Reading: Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come.

Watching: The Homecoming, the televised dramatization of a Christmas story written by Earl Hamner. It inspired the series The Waltons but it was somewhat grittier and less sentimental than that series. It's one of my collection of Christmas movies that I watch every year. I like Patricia Neal as the mother.

Link of the Day: Kate's journal, If I Wrote You. I've been reading Kate for more than a year, now. I discovered her journal in the Xoom listings, back when my journal was there. She observes both the outer and the inner world with a keen eye, as befits a writer by vocation. I especially liked this entry from Monday.

Rapping about Wrapping

Last year I was able to wrap all the Christmas presents for the boys in the afternoons while Daniel was in school and Stephen and Matthew napped. I realized that this year I'd have to come up with another plan since only rarely do the twins actually sleep during their afternoon rest time.

So I asked my mother-in-law to take them out for part of the day. Of course, by the time she left with them it was almost 2 p.m., which didn't give me much time since I had to pick up Daniel at 4. Still, I finished wrapping one bag of Christmas gifts.

Tab had stored the presents for the boys in garbage bags and put the bags in the basement in an out-of-the way corner. The boys rarely go down there, so we don't worry about them finding the presents. The Christmas wrapping paper, tags, and bows are all in a long Rubbermaid container in the basement, too.

In the past few years, I have started to be careful about the wrapping paper I use for the Santa gifts. When my sister Monica was little, she noticed that the wrapping paper Santa Claus used was the same as the wrapping paper my mother used for other, non-Santa gifts. She became suspicious and soon decided that there was no Santa Claus. I didn't want Daniel to reach the same conclusion, so I have set aside two or three rolls of wrapping paper to be used only for the Santa presents.

Another thing I have learned is to forgo the ribbons and bows. The boys don't care one whit about how the package is decorated; ribbons and bows just make it harder for little fingers to tear open the wrapping paper and get to the present, after all! And not having to fuss with the decorations speeds the whole wrapping process along.

So, after I posted yesterday's entry about Daniel's test, I found this poem by Jane Kenyon, which would have been the perfect epigraph.

Learning in the First Grade "The cup is red. The drop of rain is blue. The clam is brown." So said the sheet of exercises-- purple mimeos, still heady from the fluid in the rolling silver drum. But the cup was not red. It was white, or had no color of its own. Oh, but my mind was finical. It put the teacher perpetually in the wrong. Called on, however, I said aloud, "The cup is red." "But it's not," I thought, like Galileo Galilei muttering under his beard....

I had to look up the word "finical." It was, as I suspected, a variant of "finicky." So there's your word for the day.

This week Daniel got his report card for the first marking period. He received "A"s in reading, math, science, and social studies. His two "B"s were in spelling and writing. I'm afraid he's inherited his bad handwriting from me. Like me, he tries to write too fast, and his letters get sloppy. As I've mentioned before, my second grade nun tormented me for my bad penmanship. To this day, I hate to write anything by hand, thanks to her.

previous       index       e-mail me       next