Summer Reading

Over at the scifi book club on good reads we have two books already selected for summer beach reading.  We are currently looking at Battle Royale and next month we will look at Ender's Game.  We also have a poll up for the August book. 

I am going to give my 12 year old some challenging books for the summer.  I plan on having her pick two off of a 9th grade honors English recommended reading list.  Since I am already reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I will also have her read that. 

I am wondering if I should have her invite some of her friends to discuss the books with us.  Most of her friends aren't as advanced in reading, scheduling such things can be tricky, and finding an accomodating venue would be the challenges.  Maybe I will suggest it, but keep the invite power for myself. 

Has anyone ever tried this with kids?  I do the library's parent child book club, but those kids generally don't know each other very well.  These books are going to be more challenging and have less general reader appeal (for their age, at least). 

Leave it to Beaver

We got a DVD with 20 Leave it to Beaver episodes on it from the library and have been working our way through them for the past couple of weeks.  My girls are 8 and 11 3/4.  They had never seen the show before.  I don't think it runs in syndication anymore.  We did the same thing last year with Gilligan's Island (also not running in syndication anymore) with equal success. 

Beaver impresses me upon rewatching as an adult and more importantantly as a father.  As a kid, I only noticed the hijinks, but now I see the parenting magic.  Like me, you may remember the Cleavers as the perfect parents.  Rewatching, they were anything but.  They made mistakes and misteps, but they learned from them and became better parents every week.  Watching the show as a parent is fairly encouraging. 

My kids absolutely love the show.  They run around quoting the show and can't wait to watch more episodes.  They love to compare our family to the Cleavers (how could we ever measure up).  My wife even likes it. 

In summary, the show is just as good as you remember it and is a great show to watch as a family.  Wally and the Beav will soon be just like family themselves. 

Thanks Film Father!

I entered a contest over at Film Father's site and got the first two wimpy kid books and a wimpy kid standee.  Thanks Film Father.  My kids love the wimp kid books. 

Oh No!

Looking back at a lot of my recent posts and it is apparent that this blog has become a daddy blog.  This was obviously not my intent and still isn’t.  I guess because I am a dad and it is a big part of my life (sometimes seems like the whole thing), it is just a natural change. 

Part of it may have to do with the focused niche writing I have been doing at my other sites.  Some of it has to do with vox closing.  How easy was it to just respond to the question of the day.  Some of my best work was snarky responses to those questions.  I realize that their is a place where I can go for these, but knowing that it is an individual working on them and not some corporate entity makes me not want to answer snarkily and I also have to go out and track the question down. 

I don’t mean to be a daddy blogger, but it just happens sometimes.  I try to post here at least once a week and I will make the conscious effort to make that two posts if one of them is a daddy blog. 

If you want to read about scifi- check out my SciFi Media Page  and if you want some martial arts stuff I write at Practical Black Belt.  I can’t promise all the posts at these places  will be daddy blog free, but a majority of them will be. 

Was this a daddy blog or do I owe you guys another post this week?

Fancy Nancy

Cover of Fancy Nancy

My youngest isn’t a bookworm like my oldest.  She reads but we struggle to find things that hold her interest.  A couple of years ago, I heard an interview on NPR about the Fancy Nancy books.  I thought that these sounded right up my youngest child's isle.  On Tuesday evening, we go every Tuesday, we went to the library and I grabbed a couple of the books. 

She didn’t want to read them.  She said they looked stupid and that the words were too easy and that she new what the big words meant.  I forced her to read it out loud to me and she finally did.  She started off reading it very sarcastically.  She finally cooled down and read it right.  We went over the list of words at the end and she stated that she knew them all except for merci.  We practiced that one and it was fun. 

I sent her to put the book away and she comes back with the second Fancy Nancy book.  She then says, I want to read this one to see if I hate it too.  Score one for Dad.  Actually I am pretty good at reading my kids and I don’t think I have suggested something that they ended up not liking yet.  I love that she wouldn’t admit that I was right.  She is just like her mom. 

Purgatory Chasm

This weekend we had a great time hiking in Purgatory Chasm.  The chasm has some great rock formations and I did a whole lot of climbing around on rocks.  They have an attached kids park that was a lot of fun because it had a merry-go-round.  Yeah, like when I was a kid.  This one was made with cables so was kind of safe, but oh well.  The kids didn’t know how to use it.  They thought the parents were supposed to push.  We did for a while but that is hard running.  they eventually go the hang of pushing themselves. 

Ally had absolutely no fear in the chasm.  Either that or she completely trusted me to not let her fall.  Probably a mix of both.  Ashli couldn’t hang with me when it came to bounding from rock to rock.  They both had me in the fat man squeeze, as I, a fat man, got squeezed.  The trail was marked well by spray paint on the rocks.  Effective but ugly.  There was a trail map available online and at the location.  So far, my favorite MA park. 

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Proud Parenting Moments

blogger Tags: ashli, ally, reading, books, parenting, proud

This morning, I had one of those rare proud parenting moments.  One of those moments that reassures you that you are doing a sufficient job in raising your child.  There are a lot of cool moments when your kids do something that make you laugh or make you happy but the ones where they make you proud are fewer. 

This morning as I was getting ready for work and the girls were waiting for their breakfast, I told my youngest to read the book she had gotten from the library.  She grabbed the book and sat down in the recliner.  Her sister came and sat beside her.  They made an arrangement; The oldest would read the left hand page and the youngest would read the right.    My oldest patiently let her sister read and only helped her when she was asked or something was mispronounced. 

It was great that they sat there reading to each other.  It is one of those times that you know are fleeting.  The oldest is almost 10 and will soon hate her sister tagging along.  The youngest is 6 and will soon not head her sisters guidance.  What made me proud though, was the way my oldest handled it.  The patience and lovingness she showed were beyond words.  I pulled her aside afterwards and told her that she was a great big sister.  And yes, I told the youngest that she did a great job with her reading.

They were reading Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. 

Ender is Done

Ender's Game (Ender, Book 1)

Orson Scott Card

I just finished reading Ender's Game to Ashli.  She loved it.  She has even recruited her friends as toon leaders in her own Phoenix Army at school.  Her favorite quotation is, "Cover your butt, Bernard is watching.  God."  It was great to share this book with her.  I hope she remembers it all of her life.  It is really rewarding to have a piece of literature that you like so much and to be able to pass it on to your children. 

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By Popular Demand

Ashliallytkd

The kids are doing great.  Since the picture was taken Ally has received her yellow belt.  Ashli (giant slacker) is still an orange belt.  Ashli started her new school on July 22 and it is a lot tougher than normal schools.  We met the teacher and she told us what the kids will be doing this year.  They are going to really push the kids at this school.  They have to do a book report every week!   Ally is jealous because she wants to go to school too.  August, 5 was her 4th birthday and she is mad that she didn't get a pink Nintendo DS.  They both spent the night at a friends house last night.  This is Ally's first real slumber party and she was excited to go.  

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I feel sorry for the kids

I really do.  I mean they are so deprived.  Do you remember slides in the 80's?  Yeah, they were like twenty feet tall with a ladder leading up to them.  Then there was the jungle gym.  It was a latticework of metal bars welded together and painted and chipped so many times it was almost psychodelic.  The monkey bars?  There was a price for falling off of those things and you learned to make it all the way across.  We had safety back then too.  Some genius decided that dirt wasn't safe so the playgrounds would be full of tiny rocks or pea gravel.  Sure it broke a fall but it was even more helpful in playground wars. 

It isn't just playgrounds though. Our children will never discover (on there own) the strength of Adam as he defended Eternia.  They will not know that life is like a hurricane in Duckburg.  Gummy bears will always only be something you eat.  Nothing will ever be smurfy to them.  They will never shout thunder, thunder, thundercats, Hoe!  Imaginations will be hampered as they will only ever see the lamborgini's with the doors that open upwards as cars and not as possibly planes too.  They will never be eager to wake up early on Saturday mornings or before school and flip on the TV, because, lets face it, the news isn't fun for them.  What hope is there if they don't know that Captain Planet will take pollution down to zero?  Sure they have the transformers, but is it really transformers if the Lion song "The Touch" doesn't send shivers down their spine. 

Cereal sucks too.  How many toys have you pulled out of your box lately?  Very few if you are like me.  Most boxes want you to collect 10 tops and send them in with 3.95 for shipping and handling for something crappy you don't really want.  How are kids supposed to know which cereal to buy without the toy showing the way?  Where is the Trix Rabbit, Snap, Crackle, and Pop?  Why does Hannah from Montana have her own cereal.  Why aren't my kids cucoo for Cocopuffs. 

Their whole lives are seatbelted, safe, and educational.  Kids are not allowed to have fun, be daring, or experience violence in fictional yet very real fashion (oh, you know you cried when optimus died).  They will never learn that prize doesn't always justify the expense without having to eat a box of crappy cereal because they just had to have the toy that was inside.  Without fun toys, how will children ever get exercise.  Sure they would rather play video games than turn the stearing wheel on the plastic, sanitary playground equipment embedded on soft foam with monkey bars that you have to lift your knees so you don't drag the ground.  I would too.  How will kids learn to appreciate good storytelling when current cartoons are all fart jokes.  Kids today will never know that knowing is half the battle;  so, they have just lost half the battle.  Without good fighting evil in cartoons how will kids grow up to know that good is supposed fight evil or that evil even exists in the first place?

We have oversanitized our world and our children will have no immunities.

 

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