I started writing a journal entry at lunch today -- got it mostly written -- then was interrupted and didn't get it saved. Hopefully it will still be there when I go back tomorrow morning. It would be hard to start it all over again.
I spent much of yesterday evening reading Margaret Atwood's The Oryx and the Crake. It reads well. I will need to think on it a while before I have any substantive comments.
This Saturday is Dean Visibility Day. A group of us are planning to stand along Route 9 and hold signs supporting Dean. Hopefully the hurricane (Isabel, which is bearing down on us now) will have passed by then and we won't end up standing in the rain. I bravely asked several people I know if would be willing to stand with me and several said "maybe". Can't get much better than that!
The entry was still here:
This morning I observed to Lucy that it's an interesting form of personal development and self-reflection to see your own characteristics in your children.
"And in your grandchildren!" she replied.
Alisa and I have agreed to bring the children up to get ready for bed and read at 8:00pm. Alisa was at a meeting and the children were playing quietly, so, after extracting a promise that they would come up at 8:30 without fail or argument, I let them stay up the extra half hour. At 8:33 they still hadn't come up so I got them and chastised them for not following through on their agreement. Charlie apologized very sincerely, but wanted to have more time to finish the part of the game he was in. I said he could have two minutes. After two minutes he still wasnt' done, so I told him to turn the game off. By that point, it wasn't going so well, so he turned it off. He sat there.
"Get your book and start reading," I said. It was 8:37.
"Well, I already read today at school during quiet reading time," he said.
"That's nice," I said. "Go ahead and read some more."
"Well, I kinda left the book at school."
"You'll need to read something else, then. Find a book you want to read."
"I don't know what I want to read. What do you think I should read?"
"How about Call of the Wild. You liked that story."
"I never read that! When did I read that?" he said.
"I read it to you before you started Kindergarten." I got up, found it on the shelf, and handed it to him. "Here! It's got Call of the Wild and White Fang.
He opened it up and started paging through it. "What page is White Fang on? I like the sound of that better."
"I don't know. Whatever. Please just start reading." It was 8:43. At this point I went to check on Daniel who had been "brushing his teeth" for 10 minutes.
When I came back, Charlie said, "I don't want to read this. It's about toilet things."
"What? What are you talking about?" I said, flabbergasted.
"I don't like this word."
"What word? White-tailed deer?" I guessed. He searched the first page and found the objectionable word in the second sentence of the second paragraph. "Toiled -- the frozen waterway toiled -- That just means it went back and forth -- it had lots of loops and meaders. I guess. It doesn't have anything to do with toilets."
(Actually, checking up today, I see that the sentence was "
Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs".)
"Well, I don't like that word. I'm not reading it."
"OK. Well, pick something else. And START READING!"
He went into the other room and came back a few minutes later with an Animorph book Alisa had gotten for him last year. He paged through it for a while, discovered it had a little flip-book animation along the bottom of the pages, so he flipped through that for a while. He looked at the table of contents and the back and the last page. And, finally, at 8:53, he began to read.