What I'm Reading 2013

Another year down, another shelf added to my personal library. I read some really amazing books last year. Books that made me laugh. Books that made me weep. Books that had me so frustrated I could barely focus on the pages. I also delved into audiobooks for the first time, with mixed results. I sort of fell off the literary wagon for a while but I'm rediscovering how much I love reading and that is a wonderful thing.

The Year in Books 2012
The Year in Books 2011
The Year in Books 2010
The Year in Books 2009 

Currently Reading 
The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman


April
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke (Science Fiction) Grade: A-


Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple (Fiction) Grade: A
 
Golden - Jessi Kirby (YA) Grade: B-  On the edge of graduating high school and winning the college scholarship that will make all her dreams come true, 17 year old Taylor takes a leap and does something unexpected on the trail of a decade-old mystery. But she discovers more than just the answers to the mystery in her quest.

The story centers on Taylor's discovery of the private journal of a girl, Julianna, who went missing and was presumed dead 10 years ago. I enjoyed the interplay of Taylor's story and the journal of the ill-fated Julianna. Despite their differences, the parallels between their lives were striking and poignant, each with a seemingly *golden* path ahead of them that they began to question as events in their lives unfold.

Despite this, I'm sorry to say that I couldn't get emotionally invested in this book. Too much of the plot hinges on quirky, unbelievable elements that didn't ring true to me. And I say this as someone who regularly reads fantasy and science fiction. The author has to make me believe and I just didn't here. I couldn't even understand how Taylor and Kat could be best friends. Class valedictorian and town screw-up? Has this ever in the history of teenage girls happened? Since this relationship is pivotal to the story, that's a pretty big flaw for me.

Ultimately, I would put this in the beach read category: it's fast paced with a light emotional payoff, but flat, stereotypical characters and predictable turns make it unremarkable and easy to put down when you want to run out for a swim.

World War Z - Max Brooks (Sci-Fi) Grade: A-

Me Before You - Jojo Moyes (Fiction) Grade: A

March
You Are Not Here - Samantha Schutz (YA) Grade: A-

A Princess of Mars -  Edgar Rice Burroughs (Sci-fi) Grade: B+

Delirium - Lauren Oliver (YA) Grade: 

February
The Obvious Game - Rita Arens (YA) Grade: A
 
The Sky Is Everywhere - Jandy Nelson (YA) After her only sister unexpectedly dies at 19, Lennie struggles to figure out who she is without her. I loved this book. I loved the words. I loved Lennie's family. I love her relationship with Joe. My favorite book of 2013. Grade: A+
 
Return to Me - Justina Chen (Fiction) Just before Rebecca is scheduled to begin her freshman year at Columbia, an upheaval in her family throws her world into a tailspin. A thoroughly enjoyable story about a young girl's struggle to find herself when her parents, friends, and boyfriend are pulling her in different directions. Grade: A-

January
I am the Messenger - Marcus Zusak ( Genre: Fiction) This book was so beautifully written and such a poignant story. But it didn't have quite the punch that The Book Thief did, so I'm dropping it down that one star. Still, it was a wonderful read and I wholeheartedly recommend this book and pretty much anything Markus Zusak writes. Grade: A

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie - Ayana Mathis (Genre: Fiction) I am generally skeptical of Oprah book club books. This was chosen by my book club, though, so I gave it a chance. Sadly, it felt like typical Oprah fare. This book told Hattie's tale, through the lives of her 12 children. However, the twelve stories felt disconnected. Grade: B-


Feed - M.T. Anderson (Genre: Science Fiction, YA) During spring break on the Moon, Titus and his friends are touched by a hacker and their internal "feeds" are cut off from the steady stream of information they've had their entire lives. A thought-provoking read about the increasingly pervasive nature of technology in our lives. Grade: B+

TBR
The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness (YA, Sci-fi)
Sea of Tranquility - Katja Millay 

Dia de los Muertos

 

Somehow October turned into one of the craziest months of this year. We've had birthday parties, at least one, every weekend; Sophie's birthday was the 14th, which meant working and baking for her birthday at school, and a small get-together turned chaotic free for all on the 27th; finally, working and preparing for Sophie's school Halloween party on the 31st. Wedge in a number of other engagements and appointments to fill up the dwindling spare moments in between and there wasn't much left of this month.

I don't mind the busyness. In some ways, I thrive on it. In the days leading up to Sophie's birthday party, I was up each night until the early hours of the morning baking and preparing. I felt exhilarated in my drive to do everything that needed to be done. Much like when I worked, and the push for a proposal would have me working long hours, I felt purposeful in a way that I don't often these days. Which isn't to say that my life is without purpose. It is. There is nothing more important than raising a happy, healthy child. But the day to day of it is wearying in a way very different from working outside of the home. It is a quiet weariness. The fatigue that set in after a hard stretch at work was harsher but easily recovered from.

The exhaustion I felt as this month came to a close was bone deep. It was the result of running a marathon and sprinting every other mile. After Sophie's party, I hurt. The aches weren't localized like they are after a particularly hard workout or vigorous exercise class. The legs. The chest. The arms. This was every single muscle of my body. I felt a weight of a thousand pounds when I tried to pull myself out of bed that morning. It took most of Sunday spent laying around before I started to feel like I wasn't under water. Even then, I was still beyond exhausted.

And now, with the school Halloween Party over and the final bit of insanity passed, I find myself sick. The running and running and running caught up with me. The recuperative days spent sequestered indoors during Sandy were not enough to bring me back from the edge. I awoke today, the Day of the Dead appropriately, with a sore throat, aches and chills. I've functioned. Even, probably inadvisably, made it to the gym for the first time in a week. But the message is clear. SLOW DOWN. Give my body a rest. Have some of those regularly tiring days before I jump back into the insanity that has become my life lately. And I plan to.

Just as soon as I go to the Mom Mixer event in Philadelphia on Saturday. And another birthday party on Sunday. And book club on Monday. And...

I think I need an intervention.

Finally. A Before and After

I spent several hours last night going through the 3000+ photos I have on my iphone. Largely because all those pics were taking up more than a 1/3 of my storage capacity and that's just plain silly when I could download them to our home computer. Not just that but so much of Sophie's life is cataloged in those gigabytes and gigabytes of photographic memories. What if my phone died or was lost or stolen and all of those precious bits were lost? I would be devastated. So I began the task of culling, sorting and transferring them.

Among the many many MANY photos of Sophie were a few photos of me. Here's a funny thing I do: I take pictures of myself in outfits to see how I think they look from a slightly different perspective. I realize its a picture of exactly the same thing I'm looking at in the mirror, but you'd be surprised how often I decide not to wear something because of the photo. I do the same thing in stores as I'm trying stuff on, especially when I'm on the fence about buying something. The vast majority of the time I immediately delete these photos. I don't need a bunch of pictures of me looking in the mirror. Vain, much? But sometimes I'm distracted or in a hurry and I don't delete them. As I was going through the pictures, occasionally one of these funny pics would turn up. And I would laugh and delete them. But then the thought occurred to me that this might be the only way I was going to get a remotely accurate Before and After picture of my weight loss journey. So I saved one of the obvious befores and one that I took a month or two ago and put them side by side.

There's no way to sugar coat it, my before picture is painful for me to see. I recognize that I was not grotesquely overweight but I was bigger than I have ever been and I just don't even look like *me* to me. I carried so much weight in my face and holy smokes, those hips. Sometimes I think about going back through Facebook and my blog and pretty much every where else I have pictures from the last couple of years and scrubbing all of the heavier ones but I won't because too many of them are with Sophie or on vacations and I refuse to delete those memories out of vanity.

But the most important part is that after a year of busting my butt, literally, at the gym and following Weight Watchers, I lost 50 pounds. 5-0. POUNDS. And I'm pretty gosh darned proud of that. So I'm going to share the pain and the joy via my silly mirror pics that were never supposed to see the light of day.

Toothless

Sophie first alerted us to a loose tooth in early July. On vacation with friends, the older daughter of our travel companions was showing off her wiggly tooth and Sophie piped up that hers was loose as well. At first assuming it was just her wanting to be like the big kid, we laughed it off. But at her insistence, I stuck my finger in her mouth and sure enough, one of her top teeth waggled. And then I felt her other top tooth and it too moved. A few weeks later, two top teeth still wiggly but not measurably more so, she pointed out that her bottom two front teeth were also now loose. Four front teeth. All wiggly waggly.

At her late July dental appointment, the dentist said she would likely not have any front teeth for her school picture. We oohed and aahed and I went straight home and made a little Tooth Fairy pillow with tiny tooth pocket to hang on her door. The tooth fairy stops at the door these days. Needless to say, we expected her teeth to start dropping out at any moment.

They didn't.

And so we watched her wiggle her teeth every day and we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Teeth wiggled. A little. But nothing substantial. I fed her apples and corn on the cob and carrots. To no avail. Her teeth were wiggly, but stubbornly still attached to her jaw.

Until today.

Today was her first day of school. It is her second and last year of pre-school before she starts kindergarten next fall. It's at the same school she attended last year, a co-op just down the street where we've been very happy. Part of the co-op format is that parents help out in the classroom at least once a month. Today was my day to work. Despite no small amount of chaos with 18 four year olds and their accompanying parents, the day went well. Sophie didn't do anything unprecedented for a four year old and other than one kid wearing a wifebeater and jean shorts who carried a wooden knife around for the first half hour*, the rest of the class was pretty tame too.

Afterwards, we went to Chick-Fil-A for a celebratory lunch with Sophie's BFF, Lila, and her mom, Eileen. As the girls delicately nibbled (read: capriciously threw food into their mouthholes) on their nuggets and delicious waffle fries, Eileen and I talked about the YA novels we're reading. At some point, Sophie mentioned her loose tooth and I cringed when she wiggled it to a nearly horizontal position. I can do blood and poop and puke but seriously wiggly teeth give me the heebie jeebies. Go figure. We laughed at her wiggly teeth and went back to talking.

Then, with absolutely no warning, she nonchalantly leaned over in the booth next to me and pulled that tooth right out. No screaming or crying or drama. With a small amount of blood and a HUGE smile, my girl dropped her tooth into my palm. Just like that, she lost her first tooth.

If only everything could be this easy.

This doubles as her first day of school and first gaptooth smile photo.

*He's a terrifically sweet kid who happens to look exactly like a bully straight out of Stand By Me.

Aren't you impressed I didn't say "my baby's growing up" anywhere in this post. I am a paragon of restraint.

Spider Kid

For the seven of you that didn't see this on Facebook or Instagram. Plus, I wanted to try out the Blogger app on my phone. We're all still alive and kicking. Maybe once school starts I'll actually write a real post!

Stages

At every stage in my daughter's brief life, I have thought things were kinda rough. I'm being dramatic, of course, because rough is relative here. But histrionics aside, I truly felt like I was struggling. I have felt out of control and crazed and frustrated. But at each stage, I have innocently, and perhaps foolishly, looked forward to the next stage with the optimism that things would be better. That when she is 2, it will be easier because she'll be mobile; at 3, it will be easier because she'll be talking; at 4, it will be easier because she'll be a KID and at least somewhat rational.

So here we are at 4 and I honestly feel like we are still in crapville. That with each stage attained, we have dropped off a few bad things and picked up double to replace them. My four year old is argumentative and willful and sassy and opinionated and ohmygodsofrustrating. She doesn't listen. At all. We've done time outs and reward charts and taking away favored toys/tv time/games and sending her to bed early and all manner of punishments and enticements for bad and good behavior respectively and she is still argumentative and willful and sassy and opinionated.

She doesn't listen. Sometimes figuratively, as in she hears me but chooses not to comply and sometimes literally in that I am pretty sure she can shut down the hearing centers in her brain and operate on sight alone thereby negating all of the NO/STOP/DON'Ts that I am shouting at her.

The funny thing is, as much as I hate her backtalk and not minding me, a part of me kind of loves that she is so strong-minded. That she stands up for herself with such fierceness. Of course, when she's giving me the sass I want to smack that fierceness into next Tuesday, but that's the price you pay I suppose. She will likely test me to my very limits. I'm not kidding when I say that it wouldn't surprise me if the police brought her home a time or two when she's in high school for some naughty behavior. Nothing too terrible, maybe caught TPing someone's yard or smuggling a couple cans of beer into the Friday night football game, but enough to give us heart palpitations.

But I also think she's the girl who will turn into a woman who's CEO of a company, or invents the cure for cancer, or wins an Oscar, or hell, the president, because she won't take no for an answer. Because she'll fight against any roadblock until she gets what she wants.

I just hope my sanity survives her early years and I'm around to see this powerful woman I helped create, because at this rate, it's not looking so good.

Lucy

My daughter loves to ride her bike. Nearly every day she begs me to take her out riding. I feel like a bad mommy but I only take her out riding a couple times a week. Its not that I don't want to take her out nor that I don't want her to ride her bike. My greatest wish is that she spend as much time as possible out of doors pursuing physical activity and exploration. It's that a bike ride is never just a bike ride.

See, this is how our bike rides start out:

Sophie excitedly pedaling in front of me. Helmet, elbow and knee pads donned. Her baby doll in the seat behind her. We chatter away as we decide which way to go. Whether we'll head towards the elementary school across the street or around the neighborhood.

She's pretty good on there, knows how to pedal and steer and brake, but we live on a busy road and I worry, so I stay close behind her, on foot. Generally, we'll sing songs and talk about what we see on our ride. The plants and animals that inhabit our neighborhood. We'll meander our way through the smaller streets behind our house. Carefully crossing at intersections. Navigating the gentle hills.

And then it happens. She jumps off the bike to pick a flower (dandelion) and runs ahead. I holler out to her that she needs to come back for her bike. And she does. For a minute. But then she's off again. To look at an unusual mailbox that she's seen a dozen times before on bike rides or walks. She comes back again for her bike, but it is short-lived. Finally, she abandons the bike altogether and this is what I see for the rest of our outing:

What you don't see, because I am the documentarian of our life, is me pulling the bike. Again. And this is why I am beginning to hate bike rides. Every time she promises me that she will ride her bike the whole way, that I won't wind up dragging it the last mile home. And every time she gets off and abandons it and I'm left with sore toes from all the times I accidentally run over them with the blasted training wheels as I chase after her pulling that bike next to me.

My girl is Lucy with the football. And I? Am a gullible blockhead.