Book #8: The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber

This book has popped up once or twice on several book blogs I follow and I guess it's telling about how much of a boring parent I am now that I thought it sounded really interesting. Lieber writes about all of his experiences and research as a personal finance columnist for the NYT and how to teach kids about money and finances. More importantly, he discusses a lot about how to talk to kids about money, because it's an uncomfortable subject that many parents avoid because they don't want their kids to get any ideas. No parents wants their kids to be "spoiled," but lots of parents fall into the trap of buying their kids too much or not giving them enough financial responsibility, which leads to basically the same problem. So Lieber writes about lots of different tactics and discussion topics and different people who have done interesting things with their kids and their money.

I really liked a lot of the points Lieber makes. He's clearly writing for an upper-class/upper-middle-class crowd, because a lot of the assumptions he makes come from the idea that his readers are wealthy--which, according to him, means that you have everything you need and much of what you want. I can see a lot of people having problems with these assumptions, but I think it's fair for him to assume a privileged audience when he's writing about how to avoid spoiling your children--not something that poor families generally have to worry about. But he has some great ideas and perspectives about teaching your kids how to deal with money and how to be generous, etc. He suggests giving your kids an allowance--which he doesn't think should be attached to the requirement to do chores (kids should do chores/work, but they should receive their allowance whether they do chores or not because the allowance is "practice" money that they are learning how to take care of). Then, like on the cover of the book, he suggests that kids have 3 jars for giving, saving, and spending, and that they get to use the money accordingly. He also talks about being open with your kids about how much money you have, but also how you spend it and what you choose to spend it on (instead of saying, "We can't afford that," saying, "We're not choosing to spend our money on that.").

Obviously, this book is really a little advanced for the stage of life that we're in--Dane's not going to be getting an allowance any time soon--but I found it very interesting and I definitely want to revisit it in a few years when we have to start talking and thinking about these things. There are so many aspects to talk about specifically when you're raising kids!

Book #7: A Good Birth: Finding the Positive and Profound in your Childbirth Experience by Anne Drapkin Lyerly

Can you tell where my mind has been lately? CLEARLY not on reading, since I haven't read at all and the only books I have been reading are about babies. I feel kind of guilty about neglecting my favorite hobby lately! But I'm not worrying too much because I know I'll be right back into it pretty soon. I pretty randomly picked this book at the library--I was wanting to check out some books about childbirth and breastfeeding and stuff (since we haven't done any classes or anything this time around, and I feel like I've forgotten it all) and this ended up in the stack. And it's the only one of those that I've actually made it through! I really enjoyed it for several reasons: Lyerly, an OB and professor in Chapel Hill, is writing about her large-scale qualitative study where she interviewed lots of women about their birth experiences and the conclusions that she has drawn from those interviews--and I do so love good old qualitative research studies. I really, really liked how she organized the study and how she presented her findings of what trends ran through all the women's birth experiences and their interviews. The other thing I really liked about this was that Lyerly's express purpose is to try and provide value to ALL types of birth and birth experiences instead of trying to preach about one side of the argument being better than others. I feel like so many books and places are so overtly pro-natural birth that there is a little bit of a stigma (depending on who you're talking to, of course) of using any sort of drugs or epidural, and a huge stigma towards C-sections, especially elective C-sections. I know that I would personally have a really hard time being told I had to have a C-section, probably in part because of what I've read from that camp. But Lyerly is trying to show, through her data and interviews, that C-sections can be just as positive and meaningful of experiences for patients, and that they are still just as important and valuable as so-called "natural" births. She talks about all of the different aspects of giving birth that can make the experience positive or negative, mostly all different aspects of the mother having control over the situation. It's important that the mom has agency, personal security, connectedness with others in and out of the room, respect, and knowledge about what's going on. And she peppers each of these sections with lots and lots of birth stories and comments from the moms she interviewed, and from her own personal experience (as a mom of four herself).

All in all, I loved the angle Lyerly took in this book. I feel like it was valuable for me in just opening my mind to the fact that even if having this baby doesn't go as planned--which means for me that we'll get to the hospital in time (I'm so afraid of the baby coming too fast!) and that I'll be able to get an epidural or at least that it won't hurt too bad; not much else matters--I'll still be able to look at things in a positive way and have good feelings about the experience.

Book #6: Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly

I read this book when I was pregnant with Dane, and I loved, loved it. I wanted to be sure to read it again during this pregnancy because of how sweet and real and reassuring Fennelly's advice was to me during the first read-through. Part of the strength of her letters is just in the beauty of her style of writing, and how open-minded and far away she is from the common "mommy wars" and "birth wars" that seem to be implanted throughout most baby books. She doesn't advise all-natural birth or C-sections or anything; she just writes about her experiences for a younger friend pregnant with her first baby and gives her the opportunity to hear what it's like from someone who's gone before. After reading this again, I felt uplifted and a lot more ready for having a baby again. I AM so excited for this baby, but like I was with Dane, I'm nervous and scared too, especially for the birth process. But there were a few parts of this book that stood out, which I wanted to write down this time:

About this fear of giving birth and the pain of labor: ""You are a warrior. You are a warrior, and for your whole life your body has been warming up for this great fight. These last months have been consumed with training everything inside you, all of the hormones and the loosening of the joints have been in preparation for this, and you are ready. You know, more or less, the day, the place, of your battle, and you will meet it because you are destined for it, it is the greatest challenge your body will ever know. . . . You are stronger than you know. You will split open your body to free the tiny god who will be caught and held up like a hero. You are the hero. No one but you can do it.
. . . Remember this when the contraction comes and your whole belly tightens like a shell about to be cracked. All the muscles in your belly, muscles you don't remember having, will grow rigid and fused like the carapace of the ornate box turtle. After some moments, it will pass, your muscles unclench, and again your flesh will feel like a taut sail propelled by more wind than it can take without tearing, but still your flesh Then you know it won't be long until your ordinary, miraculous flesh, your warrior body will be victorious" (190-191).

About her miscarriage: "I stopped comparing my pregnancy which ended so early to friends' stillbirths and other tragedies. I stopped trying to rank sorrow, realized that the world has sorrow enough for all of us, and when some of it falls to you the best hope you have is letting yourself suffer through it. I suffered through it. I suffer through it. I allowed myself to think of the child as exactly that, a child. It wasn't nothing; it was never nothing. That's why it's okay for you to ask me about that death, as I've learned to think of it, and talk of it. For so long I told myself to get over it, was impatient with my weakness. But now I see it was weakness that kept me from grieving how I needed to grieve. And now I know that I'll never "get over" my miscarriage. I've stopped wanting to. I'll carry it and carry it and never put it down" (97-98).

Book #5: Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue

This is a random book that I read in spurts while sitting and watching Dane play at the Barnes and Noble train table. I went over to the parenting section hoping to find something about helping older siblings with new babies, etc., but this was the most interesting thing I could find over there (almost all the parenting books at our BN are about infants or school-age kids). And I thought this had some great information that I wanted to remember. I think this topic is starting go into the zone of being overly politically correct and I think some people might see this as trying to raise gender-neutral kids. I am definitely not interested in doing that, but I think there are lots of harmful (or just stupid) existing stereotypes for both genders that I would love to avoid passing on to my kids (as much as that's possible). Some of the major ones are that girls aren't as good at math and boys aren't as good at reading, or that boys shouldn't cry or show emotion and that they need to be tough and macho. I really do not agree with those assumptions and I don't want my kids to learn those, particularly not (accidentally) from me. Brown is a researcher who's studied this and provides a lot of good thoughts on how to avoid this with your kids. One of the best things you can do is to correct these stereotypes as your kids hear them from other people--like if some well-meaning adult says, "That's okay, girls just aren't as good at math anyways," you should later pull them aside and tell them that's not necessarily true, and provide a specific example of someone who defies that stereotype. It's also helpful to hold open conversations about these stereotypes with your kids--let them know that some people think that boys are supposed to be tough and never cry, but that that's just what they think.

Really, it's just scary to me how much is out there (stuff that is much worse than these stereotypes, even) that you can't 100% protect your kids from learning or being taught. Sometimes I can see why people homeschool their kids (although I really don't think that's the path for me)--just for not having to worry about all those other potentially negative influences. Gahh.

Book #4: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

I have been in a reading slump lately. It must be the whole nesting phase, but nothing seems interesting to me except working on and planning our house projects and trying to make progress to get everything ready for the baby. Reading has not been on my radar for the last few weeks--which has been weird! I've been missing books lately in my life so I pulled out this one I read back when I was pregnant with Dane, because I remember it having lots of good ideas and thoughts about parenting, which can't hurt as we're about to embark on a totally new phase in our parenting lives. This book was definitely worth a re-read, because it is such an interesting ethnological study on American and French parenting styles, and it exposes a lot of the assumptions we Americans take for granted and show that they aren't necessarily 100% true. For example, Americans have a whole narrative about how parenting is supposed to be this all-encompassing, self-sacrificing endeavor at the expense of all other aspects of your life (obviously, there's lots of people who argue with that, but the fact that they HAVE to argue with that means that it's still there). And according to Druckerman, French parents don't have those sorts of expectations at all; it's much more expected that parents will have separate lives and ambitions and thoughts apart from their parents.

There's lots of other areas in which American and French expectations about parenting differ, and Druckerman, an American who lives and is raising her children in Paris, is well-placed to analyze and discuss them. The ones that I found most interesting were the practical differences between the sleeping and eating habits of French children and American children, because French kids seem to have got it DOWN in ways that most American parents can only dream. For example, most French babies sleep through the night earlier than American babies. After lots of digging and searching, Druckerman figures out that all French parents tend to wait longer to respond to their babies when they first start crying--they give their babies a few minutes to try to go back to sleep on their own before immediately responding to them. This seems like a genius idea, and I remember trying this with Dane (and he did sleep through the night pretty early on, so maybe there is some truth in it!). I definitely want to make sure we try this with baby #2 as well.

Book #3: Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Funny enough, I've only heard about this book when Amy Poehler mentioned it in her memoir Yes, Please. But the fact that Nora Ephron wrote it made it stick in my mind, because her movies are some of my favorites. So I wrote it down and put it on my Goodreads account, and eventually checked it out from the library and it sat around at my house for a month and a half before I read it today. And I kind of wish I hadn't read it--just because of the subject matter. I hate stories about cheating spouses--and that's basically all this book is. Rachel Samstat, a cookbook writer, with one toddler son and seven months pregnant, finds out that her husband has been having a serious affair for months and that he has no intentions of breaking it off. The whole book is basically her funny, sarcastic reactions and thoughts on the whole situation and the whole month or two after finding out about the affair and what she decides to do about it. To make matters worse, it's an autobiographical novel based on Nora Ephron's marriage to Carl Bernstein (Watergate), and how she caught him cheating on her. So it's not just a story about a spouse cheating on her--it happened like this to her in real life. And no matter how funny and well-written this book is (which it is, don't get me wrong), the subject matter is still so distasteful and depressing to me that I don't like thinking about it. Plus, Rachel's life sounds eerily similar to mine right at this second (2-year-old son, seven months pregnant with another boy) which makes it all the less appealing to read. I feel like everyone in the novel was just so selfish (especially her husband, but also Rachel herself in a lot of ways--her two kids didn't ever factor into her thoughts about the break-up at all) and that wasn't all that fun to read. This was really a funny, quick read, but not worth all the negativeness of the storyline to me.

Book #2: Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers

I think this and Gaudy Night are my two favorite of Sayers's murder mysteries that I've read. This is also the last one I'm planning on reading, at least for a while, because I'm eager to move on to some of the other books I have on my list (at some point, eventually--we have so much going on that I'm not getting much reading time in lately). But I felt like I had to read about Harriet and Peter's marriage and honeymoon to feel like I've finished off their relationship arc over the books I've read. As you can guess by the title, Harriet and Peter go on their honeymoon and get involved in solving a murder mystery when a corpse is found in the basement of the home they're staying in (after they've already slept there a night!). The mystery is complex--they have to try to figure out why or how the man was killed without basically any clues, since they'd disrupted the whole evidence scene when moving into the house. But they of course figure out the whole scheme in the end.

I really liked how this book kind of introduced Peter and Harriet into a small hamlet in England (where they're honeymooning) and brings the motley crew of characters who you would expect to find in such a place. I also, of course, liked the honesty and difficulty that the two honeymooners have with each other and how they begin to navigate marriage together, and how being married instead of just friends/engaged affects or changes their relationship (for better and for worse). I think it's so interesting how both Peter and Harriet are so flawed, both of them being almost too independent for marriage and too messed up by past lives to make it work--but they somehow do. I did feel that Harriet made quite an abrupt about-face in this book from previous ones, where she repeatedly ignored and resented and refused Peter's advances and proposals, to now being completely besotted and in love without any problems with that. Oh well, I guess it could happen that way.

Overall, this book had a great mystery in it, and it helped me to finish off the Peter Wimsey storyline that I've been interested in, so now I'm ready to move on to something else.