I will remember

It has been a long time- too long.  A great reminder to continue on creating beauty and truth even when life is pressing against you...

*thanks to Renee at FIMBY for the timely post.

The Daughter's Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick

In 1896, Helga Etsby and her 18-year-old daughter, Clara, sent out on a 3500 mile walk from Spokane, Washington to New York City.  They had 7 months to complete the walk in order to receive $10,000 to save their family farm from foreclosure.  This adventurous and heartbreaking journey kept them away from home for more than a year.  Upon arriving home, Clara departs from her family for more than 20 years.  Not much is really known about what prompted this.  Based on information from family members and a little detective work, author Jane Kirkpatrick presents a historical fiction account of what may have happened to Clara during these 20 years.

I found the walk and the facts of the story very interesting.  That being said, I never found myself endeared to Clara in this particular story.  She didn’t have much heart or soul.  I never felt like she really figured herself out.  As soon as the story took a turn to the fur-trade industry and fur ranching, I lost all interest.  I did stick with the book until the end.  I enjoy stories that bring people together and have a purpose for the reader.  There is a lot of talk about the importance of friends and family in this book, which I agree with, I just feel as if the book ended with a family still living in bondage to the past.

I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.

The Tween Life - Frindle by Andrew Clements

Frindle is a fun book for kids all ages. It is about a 5th grader named Nick Allen. He is not a trouble maker, and not a goodie two-shoes either. He is very bright and has lots of ideas and knows what to do with them.
When Nick starts middle school he has a new teacher and her name is Mrs. Granger. She basically idolizes the dictionary. She always says,“Look it up in the dictionary” when a kid asks about a word. When Nick comes up with a new word, Frindle, and all the kids start using the new word it gets the whole school mixed up. The teachers are mad, all the kids are forced to stay after school and in the middle of this the new word is getting more popular. Soon everyone knows the new word. I don’t want to give away the book, so that is a little bit about the book Frindle. You have to read this book!

Claire :-)

Quotable Wednesday

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.                        C.S. Lewis

Strawberry Girl - 1946 Newbery Medal



Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski was another read-aloud we had this year with Sonlight.  It's the story of two very different families in the early 1900 Florida backwoods.  The Boyer family comes from northern Florida to start a strawberry farm.  The Slaters have lived on the land for generations. The Boyers are what you would consider upstanding, responsible, rule-following citizens.  The Slaters would make you think of as being from the "wrong side of the tracks." This is a story of struggle, disagreements, misunderstanding, and prejudice towards others not like us.

This book provided quite a bit of discussion among us.  While most people would want to side with the Boyers, it's much more complicated than that.  The Slaters may not have bought their land, but they have lived there for generations and they view the Boyers as trying to ruin their way of life. We all enjoyed this book and it helped to remind the kids that life is not always black and white, good and bad.  There is a lot of gray area that we all spend our lives maneuvering around and learning to love our neighbor and serve others is really what everyone should strive for in this life.

Ms. Lenski writes in the Foreword, "In this series of regional books for American children, I am trying to present vivid, sympathetic pictures of the real life of different kinds of Americans, against authentic backgrounds of diverse localities.  We need to know our country better; to know and understand people different from ourselves; so that we can say: 'This is the way these people lived. Because I understand it, I admire and love them.'  Is not this a rich heritage for our American children?"  I couldn't have said it better.

Quotable Wednesday

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends.                  Albus Dumbledore

The moments that make it all worthwhile...

I have started reading a book called NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.  I plan on posting a full  review when I am done with the book, but I just finished a chapter entitled, Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race. A very interesting chapter that proved most helpful to me today.  I've always tried to be open with my kids and help them understand how God creates and loves all of us, no matter our skin color, religious affiliation, etc., and I thought I was doing enough.  Boy, was I taken aback when Matt asked, "Are all dark-skinned people in other countries poor?  If they are, I would never want dark skin."   There was sadness in his voice.  Before I read that chapter, I wouldn't have really understood where Matt's question/statement was coming from and I would have felt like I failed him. 

First, let me back up a bit.  Throughout the year, with the Sonlight  curriculum we're using, we have been reading a book called Window On The World .  It highlights different countries and people groups around the world and ways that we can pray for these countries.  As I flipped back through the book I was struck by how most of the impoverished people we read about were indeed dark-skinned.  Within the past week alone, we have read and prayed for Cuba and Haiti and have learned how the people in both countries are descendants of the African slaves brought over to the West Indies hundreds of years ago.  So, I can see the thinking behind Matt's question.

According to the authors of NurtureShock, from the time we are babies, we have a strong need to belong.  That's why, even in very diverse schools, there are still racial divides (they actually argue there is a form of resegregation occurring).  We all need community and we usually try to find that in others who are like us, whether we realize it or not.   For young children, the color of their skin is one of the easiest factors because it's so noticeable.  It doesn't mean kids are racist, it means they want what's familiar to them.  Race needs to be talked about explicitly for kids to really understand.  For instance, kids don't understand what  the term equal really means, but they do understand it when they learn how awful slavery really was.  When they see how people were torn away from their families, many young children even, forced onto dark and crowded ships, chained like dogs, taken to another world where they would never see their families again and forced into hard labor for the rest of their lives.  Kids understand that kind of  injustice.  My kids still remember a book we read last year called Henry's Freedom Box  which tells the true story of Henry Brown who was torn from his mother when he was very young, and then taken from his wife and children as an adult.  He eventually mailed himself to freedom and we cried all the way through.  Or, The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom, where we learned about slaves escaping to the North by following designs on quilts.  This is the kind of concrete information that our kids remember and it helps them create a sense of unity with people different than them. 

Remembering those books today from last year led Claire to ask, "Mom, would we have helped the slaves?  Would we have been part of the Underground Railroad?"  I told them we sure would have done what we could.  Then we discussed how brave people were to help and wondered what it would have been like at that time in history.  All that talk then led Matt to a little understanding of why so many black people around the world are poor.  I understand it's more complex than that but Matt was reminded of what it would be like to be treated as half-human and have your freedom snatched away from you. 

Matt's final question was, "People with our skin color did that?"  Unfortunately, yes.  Which led to a whole other discussion about how slavery still runs rampant today around the world.  I can't recall that entire discussion because my little justice fighters were so angry that I had to calm them down by making lunch.

I wouldn't trade the blessings of  these days home with my kids for anything in the world.