Today’s a day for wishes. Write about a wish you dearly hope will come true in your life.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
In preparation for…
book seven, I’m rereading book six.
Not everyone is a fan of Harry Potter. Though today, you’d be hard pressed to find too many who haven’t at least seen a movie or read a book. What makes this moment significant, though, is the scale of HP’s entrance into our popular culture. Like the Beatles did for pop music and Star Wars did for the movies, Harry Potter will go down as the most powerful literary phenomenon in our time.
Friday night will be an international party as the seventh book is released. Fans are already figuring out ways to avoid the Internet, magazines, television news and friends who might spoil the greatly anticipated ending to the series.
In the homeschooling world, much has been written about the dangers of the books versus their delightful and engrossing plot-lines. No matter where you fall in that debate, we all can see that Harry Potter and his magical world have invaded our international consciousness, have created a memorable cast of characters whose names are now synonymous with the character qualities they represent, and have engaged children and teens in their first most delicious and satisfying book discussions many of them have ever known. They have discovered that books are more than stories to be read and finished. They are to be savored, analyzed and enjoyed with fellow readers.
To that end, we will open a discussion forum some time in August (depending on when I finish the book!) for any teen or child (or enthusiastic parent!) who wants to have a place to discuss the series with fellow fans. It will be supervised (by Jon and me) requiring a log in, but for no fee (free of charge).
So if the magical world of Harry Potter has kept you spell-bound for any length of time, I hope you’ll join us when we have the fun of discussing how it all turned out. (I’m personally on pins and needles wondering whether or not Snape really is a bad guy… Can you imagine keeping that question so alive for six, SIX, books? J.K. Rowling – what a good writer!)
Thank you note
Dear Bogart Family,
Thank you for the money. I would most like to thank you for the help with my college (application) essay. With my grades and ACT scores, it may be all that got me to college.
Sincerely,
Dan
This “graduation gift thank you” note cracked me up so much, I saved it in my “favorite notes from former students” file. Dan was a wonderful student with good grades and more than adequate ACT scores. But I sure appreciated his enthusiasm for his essay. It turned out to be a favorite with me. He wrote about how his experience on a high school football team taught him, a white kid in a majority black school, the importance of diversity and the power of friendship to transcend racial differences. Terrific little essay that I had the privilege of coaxing and editing.
Writing your memories
Johannah graduated from high school in June. On Saturday we celebrated her admission to the Ohio State University with a big party. (That girl has friends! They came by the dozens…)
At the end of the day, my mother who had flown out from California, my mother, author of the Help Lord! I’m Having a Senior Moment books, gave Johannah her graduation gift. As Johannah unwrapped it, she assumed the sunflower covered book was blank for recording her college experiences. But on closer inspection, she discovered that inside were entries written by my mother (her grandmother) that went all the way back to 1995. My mom has been making entries in similar books for each of our kids. She writes an entry each time she returns from a visit.
Johannah was blown away. She hadn’t known.
Unlike gifts of money (much appreciated) and dorm stuff (much needed), this gift came from the heart (much more meaningful). I had done the same thing for Johannah in her baby book from birth through age seven. Together, these two sources of journaled memories gave Johannah not only a glimpse into what her life was like as a child, but also what her grandmother and mother were like as they watched her grow up. What did we enjoy? How did we express it? What mattered to us?
I haven’t always been consistent in journaling my kids’ lives. (My mom has – she’s more like that than me. Rats! Where did that gene go?) But any time I’ve taken the time to write down my heart for my kids, I know I’ve done something worthwhile.
Go get that baby book and add to it today. You’ll be glad you did.
Reading aloud
We sat on cold tile floors, Jon lounging in a blue caftan, extending his 6’4″ body over a couple of red pillows for comfort, while I leaned my back against the concrete walls, upright, to better hold open the pages of the novel. The Far Pavillions by M. M. Kaye brought us spices and India, romance and war. I read aloud to Jon sometimes for three hours in a day while we waited for the hot, slow summer weeks to roll by so we could leave the country and head out to sunny Spain for our missionary camp.
The Far Pavillions wasn’t the first book I read aloud to Jon. When we were engaged, I read Shogun to him, every page. Reading aloud became a shared point of connection and escape. We eventually worked through several of James Clavell’s novels, most of M.M. Kaye’s and a few of John LeCarre’s.
Once we returned to the states, life became hectic with the increase of children, Jon working away from home, homeschooling. When I had just given birth to our fifth child, we decided to give it another whirl. We read aloud in the evenings after the other four kids were in bed. Instead of TV or videos, we’d snuggle in blankets while I’d nurse Caitrin, and Jon would read to me. Eventually, I’d yank the book back from him as he has this habit of getting so wrapped up in the story, he starts skipping words in order to get ahead. It’s not as much fun for the listener at that point. 🙂
What is fun, though, is reading together. Even today, while we don’t have as much time as we once did to read aloud lengthy novels without interruption, we still find ourselves reading aloud bits of articles, paragraphs out of books, quotes, poems, essays. It’s not enough to say to each other: “Read this article when you get a chance.” For some reason, we just have to do it out loud and talk about it right then and see the reaction of the other person as we are reading or it isn’t the same.
Reading to our kids, then, was a no-brainer. And it never occurred to me that a time might come when they were too old to be read to. After all, I’d been reading to a full-grown male for most of my married life!
With the approach of the release of the final Harry Potter book, my kids are at fever pitch around here trying to determine how many copies we must purchase in order to make it possible for as many people to read it at once as want to. I’ve read all six aloud, the first three twice (at two different times to two different sets of our kids). The older kids want to read the newest book right away, to themselves. But the younger ones have already asked me to read it to them like I’ve done with the other six books.
I’m glad.
There’s something about that shared time that transcends reading to myself.
