It's been awhile

There has been so much going on! Nobody really reads my blog, so it's easy to let it go to the back burner. M has been having tummy troubles, what with the HD and all. :) She was having blood in her stool and quite a bit of pain. Turns out the silly goose had swallowed a penny. Most kids, I think, swallow their share of loose change. Not a good idea for M, though, because her lacking a colon makes it impossible to get anything like that out. She's doing better, though. They did a flexible sigmoidoscopy and found the penny. They also did some xrays to make sure there wasn't any more spare change in her body. She was all clear. :) We met with her GI doctor this week. He recommended we put her on a fiber suppliment and gave us samples of some probiotic that he said was much better than the over the counter stuff. So we're trying that out.

In other news, I feel so domestic. I found this blog, which has really inspired me to be a better homemaker. Also, one of my friends is going to teach me how to knit in exchange for homemade bread.

Now I'm taking a self-imposed exile from the computer so I can be a productive homemaker!

Okay, this is just scary

Wow. That's all I have to say about this.

Eye rolls, air quotes, and clenched jaw

McCain must be spending time with Gov. Palin's kids. Because he was sure acting like one last night. A couple of highlights:

He rolled his eyes when Obama mentions labor leaders in Columbia being the targets of assassinations.

He used air quotes when talking about the health of a mother while pregnant

Throughout the debate, he kept clenching his jaw and showing utter disdain for Senator Obama.

He shows total astonishment when informed of Obama's tax plan, stammering "zero".

He maintained total lack of logic and basic understanding. At one point, he blamed Obama's not agreeing on numerous town hall meetings as the reason for his attack ads. And then he kept referring to Palin's understanding the needs that Autistic children have. He must have figured Autism, Down Syndrom, same difference. What the heck?!?!?!

Those are just a few examples. On a whole, Barack Obama mopped the floor with him.

Top 100 books?

Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts has a list of the top 100 books they have published. I haven't been able to find the list directly from the NEA website, but I only made a cursory glance. At any rate, from what I've read on a couple of blogs, the average American has read only 6 of the books on the list. Some of these books are great books. Others, not so much. I'm not sure what the criteria was for selecting these books, but one book in particular I read because it was on this list and I thought it was dreadful. Also, there are some books that I feel should definitely be on any list, but aren't on this one. Go figure.

I think what I've determined for myself is to read the books on this list that I have had recommended from other sources and hope for the best.

So without further adieu, here is the list. I have listed in bold the books I have read and italized the books I want to read. In blue are the books I probably should read. In green are books that the kids and I have read together. In red are the books I love.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling K1 and I have read this together
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible most of it, anyway. ;o)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott The kids and I have read this together
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebeeca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams I've tried to read this a few times. It's funny in parts, but a little too slow going.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis The kids and I have read this together
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A A Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love.
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery the kids and I have read this one together.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt So Ridgecrest.
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac Big
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo probably one of the best books ever written!!

Wow. I think I have some reading to do! I have quite a few of the books around the house. I think I'll start with the ones I should and to read. Then alternate between the books I want to read and the books I should read. Hmm..... if I read one book a week, it will only take me about a year! :D For now, I'll just pat myself on the back that the kids have read more of the books on the list than the average American and curl up with To Kill a Mockingbird.

They keep dragging me back in

Every fall, I feel like Michael Corleone. During the summer, I have grand plans.

I have daydreams of ditching the TV. It's a big time and brain sucker. Imagine what little geniuses we would have running around, if they were kept from the boob tube. Imagine the books I could read. Imagine the conversations we'd have around the dinner table. Imagine the game nights. Imagine the quiet.

Heck, the only shows D and I watch in the summer, and most of the rest of the year, are The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. And we watch those online, since we ditched cable when we started living on a student budget.

Then the end of September rolls around. And the fall sweeps hit. And I remember how much I like The Office, My Name Is Earl, and Pushing Daisies. And I start to think that maybe, just maybe, literature, learning, and culture are overrated. At least on Wednesday and Thursday nights.

To protect the innocent and my kids

I'll be talking about my kids, since I spend a lot of time with them and frequently find them amusing. I'll also be talking about my spouse. But not because we spend a lot of time together. Law school has made that not so possible lately. At any rate, for the sake of ease and a perhaps irrational fear of what an open space the internet is, I'll be using first initials for my family members.

Our cast of characters are as follows:

C (yours truly)
D (the spouse)
K1 (oldest kid)
K2 (second kid)
E (smack dab in the middle kid)
S (second youngest)
M (the "baby")