With Telfer turning 34 on Monday, the Griffith family birthday season has come to an end. The girls have been calling Telfer “the birthday boy” so it was both inevitable and awesome when Jane called out from the toilet, “the birthday boy can wipe my bum!” Yes, he can!
Telfer carved pumpkins with the girls on Saturday. We have a kitty and a wolf/dog. We have one more carvable pumpkin and I am hoping Telfer will carve me an owl. The weather has been so beautiful this last week plus – foggy (soggy as the girls still call it – mostly just humoring me now) in the mornings and clear and beautiful in the late afternoon.
The girls have both been up since 5:40 this morning but they know they can’t wake mom up until 7:00 on Fridays. I think this is a very good rule. They went straight down the stairs to start their coloring projects and I was asked, before coffee, and very urgently, to draw a beaver. I could be the world’s worst artist. This is my 7:05 AM beaver.
My parents are driving in from Richland today and the girls are so excited for a little visit. The weather promises to be nice so I think we are going to the farmer’s market later this afternoon. Mussels are on the menu for sure. The girls want to Grandma to play Calico Critters with them and I thought we would do a Halloween costume dry run.
A couple of bookish notes from this week:
I love this Neil Gaiman lecture/essay on libraries and reading published in The Guardian.
Indulge me with a quote: “I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.”
And it goes on from there. Good stuff people – about libraries, raising kids who love to read for pleasure, and our obligations as literate adults. Please read.
Also, I went to Powell’s last weekend with the women from my life group and picked up this. It dovetails nicely with the essay above. Those two sentences made it sound like I only bought one book at Powell’s. Hah!
I think I have said this before, but I have been slightly ADD with my reading the last few months and on a whim, I grabbed Possession by A.S. Byatt. Rereading is one of life’s best and most intense pleasures. At least if you are me.
Andrea Y. Griffith 