Books

194. A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole
Saw this one at the used bookstore and the drawings inside caught my eye. Chapter book level reading, simple, but nice story. Illustrations are awesome

195. Bunny tales:Behind closed doors at the Playboy Mansion by Izabella St. James
Story of one of the Party Posse. Hef's set of 7 girlfriends. No surprises, but still interesting.

196. Teach your own by John Holt.
Old book on homeschooling, but considered one of the classics. As a nearly 30 year old book its legal information was quite dated, but some of the other bits were still applicable. Enjoyable read. One statement that made me really think. At one point the author points out that most people not only neither trust nor respect children, they don't like them either. And I'm going "Wait....what?" I thought about it and realized its true. We don't trust children...we weren't trusted as children (I'm sure we can all point to incidents we when we were children and adults didn't trust us) and in turn we don't trust the children around us. We are trained by society to believe that children are out to do bad, make messes, do the wrong thing on purpose to irritate us, etc, etc. Its making me think about how I think about my children.

And I also pondered the not liking children. I realized that's true too. Most people will say they like children. And what they mean is they like well behaved, quiet, non-intrusive, instantly obedient children. Hence ross_teneyck 's comment that truly the best thing in the world is holding a sleeping baby...who upon waking up screaming and puking which you can hand back to its mother. As long as the baby was quiet and sleeping...its a good baby and you like it. Once it wakes up, hand it off to someone else to deal with, its not such a pleasant baby anymore. So go away baby! (Sorry to pick on you Ross). And most adult views of children follow this same path. As long as children are quiet and not bothering me...they are good kids and likable. Once they start acting like active children...they are a menace and need a good beating disciplining so they stop acting up. Maybe I'm a little sensitive about this. Not too long ago someone told me that I have the worst behaved children they've ever seen. Maybe that's true...but I think I need to work on continuing to like them when they do act like little beasts brats heathens terrors monsters children. Loving children is easy...liking them...especially when there are a lot of them, and are not easy children, is a lot harder.