Friesencold

I had a great trip to Boston this past weekend with Cash to visit my sister Holly and her husband Dwight.

Cash was amazing, the baby who never cries. I loved being with my sister, seeing where she lives, getting to know Dwight better, watching two movies (Children of Men and Girl, Interrupted), eating dinner at a great pizza place called Za, watching Dwight make poached eggs the real way, finding out more about Holly’s job at OxFam, and wishing it wasn’t snowing so much. I just love the area of Cambridge where they live. It puts downtown Naperville to shame and that’s coming from one of DT Napes’ biggest fans. I’ve already decided that we must take a family trip back to Boston in the summer of 2010.

I’ve kind of been in a funk lately due to not having any good reading material. The best thing I’ve read in the last 2 weeks is probably the underlines I made during my first reading of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) back last fall. I’ve enjoyed going back through the book and remembering why I liked it so much, but I need to read. I checked out 2 books by writers that Amy Krouse Rosenthal mentioned in her Encyclopedia that she likes, David Sedaris and Annie Dillard. I took a good look at both of them, their outside covers, inside covers, copyright page, author bio, etc….which is what I always do before I dig in and start reading, but I am not really reading either of them just yet. I feel like I need something I can easily get into right now and enjoy the story (neither of the above two I mentioned are really story books). My sister was reading the book Dreams From My Father by our new President way back in ‘95 probably before he had any inkling he’d be President. I think it’s so cool that he wrote the book so long ago before he was famous, although I did see on the copyright page that there were updates added in 2004. I got the book from the library today – I HEART THE LIBRARY – and look forward to starting it tomorrow since LOST is about to take up my evening.

Bauer’s memory is stellar. Are all kids like this? I think so, but it is quite amazing to see what they can remember just from hearing words and not from seeing or recognizing words yet. At the beginning of the year, Bauer helped me make and decorate a Rules Chart for our family. I got the idea from a friend who had something similar displayed in her kitchen for her kids. In addition, I decided to add a Bible verse at the bottom of the chart that we can switch out every couple of weeks. The plan is to go through the whole alphabet this year, doing a verse beginning with each letter A-Z. I did this as a child, and the last time my mom visited I asked her to bring the Bible verse book that we had with all the verses in it. It was fun to see how many of them I was able to remember from over 20 years ago.

We put the decorated posterboard up by the table so when we’re eating we can take time to read over the rules and the Bible verse. We’ll leave each verse up for about 2 weeks and when the 2 weeks are up, we’ll make a special point to have Bauer say the verse all on his own and then reward him with a small toy that he gets to pick up from our special new toy bin. That night was tonight for the A verse. See this video (along with other new ones on the Movies tab)….

From Memory from friesencold on Vimeo.