Have you been encountering articles online about how it’s a great idea to get into cooking and baking during the coronavirus shutdown? Make bread! Make cookies with your kids! Etc. And while I’m all for positive family activities to hold everyone together during these long days, I’d sound my usual note of caution about discretionary eating. It’s all too easy to binge/gorge on food as well as Netflix. Neither choice is going to have a good end result.
So, several weeks ago I put together one of my four-times-a-season retreat breakfasts for the wonderful, wonderful choir to which I belong. (Be sure to get your tickets now.) I had actually done a pretty good job of getting things done ahead of time, making up my chile-corn-cheese casseroles the night before and also the cranberry-orange rolls from Smitten Kitchen. (Mine didn’t have glaze–too sweet.) I had loaded up the car with supplies the night before also, a task I usually postpone until the frantic morning of the event. Really, as I look back on the whole thing I don’t see any particular reason for me to have been at all frazzled. I think that perhaps I didn’t get on the road quite as early as I meant to, but even that’s a little doubtful.
Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days: An Almost Completely Honest Account of What Happened in Our Family When Our Youngest Son, His Wife, Their Baby, Their Toddler, and Their Five-Year-Old Came to Live with Us for Three Months by Judith Viorst, originally published by the Free Press, 2007, now available in a number of formats through Amazon and at the library. (The above is an Amazon affiliate link.)
To be honest, I haven’t been doing a lot of book reading these days. It seems as if every waking moment that I’m not spending on anything else I’m devouring articles about the election. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still love books and have ones that I recommend, and I can’t believe that I’ve never posted about this one. I bought it in hardback when it first came out and vividly remember reading it aloud in the car to my husband and son. The title is a takeoff of Viorst’s earlier children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very Bad Day. Same guy, but now he’s married with three children, needing a place to stay while his family’s house is being remodeled. So his parents invite the tribe to stay with them rather than renting a place. It turns out to be quite an adventure.
I love books that have a strong authorial voice, and especially those that echo my own personality. Oh my! Do I ever relate to Judith, whether she’s slipping an article underneath her son’s bedroom door about the dangers of too much bike riding, or trying to nonchalantly remind him about the instability of the big oak dresser upstairs, or restraining herself from shrieking about chocolate coming anywhere near her beloved velvet furniture. (I’m that way about my beloved dining room table and anything that could possibly scratch it.) She’s very self-aware, though, as I hope I am. Here’s a representative passage:
It’s inevitable, I suppose, that living, as Milton and I are now living, in close quarters with our resident grown-up children, there are bound to be opportunities–lots of opportunities–for intergenerational irritations. Some of them, however, some of us parents might be able to avoid by repeating the following mantra twice a day:
Don’t judge, advise, or criticize.
Respect their boundaries and choices.
Accept who they are.
Well, sometimes we need to repeat it ten times a day. And then we must try to abide by what we say. I’m doing my best.That doesn’t mean that I always succeed in keeping my mouth shut when I should keep my mouth shut. But I don’t understand those parents who won’t even try.
For me, the greatest delight of this book is that it reminds me of my own wonderful family, both immediate and extended, and how much I enjoy spending time with them. The long trips taken with my in-laws. The family reunions at the beach. The Thanksgivings and Christmases. This afternoon we’re heading over to said in-laws for dinner, so I’m trying to get this post done and my newsletter out before we leave. We haven’t had our usual Sunday-afternoon lunch for a couple of weeks, so it’ll be nice to see them.
Great takeaway: “And then we must try to abide by what we say.” A great reminder to me, as a champion maker of resolutions that I don’t keep,
Eventually the 90 days end and everyone goes back home. It’ been a great time, and now it’s over. One more quotation, only one, I promise: “I am full of smiles and tears at the same time, full of the difficult knowledge that I can’t, as the poet once put it, ‘cage the minute within its nets of gold.'”
Well, you need to read the whole thing. Only 113 pages of big type, and every one of them full of wisdom. Well, well worth the time.
I wrote a post some time ago called “Fifteen Minutes a Day Can Change Your Life.” This was a quotation from a former pastor, who may have gotten it from the book Success Is Not an Accident: Change Your Choices, Change Your Life by Tommy Newberry. (I just googled the phrase and this book came up—it looks good! I now have it checked out from that great library service Hoopla.) Anyway, the window of opportunity has now narrowed from 15 minutes to 5 seconds. Very efficient, no? I found out yesterday about this totally, insanely motivating woman named Mel Robbins through a rather circuitous route that started with my usual Thursday listening of the “Happier in Hollywood” podcast hosted by Sarah Fain and Liz Craft. They were interviewing someone who had interviewed Mel on her own podcast, so I went over and listened to that episode (language warning) and then watched Mel’s TED talk (access below) and a video or two or her on her own. Now I’m a Mel Robbins fan.
I just had a wonderful weekend at Camp Elim, a Christian camp near Colorado Springs, where I was privileged to speak in a couple of workshops. My two topics were “What’s Your Tendency?”, an examination of Gretchen Rubin’s theory about the four ways that people respond to expectations, and “How Food Fads and Myths Can Harm You,” in which I took on some of the current ideas floating around in the eating theories world, with a few side trips into my views on alternative medicine. I may get myself into trouble with that second one! My actual group for that session was small as I was competing with a very popular one on marriage, and they all seemed very receptive to my ideas. I gave everyone who attended the sessions the opportunity to sign up for a resources page, so I decided to just turn that material into a post for all my readers to access. Here ’tis:
I’ve written before about the JFK assassination in reference to an excellent book about the conspiracy theories surrounding it, and I’ve been obsessed with that event for years. (For awhile I even bought into one of the more outrageous CT’s—that JFK’s body was spirited off the plane out the back door, taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and then had its head wounds “modified” before the autopsy took place. The shenanigans that would have had to take place in order for this to happen are unlikely, to say the least. But boy, was I riveted! That book is Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David Lifton, and no, I don’t recommend it, unless you have a taste for fantasy. You’ll note that I’m not giving my usual Amazon link to it.)
For some reason I got to thinking today about a situation from back in my grad school days, one which I may have written about before. For my master’s thesis and recital I had a teacher assigned to me for us to work one-on-one. She had extremely strong opinions about how my writing should be done; she was a writer herself, and she thought her process was the only way to go. So she informed me early on that I would have a certain number of pages due each week—five, I think. I protested. “I need time to research and think about what I want to say.” That was fine, she assured me. I might end up throwing those pages away, but I needed to do them anyway. Well, what a pain. I did what she asked, but in the end I wasted a lot of time, because I was being forced to follow her process instead of my own.
The hits just keep coming from Dana K. White, author of last week’s book pick, How to Manage Your Home without Losing Your Mind and of the blog A Slob Comes Clean. Remember how I said that she had me nailed with her description of someone sitting at a messy kitchen table reading about how to clean up her kitchen, when what that person really needs to do is . . . clean up the kitchen? Well, she has another concept that is so, so me: “project brain.”
For the past three years I’ve been involved with an organization that promotes Bible study and faith around the world, Bible Study Fellowship International. The procedures that BSF follows were originally developed by its founder, A. Wetherell Johnson, who had been a missionary to China for many years. She was asked to start a Bible study for a group of women in California, and the organization spread from there.
If you’ve taken my advice and subscribed to the “Happier” podcast with Gretchen Rubin and her sister Liz Craft, advice which I have given any number of times, then you have already heard this. But if you haven’t, or even if you have, then I’m passing some thoughts from this week’s episode along now with my own take added. (See note below on subscribing.)
Because, if you think about it, the description given in the title is the recipe for being a super-nice person who’s fun to have around. The point