(June 22, 2007) I have a horrible confession to make. I have not started anything new this week. Wait. Let me think about it for a minute... Nope. No new books. I have been reading multiple, 300-page grant proposals and making tables out of information, but I don't think you really want to hear about that. Not to mention confidentiality issues... So, today I thought I would talk about Life Changing books. Those books that have a significant impact on who you develop to be as a person.

I think we all have them. Here are mine:

(June 15, 2007) After I finished A Widow for One Year, I was gangbusters to read another "real" novel. So, I pulled out my copies of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Prince of Tides. And I discovered that I was simply too mentally exhausted to start reading either of them, despite remarkable reviews of Owen Meany.

On a whim, at the grocery store, I noticed a new Thomas Perry book. And oh, boy, Thomas Perry books (Leian, forgive me, I forgot about these). They are probably best-described as thrillers, because you know who the guilty person is. The real challenge is how many people will die before the murderer/bad guy is stopped. I started reading Perry's Jane Whitefield novels years ago, and I so wish he was still writing them. Jane Whitefield is a woman who helps people in trouble (mostly women) disappear. The books are so thrilling, they made my feet sweat as I read them, and I would end up with damp socks all the time in winter.

So, when I noticed Nightlife, I put it into the cart. The book wasn't as strong as the Jane Whitefield novels-- it didn't make me sweaty-- but that didn't stop me from spending all day Sunday reading it. My kids were at their father's house and I decided just to take a day for me (I seem to need/take a lot of mental health days for some reason).

A dear friend of mine had her first baby last week. As I slowly started to get the details of the birth from her husband in hurried conversations while they were in the hospital, I started to realize that this was an enormously difficult birth experience all the way around.

Everything that happened was punctuated by the fact that they had originally hoped for a home birth. My friend was raised Sikh, and she wanted as pure, as non-invasive a pregnancy and birth experience as possible. And she knew that this might not be possible. She was realistic about that. But what ultimately happened was a brutal way to bring a child into the world. And I know this because almost the same experiences happened to me with my first child--only hers was just a little bit worse.

When I tell people about her experience, because our friends have moved now and told me I can fill people in here, they have been remarkably unsympathetic. "Well, they're okay, right? That's the most important thing." "Well, things don't always go as planned." Yes, it is. And we all know that. But that doesn't change the fact that a joyous outcome is paired with exhaustion and disppointment, and yes, violation. It makes the recovery that much more difficult. It makes your first days with your baby tremulous and more fearful and more painful.

Here is the story: The baby was breech. The mama blood pressure was high. The mucous plug came out. Contractions were five minutes apart for 24 hours. An epidural was given, and doctors tried to turn the baby. It was immensely painful. The mama was rushed into surgery, whilst telling the doctors, "I can still feel things. I can still feel pain." Fortunately, she didn't feel the incision-- just every stitch when they were stitching her up...

Her brand new baby girl was taken immediately to a NICU with low blood sugar. When the 23-year-old mama finally got to see her baby, hours later, when her hospital bed was wheeled up, the NICU nurse told her not to try to breastfeed, and after ten minutes, told the mama to leave because she was overstimulating her baby. She was basically told that every instinct she had as a new mother was bad for her baby.

Maybe this doesn't sound very traumatic in quiet black and white. But I've been there, and it is very traumatic. It's frightening and painful and invasive and horrible. It will take some time to recover. Time, and their beautiful baby girl. You can read the father's firsthand account of the experience here. How did you recover from your awful birth experience?

(June 13, 2007) This summer, we have been trying to have the kids turn off the TV every morning and read. I say the word "trying" because we have been met with some resistance. My youngest son is trying to tell me that summer is for playing outside, not reading. "That's funny," I told him, "because you were just inside, watching television."

We made deals with the kids before summer even began: We want you guys to read at least one book a month, preferably two. There are lots of things that we let them do in the summer, things that cost extra money. However, we also want them to take advantage of the long stretches of time in the summer to read.

Initially, we wanted to give them some book options to choose from. Rather than reading the same Bart Simpson comics over and over, we would like them to read some actual books. This is not an issue for the oldest child (13.5), whose room is so scattered with books it's hard to walk through it. He is reading The Fellowship of the Ring right now, and just finished The Hobbit. But it's harder for the younger two, who are more resistant at the page numbers present in a novel. My middle child (10) has read the first Harry Potter book and loved it, but he doesn't want to read the second. He has read The Hobbit, and loved it, but he doesn't want to read. He wants to watch television or play on the computer. I think that is the main issue here.

My youngest child (9) is simply not a reader. He has a way with simile and metaphor when he writes and speaks that astonishes me: It can't be taught. I cannot believe he is so resistant to reading. So, I try to read carefully: "This is reading time. You can choose what you are reading[even the Bart Simpson comic books], but this is reading time." And as I am saying the words, he will open the door and go outside. So, then, I have to go and get him, bring him inside, and start again. I hate that: I don't want to fight with him about reading. But I'm afraid that if he never experiences the actual joys that reading brings, he will just get farther and farther away from it.

I feel like I'm being pushy. Just let the kid have his summer! Don't worry about it! But I do worry about it. Books, magazines, words-- they are very important to his father, his stepfather, and I. It's probably one of the few things we all agree on. We are all academics, have all taught students who can't write because they don't read. These college students don't know the difference, when they write papers, between the words "definitely" and "defiantly." I know first-hand from my career that writing and reading are important. They go hand-in-hand. But I don't want to push him away from reading. I wish so much that he would come to it on his own.

Do your kids like to read? If they don't, do you have any tricks to encourage them?

Reading Roger Sinasohn's piece about tattoos made me sit and think for a long time. And what I finally realized is that although I am deeply deeply sympathetic to his horror about how tattoos were used to brand holocaust victims, and I respect his position that tattoos are symbolic of de-humanization and slavery, we are all see the world and make decision based on the lens of our own experience.

When we first began talking about our positions about tattoos and being parents, I raised this issue: I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to talk about tattoos and children. Perhaps this is just a reflection of my own position. I think permanent tattoos for children under the age of 18 are probably akin to criminal negligence or abuse. And I think 18 years old is too young to make decisions about tattoos. I have two tattoos, but I got both of them when I was in my thirties, so I will tell my children that when they are in their thirties, if they feel really strongly about getting a tattoo, they can get one then. Of course, they will be able to make their own decisions before that age, but I think as much as I can influence anything they do, I will strongly encourage them to wait.

I spent more time talking about kids' tattoos than I intended to. What I'd really like to talk about is parents and tattoos. Jennifer Jordan and I were talking about the ages we were when we got our tattoos and how having kids has or has not changed our positions and attitudes about tattoos.

(June 8, 2007) I stayed up late last night finishing A Widow for One Year. And it wasn't ONLY so I could write this post today and say, "I finished!" but I admit that that was part of it. I have been walking around thinking all morning about how all of the little details that he set up early in the story were taken care of. I saw a description this morning of this novel as John Irving's "most intricately crafted" novel, and while I haven't yet read all of his books (and A Prayer for Owen Meany is staring me down right now), I'd have to agree with that statement. It is the kind of novel that really makes you think of a tapestry with all of the threads interwoven beautifully, and no stragglers hanging out. Every detail, every minor event, had a point that would resurface again later.

As a case in point, one of the novel's protagonists (Ruth Cole) (there are really two main characters whom the book follows from the opening pages to the last), cuts her finger on sharp glass when she is four years old. The other protagonist, Eddie O'Hale, who is 16 years old at the time, tells her that the cut has perfectly bissected her finger, and that nobody else will have a fingerprint quite like hers. That episode comes back when the two characters meet more than thirty years later, and then again, later in the novel, when Ruth witnesses a crime and leaves her perfectly flawed fingerprint at the scene of the crime, leading the investigating officer to find her more than five years after the crime.

I noted last week that John Irving's books have plenty of sex in them, but that the books are more about the consequences of that sex. And that line actually showed up in the novel later! One of the things that faintly irritates me about Irving's plots is that the stories always seem to devolve into dancing bears or weird transvestites whose tongues have been cut out at some point. In this case, it was Ruth's idea (she is a novelist) that she needed to talk to prostitutes in Amsterdam about what it would be like if a woman and her boyfriend wanted to watch the prostitute with a customer. The novel took the shape of farce for awhile, and even though all of the details were later neatly tucked into the tapestry, I find those farcical adventures fairly exhausting.

I don't know whether they are called tree frogs, bullfrogs, or even whether they were toads, to be honest. I was walking home early yesterday evening with a friend and her daughter: My friend and I run together, and then we walk to the convenience store to get a big Diet Coke, and then walk slowly back. Yesterday, we ran five miles. On the way home, we could hear frogs out, and they were trilling. My friend's daughter asked if we were hearing crickets, and we explained that they were frogs. And then, suddenly, we saw them!

There were two huge puddles in the street before us, and in each puddle sat one frog. They started hopping toward the corner, and on the corner sat another frog/toad/whathaveyou. And suddenly, its throat blew a huge bubble and it started trilling! I have never seen that in person before. It was amazing. It continued its trilling as we walked by, and then abrupty stopped.

I ran home to ask my sons if they wanted to see it. I burst through the front door, set my pop on the table, and burst out, "Hurray! Get your shoes on! I have to show you something amazing!"

Two of them ended up coming barefoot, but it was a short walk, around the corner. By the time we got there, there were four frogs. This time, the leader showed some trepidation. Perhaps small boys who are eager to bend down and touch, to pick up, to laugh, to splash, to chase, are more intimidating than two cautious adults and one small female child. For whatever the reasons, the frog clamped its mouth shut and stopped trilling. We all got out of the street as a car went by. My son Christian asked where the fourth frog had gone, and then spotted it, completely flattened, in the street. They stood over the squished frog and marvelled that it had been alive and now it was completely a pancake frog. The two who were barefoot steadfastly stepped around it.

Finally, we turned to return home. It was now dark. And behind us, in the moonlight, the frog begin to trill again.

What sorts of nature treasures have you happened upon and shared with your children?

I finally did it. He hasn't been asking very much or for very long. His friends are now starting to get them. I have had to re-think some of my original ideas about things like cell phones. My son spends time away from both of his parents, as we are divorced. Therefore, in some ways, his having a cell phone makes a certain amount of sense. If one of us parents can't reach the other, we now have an alternative number. Sam, age 13 and a half, had started calling me from school during the afternoon to tell me about a change of plans or to ask permission to do something with friends. A cell phone eliminates the need to use the school office phone, and allows him more chances to call if he can't reach me on the first try.

But the reason I finally got him a cell phone is simple: My husband's phone started malfunctioning. When we went in to replace it, they told us that we needed to get a new plan to do that cheaply, and the new plan made introducing a third line the same price as what we had been paying monthly. In its most simple and clear terms, it no longer made financial sense NOT to have a third line. So, I picked out a moderately priced cell phone, not one that would break or become useless easily, but certainly by no means an expensive phone, and took it home.

I put it on the kitchen counter with a post-it note and then called it and asked my son what that noise in the kitchen was. He was, do I need to say it? Delighted.

We haven't run into the problems I had expected. I haven't had to tell him to use the cell phone less: I have had to insist that he carry it with him instead, because there have been a couple of times when I have tried to reach him and he didn't have it with him. He looked at me, still at that moment more child than Youth, and asked, "Oh, should I carry it with me all the time?" Yes. Unless you are going over to the playground to let your friends bury you in the sand. In that case, please leave it home.

But just in case you are wondering, I did buy insurance for the phone, in case of loss, or accident.

Do your kids have cell phones? Will you get cell phones for them when they are older? And how old is old enough?

(June 1, 2007) What are you reading this week? I have had a busy week of reading around here. I am not quite sure why, but I have sort of run out of patience with my romance novels, though I am still working my way through one. I am pretty sure that my impatience is temporary. However, in the meantime, I am looking for other things to read.

I have been enjoying a very lovely email conversation with commenter Mandy this week. At her recommendation, I decided to go ahead and overcome my fear of The Lovely Bones. I started it last Friday, and read it all before I went to bed that night. It was a beautiful, compelling book. But I am not going to discuss it quite yet, here, because I promised I would give everyone time to read it first. So, readers, start your engines! Can you at least post in the comments and let me know when you have started reading it? Then we will all kind of be able to keep track of how far you are in the book, and we'll know when we can discuss it here.

I think you will have a hard time putting it down. Mandy also wrote that she had gotten Twilight, and she took her three-year-old son to a new playground so she could try reading it. However, she had to follow him around, which distracted the reading. But I remember doing the same thing when my kids were that age. I love hearing how other moms try to find time to read.

I have a confession to make: I haven't started The Lovely Bones yet. Have you? How is it going? I know I need just to do it, but I have to admit: It frightens me a little bit. I am afraid it might be too dark. But I have been practicing! I figure reading dark books is a little like diving into the deep end of the pool. If you practice swimming in shallower, lighter water, you just remind yourself that you can swim, and that the currents of the pool won't pull you down. The thing that bothers me about this analogy is that I am not sure who the lifeguard is...

I continued my rampage of reading real books this week (I actually consider my romances to be real books, but I like to pretend that I don't, so please forgive my little penchant for dividing romance from non-romance books). I picked up a book that has been on my shelf for years. I read a review when it first came out and I was fascinated: I so wanted to read it. So, I bought it, and there it sat. I read Ann Packer's book The Dive From Clausen's Pier.

The book has a fascinating premise: a young woman's fiance, Mike, dives into a quarry. The water has become more shallow than previous years, and he breaks his neck, and becomes a quadraplegic. The young woman, Carrie, packs up her apartment in the middle of the night shortly after his accident and flees to New York City without telling anyone from her Wisconsin town where she is going. She bunks for free with a friend from high school with whom she reconnected shortly after Mike's accident.