Book #17: The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The book club I just joined is reading this book, which is the main reason why I picked it up. The main character of the book is Victoria, who was a foster child and who has serious attachment issues. She spent her childhood bouncing around between 32 different foster homes, and the story starts as she ages out of the group home she was living in, and she becomes homeless. But she has this magical ability to do flower arrangements and she manages to get a job at a flower shop, and people fall in love with her flowers. She believes in the flowers and how each flower means something specific (according to the meanings of flowers in the Victorian age, very kitschy of the author to name her Victoria) and somehow her meaningful flower arrangements make people fall in love. She begins to have relationships with people and tries to overcome her natural desires to leave every relationship she has before she gets hurt. There are flashbacks every other chapter to Victoria's last foster parent, who she had a wonderful relationship with and loved, but you just knew something bad happened to ruin their relationship since she didn't end up there, and I felt like I was reading the whole time waiting for the hammer to fall.

I felt like Diffenbaugh was asking us to suspend a lot of disbelief by saying that Victoria was this magical flower arranger (knowing the meaning of flowers doesn't = amazing flower arrangements automatically) and that she immediately had this huge flower business after she started one. But overall, I really liked the part of the story dealing with flowers and how she handled them and made her flower dictionary; that was the fun part of the story.

[SPOILER ALERTS FOLLOW]: I just hated, hated, hated how depressing the main story of the book was. Victoria's history in the whole foster care system is super depressing to think about--I follow a blogger who writes about foster parenting and the sadness of it all really is hard to take. So I know this is real life for some people/kids, but oh man, it is really sad to think of them turning out like this. I also really, really hated how she got pregnant and gave away her baby. I cannot read those sorts of things while thinking about my own babies and all the real babies who are treated poorly. I was BLASTING through those chapters, just skimming and getting the main ideas, because I did not want to wallow in thinking about that. I knew that it would end up happy at the end, and it does, everyone reunited in almost too easy of a fashion, but I hated it still. I feel like a spoiled, privileged rich kid saying that I don't want to read about sad hard life stuff like that, but I don't. Particularly when it has to do with little kids or babies.

I do feel a lot of interest in looking into the foster system to be foster parents sometime, though. I feel like that is possibly the best place for service, the best one-on-one sort of service you can give to a child, although I don't think I would want to do it until we were done having our own babies. If the fictional Victoria had had one nice family try to take her in, she could have lived such a different, more secure life. And there are too many kids living in the same situation in our world. Maybe someday.

Book #16: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson

This book seems like the quintessential in self-help books, but not the current stylish kind of self-help books. I know I've seen it before because it is pretty ubiquitous, but I'd never considered reading it. But it is really chock full of great thoughts and great strategies for managing stress and making your life slower and more enjoyable. Some of them almost seemed gospel-related if you tweaked a couple of his ideas. I think this book would be better reading if you just took each vignette/idea individually instead of reading it in one sitting. They need to be considered separately in order for them to have the most impact, I think. I didn't read it in one sitting but I did push through it too quickly because I was pretty interested in it. I'm thinking I might make a list of my favorite 10 or so and try to apply them one at a time or something. Because I have so many moments a day where I need some reminders to calm myself and to remember not to take myself (or whatever frustrating predicament is going on right then) so seriously!

My favorite ones (I folded over the corner on the pages that seemed especially applicable to me):
1. Be aware of the snowball effect of your thinking. Notice what's happening in your head before your thoughts have any chance to build momentum. Say, "Whew, there I go again," and consciously nip it in the bud. <--- I have already figured out how to do this when I'm laying in my bed late at night and trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep. It's so important to get your brain to stop whirling!
2. Create "Patience Practice Periods." Set up periods of time in your own mind to practice the art of patience. Start by saying to yourself, "Okay, for the next five minutes I won't allow myself to be bothered by anything. I'll be patient." Just having the intention to be patient will strengthen your capacity for patience. And you can build up to longer and longer periods.
3. Ask yourself the question: "Will this matter a year from now?" This helps you to see what is really important or if you're making it out to be more than it really is.
4. Become an anthropologist. Be interested, without judgment, in the way people choose to live and behave. Be genuinely curious about the way someone feels about something, and the less likely you are to be annoyed.
5. "Wherever you go, there you are." Don't constantly wish you were somewhere else and think that if you were, somehow you would be happier and more content. The truth is, if you have destructive mental habits, those habits will follow you wherever you go, and you will likely be as unhappy in other situations as well. You need to focus on becoming at peace with where you are right now.
6. Count to ten. When you feel yourself getting angry, take a long deep breath, and as you do, count the number one. Repeat with all the same numbers up to 10 (or even 25 if you are really angry). The combination of breathing and counting is so relaxing that it's almost impossible to remain angry once you are finished. <--- This would be an excellent one to use with kids. I have tried to implement this before but it's hard to break out of the cycle of anger once you're in it. You've got to catch it beforehand.
7. Be happy where you are. This reminds me of President Uchtdorf's quote, "Life is not meant to be appreciated only in retrospect."
8. Remember that you become what you practice most. This reminds me of another favorite quote by Richard G. Scott: "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day."
9. Become an early riser. Having a peaceful, meaningful life is made much easier when you have time for yourself. Consider that fatigue is caused by a lack of fulfillment and a sense of being overwhelmed, and getting up early to take care of things you want to do yourself is one way to combat this. You can have your "me" time before anyone else wakes up in order to have the quiet activities you never have the time to do. <--- This one is way easier said than done; particularly when in this phase with young babies. I have good intentions maybe once every few months but it never lasts very long. But it does sound lovely in theory.
10. Keep asking yourself, "What's really important?" Reminding yourself (consciously) of what's really important helps to keep your priorities straight. <--- I have thought about this but not on a super regular basis. It is easy to get caught up in feeling like my life at home with these kids is slow and not filled with anything important, but if I ask myself this question, I remember that the important thing is that they have a happy life--that we all have a happy life together.
11. Be open to "What Is." When we have preconceived ideas (expectations) about the way life should be, they interfere with our opportunity to enjoy or learn from the present moment. This prevents us from honoring what we are going through. Rather than reacting to a child's complaining, try opening your heart and accepting the moment for what it is. Make it okay that they aren't acting exactly the way you would like them to. <--- This reminds me of something my mom said to me: "Those expectations, they'll kill you every time."
12. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. We see in life what we want to see. < --- This one should be easy to do while staying home with adorable, sweet, precious kids.

I want to start implementing these strategies in my everyday life. I can totally see how if they became habits, you would be a calmer, happier, more peaceful person.

Book #15: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I've literally had this book on my to-read list on Goodreads for two plus years. And I'm glad I finally got around to it. This book tells the story of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and how it came about, how they put it together, and how it affected American culture afterwards. At the same time, the book also talks about Chicago serial killer H. H. Holmes, who lured innocent and vulnerable fairgoers and murdered them for his own pleasure. He may have killed up to 100 people, although that's probably an exaggeration, but he definitely built a whole hotel, with a creepy murderer's basement, for the express purpose of finding and killing victims. So you basically learn about the whole story of the fair and this murderer at the same time.

Honestly, I felt like these two storylines didn't overlap all that much. By the title, I expected that the murderer was going to the fair and killing people at the fair itself. But no, he was finding victims before and after the fair; his actions weren't all that related to the fair storyline. So I don't know, I think that Larson maybe could have done these stories completely separately and been pretty successful. There wasn't much of an overarching connection at the end to bring everything together. I also didn't really like how Larson dramatized some of the elements he was writing about. Unless it's a stylistic decision about the genre, I don't think that non-fiction writers should dramatize or imagine things about their books. Larson tended to make up motives for things that Holmes did and included them as facts, but they were completely made up (as he said in the notes at the end).

However, each story was very interesting. I loved seeing a look into Chicago in the 1890s, and I felt like I really got the emotions of the city and the expectations they had for the Fair. I loved learning about the World's Fair and the amount of community pride and work that it took to get it ready and going in time. And it was very interesting to learn about all of the things that are still familiar to us in culture today that came out of the fair itself, considering how most people today barely know that it happened. And I was very creeped out and disturbed by the story about Holmes and his evil plans, which is to be expected. This book was definitely worth a read and definitely a great glimpse into a time period that I wasn't familiar with, but probably should have been.