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This post is from from my other blog here Today my daughters surprised me with a chocolate cake in a mug, which they heard about from a Delicious link (no pun intended, but it fits) I posted right here on this blog. The cake included 78 chocolate chips. They counted. It was heavenly: warm and melty, and even though I shared bites all around, they insisted that I should get the lion’s share, and I was stuffed afterward. Oh my goodness.
And they even cleaned up the kitchen afterward. Someone give those kids a raise.
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic ...
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This post is from from my other blog here Understanding
by Sara Teasdale
I understood the rest too well,
And all their thoughts have come to be
Clear as grey sea-weed in the swell
Of a sunny shallow sea.
But you I never understood,
Your spirit’s secret hides like gold
Sunk in a Spanish galleon
Ages ago in waters cold.
***
Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as ...
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This post is from from my other blog here If you subscribe to my feed, you just saw a second Cybils post that wasn’t meant to go live. I’m keeping a post for notes on the titles I’ve read, and I thought I marked it ‘private’ before I saved. Oopsie.
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This post is from from my other blog here That’s how many titles were nominated in the Cybils Fiction Picture Book category, and how many I need to read in the next six weeks or so.
Two. That’s how many I’ve read so far. Neither one was a standout.
I am keeping my Library Elf hopping these days. Slowly I’m making my way through the Cybils database, clicking back and forth to my library catalog to see which nominees are in our local system, reserving all I can find.
It’s fun to observe which books catch the kids’ attention. Reading and discussing the nominees is something of a family affair, as most ...
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This post is from from my other blog here |
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This post is from from my other blog here On the Typepad site I received a comment on my Coats of Many Colors post which suggested that there might be something morally wrong about paying Coats of Many Colors prices for Halloween and/or All Saints Day costumes:
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This post is from from my other blog here I’m pulling out of the Trader Joe’s parking lot when Rose asks what happened to our shopping cart. “I didn’t see you put it away,” she says.
“I didn’t have to! A nice man was heading into the store, and he took it for me. Wasn’t that kind of him?”
Rose ponders a moment. “Maaaybe,” she says skeptically. “Or maybe he just wanted a way to get your fingerprints.”
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This post is from from my other blog here |
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This post is from from my other blog here This one I Twittered yesterday, but in case you missed it: “Mom, is this correct? For men we say ‘fat,’ for women we say ‘overweight’?”
And this one was uttered casually during dinner cleanup by that same dainty daughter: “Mom, do you know what I like best about girl superheroes in comic books? The fighting. Because I’ve always wished I could just punch someone in the nose too.”
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This post is from from my other blog here Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Hardly needs annotating: the comparative mythology classic, massively influential on literary analysis. I’ve only read chunks of it, never the whole thing. I took a college course called “Men’s Images in Literature” which examined different roles and types of male protagonists, and it was one of the best classes I ever took. We read Hamlet, Goldfinger (yes, a James Bond book!), The Maltese Falcon, Bill Bradley’s autobiography, Malcolm X, and I’m trying to remember what else. I remember how disappointed I was the following year when, after a transfer to another college, ...
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This post is from from my other blog here |
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here I promised to show a picture of the table runner I made. It’s not a great picture, but that’s okay because it’s not a great table runner. But I’m pretty pleased with it. The runner, I mean. The other side is the same green floral as the ends here. The checked fabric—which has green in it and isn’t as orange in real life as in this photo—was a long scrap from the curtains I made for the kids’ craft room.
I had fun with Flickr’s “add a note” feature if you want ...
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This post is from from my other blog here 
1. pink back, 2. summer sunrise quilt, 3. First Doll Quilt, 4. FlockTogetherFront, 5. SewConnected embroidered patches, 6. Polka Dot Estates, 7. baby quilt, 8. raspberry lemonade back + binding, 9. aqua and red, 10. candy corn quilt, 11. spider web, 12. february block, 13. Virtual Quilting Bee - February 2008, 14. february block, 15. 8crayonsA
OK, this is strange. That last picture, the crayons one, is not one of the photos I starred as a Flickr favorite for this mosaic. I have no idea why it’s jumping in there instead of the one I picked. Crayons are always kind of inspiring, though, so I’ll roll with it.
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here Apple cider donuts, gritty with granulated sugar, crisp outside, soft and warm on the inside.
It’s Uncommon Grace’s fault.
From here would be best (sniffle: October = Blue Ridge Mountains homesickness), but I bet we could find some in Julian.
Aha. I knew it.
Can you believe we’ve been in California for two years now?
(Almost. This date two years ago was the day the kids and I reached Phoenix, thirteen days after we left Virginia in a minivan stuffed to the gills—mostly with children—and picked up Scott at the Phoenix airport for the last short leg of the trip to our new home. ...
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This post is from from my other blog here
- Flickr: The The Virtual Quilting Bee Pool - Well. I am completely enchanted. I don’t remember how I came across this virtual quilting bee, but I can’t stop ogling these photos. 12 women agreed to make 12 quilt squares through the course of a year—one square a month, each month devoted to one woman’s quilt. The quilt recipient of the month sends out two fabrics to the other women in the group as a starting point for their squares. The results are stunning.
- Flickr: The one quilt Pool - And here’s another virtual quilting bee. Delicious. I may not do anything ...
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This post is from from my other blog here A blog friend was curious to know why we decided to get Wonderboy’s speech therapy and audiology services from the public school district instead of through a private (i.e. medical) source. It was a tough decision, and I still have moments where I second-guess it. Navigating the system, dealing with an IEP—not to mention the IEP team—hasn’t always been easy. But most of the time I think it was the best choice, bearing in mind that no alternative is perfect.
The advantages, for us, of accessing these services are:
• close to home
• free (including ear molds and hearing aid batteries)
• no ...
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here 
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This post is from from my other blog here I’m passing on some important information from April Halprin Wayland, author of one of my family’s favorite picture books (as I may have mentioned once or twice…):
If you ordered IT’S NOT MY TURN TO LOOK FOR GRANDMA! from April Halprin Wayland’s website, her order form is broken and she didn’t get your order. Please email her at aprilwayland@aol.com.
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here “Where can I find the unabridged editions of the Martha and Charlotte books” is one of the questions I am asked most frequently. I have set up a page to list any sources readers alert me to. If you spot the books somewhere, please let me know and I’ll add the information to this list.
Please note: none of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books have been abridged. You can find them anywhere!
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This post is from from my other blog here I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the Little House books via email lately, and I thought I’d post the answers to some of them here so others can find them.
Where can I find a listing of all the Little House books in order?
Here you go:
Books about Martha Morse, Laura’s great-grandmother, by Melissa Wiley:
Little House in the Highlands
The Far Side of the Loch
Down to the Bonny Glen
Beyond the Heather Hills
 Books about Charlotte Tucker, Laura’s grandmother, by Melissa Wiley:
Little House by Boston Bay
On Tide Mill Lane
The Road from Roxbury
Across the Puddingstone ...
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This post is from from my other blog here Jennifer asked for a photo of the crochet project I mentioned in my weekend crafting notes post at the notes blog. I actually happen to have one already, which is unusual for me. (I still haven’t gotten around to taking a picture of those uneven curtains you were all demanding to see the other day.) Jane and I were working out the pattern for these little picot square table coverings I’m making to hide the scratches on our cheapo end tables, and I liked the way her color sketch looked next to the squares. (The squares are as yet untrimmed, ...
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This post is from from my other blog here
- SouleMama: For 2009 - Oh oh oh!!! Have you bought your 2009 wall calendar yet? I usually pick out an artist’s calendar for the year, but I might just have to go with Amanda Soule’s A Year of Craft instead. That red bird against aqua wall photo is the one that made me fall in love with her blog. ETA: Oh, shoot. It’s 28.95. Hard to justify spending more than 12 bucks on a calendar, especially this year. I’ll just have to keep up my ceaseless clicking around her blog.
- FreeRice: Subjects - Many thanks to Karen Edmisten for pointing out ...
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here I just found some nice comments from friends (Jennifer, Helen, Explore Academy) in my spam folder. Sometimes good comments get marked spam because they contain links. If ou ever send a comment that doesn’t go through, please give me a heads-up. Thanks!
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This post is from from my other blog here My blogroll is bursting lately with beautiful autumn posts and pictures. After so many years on the East Coast, I’m still not used to fall here in Southern California.
Around here, autumn is blue and green
and hot pink
and candy-apple red
and sunny gold.
It’s definitely fall, though: nippy mornings, Santa-Ana-hot afternoons, fruits ripening on the neighbors’ trees.
The bees ...
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This post is from from my other blog here
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This post is from from my other blog here This started out as a daily notes post for Bonny Glen Up Close, but then I figured ah, why not just stick it on the main blog. Sometimes I really don’t know where to put things.
I love at-home days. Yesterday we got out for a walk bright and early before it got too hot. (Except it wound up being a nice coolish day, not too hot at all.) I’m going to try really hard to make first-thing-in-the-morning walks a standard for our at-home days. Everyone had such a good time. Rose took along a notebook and made quick sketches of ...
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This post is from from my other blog here  You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after what happened to poor old Homer and Herodotus. But nooo, I had to go and write about the happy little caterpillar who found its way to my kitchen windowsill and spent the past week munching my geranium to shreds. I celebrated his presence the night before last, and then all day yesterday he was nowhere to be seen. Mysterious, I thought, but honestly I wasn’t searching too hard.
Well, this morning I found him: curled up sideways in the dirt in the bottom of ...
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This post is from from my other blog here I didn’t grow up Catholic. I converted a year before I got married and two years before I became a mother. I had studied the theology pretty intensely for the two years before my conversion, but as a new Catholic, I was clueless about many of the cultural traditions (small-t “traditions” as opposed to capital-T “Sacred Tradition,” which is kind of a big deal in Catholicism).
All Saints’ Day celebrations, for instance. I knew Halloween; I had a very good handle on Halloween. Halloween was one of the three best days of the year when I was a kid. And I’d ...
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This post is from from my other blog here Curly blonde head leaning against my shoulder in the early morning: sleepy child not ready to be awake yet but wanting to be close to mom.
Bach prelude in C on the CD player during breakfast.
The smell of grapefruit dishwashing liquid.
The delight of small children helping wash dishes; the everyday miracle of soap bubbles.
Two-year-old insisting that her big sisters join her in the “Kokey-Pokey.”
Children asking to be read more of the Iliad.
Two-year-old taking an early nap, and a long one.
Blue-and-whites in the fabric stash, and pinks with flowers.
Pink inspiration at As Cozy as Spring, and the feast for the eyes Posie ...
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This post is from from my other blog here 
Can someone tell me the name of these trees? We see them all over Southern California. They’ll be an entry in our 100 Species Challenge after one of you IDs them for me.
Here’s another entry waiting in the wings: morning glories. These are everywhere around here as lush groundcover and picturesque fencecover. I know they can be invasive, but I love them, love them, love them.
This next shot is almost one of the best pictures I ever took. If only I hadn’t ...
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This post is from from my other blog here  The ball is rolling for the 3rd annual Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards. Between now and October 15th, you are encouraged to nominate the best children’s and YA books of 2008 for consideration by the Cybils panelists.
There are many categories of books awaiting your nominations:
Each of those links should take you to the appropriate page for entering your suggestions in the comments. (Just please double-check the category, in case I botched any of the links!)
Thanks for helping us find this year’s very best books!
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Member » 
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There are some great blogs in the running, including one of my personal favorites, 
