Purse Contents

I needed a pen out of my purse today and realized it is crammed full of stuff that doesn't need to be there.  I had to hunt around to find the pen.  So I am cleaning out the purse, and recording, just for fun, the complete contents before paring down.

• Camera case, but no camera.  That is sitting on the couch where I left it this afternoon after a different blog post.
• Two bottles of hand sanitizer, one practically empty, the other half full.  I will throw away the empty.
• Wallet, whose contents I will not bother with.
• Fifteen receipts that need to be put in the receipt cubby of the desk.
• The Hobbit, in my purse because I am reading it out loud to Brandt, and I took it with us when we went to the doctor day before yesterday.  I read while we waited.  Bilbo has just met Gollum!  That will go upstairs to Brandt's room.
• Checkbook
• Two partially used packages of Kleenex.  I will combine them and return the one package to my purse.
• One travel size, half full bottle of orange scented lotion.
• Two movie tickets to Skyfall.  Kent and I saw that this afternoon.  That Daniel Craig is yummy!  He's the Bond for me.
• Directions to the wedding reception for our niece Jordan who was married a week ago.  She was a beautiful bride, it was fun to be with family, and our dinner was lovely.
• One small fabric bound accordion file for coupons.
• One empty Ziploc bag not going back in the purse.
• One mini calculator that Blythe uses as a phone.
• One checkbook size rice paper zippered bag that holds "supplies" when necessary.  Not necessary this week, but was last week.  That will go live on the desk until needed again.
• One Swiss Army knife purchased while on my mission in Switzerland.  It goes with me everywhere (except when I fly) and I have cause to use it frequently.
• Four pencils, none of which will go back in the purse.  One of them, a Santa pencil, has not been sharpened.
• Glasses in hard case.
• Lipstick in hard case and lipstick brush, necessary because someone opened it all the way with the lid still on, so all the lipstick is in the lid.
• Two AA batteries, probably dead.  I'll need to test them and then (likely) throw them away.
• Two paperclips, one large, one small.
• Two erasers, fallen off the pencils.
• One CTR ring (Brandt's).
• One cherry Chapstick.
• Set of keys to my in-laws house and car.
• Small tube of bubbles from the wedding reception last week.
• One pen.  Only one.  Considering all the other stuff, is it any wonder I had a hard time finding it?

Adoption

Recently I was having a discussion with Brandt and Blythe about pregnancy.  My sister is pregnant and we were talking about the baby growing in her tummy.  Blythe said, "Mom, did I come out of your tummy?"

"Nope," I replied.  "You are adopted, remember?  That is because I haven't been able to have a baby, so you were never in my tummy."

This naturally led to the next question.  "Whose tummy was I in?"

From the beginning of our parenting, Kent and I have been open with our children about their adoption.  We have spoken of how happy we were to welcome them into our home and to have them sealed to us.  We have a picture of all of us dressed in white outside the temple on Blythe's sealing day in each of their bedrooms, and we talk about their sealing days often as we drive past the temple.  There is no secret about how they joined our family, and we are committed to being open and honest with our kids about their personal history as it relates to their origins.

So when Blythe asked, I told her.  "You were in Key Bug's tummy."  Key Bug is what Blythe calls her birthmom, Keyaira.  Brandt followed up with the question, "Was I in Key Bug's tummy too?"

"No," I said, "you were in Jamie's tummy."  For Brandt, that was enough information.  He was probably about four when he first asked me this question, and I had answered the same way then.  For him, Jamie is a name and nothing more.  She has never been part of his life, and although she has visited with us once, Brandt was too young to remember and saw her simply as someone I knew who came for a visit.  At this point in his life, he is not interested in his origins.

The same can not be said of Blythe.  She is a thinker and this issue, where she came from and why she is with us, is deeply important to her.  I know this because the first question, "Whose tummy was I in?" has been followed by many others.  Key Bug remains part of our lives.  When she is clean and doing well, we see her with some regularity.  When she is using, we don't see her, but Blythe talks about her and asks to call her and wants to know what is going on with her.  We are supportive of Blythe maintaining a relationship with Keyaira because that is important to her.  Blythe was 14 months when she came to live with us, and although she doesn't remember her time with Keyaira, she knows Keyaira loves her.  We regularly see Keyaira's parents, Grandma Dawn and Papa Scott, as well as Keyaira's other children, McKenna and Greyson whom Scott and Dawn have adopted.

The tummy question has led to other questions: Why did you and Dad adopt me?  Why is Brandt my brother?  Why doesn't Key Bug live with us?  Who takes care of Key Bug?  Where does Key Bug live?

Kent told Blythe about Key Bug's drug use on a day when Key Bug had arranged to come for a visit and then didn't show up.  I like to arrange those visits directly with Keyaira.  I don't tell the children she is coming because too often she doesn't show up.  On the Sunday she was expected and Blythe knew she was supposed to come, I heard all afternoon, "Mom, when is Key Bug coming?"  Then, when she didn't come, we were left without a good response.  It had been drug awareness, Say No To Drugs week at school for both the children, so Kent explained simply but honestly about Keyaira's drug use, and that because of it, she sometimes did things that made other people sad.

Again, our little thinker had lots of questions for me, and with much compassion and sensitivity, and something of a struggle to explain to a four year old about the sad circumstances surrounding drug use, I told her about Key Bug.  I know that this has weighed on her mind because since our initial talk, we have spoken about this issue many times.  Every few days Blythe bring up something about adoption and family and drugs and we talk.  She was with Grandma Dawn yesterday and grilled her with questions too.  I hadn't prepared Dawn, she didn't know all Blythe knew, so she was feeling a bit pressed.

I will admit that I didn't think I would be having these discussions with our kids for a few more years.  As I said, Brandt has not had a follow-up question since I told him he came out of Jamie's tummy, so I sort of figured it would end there with Blythe too.  I guess it is good to start answering questions early on so that there is no sense of mystery or confusion and so that Blythe is comfortable with who she is and where she fits.  I hope I am doing a good job answering her questions.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I took Blythe to the library last week for story time.  She is in big story time now, so I have 25 minutes to be by myself during which I usually find new books, check them out, and then read.  I forgot my book, but as I walked past the Caldecott section, The Invention of Hugo Cabret caught my eye, mostly because of its size--it is 500+ pages.  How could a Caldecott book be so long?  It was also released as a movie recently and I thought the movie looked good, so I checked it out and began reading.  

I finished it the same day.  The 500+ pages are deceiving because many of them contain pictures with no text.  You sometimes turn eight or ten pages at a time without reading anything.  I thought it was a wonderfully fanciful way to move the story along without having to explain through the text what is happening.  Brian Selznick, the author, said, "the images in my new book don't just illustrate the story; they help tell it."  

Hugo's story is very engaging.  Set in Paris in the 1930s, Hugo lives in a train station and is responsible for the care of the 27 clocks throughout the building.  He is trying to rebuild an automaton and steals small toys to get the parts he needs.  He is eventually caught, makes a friend or two, and through the automaton, makes an unusual and historic discovery.

I really liked this book.  I liked it so much I began reading it to Brandt on Friday before bed.  We read for nearly 40 minutes and well past Brandt's bedtime.  Saturday night we did the same, and Sunday night as well.  Brandt is totally into the story, wants to know what happens next, and has lots of questions about how things will unfold.  I suppose it helps that the main character is a boy, the boy has a mechanical man, and he lives in a train station.  I love reading it out loud to him, and watching him study the pictures as they move us along through the story.  

This is definitely a book I would recommend, especially for those with boy children of almost any age.  I know the movie is now available on DVD because I have seen it at Redbox, and so we will watch it after we have finished reading.  There is enough detail in the written story, however, to capture the imagination.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

I got this book, The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais, for Christmas.  Kent asked his sister Brenda for a novel suggestion (not as in "new" but as in "fiction") and this is what she recommended.  I have been reading various other things since Christmas, but I picked it up at the beginning of the week and finished it this morning as I rode my bike.

This is a great book.  It is the story of an Indian boy, Hassan Haji, whose family is in the restaurant business in Mumbai.  A tragedy at home pushes Hassan's family out of the Indian, across Europe, until they finally settle in a remote village in France in a house across the street from a famous restaurant run by a formidable woman chef.  Quoting from the author's web site, "After a series of hilarious cultural mishaps, the grand French chef discovers, much to her horror, that the young boy cooking in the cheap Indian restaurant across the way is a chef with natural talents far superior to her own."  She eventually takes him on as a pupil, and so begins his journey to culinary greatness.  

The descriptions of food throughout the book are yummy.  It made me hungry for Indian food, which I made on Monday, just to satisfy my cravings, hungry for French food, hungry for food.  Morais does a fine job evoking a sense of place, capturing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a place.  The characters are believable and likable and I found myself rooting for Hassan, the protagonist.  I just liked this book and would highly recommend it.  

But don't read it when you're hungry.

A Suitable Boy

This afternoon I finished reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.  It is lonnnnnnng.  When I was looking for an image of the cover, I read on Wikipedia that it is one of the longest, single volume English novels ever written (comes in at 6th longest).  It ranks up there with Atlas Shrugged and the ever great and popular Varney the Vampire (?).  It is 1349 pages, and they aren't small pages either.  I started reading it back in October, but I had to put it down to move and have Christmas and put together my house.  I did want to finish and I did.  Phew! 

I picked up this book as part of my BBC list reading, and I am glad.  Although I thought Seth could have been a bit less wordy (591,552 words total), I enjoyed it.  This book is set in a fictional Indian town shortly after India has gained independence.  It revolves around four families who are interconnected either by marriage or friendship, and the search for a suitable boy to be the spouse of a nineteen year old university student named Lata.  During the unfolding of the story, Lata has three suitors: Kabir, an unsuitable boy because he is Muslim and Lata is Hindi; Haresh, a shoemaker who is a friend of a friend; and Amit, the poet brother of Lata's sister-in-law.  While I would say this is a love story, it is also the story of the political situation in India.  I learned all about Indian politics, land reform, differences in castes, and the struggle India faced in the early days of its independence.  Seth does an excellent job of character development and I felt like I really knew the people in the story by the end of the book.  I think that is what kept me reading when I started all those months ago, and what brought me back to finish.  I wanted to know how my "friends" were doing, how things resolved themselves in their lives.  And in book 17 (of 19), things take a decided turn for the worst (or so it seems), making it difficult for me to put the book down and do other things.  Fortunately, I have been biking for an hour in the mornings on the bike trainer, and I get to read while I pedal, so I was able to finish without ignoring my children too much.

Speaking of length, I wanted to include a passage from the book that I found particularly funny.  Amit, the poet suitor, is writing a novel.  He is asked to come and speak and give a reading at the university's literary club, and following his reading, there is a question and answer period.  This exchange takes place during the Q&A.  

     'Do you believe in the virtue of compression?' asked a determined academic lady.
     'Well, yes,' said Amit warily.  The lady was rather fat.  So funny!     'Why, then, is it rumored that your forthcoming novel--to be set, I understand, in Bengal--is to be so long?  More than a thousand pages!' she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.
     'Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long,' said Amit.  'I'm very undisciplined.  Bit I too hate long books: the better, the worse.  If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes.  But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals,and making enemies out of friends.  I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.'
     'How about Proust?' asked a distracted-looking lady, who had begun knitting the moment the poems stopped.
     Amit was surprised that anyone read Proust in Brahmpur.  He had begun to feel rather happy, as if he had breathed in too much oxygen.
     'I'm sure I'd love Proust,' he replied, 'if my mind was more like the Sundarbans: meandering, all-absorptive, endlessly, er, sub-reticulated.  But as it is, Proust makes me weep, weep, weep with boredom.  Weep,' he added.  He paused and sighed.  'Weep, weep, weep,' he continued emphatically.  'I weep when I read Proust, and I read very little of him.'

All this, especially the part about long books, came on page 1254.  That's right.  1254.  For the record, I have neither scowled nor growled, and I don't think I made any enemies reading this book.  A Suitable Girl, the sequel to A Suitable Boy comes out in 2013.  As A Suitable Boy was first published in 1994 and it will be twenty years to the second, I imagine the sequel will be longish too.

Rifles for Watie

For book group this month we read Rifles for Watie  by Harold Keith.  This is historical fiction and won the Newberry Award the year after it was published, 1958.  It is a story of sixteen year old Jefferson Davis Bussey who lives in Kansas and is anxious to join the army as the Civil War breaks out.  The novel tells of his experiences during the war, marching, fighting, scouting and spying.  Harold Keith deals with a part of the Civil War I knew nothing about, the Cherokee Indian rebellion led by Stand Watie.  Jeff fights for the Union, but towards the end of the novel, as he is trying to scout enemy activity, he ends up a part of the Rebel army.  He finds the men fighting for the South to be as nice as those fighting for the North and is glad when the war comes to an end.  

There is a secondary plot involving a beautiful young Indian girl, Lucy Washbourne, Jeff falls in love with, even though they are on opposite sides of the conflict.  

I liked this book.  I knew nothing of the Cherokee involvement in the war.  They blamed Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears and were in the practice of keeping slaves.  The chief of the Cherokee, John Ross, was adamant that the Union not be dissolved, but another leader, Stand Watie, was eager to join the Confederate cause.  Mixed-blood Cherokee supported Watie and in 1862, he was elected Chief of the Southern Cherokee Nation.  Watie was the last Confederate general to end fighting in 1865.  I thought Keith did a good job of making the characters real and interesting, and I wanted good things for them.  The book is written for an 8-9th grade reading level, and would appeal to boys more than girls.