Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

It’s been a rough week this week, with both the kids and me adjusting to school again after two weeks of vacation.  (No, I’m not in school.  I just had a two-week break from getting up and making sure the kids get ready for school, as well as making sure the girlies get their homework done in spite of a two-year-old brother who wants to be part of the process in decidedly unhelpful ways.)  Being almost 8 months pregnant means that I get frustrated easily at the end of the day; despite the frustration, however, good things also happened today, and so I’m going to highlight them instead.  Why only focus on gratitude in November?

1)All of the kids ate dinner willingly.   (This always makes your day better.)

2)My oldest, for the first time I can think of, was willing to try a suggestion I made to her when she was frustrated with her piano practicing.  She found that it actually helped, and her practicing ended on a positive note.  This is a truly wonderful thing.

3)The kids ran and enjoyed being outside today, both the girls on the walk to school and all the kids on the walk to piano lessons.

4)I put frozen meat into the crockpot at 2:30 and hoped for the best, and it really got about perfectly done.  This does not always happen.

5)My son may have decided that he actually likes clementines (he certainly stole half of mine).  If this isn’t just a passing thing, it will make winter lunch options SO much easier.

And there you have it.  I have many, many other things for which to be grateful, but when kids are not their best at bedtime, it can be helpful to remind myself that we absolutely had good moments today.  Here’s to more good moments tomorrow!

My hubby gets his choice of a ham, a turkey, or a roast from his work every Christmas, and I’m a fan of the ham.  Besides its salty, smoky goodness, ham is also versatile; I usually don’t even bother to serve it as a main course.  Instead, I dice it and freeze it in one cup containers, so that I can grab a couple when I’m in the mood for a ham recipe.  I haven’t gotten the whole ham take care of yet, sadly, but on Saturday I diced enough to freeze two cups and make this Chunky Cheese Soup.  Shockingly, I follow all the directions when I  make this (unless you count subbing a grind or two of my pepper grinder for however much pepper a recipe calls for, but that’s because I’m freakishly sensitive to black pepper), although I was generous with some of the amounts.  (It’s soup, after all.  I figure you’re better off heaping up the measuring cup than figuring out what to do with an extra tablespoon or two of diced celery.)

Anyway, this soup has a lovely cheesy, hammy flavor, and it’s fast, which is nice.  One recipe fed our family of five (keep in mind, our kids are young and two out of three aren’t soup fans) with enough left over for my lunch the next day; I would have doubled it, but cheesy soups don’t freeze well. I always use sharp cheddar, because that’s what I buy, and I think the flavor it brings is important.  My oldest really likes this one, and my youngest was pretty willing to eat it when I fed it to him (soup is hard when you’re two!).  My middle did better than she usually does with soup, which I’ll take.  In summation (I’m feeling formal today, apparently), it’s a relatively fast and easy soup if you’ve got ham on hand.  Give this one a try!

I did, in fact, finish Natalie Kinsey-Warnock’s A Doctor Like Papa on New Year’s Day, but don’t be overly impressed–its 73 pages include several full-page illustrations, and the font is definitely on the large side.  (And I didn’t start it on New Year’s Day.)  That said, I still really enjoyed this one.  It made such a nice contrast to the last Kinsey-Warnock book I read, which was her first novel and not her best.  In it, ten-year-old Margaret wants to be (surprise surprise!) a doctor like her father, but when she meets the reality of the influenza pandemic of 1918, she begins to wonder if she’s ready to make the necessary sacrifices.  How she proves that she is completes a satisfying tale for young readers that is just poignant enough for its intended audience.

I just finished Rachel Baker’s The First Woman Doctor, and while I absolutely found Elizabeth Blackwell’s life fascinating, I realized that I’ve become a bit spoiled in the children’s non-fiction department.  After all, because of my Newbery quest, I’ve read quite a few books by Russell Freedman, as well as a couple of Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s; not all of them were biographies, of course, but they were all meticulously researched and well-told accounts of either historic events or famous people.  The First Woman Doctor, by contrast, has a certain tone that’s not uncommon in biographies written for children, especially those written in the latter half of the 20th century; it’s an inspiring story told to children in such a way that an adult reader can easily recognize the signs of assumptions and opinions throughout the book.  That’s not to say that it’s willfully inaccurate, necessarily; it’s just that the book has a definite spin.  No negative aspects of Elizabeth Blackwell’s personality come up at all (unless you count her restlessness, which is essential to her story); it isn’t that I want dirt on someone, but this sort of biography is an idealized portrait, rather than a vivid snapshot.  It’s a style of biography that describes a life in a certain way and likely omits details that interfere with that vision.  I’m not saying that the facts in the book are inaccurate, mind you, but it would certainly make an interesting lesson on fact and opinion for high school students.  I think I might enjoy reading the book with them and then discussing different aspects–is this a fact or an opinion?  Can the author prove this?  What ideas and happenings are presented as true that are inherently subjective?