Month: April 2005

A Series of Unfortunate Events

After plodding through Atlas Shrugged and Guns, Germs and Steel, I needed something light. Something fun. Something written with a child’s intellect in mind. So I turned to the “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” books. They’ve been compared (favorably) with the Harry Potter books, which I like quite a bit for their imagination, easy access, and insight into childhood/adolesance.

The books are short (under 200 pages each) and read quickly, so I’m going to tackle them 3 at a time. Here’s a description of the first one from Amazon:

Make no mistake. The Bad Beginning begins badly for the three Baudelaire children, and then gets worse. Their misfortunes begin one gray day on Briny Beach when Mr. Poe tells them that their parents perished in a fire that destroyed their whole house. “It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed,” laments the personable (occasionally pedantic) narrator, who tells the story as if his readers are gathered around an armchair on pillows. But of course what follows is dreadful. …While it’s true that the events that unfold in Lemony Snicket’s novels are bleak, and things never turn out as you’d hope, these delightful, funny, linguistically playful books are reminiscent of Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, and Edward Gorey.

I can’t wait until Sam is old enough for me to read her books like this, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potter books.

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Whee.

Ger seems more excited about going down the little slide than anyone. Sam actually loves it, though, and when she gets to the bottom she’ll turn around and try to climb back up the slide.

Jamie

Sam’s Story: Week 63

Sam’s new favorite thing? It involves her finger and her nose. Rather than taking a thousand words to spell it out, here’s a picture:



Hopefully this won’t be a habit that persists into her middle age.

In other news, Sam is a little soccer hooligan. While at playgroup last week, Sam took an immediate and intense shine to one of the other children’s soccer ball. Ger says Sam toddled over to it, picked it up, and proceeded to carry it with her everywhere she went. Upon hearing this, I insisted that we buy her her own and as you can see Sam absolutely loves it. Kicking is still beyond her –she can still barely use her feet for walking– but she carries the thing with her wherever she goes. These pictures were taken at the park down the street where Sam played with both her ball and the playground equipment.

Pictures!



Sam continues to expand her verbal prowess and she obviously knows more than she says. She can respond to several kinds of requests (“Put the toy in the basket, Sammy” or “Diversify your stock portfolio, Sammy”), she can point to Mommy, Daddy, or the cat when prompted, and can find her nose, ears, hair, and belly button. It’s awesome to have this little person you can interact with and who now takes her own initiatives during playtime.

Not much else to report, other than Sam and Ger start a “swimming” class next week. I put “swimming” in quotes because it’s really more of a “standing” and “floating” in the water kind of thing. I’m curious to know how it will turn out but I still harbor fears that Sam will somehow be swept out to sea. These fears persist even though the class is taught in a pool at the YMCA. We’ll sea. See. See?

Jamie

Guns, Germs, and Steel

I’m actually halfway through this book already. I’m glad to be reading something other than Atlas Shrugged, but MAN –I really didn’t think it would be possible for a discussion of wild cereals to be this boring. I mean that.

This book contains an attempt to answer the riddle of why some human societies (think Europeans and Asians) advanced and spread while others (think most Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals) did not. From Amazon:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this “artful, informative, and delightful” book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion –as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war –and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

It’s a fascinating topic, but Diamond is giving it a pretty dry treatment so far. The language is academic (Latin, scientific names for animals and plants abound) and he doesn’t really make me feel any sense of scope, awe, or triumph. Or tragedy. It reads, in other words, like a textbook.

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READ ME

When Sam comes right at you with a book, she means business. You’d better drop what you’re doing and read to her. Or there will be The Displeasure to deal with.

Jamie

I can see my house from up here!

Wow. This is amazingly cool: Google Maps has upgraded their mapping/directions service to include satellite photos. So you can enter an address in and see a photograph of the location. You can then zoom in, zoom out, or drag the map around to see surrounding areas. Astounding.

The little red marker in this picture, for example, is my house:



On the website, I can zoom in on that location all the way until I can see my front yard. In the near future, I hope to be able to zoom in so that I can look through my window to see myself, sitting at the computer looking at myself on Google Maps. Oh George Orwell… You sure had our number!

Jamie

Sam’s Story: Week 62

In my grade school science class the teacher taught us how rivers were formed by taking a wide, shallow box and filling it with sand. She then poured little rivulets of water through it so they carved paths on their way to a drain at the far end. I’m reminded of this because that’s what Samantha’s bathtub looked like tonight after her first ever trip to the beach.

It’s sad that we live so close to the ocean (about a 20 minute drive) but we so rarely go. I decided that Sam was old enough now, though, and by jiminy she was going to go. Besides, she should be past the stage where she’d try cramming fist fulls of sand in her maw. Well, mostly. She only did it twice, which really is once more than I would have expected after seeing the look on her face the first time. Babies have gizzards, right?

At any rate, Sam seemed to enjoy it. It was still too cool for her normal beachwear, so she looked a bit silly dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, but she didn’t seem to mind. She had an awesome time using her little plastic tools to dig up traditional beach treasures like seashells, driftwood, cigarette butts, and liquor bottle caps. And only once did she lose her balance and tumble down a shallow dune to cover her entire face –recently made sticky by Ger’s generous application of SPF 50,000 sunscreen– with sand.

The only rough spot was when Sam got it into her head to throw sand. I mean, it seemed like a pretty natural thing to do and she seemed to be having fun. But fearing that Sam would grow up to be some kind of sand slinging miscreant, Ger panicked and insisted that I chastise Sam for doing this. I finally acquiesced, grabbing Sam’s hands and saying “No, Sam. Do NOT throw the sand.” Problem was, I think Sam got the unintended message that ALL sand was bad and that she shouldn’t even be touching the stuff. Upon looking around and seeing herself surrounded by miles of the stuff, a wave of abject terror overtook her and she burst out crying. But other than that, good trip!

Pictures!



Not much else to report on this week. Sam continues to walk more and more, and her verbal prowess is growing. Last night while giving her a bath I would ask her, “Sammy, can you give me the duck?” She’d look around, spy the duck, grab it, and fork it over. Same thing when I asked her for the little “watering can” that she loves have me pour bath water out of. Now, I’ve never heard her say either “duck” or “watering can” so I was pretty impressed. And a little disquieted, because that kind of thing is proof that she’s pretty much listening to us all the time. She doesn’t act like it, but I think she’s always listening. Sometimes, out of the blue, she’ll call out “Rowerrowerrower!” in imitation of a cat. But the cat will be nowhere in site, neither of us will have mentioned cats, and she will be nowhere near any of her cat-shaped toys. And then some part of my brain that listens to background noises will realize that someone on the television had just said “cat” in passing. Apparently children don’t have an “off” or “mute” switch that powers them down. So now feel awkward watching “Chappelle’s Show” OR the evening news with her around.

Okay, I’m kidding. She can handle Chappelle.

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