Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters by Erica Komisar

I feel very ambivalent about this book. There were some points that I really strongly agreed with, and then some points that I wanted to throw my phone against the wall (since I was listening to it as an audiobook).

First, for what I liked:
-This whole book is an argument that it's important for mothers to be "present" with their children as much as possible when they are young. She presents a lot of different research experiments in many different facets of parenting/child development that concur with this argument, and I really liked getting that information that supports my already-strong conviction that staying home with my kids is important. It's important for their emotional development to not be separated too much from their mothers, and they need the sort of nurturing relationship that is almost exclusive from the mother. All of these things she talked about made me, as a stay-at-home mom, feel great about my life choices and helped me feel more motivated to continue to try and be emotionally present and supportive to my kids while I am physically present with them.
-I liked the non-religious argument that moms staying home is important. I feel like most people who are not LDS or strongly Christian do not have this view, and I liked this information- and research-based opinion.
-Some of the research was really interesting, like the differences between mothers and fathers. Our different hormones actually influence the way we nurture and interact with our children, and changing the balances of the hormones can change our nurturing as well. So interesting.

I did not like:
-Some of the stories about these moms who hate being with their kids or who spend 70 hours a week at their demanding jobs away from their kids made me want to cry. It is so common and obviously so damaging. I hate imagining all of these emotionally neglected kids and I wonder what sort of world these people live in? (Answer: the rich New York City world where everyone has to work at high-powered jobs and make tons of money.) I was SO MAD at the section where she talks about husbands being unsupportive and resentful of their wives desiring to stay home or work part time to be with their child more because they wanted them to "pull their weight" and make more money for them. What is WRONG with people???
-I felt like the author was extremely one-sided and sounded really judgmental at times, even though she was trying not to be. She didn't necessarily strike a great tone about women who work full-time--she obviously thinks that's a really really negative choice for your kid. Every time she talked about day care she sounded like it was the worst thing ever you could do for your baby, and while I definitely am grateful I don't have to send my child to day care, it seems very insensitive to all the moms who have no other option for their child.
-She seemed to basically blame EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM that children have on being raised by neglectful mothers, and blames all of mothers' problems with connecting with their children on THEIR mothers not wanting to be with them when they were babies. And the only solution she seems to offer is going to therapy. Which makes sense, because she's a psychotherapist and this is what she does. It just seemed a little heavy on her opinions and not necessarily open to the idea that not every problem that every child has is caused by insecure attachment to their mothers in their first year of life.

Overall, it was a good listen and I honestly think this book needs to be out there. Because if there are people out there like the women and men she talks about as her patients, who seriously don't know why their kids are struggling when they are with them for only an hour a day, then it is necessary. There are definitely some flaws with it, but I would read it again if I ever need a pick-me-up and reminder about why I stay home and why my choice to spend my time raising my kids is important--because nothing is worth risking the emotional health of my children if I can help it.

Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace

I don't have anything very eloquent to say other than I am so happy to have read this series and I loved every minute of it.

I loved traveling around Europe with Betsy in Betsy and the Great World and seeing where she went, particularly at that moment in time just before WWI started. I remember reading somewhere about someone who went to Europe in the decade of the 1900s and that book said that it was probably the most perfect time to go to Europe in the whole decade of the 1900s, before everything was changed and torn up by the wars. I loved imagining Betsy's travels and watching her do that. I felt like she maybe spent too much time on her trip in Munich and not enough in Venice or London--there were only about two chapters about London and I was most excited for that!--but it was all lovely all the same. I loved her whirlwind romance with Marco in Venice, and how the book ended with her reconnecting with Joe. I was surprisingly moved by the chapters in London when war was being declared and all of Betsy's friends there being affected by it, and I almost cried. Sometimes I forget what uncertainty and fear people must have felt before something so obvious and historical like WWI, when they didn't know when it was starting or if it was going to happen. That chapter felt very, very real.

And Betsy's Wedding was just a dream. While there were almost none of the familiar characters from the other books in Betsy and the Great World, it seemed like Betsy was right back in her home with all of The Crowd around her after she is married and settled down. I mostly loved her relationship with Joe and how they learned about being married and working together. It was such a sweet story but not mushy or fake, with some real heartache too. I kind of hated how it ended--spoiler, it was WWI and Joe ends up going off to war!--but since it's so based on Maud Hart Lovelace's life, it's pretty obvious that Joe is going to come home safely and that Betsy and Joe will live happily ever after like Maud and Delos, so it's not too hard to imagine. I wish there were at least one more book with Betsy and Joe having a baby to really complete the series, but this was a great ending place too.

I will definitely be coming back to read these again someday. These books were such a treat to read and they make me so happy.

Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe by Maud Hart Lovelace

I blasted through these two books because I just couldn't wait to find out what is going to happen to Betsy. I think these books would be so much fun for a teenager or tween, although it started to get a little old for me to just read about all of the many parties that they were going to over and over. However, I loved loved loved the blossoming romance between Joe and Betsy. Lovelace does an excellent job of sustaining the reader's interest in Joe over the course of the four high school books--you can tell that he's the best boy for Betsy even though she doesn't know it for a while, and then all sorts of conflicts and love triangles arise to keep them from getting together too early. I also love how Betsy has real consequences for her actions in these books--not something that she struggles with and then is able to fix by the end all the time. In Betsy Was a Junior she creates a sorority with her friends and it really damages her relationships with some other friends and people, and makes it so that she isn't able to write in the Essay Contest. She isn't able to talk her way out of that one and she has to learn from her mistakes. I like how Betsy is always learning from her mistakes and becoming better, even though she does always fall back into some of the same mistakes of being too social and not studying hard enough. She is very real in that way, and I just love her.

I'm excited to read the last two!

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I absolutely loved this book as a kid. (I feel like that is a common theme for how I'm starting all of these book post reviews lately.) I read it so many times, but I haven't revisited it since I was in high school, I bet, and I wanted to see how I felt about it now as an adult. I was sucked in from the first chapter, and polished this off in an afternoon/evening while we watched our family movie for FPMN last night (it was The Sword in the Stone and I have no interest in that movie so I was reading surreptitiously on the side). And this time around, I think my experience was a little different. I loved, loved the beginning chapters where we meet all the characters--Meg, Charles Wallace, their mother, and Calvin. I instantly felt connected to all of them and loved them all. I especially love Meg and her angsty teenager-y-ness and her anger and stubbornness. She is grumpy and nasty sometimes and does things like yelling at her long-forgotten father in a selfish way, but it's so believable and real because that is how a stressed-out teenager would act. I also loved Calvin and how he is so open about loving the Murrys and his not fitting in with anyone else.

But I felt way more disconnected to the story once things got science fiction-y and they left the world and started tesseracting. I felt like L'Engle didn't describe much of the inter-world setting and I couldn't envision what they were seeing and doing. Like I couldn't really imagine what Mrs. Whatsit looked like when she transformed into the centaur that definitely wasn't like a centaur because it was indescribable to Meg. So many things were "indescribable" and it felt a little bit like a cop-out. However, that only tainted my enjoyment of a few scenes and I still felt very invested in the rest of the story, like when they get to Camazotz and meet IT, and when Meg has the climactic battle of love to save Charles Wallace from IT. I wish there were a little more at the end--the ending was so sudden and there wasn't enough closure to how they all were at home again. I am planning to re-read all the rest of the series as well. I didn't know that there were five books in this set--I'd only read four--but I have all of them now and I am going to work my way through them again.

Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace

This is actually two of the Betsy-Tacy books in one volume, but they are similar enough that it's not worth doing two separate posts about them. Plus, I sped through them so fast it'll be hard for me to keep straight what came from each one!

I'm trying to remember if I ever read these books when I was younger. While the first four Betsy-Tacy books are burned into my memory, I don't really remember much from these. That may be because I was too young to really understand or appreciate what was going on in Betsy's high school years when I read these, or that I just never got around to them. These two books cover Betsy's freshman and sophomore years of high school, and there is definitely a huge jump in Betsy's maturity between Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown and Heaven to Betsy, although there's only two years in their age differences. But I think there is a huge difference between middle and high schoolers (generally) so I guess that is believable.

There is also a much wider cast of characters--while the first four books are basically just Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, Betsy and Tacy have a wide range of friends that they meet at their new high school and it evolves into "The Crowd" who they are always hanging out with. I was a little disappointed by this at first, because I didn't want this to be a sign of Betsy and Tacy becoming less close, but they remain just as close of friends, just with other friends around them. And some of the cast of characters are really lovable, especially Betsy's guy friends who are always over at her house like Cab, Herbert, and Tony. I feel like I was probably more like Tacy when it came to boys--much more shy and bashful around them, while Betsy's easy banter and desire to have boys in love with her was not part of my high school experience, so that was fun to read. I wished I'd had a Crowd like Betsy and Tacy, with friends always dropping in and lots of fun, easygoing outings together. It sounds so quaint, with everyone just having Good Clean Fun--going on car rides and playing a Ouija board and going ice skating, and the worst thing a boy can do is try to hold your hand. I wish it were still that way!

I loved the main lessons that Betsy learned along the way. She learned to stay true to herself and not try to be someone else, even if it helped her to get a boy, and she decided to be more serious about her writing after she realized she wasn't taking it seriously or caring enough about it. I loved how she realized that everyone had something for their own--something they wanted to be theirs, like her sister and her opera, and for Betsy, it was her writing. Betsy seems like such a normal teenager who makes really normal teenage mistakes, like letting her affairs of the heart get in the way of her long-term goals with her writing, and desperately trying to be Mysterious and Passionate with tons of perfume and a tinkling laugh. But she grows up. And I cannot wait until I can get my hands on the rest of them!

The Read-Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie

I am a sucker for books about books, and particularly books about reading books to kids (as it turns out). I don't need any extra motivation to read to my kids since it's one of my favorite things to do with them, but if I had needed some, this book would provide it. Mackenzie talks at length about all of the added benefits that reading aloud with your kids will provide, even long past the age when they can read on their own (even until they are teens!). It puts them leaps and bounds ahead in school, teaches them empathy and interest in the world and other people, but most of all, it creates meaningful connections between you and your kids by giving you shared experiences and meaningful time together. That is more important than improving their academic achievements or anything else, and she gives compelling reasons why it helps bring families closer together. She also talks about ways to talk about books together, how to go about reading together as a family, and what things your kids can do while you're reading to them so they're not bored, and gives some really thorough and great lists of books to start with for each age. I really enjoyed this and will definitely check back into it again and again, especially to look through some of the books she suggests (because they sound awesome). My only gripe is that I was hoping to get some suggestions for how to read books together that work for a number of different ages, because I can see us in the future trying to read together but having kids of all ages and having a hard time picking books that work for everyone. Do you just read to the little kids separately and the big kids? But how do you have time to read to each separate group? It's already going to be hard enough to read regularly (which she does address--she does a good job of making it seem possible and not a huge commitment) without having to do it for multiple ages every day. I wish she'd talked about how she does it with her family, since she has six kids--but it sounds like she just reads books for all of them from what she's talked about in the book. Anyway, otherwise, it was an inspirational read and I'm glad I bought a copy because I will want to use it again and again.

Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace

I have some mega, mega love for this book. I vividly remember reading about Betsy's writing when I was a kid, and it definitely motivated me to write my own stories as well. I wish that I had saved any of them--I know that I threw them away because I was embarrassed about them later. But Betsy wasn't embarrassed, she loved sharing her stories and even sent them into a magazine. I remember "Flossie's Accident"--as I was reading the story I was smiling, remembering when I read it the first time--and I now loved how they squeezed it onto one piece of paper to send it in to the magazine. I loved Betsy's excitement about going to the library and the magic of those trips to the library, and her parents' insistence that she read good books like the classics. And I remember being very impressed by their trip to the Opera House to see Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rip Van Winkle. I think, however, that the Christmas shopping trip is one of my very favorite stories in the whole Betsy-Tacy series. It just sounds so magical and wonderful, and I remember wanting to do the same thing. After reading the first three books, this one felt just slightly meant for an older age group. This book is just about perfect, I think.

Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill by Maud Hart Lovelace

I was sick yesterday, so I spent all of Sunday afternoon lying in bed trying not to throw up (thank goodness for Tommy!), and I read two Betsy-Tacy books while laying there. I accidentally read them out of order, so I read this one after Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, and I think that made me like this one a little bit less than I would have. Because Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown is possibly one of my favorites of the whole series (although I have to read the other six to decide that for sure!). Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill is charming and cute and I love the story of them meeting the Syrian refugees (and I definitely love and support the overall message of being welcoming and kind to these new Americans). I also loved the chapter about them falling in love with the King of Spain and how they pinned his picture to their undergarments, hahaha. It just is so perfect. And the chapters about the fight they had with Katie and Julia over who would be queen just is so real--I can completely imagine that exact thing happening between me and my siblings as well. But it doesn't have the thrill of Downtown and the just slightly older writing style, which makes it feel more like a book for an older kid. I still love this one though.

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

I'd never read this book before, and I still haven't seen the movie (although I am definitely planning on doing so after reading this book). My only real introduction to this movie was a poster of the famous picture of the greasers from the movie hanging in a friend's apartment at BYU. But when I listened to Rob Lowe's memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends, he talked for at least a chapter about his experience on The Outsiders, since it was his first real big break into the movie business, and that got me interested in the movie and the book. And now I'm just finally getting around to it.

It was definitely worth the listen. I loved how Hinton created this lovable cast of delinquent characters--it was hard not to love them all and root for them even as they did pretty dumb or terrible things. I especially loved Ponyboy Curtis's character and his relationships with his brothers, and how he kind of grew and learned how much they cared for him over the course of the book. I loved the overall message of the book about Ponyboy's discovery in his search for his identity and that people aren't all that different on the inside no matter what they look like on the outside. There was a lot of violence in the book (since it's basically about different gangs fighting with each other), but it wasn't vividly described and I didn't mind it. This was definitely a great book and I can imagine thinking it was super amazing if I had read it as a teenager myself. I would definitely re-read this and I really enjoyed it.

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie

I think this may be the last of my Agatha Christie's for the next little while. I really enjoyed listening to all of her Miss Marple mysteries, and this was another highly rated one on Goodreads, so I thought I would check it out. I apparently read it before in 2013, but I had no recollection of it (haha), so it was totally new to me. (It's amazing how little I can recall from these Agatha Christie mysteries later on. I guess I will always remember Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None but other than that I forget them so quickly. That's good because I can always revisit and still enjoy them later.)

I didn't love this one this time, possibly because Poirot was digging up an old crime that had been committed sixteen years before, so it was lacking in any sort of action. Basically the only thing that happened in this book was Poirot visits the five people staying at the home at the time of the murder, and then asks them each to write a narrative saying the same thing of what they told him. So you basically get a lot of repetition of each person going over what they did and saw and it got a little bit old after a while. I was very interested in how Poirot solved the mystery and figured it out, and was engaged in the ending. Overall, maybe not my favorite Christie mystery, but it was a fun, short read.

Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace

These books are just so fun to re-read. I love the simple language and stories that make these books great for young kids, and I can just tell that Dane will love these when we get around to reading them. Betsy Tacy and Tib are girls, but the things they do and the shenanigans they get up to would be so enthralling to him, I just know he would love it. I read these books and just wish I could give him this life of freedom and fun and imagination.

My favorite stories in this book were when the girls cut their hair, and the mirror palace (I remember being impressed by that when I read it as a kid), and the Everything Pudding. I love how Maud Hart Lovelace tells the stories of these girls, and it's interesting to read at the back of the book about how she got all of the stories from her own life and her childhood friends.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

I don't necessarily know what I thought about this book. Much of it felt very real, particularly the first 3/4 of it which focused on the relationship between Lucy and her mother when her mother came to visit her while Lucy was in the hospital with an unnamed illness. I really liked how Strout portrayed the way these two women talked to each other, and how Lucy felt about her mother, and how they showed love to each other even though it didn't look like it. I didn't love the last bit where Lucy talked more about her marriage failing, etc., which just didn't feel like it was all that connected to the narrative that I really enjoyed about her mom. I wanted one cohesive story about Lucy and her mom, and I was surprised that there was more to Lucy's story that didn't go with it, because that was what the rest of the book seemed like it was about. There were several parts that were painful to listen to, like Lucy talking about her childhood, but it was inspirational how she overcame those rough beginnings without making a huge deal out of it. I thought Lucy was like, yeah, my childhood was hard, but no big deal, I'll just go to college and be awesome but still be myself and not ashamed of where I came from. She didn't seem to celebrate or run away from her impoverished background or her somewhat abusive home (it doesn't seem actually abusive, but definitely dysfunctional and neglectful in a lot of ways), and just accepted it for what it was and herself for what she was and grew to love her new life. I wouldn't say I loved this, but it was an interesting book to listen to. Plus, it was super short (only four segments on Overdrive), so that was a bonus. I don't imagine I will remember this book for very long, though.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I loved reading this out loud with Dane. He loved the first one, and we quickly made it through this one together too. The first book is so cute because of the stories that Pa tells Laura about her grandpa as a child or about panthers, and there aren't really stories like that in here. But this book is so interesting about how they start from absolutely nothing, just pull up their wagon to a random spot of prairie and make a life there. You read about how Pa hauled the logs, built the house, built the barn, put on the roof, built the fireplace, dug the well, started the farm. I love how Laura (I can't just call her Wilder, she is Laura to me!) gives so much detail and tells you how Pa goes about doing everything, because although sometimes it's a little hard to envision (and I'm sure Dane didn't understand most of her detailed descriptions about how Pa build the fireplace), it's so interesting to read. Dane just loved this book and I loved reading it with him.

Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace

This is another one of my childhood favorites that I am revisiting in my old age. I utterly adored these books when I was a kid, and I wanted to see how they stood up. I loved remembering all of these sweet stories about Betsy and Tacy, these two best friends who never fought. I especially remembered the story about them dressing up in their mother's clothes and going calling on other women, and dyeing the sand different colors to sell. I think that their childhood just sounds so perfect and idyllic, and I wish I could give Dane the same complete and utter freedom that Betsy and Tacy had as five-year-olds. They wandered around all day and played together, and I wish Dane had a friend living next door that we could let him just run around with all day. I think he would really love this book and these stories about Betsy and Tacy, and I'd love to tackle these books soon with him. (There are so many books I want to read with him!)