bears Science Fair follows the Berenstain Bear family as they get ready for a science fair and learn about science in the process. There are sections about machines, energy, solid/liquid/gas states of matter, and so on. There is a lot of information in this book, so usually we read it in sections rather than all at once, but you can also read it quickly if you skip over the smaller details on the pictures. Hannah and Jack are especially enthused about their new found ability to classify things as solid, liquid, or gas, and they like to do things like watch water boil into steam, see how ice melts, and so forth. The book contains a lot of simple ideas for "experiments" like the ice/water/steam idea that work well with small children.

In the Tall, Tall Grass and In the Small, Small Pond, both by Denise Fleming, are really excellent books for getting children started in how to notice and describe wildlife around them. The books show small children observing animals and insects in a backyard or small pond and uses rhyming text to describe the creatures and their habits. The illustrations in the books are unique and colorful, and will keep the attention of even very small children.



Our Animal Friends At Maple Hill Farm is a very funny book about the habits and foibles of different types of farm animals. The book includes a lot of details that you might not think to tell a child about farm animals, but that are quite descriptive and helpful in stimulating a child to notice things about animals. I think the book also gives a lot of insight into why certain animals are supposed to have certain traits - for example, the section on geese is funny and will help a child understand the way the geese behave in other books like Petunia and Charlotte's Web (which are both also excellent books and among our favorites!).

The Bird Alphabet Book is, as you might imagine, an ABC book, but it's also a really good bird book. The book assigns one bird to each letter of the alphabet and gives useful information about each one. The best part of the book are the excellent illustrations.




About Birds: A Guide for Children is a gorgeously illustrated, easy to read guide to different birds. I like that the pictures have detail and are realistic, but are not just technical drawings. I think this book is a really good background for children, and a good tool to get them started paying attention to birds and being able to identify them.




One Tiny Turtle is one of several great books about sea turtles that we have read since the kids got on their big sea turtle kick this summer. You can read more about our adventures with real sea turtles here if you're interested. If you happen to have a similar interest, other good books on the subject that I recommend are Little Turtle and the Song of the Sea, Into the Sea, Sea Turtles, Sea Turtles (by Gail Gibbons) and Look Out for Turtles!.




Bugs is an Usborne reference book for children that my mom found for us at a teaching conference. She also got us Caterpillars and Butterflies, Night Animals and Tadpoles and Frogs. While these books are not story-based, they are fun to look at and good for pulling out pieces of information. The books have a lot of detail so kids will like to look at them by themselves, but the detail is appropriate for young kids so if you do read them the books you won't get bored and they will learn a lot.



I Love Bugs! is a simple rhyming book about bugs and what they do. The illustrations are nothing to write home about, but they are detailed enough that kids can learn from them. I don't know why but my kids love this book. They can recite it and often "read" it to each other. The book is cute overall and I do think the text is good, plus the labeled drawings of bugs are useful if you have a child who might like to know what different types of bugs are called. I also like that the book depicts a little boy who is observing and learning about nature.

An Egg Is Quiet and A Seed Is Sleepy, both by Dianna Hutts Aston and illustrated by Sylvia Long, are some of the most beautifully illustrated books for children available. They are informative and can be read at different levels depending on how much information your child is interested in or has patience for, but the pictures alone make these books well worth owning.





The Carrot Seed is a short book but a good one. The story follows a little boy who plants a seed and dutifully tends to it in spite of his family's assertions that it won't grow. In due time, the carrot grows into a gigantic specimen as big as the little boy. Although the book is simple, it does a fabulous job communicating the time it takes to wait for a seed to become a plant, which I think is a hard concept for very small children sometimes, at least it has been for my kids, who have been known to eat the plants out of the garden at the first sign of leaves instead of waiting for the green beans to materialize.


My Visit to the Dinosaurs is one of Jack's favorite books. The book is older (our copy belonged to Josh when he was little) so the dinosaurs are shown with some older conceptions, such as showing the tails on the ground rather than up in the air like paleontologists show them now. That said, the book is a great overview and tells about dinosaurs through the story of a child visiting a natural history museum.

If you have a child who is interested in dinosaurs, I would also recommend the "How Do Dinosaurs..." series. While that series is mostly playful and silly, there are fabulous drawings of dinosaurs that are all labeled with the proper name of each one. Jack also loves these books and will look at them for a long time by himself. Some of the books in the series come in board book form, which is especially helpful if you have very little kids around or if you have a kid who likes to rip pages. Not that we have any of those at OUR house, I'm just saying.

Flash Forward

Here is Jack. He's a happy-go-lucky two year old. He likes to imitate his daddy. He pretends to play guitar and plays the drums. He has a new pair of dark brown oxfords just like the ones his daddy has. He calls them "mah Daddy shoes!"
So it did not surprise me overmuch when Jack came out of my bathroom and announced, "Yook! I Daddy now!" He had gotten into my makeup bag, found the dark brown eyeshadow, and used it like fingerpaint to give himself a mustache and beard. It's more of a soul patch, really.
This gives us a foretaste of how Jack will look in 25 years. The weight of his many responsibilities weighs heavily on his tiny shoulders, as you can see from his pensive expression.
But I'm glad he's just a little tyke for now! What a handsome boy he is! And yes, I did give him another haircut, so don't make fun of him if you see him in person, ok?

The Week in Books 2009, No. 41

I'll admit I was skeptical about Mary Ostyn's new book Family Feasts for $75 a Week. The blurbs said it was about how a family of four can eat well on $75 a week, and since that is a heck of a lot more than my food budget for a family of five, I figured I would not learn much.

Wrong.

I was pleasantly surprised to find many helpful nuggets of information in the first part of the book, although a lot of them were things you probably already do or have considered if you are fairly frugal. I would bet that anyone could read this book and find at least one or two ideas for ways to cut your food budget and increase your efficiency in the kitchen. For example, I had not considered adding shredded cabbage to salads to bulk them up and add nutrition without costing much. I also learned a lot from the chart showing how many servings you can get (on average) from different cuts of meat. That's the best way to really calculate how expensive a particular cut is - not just the per pound price. I've always wondered if bone-in cuts were really that much cheaper than boneless, and now I know how to factor in the weight of the bones and skins etc.

But really the reason you should read this book is because of the recipes. The first few are casserole recipes of the "cheesy creamy crunchy" variety and I know recipes like that are a dime a dozen, but once you get through the casserole part you'll find some really interesting Korean and Ethiopian recipes (the author has adopted children from both countries and I think it's awesome that she integrates these recipes into her family's diet) that don't require exotic ingredients! Hooray! Ethnic food for the rest of us! I'm especially excited to try the Kalbi and Chap Chae recipes, but I made note of sixteen other recipes I intend to try as well.

I do have to make one caveat about the recipes: the author is from Idaho and so she thinks it's ok to put sugar on grits. Oh my word y'all that is so disgustingly nasty. Grits are supposed to be a savory food, so you can put salt and pepper on them or put cheese on them or put shrimp in them, but you are not supposed to put sugar or syrup on them. Gag me with a spoon. I guess, to be charitable, grits are just food, and if you need to put sugar on them to eat them, that's ok. Just know that you're as weird as people who put ketchup on their cottage cheese.

Aside from her odd recommendations for grits, I think this is a great book. Mary Ostyn is a personable and down-to-earth writer. This is not a book full of weird ideas, it's a helpful reference for how you can be a good steward of your resources while also being normal. You won't find tips like "use old bread bags as diaper covers for cloth diapers you made out of discarded tshirts you found on the side of the road" (not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's how you roll....) but you will find lots of tips on how to reduce your spending on food and ideas for how to do that incrementally so it's not scary or strange.

Enigma Sartorial

Enigma Sartorial
by Lucy W. Rhu

Consider the Penguin.
He's smart as can be -
Dressed in his dinner clothes
Permanently.
You never can tell
When you see him about,
If he's just coming in
Or just going out!

Sarah is growing so fast!

Sarah is growing so fast, so I thought I would post some pictures of her. She really has her own distinct look. Sometimes I see flashes of myself in her, and sometimes I think she looks like Josh. A lot of times I think she looks very much like the baby pictures of my grandfather's sister, Mary Reed.
A serious look. This was the day I decided to put her hair in a ponytail on top of her head from now on so she won't have such a mop top!

I say "harrumph" to you!

I stick my tongue out at you!

This picture is so sweet looking. What you can't see is that Sarah is looking intently at the carrot she's hoping her brother will share with her. He obliged.

I show you my six teeth!

In addition to pulling up all over the place, Sarah now walks around holding on to things. She is also able to climb up the first two steps of the stairs. She still prefers crawling overall though. We have her nine month well baby checkup this morning and I'm interested to see how she's grown in height and weight since her last appointment.

The Week in Books 2009, No. 40

The world is full of books that are worth your time. Pat Conroy's South of Broad is not one of them.

I hate to say this, because I think that in some ways Pat Conroy is a gifted writer, and a novel set in Charleston that covers truly interesting topics like the start of school integration in the deep South and how Hurricane Hugo impacted the historical mansions South of Broad has a lot of potential, but I think Conroy got lazy and his novel suffered terribly for it.

I can't recommend this book for the following reasons:

1) The book is about 150 pages too long. The story sort of sprawls about and meanders, which might be some sort of deep reference to the pace and city layout of Charleston, or it might just mean the book could have used tightening up. I know Conroy is capable of precise writing, and that shows in some places in the book. I just wish it would have been pervasive.

2) Much of the dialogue sounds fake and is grating. I feel like Conroy should have taken his draft and read it to himself out loud. Then he would have gotten to most of the dialogue between the main characters and thought, "Pat, buddy, we need to scrap this trash and start over."

3) I felt like many of the characters, especially the bit players, were stereotypes. Most people aren't totally stereotypical. Even if they were, it doesn't make for clever writing. When Conroy did try to break the stereotypes, he was so heavy handed with it that it didn't ring true.

4) Lots of the plot twists were too predictable. Especially the ones that seemed like those lame commercials for cop dramas billed "ripped from the headlines!!!!" At times I felt like Conroy sat down and made a list of every sensational thing that's been part of the cultural milieu for the past few decades and tossed it in this book as a subplot. The worst part was that many of them were added in such a way that it was obvious from the beginning but then showcased later as if it was a plot twist.

5) Conroy evidently thought it would be droll to name one of the couples that forms the group of main characters Niles (guy) and Fraser (girl). Wait, did anybody miss the 1990s sitcom reference? Aren't you giggling at how clever that is? No? Neither was I. It was distracting and annoying. I like the Southern custom of naming girls family names, and I personally think Fraser (or Frasier) can go either way as a guy's name or a girl's name, but pairing it with Niles was not clever, just dumb, and a waste of a good character name.

6) Remember your grandmother telling you that only people with poor imaginations use cuss words? Pat Conroy should heed your grandmother's advice. I think it's important to write in the voice your characters would really use, and sometimes I think it's appropriate to use language you wouldn't normally use yourself to flesh out a character. That said, if you can't convey to me that your character is gay without using completely vile and horrifying language, you need to quit writing until you develop better language skills. The language alone would keep me from recommending this book. It's completely abominable and, worse, it was UTTERLY unnecessary to the plot or character development of the book. I guess trash sells, but it doesn't make strong writing.

7) Closely related to the previous point, if you are unable to convey the fact that a bedroom scene occurred and what it meant to the characters involved without giving the reader a needlessly lascivious play-by-play account using almost unbelievably coarse vocabulary to do so, you lack imagination or are deeply lazy. I think Pat Conroy has a good imagination, so I can only conclude that he was beset with the latter problem while writing South of Broad.

Needless to say, I skimmed a lot of parts of this book and I only finished it because there were a few pieces of the story that were interesting and I feared that if I didn't finish the book I would keep thinking about it, and I don't care to waste any more of my life thinking about this book than is absolutely necessary. I wish I had not read it at all in the first place.

It's too bad that Conroy got bogged down writing this novel, because I think he could have written a really moving and interesting book about Charleston that would have been stronger and more resonant. What a wasted opportunity.