Monday, May 25, 2015

Books #24-30: Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

After reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiography, I couldn't wait to get into her books again to revisit all the scenes she writes about--which is funny, since the books and the autobiography have a lot of the same stories. I'd read the first two books a few months ago, but hadn't re-read the last six or seven for years, so it was really fun to get back into them. It was especially enjoyable after re-reading the autobiography to compare what I knew had really happened in her life (like, 90% of what's in the books) with the fictionalizing that she did.

As I read, I was so blown away by how resourceful and independent they were 150 years ago. Sure, I know that those were the themes that Wilder wanted to emphasize in her stories, and therefore she told them in a way that made those themes most obvious, but no matter how you look at it, it's really amazing how strong they were and how they survived. The hardships they went through just to make a living are just amazing--the grasshoppers eating their whole crop, illnesses that go through the whole family, babies dying, an entire winter without any supplies and being shut up in the snow for months. When reading these books as a kid, I never really noticed or thought about how ridiculously hard and stressful that would have been to live through, particularly as a parent. And it's unbelievable how they were able to make a meal from nothing but potatoes and wheat and a happy life from nothing. I read these feeling like I am such a whiner with no real trials in my life, compared to them--it was a good, uplifting series to help me stop being such a baby with my easy, easy life that we have here.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Books #22 and #23: Baby Sleep Book Knockdown!

These are totally only interesting to parents of newborns who are really lacking in sleep--but obviously, that's the intended audience for them anyways. As we've been getting used to having a newborn and remembering what all of that entails, I've been trying to remember what we did with Dane and what works with getting your baby to sleep enough--and enough sleep for us along with that. I read both of these books and wanted to remember what I thought about them so I know what to look at next time around. And these two books recommend kind of different things, so it was interesting reading them so close together. First off, I HATE Babywise. I wish I'd remembered how obnoxious it is before I read it, because even though I disagree with it, it still adds to my stress by making me think that I'm doing something wrong. Babywise suggests that you should start sleep training your baby when they are ONE WEEK OLD--that you should put them down and make them learn how to go to sleep on their own from the very beginning. And it tells you that if you don't do this, you will NEVER EVER get your kid to learn how to sleep and you will hate your life forever. It doesn't tell you that NO one-week-old baby is going to go to sleep on their own and you will just hate your life and be extra stressed from the very beginning, causing unnecessary stress from the very beginning of your parenting. I really regret reading it because even just when Graham was two weeks old it made me start feeling panicky that I wasn't already working with him to learn how to sleep on his own--which I know is ridiculous. I don't need that extra stress.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child has a different approach. The book is very poorly organized, which makes it annoying to read (I want to go in there and be Weissbluth's editor), but amidst all the chaos in the book there is some really good information that is really helpful to new parents. The thing I like about this book is that he emphasizes that it's very important that your baby get enough sleep, and that it's your responsibility as a parent to help that happen, but that there are any number of different ways to accomplish that, not just ONE right way. He presents tons of research to back up his claims and explains the natural sleep cycles of infants and children to help you get them to nap and sleep easier at night and during the day, and he talks a lot about helpful tactics to soothing and calming crying babies (which is really important at this stage!). And he doesn't make you feel guilty about not getting your baby on a schedule right away--the main thing about this age that he emphasizes is that babies can only stay awake for 1-2 hours (and sometimes not even that) in between naps during the day, so try to let them get back to sleep quickly after that. This book has been very helpful to me and I think about it 25 times a day when I am wondering if Graham is tired or what I could do to help him--it's got some great tips and things that I am always remembering and thinking about.

Book #21: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I loved, loved, loved reading the Little House on the Prairie books when I was younger--and still do. I asked for Pioneer Girl for Christmas from my parents, without really even knowing what it was. Turns out it's Laura Ingalls Wilder's official autobiography that she wrote, which she tried to get published before she ever got into writing the novels in the Little House series. She used the stories and life history from Pioneer Girl to shape the children's books that she wrote. But, unlike what I thought before, the children's stories in Little House are not perfectly true to what really happened--they're fiction based on fact, not fact themselves. Wilder did a lot of reshaping and representing as she wrote the novels in order to make them work for her young audience, to make the chronology work appropriately, to make her characters sympathetic, and to give the entire series an overall feeling and plot of the family always moving westward and progressing to bigger and better things. This, Pioneer Girl, is the unedited and true-to-life autobiography that Laura Ingalls Wilder originally wrote. And it's accompanied by pages and pages of annotations explaining and expounding on the stories and people that Wilder mentions throughout her narrative. Almost all of it is already familiar to anyone who's read the Little House books, but the fascinating part of it all is reading where and how things were the same or different from what really happened to the novels, and to read about these characters that Laura meets and describes in the books and what happens to them in their real lives. I really enjoyed reading the annotations, even more than Wilder's autobiography itself--so much so that I think I am going to look up a biography of her to read. And I had so much fun re-reading the story that I'm going to revisit the Little House books now--I recently read the first two, so I already started On the Banks of Plum Creek. This was definitely worth a read and I felt like I got to know Laura herself better through reading it--although it is a HUGE book (not in number of pages, but in the size of the pages themselves) and kind of cumbersome and awkward to read.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Book #20: Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin

I wasn't really planning on reading this one of Rubin's books (especially since I read another book on habits last year), but I saw enough positive reviews about it that I decided to just go for it. The book was, of course, fantastically interesting. Rubin theorizes that the habits that make up our daily lives are essential to determining our happiness level. Once something is truly a habit, and not something we have to decide to do every day, it helps us to maintain our self-control and use it for other ventures we want to accomplish. If we can decide on and stick to establishing positive habits in our lives, we can really improve our health and standard of living.

Rubin writes about different motivations and ways that we can try to establish (or break) habits that we want to develop. She doesn't try to recommend specific habits, because she recognizes that different habits work for different people--and, more importantly, different methods of establishing habits work for different people as well. She developed a framework of four different personality types divided by how people respond to expectations--Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. Upholders respond well to internal and external expectations, Obligers only to external, Questioners only to internal, and Rebels to neither. (I'm pretty sure I'm an Obliger--I put priorities that affect other people first (like work for my class, even when I'd rather do something else) and don't always follow through on resolutions or goals that only affect or influence me (like healthy eating).) Depending on what your Tendency is, you'll be motivated in different ways to stick to habits that you set. These motivations might include monitoring (keeping track of what you're doing, like counting steps or budgeting), scheduling (putting things on the calendar), or several other options.

I like Rubin's writing style in some ways and not in others. I like how she kind of lays out her thought process and makes the whole thing open to you--she tells you where she comes up with ideas and conversations that spark thoughts for her. However, I was kind of annoyed by how know-it-all-ish she comes across in the book. She's constantly telling her friends and family about how they should improve their lives and which habits they should implement. Seriously, I am so glad I don't actually know her in real life. She seems WAY Type-A personality. But overall, this book was super motivating and made me want to try again at some of those never-ending resolutions of eating healthier, exercising better, and managing my time better.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Book #19: Design Mom by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

I've read Gabrielle Blair's blog for several years now. She's LDS, a mom of six, and a designer. She posts about really interesting things and always shares beautiful pictures of people's homes and ideas for designing/decorating your home with kids and the family in mind. I didn't really plan on reading her book, but I requested that the library buy a copy (my favorite new tactic! Don't buy books, ask the library to buy them!) and they did. The book goes room by room throughout your house with 15-20 design tips per room for how to make your life smoother with kids by designing the room appropriately for them (and you). I honestly don't think that much about designing things consciously or deliberately--I usually just let things happen and leave them the way they are just because they're already that way. So it was eye-opening to read and to think about how we could reorganize things to get rid of clutter or to make things go smoother for us all. (Like our problem with the mail. We bring in the mail and it's always just everywhere, never in one place.)

I want to read through the book and make a list of small changes we can make to make our lives easier, based on her ideas. I just don't want to spend tons of money like she seems to suggest, haha!