Back from Vacation...

and I'll give a full report, once I have a bit more time. Playing the catch-up game at work and I think I'm nearly there.

Banned Books Meme

Ripped from Radio Ventriloquist

This is a list of the top 110 banned books.

Bold the ones you've read completely and italicize the one's you've read at least some of.

(The English Major has read a lot of books!)

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Summer Stuff

My eldest still doesn't have a summer placement, but she seems to be having the time of her life despite a daily place to go. She stayed with the neighbors last week on the two days I came into the office. This week, she's hanging with a friend. Unfortunately, the friend and her siblings got into major trouble while the babe was over there, but I was happy to hear that my own behaved herself appropriately. She even helped with the sweeping and the mopping!

Yesterday was hubby's birthday and we got him Jumper as his gift. We also took him to dinner where he ate a buffet of authentic Mexican cuisine. He was very happy. Afterwards, it was off to Krisp.y Krem.e for treats. The girls had a blast and in the midst, I got a call from my neighbor (the one who kept my eldest, the babe, last week) inviting her over for a sleepover. We got home and quickly packed her backpack with next-day digs and toiletries. Her very first sleepover (the neighbor's daughter's birthday is today). We all walked the babe over, gift in tow and chatted with them while the girls played.

Back home, hubby and I spent quality time together and enjoyed more Krisp.y Kreme.s (I'm feeling it today...even after the workout). This morning, with just me and the baby, we talked about potty training. She was good about taking off her pants quickly, after the accidents, but she still hasn't gone in the pot. We'll continue to try.

The eldest came home just a little bit ago and told me about her good time. She wanted to watch the Simp.sons, so I put that in for her. They must have played really hard because she sleeping, sleeping, sleeping (meanwhile, I can hear her sister talking to herself from her crib...silly girl).

Two more days before we're off for vacation. Sleeping in, eating what we like, swimming, playing...can't it start right now?

In the Mood, but Tired

Hubby says that passion and desire will overrule tiredness. I don't know...I've been in the mood for the last few days but sleep has overruled each time. I told him that if we'd stop keeping such late hours, he'd be a much happier hubby. I'm going to make the effort to make sure kids are in bed on time and hubby is ready for couple time earlier rather than later. I hope I succeed. Every time I say I'm going to do something, it usually ends with whatever I've had in mind blowing up in my face.

Speaking of which, I've added to my "wish list to life" again. I'd sort of forgotten about it, but then realized that it's a never ending project that needs attention every once in a while. Some wishes are added or removed, some need appending and some just change their feel entirely. I feel like creating the list makes it real and closer to being a fact than just a wish.

My eldest had her recital last night (third from the last group on the program. Oy!). It was a long night, but she was fabulous. She also received a Student of the Year award from her teacher. She was so thrilled and we were thrilled for her. My coworker came in support (as she did last year). What a peach to drive thirty miles in the rain to support your co worker's daughter's endeavors!

Today, she goes back to the neighbor's house (this is after the incident I described in the last post). She took them her apology letter yesterday and the mother called to tell her that she forgives her and thinks that she's a sweet girl. I hope so. I really do.

The daycare/camp I want to use is still filled and I'm starting to get a little nervous. What will I do next week? Where will she go? I suppose my neighbor would be OK keeping her again, but I really don't want this to become an everyday thing. I don't want to "wear out our welcome" as it were, with our neighbors. Plus, my eldest needs lots of stimulation and things to do. She's a better kid when she's crazy busy. I guess I'll add this to my wish list, too.

Raising Kiddlings the Best Way I Know How

Why is it that when I have my proudest moments around my kids, they go and blow it all up to hell? It just seems to happen in that sequence every time and it really irks me. Yesterday, my beloved eldest had to stay with the neighbors, while I went into town to work (we're on a summer camp waiting list). When I picked her up, we had to hurry to swim lessons, so I couldn't talk to the mom about the girls and their day. Right after swim, it was gymnastics time. The girl is good, I gotta tell you and the teachers felt so too. So, they encouraged me to move her to the intermediate class. Fine. Another fifteen dollars and an additional hour to class time, so that she can possibly get a gold medal some day. Suits me.

I was proud, to say the least, and she was excited to move to the next class level and join her friend, who had already moved up earlier this year. When we got home, I ushered the kids into the shower and started working on dinner. Not two minutes into their shower, I get a phone call from the neighbor. It seems my blessed child, along with the neighbor's daughter, destroyed some moon sand...basically turning it into moon mud. Along with that, the seed of my loins carved her name into their kitchen wall with a knife. What the hell?! Oh! We were livid! She was sobbing by the time we were done with her. Phrases like, "home training" and "destruction of property" and "things you wouldn't do at your own home" were thrown around like crazy last night. I couldn't believe it and, on top of it, I was utterly embarrassed.

The mother kept saying that they had just made bad decisions and it was no big deal. Like hell! It is a big deal when your kid is acting like a hooligan at someone else's house. We've had discussions with her before about how to act away from home and it was if it her memory suddenly disappeared for the day. So, while I work downstairs and her sister enjoys Barney times in the spare bedroom, eldest sister will be cleaning her room and organizing her closet for the first part of the day. It's raining, so there's no going out side and she's also to write an apology letter to the neighbor's. It's a good thing they haven't banned her from their house (which we informed her that they had every right to do).

I know kids mess up but I internalize stuff like this so much. Thoughts of, "Am I doing something wrong as a parent?" or "What do they think of us, now?" and "Will the whole neighborhood be buzzing of this after yesterday?" flooded my mind. Is it crazy to be worried? I don't want her ostracized from things because of a mishap like this. We've had troubles with behavior before and I really thought she was out growing this. I could rack my brain all day, but I don't think it's going to get me anywhere but ulcerated and stressed.