Books and corsets

Another day reading to the kids yesterday.  I picked some of their favorites this time.

Henny was born with arms.  This made her decidedly different from the other chicks and her life wasn't easy because of it but in some circumstances she was at a distinct advantage. The pictures are quite funny when you realize you're looking at a chicken with arms.

 This one was meant for Adelaide's class but when Elizabeth saw it in the tote she pulled it out and said she wanted me to read it to the second graders because she looovvved it.  It's told completely in dialogue and amazing pictures, no narration at all.  Fish comes to find snail in the storybook they live in with the exciting news there is another book with a whole ocean and big adventure waiting for them. Snail is too timid to leave and likes to read stories about kitties, not pirates.  Fish leaves for big adventure without him.  Well, it's not so much fun alone and snail takes the brave plunge to adventure.

 This is a really interesting story about a guinea fowl without spots. She knows she is different and just wants to fit in so she sends away for spots and they arrive in a box.  But some are too big, some too shiny, some too small, some not fit for a guinea fowl, some not spots at all.  In the end she finds some that are just the right fit for her.  The last line makes the whole point "So the best spots to choose if it's friends that you seek, are the spots that you find put a smile on your beak."  Wonderful!

 March is Reading Month and it's also Women's History month and it was always my habit to read books about strong, brave and smart girls during March.  Fiona's Luck was a good choice because it was also St. Patrick's Day.  Luck abounded in Ireland before the big people came.  In order to savae the luck for themselves, the king of Leprechauns gathered all the luck and locked it away for safe keeping.  But his act meant that there was NO luck to be found in Ireland. People went hungry, crops failed.  Fiona found a way to trick the King into letting the luck out and restoring it to the land.  She used her wits!

 

 Same with Beatrice.  She and her mother live in the northern lumber camps in Michigan and they are down to their last bowl of porridge.  Beatrice's mother tells her there are only two ways to make a living there, lumbering or outsmarting the giant that lives over the hills and unfortunately Beatrice was too small for either. Beatrice asks her mother if the Giant is smart.  "You don't have to be smart if you are rich," her mother tells her. Ha! Beatrice uses her wits and outsmarts the giant with great skill.  Just a clever little girl.

"If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft, And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left, Sell one & from the dole, Buy Hyacinths to feed the soul"  Muslihuddin Sadi

After I left school I stopped for a program my daughter was hosting at the Lowell Historical Museum.  We were treated to an understanding of women's clothing in Victorian times. The speaker arrived in her nightgown and proceeded, after a lively presentation of exactly what it took for women to be fashionable from Civil War to the 1890s, to get dressed.  You can see on the table behind her she brought many examples.  It was a fascinating and very interesting afternoon.


First thing after taking off your gown you begin with the underwear.  A word that was never, ever uttered.

The undies were open in the crotch.  There was no "seat" because once you got all those hoops, petticoats and skirts on you could no way maneuver them up over your hips to sit and relieve yourself.  So, the crotch area was open for the breeze.

  First after the undies, the stockings because if you didn't put them on first, you would never be able to bend over in the corset later.

then the shoes

the corset with metal stays that absorbed your sweat and stayed wet and rusted

unlike on television, you could pull the laces on your own corset

for this day's purposes she wore just one petticoat but women wore many. The more petticoats, the more oomph to your skirt.

camisole to hide the corset

blouse

skirt

and jacket.  

I had to leave and get back home so I didn't see the hat and reticule. This outfit was one of many for the day.  Morning dress, going out for a walk dress (this one),  accepting callers dress, dinner and/or evening dress.  Women were tortured.  Can you imagine this in your heat, Australia friends?  We need to all thank Amelia Bloomer, the woman who was brave enough to wear a split skirt, gathered at the ankles and calf length. 

Please, please, please, someone who uses blogger tell me how to do the picture on the title so it goes all across the page?

3.1415....

Happy Pi Day!  We celebrated Pi day today by going to the best pie pantry in, well, anywhere!  I would put Crane's pies up against any pie you can enter in the contest.  Crane's Pie Pantry is in Fennville, Michigan, about 20 minutes from us.  No skinny pies from them.  They pack the fruit in till you can't imagine they could fit in one more cherry or raspberry.  They come from the oven inches thick and oozing juice and are put in the display case for mere moments before someone comes along and buys them.  Or they get served to a diner. Warm.

Our hostess said they had SOOO many orders for pies to be shipped out for today's Pi day and the only thing many customers put on their emailed orders was the number 3.1415.... and their preference:  apple, cherry, raspberry, blueberry, rhubarb, strudel pies.

 PH chose a rhubarb raspberry pie

 I chose the cherry cheese studel pie.  It's a pie thick with cherries then a layer of cream cheese is spread over the fruit and the top crust put on top of that and baked. My absolute favorite. 

I hope you had the chance to celebrate Pi today!

Mud season

It's here!  It's here!  The birds were right!  For the past couple of weeks we could hear the birds chirping like they knew we were close to spring.  It just didn't feel that way till this week.  We made a sharp hairpin curve right turn toward spring this week.  The snow is melting fast, the sun is shining, the sky is blue and the temperatures are close to or in the 50's and people are going without coats and smiling!  We live on an unpaved dirt road and the mud is up to your ankles. 

The sure sign of spring is my daughter's maple syrup harvest from the tree in their backyard.  I was there yesterday afternoon and saw the buckets tapped onto the tree.  You can just see the line of sap  through the white bucket.

She said by this afternoon the buckets will be full and she can start cooking it down.

If you've never seen maple sap it's not sticky, it's the consistency of water, clear like water and tastes like water with just a tinge of outdoors.  Kind of like how the kids smell when they've come running in the house from outside and you give a quick hug.  I always wondered how the native Americans knew that tapping a tree for this liquid and cooking it down would yield sweet sugary syrup.  I wondered until I asked my daughter how she knew this tree would yield.  Well, it's pretty easy. In March when the sap is running in a big old maple tree like this, the sap literally oozes out at points where branches meet trunk. You can see the wet bark.  She noticed the squirrels lying on the branches licking the tree.  So she knew.  As did the native Americans.

While I was packing and purging and getting deep into closets I found this.  Totally forgot about it but remembered I threw it together to be a beach quilt.  I remember the day I grabbed scraps and put them together and bordered it.  There was never a grand plan for this. I even backed it with fabric I had used on occasion as a whimsical table cloth!   It was SO long ago.  But I went so far as to pin it then stuck it away. I think I stuck it in the closet because I dreaded the thought of hand quilting something that was going to get wet and sandy and dirty on the beach. I didn't know about perle cotton and big funky stitches then.  And now, there are many other things I need to be quilting.   So, yesterday Friend Jan and I went to a place called Inspirations of Art in Grand Rapids. She needed to use their AccuCut machine and I used the Sweet 16 to quilt this.  Quilt is the correct term but let me tell you, I HATE machines.  All of them.  Sewing machines and I especially are not friends.  I'm glad the thing will be relegated to the beach.  Anyway,  for $7.50 for a half day I ran straight lines through these strips and "quilted" it.  Ugh.   If those borders were gray it might be considered a modern quilt. 

School days

Another day of sharing good books with kids!  I took Grandpa with me this week and Adelaide curled right up in his lap to listen...just like at home.  She can find the smallest nook and cranny on a grandma or grandpa's body to snuggle in and listen.

A group of Kindergartener's don't have the attention span for long books.  They want action, surprise and good guessing in their stories. I brought two books about hopes and dreams and making them come true through ingenuity.  They think the books were about penguins.

 In this one our penguin friend wants more than anything to fly.  His best friend is determined to help and they go to the zoo to find it.  On the way, penguin notices a flyer for the circus and their need for someone or something to be shot out of a cannon.  Penguin believes he has his answer at last.  But you still need a friend.

 In this story penguin is also determined to fly and gets in his boat and goes to flight school.  All the other birds at the school try to explain to him that he's a penguin and so can't fly.  He tries and tries and tries again.  Finally dejected, he heads for home.  But flamingo can't stand such a sad face and has a plan. 

 These three I read to the second graders.  Again, the element of surprise at the end and the problem solving during the reading is so fun to see.  Our young friend in Stuck finds himself with the problem of getting his kite out of a tree.   He tries tossing his shoe up.  But it gets stuck.  His other shoe.  It gets stuck.  A ladder (here's where the problem solving comes in. "Why doesn't he just...." comments are being made from the class.), etc. until all sorts of improbable things get stuck in that tree.  Does the kite ever come down?  You will have to find out.

 There really is a Holly Hobbie.  She's a real person, not a doll. Her watercolor illustrations are gorgeous and she has a great collection in the Toot and Puddle stories.  This one is a true memory of hers and it's beautiful.  Again, with a surprise ending that leaves kids either satisfied or thinking the girl got the sad end of a horse. But always a response.

Our last Betty Bunny book!  You remember the Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake,  Wants it All, Wants a Goal, Didn't Do It stories.  These are really meant for a younger crowd than second graders but reading them to this group only underscores the point that you can read a picturebook to any age child (or adult) and they'll all find something different in it.  By this age the kids really see the humor in Betty's reasoning process.  Betty Bunny Loves Easter and can't wait for the Easter egg hunt.  She is going to find the MOST.  She loves eating chocolate that looks like her and she plans to BE the Easter bunny when she grows up.  Oh, and a dentist, too.  At this year's hunt she notices her brothers and sister helping her by dropping eggs into her basket and she tells them to stop.  She wants to find them on her own.  But of course, without help she doesn't find as many.  This one is about independence.  You appreciate what you do on your own.

A Fifty Year Silence: Love, War and a Ruined House in France

 A Fifty Year Silence: Love, War and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillet

War changes a person.  You don’t come out the same person you were when you went in.  Anna and Armand were no exception.  At one point, about five years after surviving World War II, Anna walked away.  She took her children, her typewriter, closed the door and left.  And fifty years later, she was still married to Armand but they had not spoken to nor seen each other in all that time. Nor did they explain to anyone what happened to spur that decision.

Miranda Richmond Mouillot loved both her grandparents though she saw her grandmother much more than her grandfather, who lived still in Europe and only came here for an occasional visit, missing all the milestones of life, and always when he knew he would never accidentally see Anna.

Anna was a physician and Armand was, after the war, an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials.  Both survived the war mostly in refugee situations barely seeing each other.  You could count their time together in marriage in months.

Now both are old and frail and Miranda is determined to understand this animosity. She moves to the crumbling, abandoned medieval stone house in France that her grandparents still owned and immerses herself in archives, letters, convoluted stories from her grandparents, and history, to put together their story, their legacy of grief  and trauma and hope passed on now to a third generation. 

I admired the author’s tenacity in unravelling this story, sticking with what seemed to me insurmountable odds, stubbornness and tenderness and even humor to ‘find’ her grandparents once and for all.

 This book was provided by Blogging for Books

Butterflies

It's so cold out.  We are all quite tired of it.  Had our fill up to here.  So today I gave myself a dose of spring and went to the Fredrick Meijer Gardens to see the butterflies.  I don't know the exact numbers and particulars, though I should.  What I do know is the conservatory is 85 degrees with 70% humidity and the hundreds of butterflies they bring in are flying all over the place.  There is nowhere else as green, warm and beautiful right now.  I stayed for two hours walking around taking pictures. It was a very welcome relief from the cold and snow and wind outside.

 

At the Water's Edge

 

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen
 

The very first word in this book had me hooked.   Drumnadrochit.  I know the what’s and where’s of Drumnadrochit.   It’s a small place in Scotland, on the shore of Loch Ness.  And we were there! So, yes, immediately, I was hooked.

But it didn’t take long before I was pulled into the story.  Set during World War II Ellis and Maddie Hyde, a very mismatched couple, find themselves ostracized from Ellis’ wealthy family in Philadelphia.  Ellis, a cad with a capital “C” decides the only way to win his way back into his father’s graces, and his bank account, is to go to Scotland and find the Loch Ness monster for real.  Not the one his father faked finding years ago. 

Maddie, Ellis and Hank, Ellis’s other half, travel the u-boat infested Atlantic to Scotland and set up shop in a small inn on the shores of the Loch.  Ellis and Hank’s snobbery turns everyone against them. The villagers can’t quite accept two able bodied young men such as Ellis and Hank not being in the war.  Ellis is color blind and Hank has flat feet.  War has reached all corners of Europe and the little village of Drumnadrochit is no exception.  Maddie who is left behind during their excursions endears herself to the people in the village by helping out, learning, and sharing. 

Whether you believe in the Loch Ness monster or not, many have tried to either prove or put to rest the stories.  Don’t decide because of the setting and the legend that this book isn’t worth your time.  It turns out that monsters aren’t just in the lake. 
 

This book was made available through Edelweiss Above the Treeline