The Twinkies

I took the kids for a walk to get groceries. Usually I let them play in the grass outside an apartment complex on the way; there is a great hill they can run up and down and F is figuring out how to roll down it.

Today there were signs up that pesticides had been spread on it and it wasn’t safe for big people, small people and pets.

So, what is the point of grass you can’t walk on? Can’t play on? Because, really, it isn’t as attractive as a flower bed and isn’t as low maintenance as shrubbery. Furthermore, our front lawn looks just as nice other than lacking that nice little hill and we haven’t done diddly to it. No fertilizer. No herbicide. No pesticide. We’ve barely even bothered to water the thing. I think we let the kids run through the sprinkler once - once! - to keep them happy while I put in some plantings.

I really hate the mindset that a lawn - and this grass was, I couldn’t help but notice, laden with some plants that wouldn’t be considered part of the perfect lawn - is so important it is worth dumping chemicals that aren’t safe for man or beast in places that both men and beasts tend to go.

My kids wanted to play on that lawn that was on our walk. F fell over onto it. Ran up the steps and lay down on it before I could stop her. Oh, and the little toxic white pellets were on the public sidewalk too. So now they are on the bottom of our shoes. Which means on my floor. Where my children play. Nice.

Weights & Heights (with percentiles)

J.:
Birth: 6 lbs. 8 oz. / 19″
1 Year: 19 lbs. 12 oz. / 29 1/2″ (10th / 40th)
15 Months: 20 lbs. 14 oz. / 31″ (5-10th / 50th)
18 Months: 23 lbs. / 32 3/4″ (12th / 59th)
2 years: 26 lbs / 34 1/4″ (25th / 25th-50th)

F.:
Birth: 6lbs. 13 oz. / 20″
1 Year: 20 lbs. 3 oz. / 29 3/4″ (40th / 65th)
15 Months: 21 lbs. / 31 3/4″ (30th / 80th)
18 Months: 23 lbs. 12 oz / 33″ (36th / 82nd)
2 Years: 28 lbs/ / 34 1/2″ (50th - 75th / 50th - 75th)

The pediatrician commented on how advanced their ability to follow directions was. Apparently most 2 year olds won’t let you look in their ears or hold out their hands upon request. Who knew?

I saw this over on Our Own Creation and thought I’d take a shot at it.

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE - mine are in red
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - 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
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
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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
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
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
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
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ~ I did read about half of it.
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 I had to read this book when I was teaching because some idiot decided that every kid in the school had to read it one year and every English teacher had to teach it. What a horrible fucking excuse for a book.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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

I don’t believe In Search of Lost Time isn’t on this list.

How ’bout you?

I don’t think a children’s show would have a major character named “Mr. McFeeley” any more.