Author: Liz

I meant to post this at the end of 2018 but it got away from me and languished in my drafts. Good thing I check that place so regularly.

In any case, 2018 was a good year. Full of ups and downs and unexpected trials, growth, change. But two healthy babies and food on the table.

But here are the books I read this year:

1. Alan Bennett – The Uncommon Reader
2. Katherin Addison – The Goblin Emperor
3. Meg Wolitzer – The Interestings
4. Jessica Lahey – The Gift of Failure
5. Elizabeth Gilbert – Big Magic
6. George R.R. Martin – A Storm of Swords
7. Barbara Kinsolver – The Lacuna
8. Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho
9. Stephen King – On Writing
10. Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections
11. Ann Patchett – Commonweatlh
12. Richard Russo – That Old Cape Magic
13. Katherena Vermette – The Break
14. David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
15. Kurt Vonnegut – Player Piano
16. Ann Lamott – Bird by Bird
17. Margaret Atwood – The Heart Goes Last
18. Anthony Doeer – All the Light We Cannot See
19. Celeste Ng – Everything I Never Told You
20. Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
21. John Irving – A Widow for One Year
22. Donna Tartt – The Secret History
23. Zinzi Clemmons – What We Lose
24. Elizabeth Strout – Abide with Me
25. Hazel Gaynor – A Memory of Violets
26. Thomas King – The Inconvenient Indian
27. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
28. Alan Jacobs – The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
29. (edited by Dan Wakefield) Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
30. Elizabeth Strout – Amy and Isabelle
31. Nathan Hill – The Nix
32. Joshua Becker – The More of Less
33. Hanya Yanagihara – A Little Life
34. Maya Angelou – Mom & Me & Mom
35. R.J. Palacio – Wonder
36. Maggie Nelson – The Argonauts
37. Robert James Waller – The Bridges of Madison County
38. Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers
39. Michael Redhill – Bellevue Square
40. Thrity Umrigar – Everybody’s Son
41. Nelson Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom
42. Laura Hillenbrand – Seabiscuit
43. Jodi Picoult – Salem Falls
44. Jhumpa Lahiri – The Clothing of Books
45. Charles Frazier – Cold Mountain
46. Jason Rekulak  – The Impossible Fortress
47. Ernest Cline – Ready Player One
48. Pamela Paul – My Life with Bob
49. Isabel Allende – The Japanese Lover
50. Georgia Hunter – We Were the Lucky Ones
51. Anne Tyler – Vinegar Girl
52. George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo
53. Andy Weir – The Martian
54. Isabel Allende – Island Beneath the Sea
55. Books for Living – Will Schwalbe

I aimed to read a book a week. I sort of made it, as some of these books were audio books. Does that count? I’m counting them, but if you don’t, that’s okay too.

Caleb has begun taking cello lessons, which has been a substantial investment both in money and in time. We (mostly) practice nightly, which can sometimes be taxing on child one doing the practising, parent one doing practice with child one, child two who wants to get involved but is mostly a distraction, and parent two, who needs to restrain child two.

We currently have a great teacher–abundantly encouraging and more patient than I could ever be–and while there are some headaches that have to do with logistics and scheduling with the school, those are of course pieces of the puzzle that take place behind the scenes. We are very much working towards cello becoming something Caleb will enjoy for many years to come.

After several years from my first job, where I needed to spend lots of time in the car for my commute, one of the highlights of my week is actually the drive to cello, about half an hour. I generally bring both kids, although occasionally Jon will take Naomi if he’s got a reason to be home early enough.

Both kids tend to be pretty good car kids, so I can’t really complain. If Naomi were more problematic, I might not even take her at all, but she’s really a fairly easy-going baby. For our weekly trips to cello lessons in particular, Naomi generally naps in the afternoon before I pick up Caleb from school, and so she’s in a good mood for the car ride over; Caleb is coming from afternoon school and will generally fall asleep in the car on the ride over. It’s a tight squeeze to get to his lesson on time, so as soon as Caleb gets home from school, he uses the washroom and gets into the car. Cello is in the trunk, snacks for both kids are waiting, hopefully Caleb doesn’t drop his snack when he falls asleep.

I’ve really come to look forward to this car ride. In fact, I, gloriously, delight in having half an hour during which no child is going to grab me with sticky hands, no phone notifications are going to buzz, no looming to-do list–or even dinner prep! Jon does dinner on cello evenings. What a joy it is to come home to a hot meal on the dinner table. I can see why men had such a hard time giving it up after getting used to it for decades.

Part of the gloriousness of this car ride is that in addition to snacks for the kids, I prepare snacks for myself. Because Caleb is usually asleep and Naomi is back facing, I can feel completely shameless eating snacks that I would normally, at the very least, not eat in front of the kids. It’s not always unhealthy, but that’s part of the fun of every week’s cello lesson drive: I prepare tea, sometimes I have chocolate, or fruit, leftover popcorn, one week I had some leftover, delicious dessert bar with nuts and chocolate chips that one of the staff had brought into the shop. Now, though, my world has completely changed.

Jon finally caved and allowed me to purchase, in bulk, bags of Covered Bridge Salt and Vinegar Chips. The real problem is that with such abundance, I’m having a hard time restraining myself, but everyone deserves a treat every once in a while. Once a week. Once a day. What is time to mere mortals?

As we approach the end of 2018, Caleb has been in junior kindergarten for four months. It has been a wonderful, unwieldy, surprising, long four months that seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye. As we’re into winter here, and I’m dreading the next couple of months ahead, I’m almost hoping January and February go by in a blink as well, but I know better than to wish for that.

It’s been fun and terrifying to see him lined up with the other kids, to watch him at his assemblies, to see his successes and failures. It’s probably even more alarming for me to see what kind of parent I’m turning out to be, as I consider all the different parent types I dealt with when I was a teacher.

In any case, Caleb has been learning to read and write, and it’s been a thrill.

Last year in preschool, Caleb had very little interest in writing letters or numbers. He would draw and colour and scribble, but I think starting preschool at age 2, he didn’t have the fine motor skills to form letters yet. I’ve sort of left him to his own devices, not wanting to rush him into things, but this year he’s turned a corner. Now that he’s in kindergarten, he probably sees the older, senior kindergarten kids writing with relative proficiency, and maybe his own fine motor skills have also advanced, and so he’s now developing his own interest in identifying letters and sight words and practising copying words and sentences out.

It’s hilarious and sometimes tedious and delightful and a bit startling to imagine all the overwhelming changes going on in his tiny brain, learning new social skills, words, responsibilities, habits, and especially, this concept of transforming these tiny strokes into letters and into words and sentences.

And of course we’re doing our best at home. I had read somewhere that reading books with pictures is a good medium: if it’s a video the brain is sort of zoning out and everything is “too easy”; if it’s a block of text, it’s too difficult and so there isn’t enough understanding to make sense of the story, leading to frustration. A book with pictures offers enough clues and context to help a child put together all the words into a story. And so we read together – story books, poems, silly rhymes, easy books, books with more text.

Development at this age is wild. Caleb has a folder where he brings home a new book every night, and he has to fill out his form with the title and who he read the book with. In September, he wanted someone to write out the letters first so he could trace them, but within even a week or two, he was copying the letters from the books on his own. It’s funny to see him trying to copy “g” like it looks typed, versus how it is when you’re learning to print – all these things you never think about as an adult.

What’s also funny to watch is Naomi watching her brother and then copying his actions. He sometimes writes on the floor, on his stomach, and this has become Naomi’s new pose for when she’s “writing.” Is it watching her older brother or possibly a more natural inclination to writing tools? Or both? A thrill.

Although, Caleb is often not thrilled when Naomi has drawn all over his sheets. Naomi is smart enough now that she isn’t satisfied with being given her own sheets – she wants exactly that folder. Tug of war, torn pages, scribbled over with pencils. Often, more accurately, a disaster.

To be honest, my biggest flaw in encouraging him to read (and in parenting in general) is my lack of patience. I know (I KNOW) so much of what a child will learn will come from support from home, and yet I find myself trying to convince Caleb to read a book on his own so I can read a book on my own – we’ll just read side by side! I’ll even provide snacks! I know. I KNOW.

In any case. I’m enjoying it, and also trying to enjoy more of it, even while reading the same books over and over again. He will often pretend to read or read stories from memory, or make up his own story in his “reading aloud” voice based on the pictures.

While he knows the sounds of the letters, and when prodded will attempt to match up the words he’s saying aloud to the words he sees on the page, sometimes he’ll just look at the pictures and we’ll end up with “the rrrr bunny” instead of “the rabbit.”

I spent a great deal of Caleb’s first two (plus?) years anxious about the lightning fast passage of time: he’s growing! he stopped doing this! he’s started doing that! he’s changing! I needed to record or photograph everything, obviously an impossibility, and therefore I worried it would all pass and I wouldn’t have it bottled up to hold onto.

With Naomi, it’s been a completely different experience. Before she was born, I had some anxiety over what it would be like to have another baby, whether it would change our family dynamic with Caleb (of course), what a daughter would be like, whether or not I would love another baby as much as I love Caleb.*

In a way completely different from Caleb’s infanthood and early toddler years, I am relishing all of Naomi’s gurgles and bouncing and babbling and arms around my neck and signing and belly laughing. Naomi has been peaceful and funny and calm, but I have also been much more at peace as a mama. This time around, I have let go of some of the worries and concerns that happen with the first one, and I have surprised myself with how much I’m simply enjoying her. Part of this might be having more help in the shop, part of it might be the natural progression of parenthood, and part might also be Naomi’s own gift to our family.

The biggest surprise, though, that never occurred to me amidst all of the over-analyzing and over-thinking and up late at night mind whirling, how much I might enjoy finding books for Naomi and sharing with her the books I read in my own youth. Like how perhaps other mamas dream of going shopping or doing make-up with their daughters, I am now full of dreams for what I will do with Naomi.

Back when we lived in Leslieville, we used to go to the Value Village by our old shop all the time, but since we moved, it’s really a trip to make it out there. The other day, though, there was a sale on books at Value Village, so I made Jon come with me so he could take care of the baby while I looked at the books. Dating from my college days when I used to visit the used books stores up and down Princess Street in Kingston, I’ve always been an advocate of used books. Used books on sale?? Come now.

I occasionally look at the children’s books, but the children’s books at Value Village often end up scribbled on, pages torn or otherwise not in great condition, so I don’t often get anything.

However, while I was there, a book caught my eye: The Secret Garden.

I hadn’t thought about this book for years and years, and all of a sudden, I thought: a book for Naomi. I remember this as one of my favourite books from early on, one of the first books I remember reading over and over again as a child. Perhaps she might enjoy it.

Since then, I’ve been slowly building up a collection of books for her, and it has been a delight. To revisit my own childhood escapes, to imagine what sort of books she might like, to think about what movies we might watch together after.

While not getting my hopes up too high with potential future disappointment if she turns out to not be someone who likes reading the same kind of books I do or did as a child, or someone who likes reading at all, I’ve been so startled with how much I’ve enjoyed picking out books and setting them aside for her. Of course Anne of Green Gables, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and Walk Two Moons, and The View from Saturday, and A Wrinkle in Time, and Harriet the Spy and oh, Little Women! and The Golden Compass, and Jane Eyre…the list is endless. Books I read over and over as a kid or a teenager, scenes I would recognize just from a glance at the page.

This is something I haven’t done for Caleb – certainly I imagine he might also enjoy some of the same series or books, and I had vaguely earmarked my Harry Potter books and the Chronicles of Narnia set already in my collection, but it isn’t quite the same. I can’t imagine him enjoying Little Women in the same way I hope Naomi might.

All those books I read in my childhood carry so much memory and time and whole worlds that I can’t wait to see Naomi explore. Which one of the March sisters will she identify with? Will she imagine her own magic wardrobe? Matilda and her library books! Just looking over the lists brings me spiraling back to my bedroom now decades (!) ago.

Not having come from a family with a lot of mother-daughter traditions, this one, this tradition of (re-)reading books together, talking about Gilbert Blythe or Mr. Darcy, watching the movies together, is so exciting for me to consider, and one I’m surprised I hadn’t considered before. This one I am full of jitters about making with my own girl.

Who knows how the future will unfold. Of course it will be okay if Naomi doesn’t like the same stories, and maybe Caleb will like ones that surprise me, but I am keeping all my fingers crossed.

*Good thing, Caleb has graduated into the stage of occasionally being an obstinate and belligerent young child, making it more difficult to love him some days than others.

I sometimes share some photos of a view from behind the shop on the shop blog, but of course my life is actually mostly consumed with babies. I think I spent the majority of my life thinking I would probably end up with kids, but with a lot of anxiety and doubt as to what sort of mama I would turn out to be, and whether or not maternal love would be manufactured or conjured up through the ether upon the arrival of baby.

While many (most?) days I run low on patience and organization and arrive to swimming lessons late and text Jon to pick up dinner on his way home, this is, I think, one of the sweetest seasons of life – when the babies are heavy and warm and wrap arms around your neck and gurgle and babble and are also learning to say funny things. And so I’m trying my best to sit with it all and just enjoy all the squeezes while I can get them.

Even though today Caleb seemed to get in a lot of trouble (pretending to squeeze the ketchup with the lid closed while not realizing ketchup was leaking out the side onto the floor, leaving a trail; pretending Super is his horse, and leading his “horse” around on a leash, and then not watching as his “horse” eat snacks off the couch, making a mess; helping to clean up by removing a shelf from the bookshelf, and then swinging it around and leaving a hole in the drywall), I want to enjoy my babies, this last summer before Caleb starts kindergarten. I want these hot, sweaty, salty days to drift past me as slowly as possible, waking up from long afternoon naps, hanging laundry outside in the sun, inhaling entire watermelons.

Other than the babies, and getting the studio shop up and running (or not, as the case may very well turn out to be), I’ve also been reading lots. Reading and writing are tied so closely together – how could you do one without the other? – and the rush of words feels comfortable and necessary these days.

I had read something somewhere about how “powering through” books is not only an ineffective way to read, it’s dissatisfying as a reader. While I hadn’t put my finger on that thought before, once I read that, it completely resonated with me and my own experiences reading. When I really try to muscle through a book, I am vaguely getting a sense of the words, but in a shallow, uneven way, details and meaning lost on me. When I discover a book rich with story and language, or re-read those old favourites, I can feel myself slowing down to savour paragraphs, sentences, words, to soak up those lines and nuances and meanings, re-reading paragraphs to make sure I’ve dug my feet all the way in, to feel every grain of sand against my toes.

So I guess that’s about it for the summer. Slowing down, soaking up. Getting ready for the fall.

Jon sometimes drinks a beer with dinner or after work, and the other day, Jon came home from the main shop. Caleb went to the fridge, and opening it up, said to him: Can I offer you a beer?

My babies are growing up.

I used to read a lot as a kid, and through high school into college. I was the kind of reader that had six or seven or ten books on the go at a time, and I read whenever I could – eating, before bed, at cafes. When I got my first job teaching, my first adult job that consumed so much of my time and attention, I slowed down on reading significantly, although I listened to quite a few audiobooks on my one hour commute, which in many ways saved my sanity.

After we opened the shop, though, and shortly after I had Caleb, everything recreational dropped off completely, and it was only after one or two years of getting adjusted to life with a baby that I started to pick up reading again.

This year, I made a goal to read 52 books. It’s not quite the end of the year, but even with some generous rounding, I don’t think it’s optimistic for me reaching that goal. I may make it to 39 or 40 with the books I’m reading now.

1. Kiran Desai – The Inheritance of Loss
2. Michael Pollan – In Defense of Food
3. Rob Dunn – The Wild Life of our Bodies
4. Wally Lamb – We Are Water
5. Anne Tyler – A Spool of Blue Thread
6. Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
7. Anne Tyler – Noah’s Compass
8. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
9. Joseph Heller – Catch-22
10. Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven
11. Emma Donoghue – Frog Music
12. Andre Dubus III – House of Sand and Fog
13. Barbara Kingsolver – Flight Behavior
14. Sandra Dallas – The Persian Pickle Club
15. Gail Tsukiyama – Women of the Silk
16. Saachi Koul – One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
17. Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Giant
18. Emma Donoghue – The Wonder
19. Barbara Kingsolver – Small Wonder
20. Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being
21. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
22. Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian
23. Mark Sundeen – The Unsettlers
24. George R. R. Martin – A Game of Thrones
25. Zadie Smith – White Teeth
26. Jonathan Franzen – Purity
27. George R. R. Martin – A Clash of Kings
28. Junichiro Tanizaki – The Makioka Sisters
29. Dan Barber – The Third Plate
30. Orhan Pamuk – The Red-Haired Woman
31. Joy Kogawa – Obasan
32. Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
33. Wesley Lowery – They Can’t Kill Us All
34. Emily St. John Mandel – Last Night in Montreal
35. Kyo Maclear – The Letter Opener
36. Amy Tan – The Valley of Amazement

I know I could’ve intentionally picked shorter books to meet my goal, or perhaps read shorter books at the beginning of the year and if it looked good, moved my way into longer ones, but I guess I didn’t mind so much if I didn’t make it.

Looking back on it, I read a lot of good books, books I really enjoyed reading – which was entirely the point. I read some books that challenged me, that taught me a lot, that made me laugh out loud. I just felt a bit more human, and a bit more alive with all of these stories and ideas flowing through. Not all of them were winners, but they all told me a story.

I picked my books off my bookshelf (I’m certainly guilty of having many, many books on my bookshelf I haven’t read yet, but strangely, I keep buying more), but also from the library, and also off the shelves at thrift shops and local bookshops. I do have a list of books to read written down in one of my notebooks, but I tend to read whatever is accessible to me in that moment, and I’ve had some wonderful surprises as a result.

I listened to audio books in the car and read paper books before bed and with the new baby, for the first time, I downloaded an ebook onto my phone, and I read while nursing in the dark. When I had Caleb, I spent a lot of nursing time on my phone, doing basically nothing, and now I’m both pleased with myself for finding a way to sneak in more reading, but also a bit surprised it never occurred to me before.

Caleb is now three, and to my delight, he has turned out to love books. He loves Richard Scarry, and anything to do with trucks or construction vehicles or trains, but he’ll read book after book with you if you let him.

I sometimes think about how technology – smart phones, laptops, iPads – will change the reading habits of children in this era, and not just because I run a shop selling fountain pens and paper. I hope his imagination soars as he experiences the thrill of the car crashing into the watermelon delivery van, or he learns about the morality of stealing from Bananas Gorilla.

I hope Caleb always keeps alive the wonder and magic of a good story, of hilarious characters and surprise accidents, of the rhyme and music of language.

Supposedly brushing his teeth.

We have a new baby. Everyone is thrilled. I think we’re going to name her Naomi.

Rediscovering:

The butter milk smell from the back of babies’ mouths.
The astonishment of free health care.
The convenience of warm spots left on the bed by a large dog that you can put a sleepy baby onto.
The large swaths of hair combed by a dog’s tongue.
The laundry.

Discovering:

The ease of a second child compared to the terror of a first.
The pleasure of being able to purchase a few beautiful items for the baby, which are really mostly for me, with so many items already in our home from Caleb.
Audiobooks during breastfeeding, and ebooks during breastfeeding in the dark. It turns out I am no Luddite after all.
A brother that insists on helping in the most precarious ways.

As I hold her, I marvel a little bit at this new being. She is somehow quite different from Caleb, although I’m not sure if it’s because Caleb was our first and there was a steep learning curve to what a baby is (probably), or if it’s because she is indeed a different sort of creature (probably, also).

There is something that strikes me this time around about the potential of a human being as a baby, before they get messed up by their parents and the world at large. I had some vague notion of the vastness of my role with Caleb, but it was all mixed up with concerns about diapers and crying and vitamin D and the shop and so I sort of let it pass.

In some ways, I watch Caleb and I think about him at 3, already his own willful self, and I love him deeply, knowing that there have been countless ways that Jon and I and our life choices have carved ourselves out into his personality and his character. The other day I discovered the bath tap and the sink tap running at full blast, and I thought to myself: I have no idea where this child came from. He said he was “just turning on the water to see.” And then I suppose he forgot.

This time around things are going smoothly, calmly. Caleb is in preschool, and the days with just the baby and I seem to be sailing by – before I know it it’s time to pick up Caleb and he’s home with his afternoon snack and his off-tune singing and his crazy ideas, like mixing up moisturizer in our kitchen bowls. His bare feet padding around, in whichever direction he chooses.

This time around I’m finding I watch her a lot. After I nurse her, she’s in this tranquil, milky, dream state. She watches me watching her. She occasionally gurgles a little. Even more occasionally a lopsided grin.

I find myself curious about her similarity to me. Jon sometimes remarks on how similar Caleb and I are, but there are some peculiar things about this baby that make me think twice. Like how she has dry skin around her ears. Just the tiniest things that unravel like kite strings connecting her and I.

I think about how my own childhood shaped me and I worry about how she will grow up. There’s a lot of worry and anxiety, but mostly I wonder about how her life will unfurl before us. Taking these days as they come and watching the moments slip through my fingers.