New Project

As most of you know, my debut novel, Jack will be coming out from Musa Publishing in September.

Of course, I would like roughly a gazillion copies to sell in the first month, so I can rocket to the top of novelist glory in record time. To that end, I have been reading all about book marketing.

Trouble is, I find it hard to believe that many of the things “They” say you should do to “promote” your book would actually amount to many sales. Book sales seem to me to be almost a matter of sheer luck. Being a best-selling writer strikes me as about as likely as winning the lottery. Like the lottery, you only hear news stories about the ones who make it, and not the (roughly gazillion) ones who flop.

So, what’s a debut novelist to do? Well…I asked myself, “why do YOU buy a book, Shannon?” To which I responded, “Well, Shannon, I buy a book because I’ve already read a book by the person who wrote it and I liked that previous book.”

That’s almost the only reason I ever buy a new novel. Very occasionally I take a plunge on a new writer, or I follow a recommendation from a friend. But I do not tend to buy a book because I like a person’s blog, her tweets, am her Facebook friend or saw an awesome “trailer” for her novel.

I blog, I tweet, I am on Facebook and I plan to make a book trailer. Because…why the heck not? But when it comes to the factor that leads me to buy a book, I’m at a loss. This will be my first book, so no one is going to be buying it based on having read and liked my others, right?

I hemmed and hawed about this conundrum for a while and finally decided, oh what the heck, give ‘em a book. You see, I wrote two books before selling my third one. So I picked the better of those two and am publishing it scene-by-scene via a new project I’m calling the “Story Sea.”

I am also hiring Astrid Lydia Johannsen to make fabulous avatars for some of the characters in the story, one at a time, as donations (yes! you can donate!) to the site trickle in.

Putting this up is a gamble of course. You might hate it and then NEVER buy one of my books in the future. But maybe you’ll love it and buy them all! Or you know, something in between. But at any rate, here it is, risk-free (to you):

1900

Eden Smith was not a boy.  But anyone who happened past Harvard Square would not have known this to see her standing there in a boy’s suit, squinting at her watch and running a nervous hand through her neat, short hair. Since coming East, Eden had found that no one expected to see a girl in boys’ clothes, so no one really saw her when she wore them.  What they saw was just another Harvard student roaming Cambridge. MORE

Homeschool Notes October, November, December

We’ve been settling into our routine pretty well this fall. The interesting thing about routine–I always think the days I let it go will be easier than the days we stick to it and I am always wrong about that. The kids are in better moods (therefore, I am in a better mood) on the days we stay on schedule (at least roughly) than on the days we throw caution to the wind.

So we’re learning to make the schedule a priority.

Within the routine of the schedule, things are still pretty scatter-shot. It’s almost the opposite of the routine thing: I will decide “It’s time for Kid A to learn Thing B” and sit down to make this happen. It never goes well. On the other hand, if the kids decide they want to do something, they get really deeply into it start-to-finish and end up happy and proud.

This is something I believe is true from a theoretical standpoint, and it’s how I want to approach education with them. (And gee–it’s not just theoretical if I report that it’s working, right?) But I have the teensiest bit of control freakishness that creeps up from time to time and convinces me I am ruining the kids for life by letting them buzz from flower-to-flower at their own pace, rather than running them through hoops. So I up and try to control their learning and it goes horribly wrong.

I’m not sure how many times this will have to happen before I let go and trust the kids.

Here’s an example. This week, Nat found an iPad app that is a Montessori division board. She wanted to play with it. So I bought it for a dollar or whatever and she played with it. But she wasn’t in the least understanding the concepts involved and I could see that. I beat myself up about it for a while, convinced I should not have given it to her until she had a solid grasp of multiplication.

But she really wanted to figure it out.

Nat works on her division with sea shells.

So I told her I’d give her some division work, but not on the iPad. She was good with that. I gave her a big box of sea shells we collected on the beach when my parents were spending winter in the Gulf, and five bowls. I made a list of division problems: 50-:-5= ; 45-:-5= ; 40-:-5= etc. down to 5. Then I showed her how to count out fifty shells, divide them evenly between the bowls and count the number in a bowl to arrive at the answer.

She loved this. She did it for 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s and 10s and went through the whole process for every single problem, even after realizing that the answers were always 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

I still don’t think she has grasped the concept of division, but all that practice is getting it into her and the steps in the process are a challenge to a kid with distraction issues. It’s great for her to practice counting out 50 shells and learning that if you make a simple mistake and count out 49 or 51, the whole problem will fail.

If I had asked her to do this without her original interest I can only guess she would hate me forever. I mean, how dull can you get??? I would hate it, myself. But it was her project and she was all into it. And if she learns multiplication via division instead of the other way around, I guess the sky won’t fall.

Another Nat-inspired, Nat-produced activity this past week was a shrine to her Granddaddy. My father died last July (in case you managed to miss me blogging/tweeting/FBing about that constantly). His 67th birthday would have been this past Sunday (9 December) and Nat wanted to do something to honor him. I suggested taking an extra can of “sharing food” to put in the basket at church on his behalf and she was good with that, but had her own plan.

“I will make a birthday card, with his picture on it. It will say “Happy Birthday Grandaddy, we miss you!”

I told her that sounded like a good idea. Then she added, “I can put it up on a shelf and when I miss him, I can look at it and say a little prayer.”

This was all her own idea, mind you.

Nat’s Shrine to her Granddaddy

And it’s exactly what she did. I gave her some card stock and printed out a few pictures of Daddy. She opted to use all the pictures and make multiple cards. Then she put them on the fireplace mantel and placed a sea shell (the same ones she used for the division project) in front of them to “make it pretty.”

I am kind of blown away by it, and really proud of her for coming up with her own little tribute and orchestrating it all in her own special way.

Selina has been doing lots of building lately. She makes elaborate cities with Lego blocks or wooden blocks, then dresses up all the people and animals and enacts little plays with them in her cities.

She finished the word book we started a month or so ago and she is very proud of it. In working slowly on that, she has also just started taking an interest in spelling out words throughout the day, and reading others as well. Her reading hasn’t started rolling on its own quite yet, but it’s going to soon, I think. She is a little linguist–always wanting to know what words mean, and using a wide vocabulary correctly in an easy, natural way. Once reading really clicks for her, she’s going to take right off.

(I have a little video of Selina reading her word book, but am having trouble uploading it for some reason. Watch this space. Maybe I’ll figure it out.)

At bedtime, if I am not totally wiped out (which, let’s be honest, I usually am), we all take turns reading a book. Nat reads something aloud to us, I read something aloud to us and Selina “reads” something aloud to us. We have some great picture books without words that Selina especially enjoys and can feel really expert at “reading.”

We should do it every day, but I am not Wonder Woman. So to substitute, I often tell Selina to choose some books and have Nat read them to her. This works especially well. Selina wants to be like Nat and so it inspires her to work on her reading and Nat gets really proud of herself if she can teach Selina to recognize a new word or two from their reading together.

We’ve also found a lot of great apps for the kids’ iPad, but I want to do a whole separate post about how we are using those.

Selina is a whiz at jigsaw puzzles. So that’s one thing we try to keep on top of. (It is really hard to find puzzles in her current zone of 250-300 pieces. 100 is too easy and 500 is too hard, but they seem to jump between those two sizes, most of the time.) I found one recently that’s 101 pieces, but they are small pieces, rather than big, kid-friendly ones, so that upped the challenge a bit.

A New Puzzle!

Selina tends to master a jigsaw after about two or three times doing it and it’s hard to keep ahead of her learning curve. But puzzles are an especially great way for her to exercise her weak eye when she wears her eye patch, so I want to indulge her as much as I can.

Speaking of puzzles, Nat is a big fan of Geo Puzzles. They are mostly fabulous realistic maps with the pieces shaped like the countries. (My quibble is that they put Mexico in with South America, then put the U.S. and Canada together in one puzzle.)

Her favorite thing for the longest time was her Africa puzzle. She chose that puzzle to begin work time every single day. So after a while, I started making her other Africa work, like matching countries and capitals, writing out all the countries for handwriting practice (she was really proud of this–so eager to get it done she actually woke in the middle of the night and got it out to finish it), African country word-search puzzles, and picture books and television documentaries (yea, Netflix!) about Africa.

Then, Cole found out that for work reasons, we might have an opportunity to take the kids to Brazil next spring. So I put Africa away for now and took out South America (plus Mexico…grumble, grumble…) and she’s been doing that one.

I told Cole that I remembered having to memorize the countries and capitals of every continent by rote in grade school, trace and color maps and be tested on it all. I hated the pressure of it. But Nat has learned all that stuff because it was fun for her. So I count that as a win.

We still aren’t getting enough physical activity in the week. The girls have ballet on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But they could really use a good vigorous hour of play or other movement every day. Next “semester” we are going to try karate at the Y in addition to the current ballet schedule. Hopefully that will help them in a number of ways. Nat’s sense of self-control is definitely showing improvement since she has turned a corner in ballet (according to her teacher). I am hoping karate will help her continue that improvement. And Selina just needs to run around!

Cookies!

Finally, some holiday notes… I am a bit of a control freak, as I mentioned above, and one of the ways that manifests is that I can’t stand cooking with anyone but myself. I had been cooking with Nat somewhat regularly last spring, but this had fallen off for a few months, as life just became too crazy for me to keep it up. It’s a challenge for me to let kids spill and lick spoons and mix poorly and all that normal learning stuff that happens in a kitchen. But I am trying to get back into the swing of teaching them to cook, so we did some holiday cookies.

The only real disaster in our cooking adventure was losing the 1/4 teaspoon down the garbage disposal. But it was my favorite measuring spoon! Alas.

It was the first time I ever made rolled cookies, so it was a new thing all-around. The kids did great and I kept my head on my shoulders (mostly). And the results were tasty, so that covers a plethora of kitchen sins.

I’m also teaching them to sing the Hallelujah chorus. Which really just means I’m introducing them (especially Nat, since she can read words well) to understanding a musical score, how to count musical time and follow your part. Actual singing is going to be another project altogether, since Nat has a habit of confusing

Hallelujah!

pitch with dynamics (ahem). But she loves to sing. So Hallelujah, it is.

Josiah is home again for several weeks (he spent the summer and much of the fall in a tepee in Iowa) and he is going to try reintroducing Nat to more routine guitar lessons. I think she’s ready to do that, as her attention and ability to focus has increased a bit lately. We are looking forward to lots of music in the house again!

Autumnal Acorn Squash Soup

Made this this morning for supper this evening. I am recording it for posterity, because I tend not to make things the same way twice and when I hit it just right, I want to remember what I did!

2 acorn squash, halved and roasted for about 40 minutes

2 cups of broth (I used chicken this time, but veggie would be fine too)

1 onion, sliced

1 teaspoon of sage

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger (a little fresh ginger would be better, but I was out)

2 tablespoons maple syrup (the real deal–don’t cheap out on the mammy one)

salt and black pepper to taste

 

While roasting your acorn squash, bring your broth to a boil. Chop and and add the onion and spices.

After the squash is roasted, scoop out its meat into the broth and puree. (I use an immersion blender for this.)

Turn off the heat and stir in the butter and maple syrup.

 

You can eat this now or later. You can add a dollop of sour cream, creme fraiche or plain yoghurt. You can serve it hot or chilled. It’s all yum, no matter what.

If I was really awesome, I’d bake some fresh bread to serve with it, but alas, I am not that awesome today. I have too much to do outside the kitchen. But you? YOU should bake some fresh bread.

Homeschooling Notes from August and September

Barack Obama and William Shakespeare Enjoy a Tea Party

Last week, Selina threw a little tea party for Barack Obama and William Shakespeare. I thought the irony was worth a photo.

Selina’s favorite thing is “imaginative play.” She puts on little dramas all day long with blocks, dolls, stuffed animals, dress-up alter egos, her sister, and whatever inanimate object comes to hand to be animated. You may remember she even used to do this with her feet.

Sometimes, she creates fantasy people to “help” her with work by changing her voice and talking her way through a problem. For example:

Selina’s Voice: “What comes after K?”

High-pitched voice: “Is it M?”

Selina’s Voice, singing: “A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L…”

Low-Pitched Voice: “No, it’s L!”

High-Pitched Voice: “Whoops!”

Then Selina will find the “L” and put it on her alphabet project. She may or may not ask aloud again until she gets stuck and needs some more “help.”

Listening to her when she doesn’t know you are around is an absolute gas.

Last week, she let me know in no uncertain terms that although she has been asking to learn to read, she cannot abide out-of-context phonics lessons. Sooo…I went back to the drawing board and this morning she took the iPad around and snapped photos of some of her favorite things, like her Pooh bear.

Pooh

Tomorrow, I’ll print her photos and let her label them all and bind them into a “Selina’s Words” book.

Given her love of creating little dramas and characters all day long, I think she is going to be a write-first reading learner.

Teaching reading is fun for me, because Nat didn’t ever really “learn” to read, she just started doing it.

Perhaps Selina would do this eventually too (though I do think Nat’s brain was just prewired to read, at birth), but she has been complaining lately about not being able to read, so I’m stepping in to help her move along. She’s five and a quarter, so I feel it is perfectly reasonable to let her at it.

Speaking of Nat, though, and particularly of her reading, she recently picked up a slightly simplified version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (it amounts to a middle-grade novel as it’s been edited) and started reading it every night before bed–and any other time she could steal. It’s the first “chapter book” she’s shown a sustained interest in reading independently, though we’ve done a few together as read-alouds and she has always enjoyed picture books independently. She got so into Alice,though, that I have been able to pick up on her interest in the story to do a lot of work besides reading.

At Work on the Alice Chart

The first Alice work she did was thumb through the book and put sticky notes on each page where Alice changed size (this was her favorite aspect of the story). She found and recorded the page number, and Alice’s height on that page, then I gave her a roll of paper and a tape measure and she charted out “life-size” pictures of Alice throughout the book–from three inches to “taller than a tree.” Selina and I both helped color and decorate the Alices.

Nine-Foot Alice

One of my favorite aspects of the completed project is that Nat made Alice African American, in spite of her pervasive blondeness in so many of her popular incarnations. We taped our Alice chart to the wall in the hallway so we could admire it for a while.

The day after that, I gave Nat a list of household stuff and had her measure each item in inches and feet, using a tape measure or a ruler, depending on what worked best for the job.

But the next day, she wanted to get back to her obsession, so I had her write a “book report” (though I didn’t call it that), and she enthusiastically did so, raving about her love of Alice and drawing a lovely picture of her favorite scene.

She has seen three different movie adaptations of Alice and she likes the Disney animated one from 1951 best, because it includes scenes and characters she likes that the other versions she’s seen leave out.

Full disclosure: I have never been an Alice fan. In fact, I have always pretty much loathed Lewis Carroll. I mean, he was a dirty old man, and most of the book is a thinly disguised drugged-out political commentary. Plus, I just don’t like the weirdness. I am not a Kafka fan either. I don’t like my own wacky-to-nightmarish dreams and don’t care to read others’. But hey, that’s just me. Clearly this is a book, if not a genre, that Nat adores. So now I’m compiling ideas for other books she might like. Do leave your suggestions in the comments. Keep in mind that she is only seven, so stuff like Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing, or Holes, while just the right reading level, are not going to ring a bell for her, in all likelihood.

One thing that has struck me since I started thinking in terms of school at home, is how much we can get done (academically, I mean) in a short amount of time. This is something I’ve heard a lot about from homeschoolers. I’ve heard more than one anecdote about blasting through a year of curriculum in four months, for example. We aren’t using a curriculum (unless “stuff Mama Shannon thinks would be good to introduce this month/week/today” counts as one), but if we were, I dare say we would be blasting too.

One of Nat’s downfalls in life is that she is highly distractable. One of her gifts is a love of and compassion towards people. I think this was tricky for her to handle in the classroom–even a classroom that allowed her lots of teacher attention and long periods of time to work on what interested her most. The simple fact is, if a kid walks by, she is more interested in that kid and what he’s doing than in the most interesting work of her own.

Last week I was plotting some subtraction practice work for her. (I have been using this websiteto make her crossword puzzles, including ones with written-out math problems. She likes to work the puzzles and I have found all kinds of ways to get her to think about different topics and disciplines via crossword.) Nat finds counters and fingers useful in doing addition and subtraction, but the problems I was doing went up and down from 100, and I didn’t want to have to deal with that many counters, so I decided to make her what Montessorians call a “Hundred Board.” Then of course, I realized that I ought to ask her to make it. More ruler work, lots of fine motor practice, reinforcement for counting to 100, etc. etc., right? So the next day I sat her down and gave her paper and a ruler and a pencil and eraser, gave her brief instructions to begin the chart (make a 10-inch square) and at each subsequent step (make ten one-inch columns…make ten one-inch rows…write out the numbers in alternating colors…cut out the chart…) and with me poking my head in the room every ten minutes to check on her progress, it was completely finished (including erasing and re-figuring out how to make the lines straight) in under an hour.

Nat’s Hundred Board

Now, this may make most of you shrug, but for Nat it’s an amazing accomplishment. I can only imagine the same task would have taken her a week of “work” periods in school last year, simply due to her tendency to get constantly distracted by other kids. As it is, she is super proud of her hundred board. Tomorrow I’m going to have her make a number line from 0-100, with a half-inch between the numbers and put it on the wall too. Then I’ll show her the subtraction puzzle and she can complete it with her math reference tools.

As for me, I’m really enjoying doing this with the kids. It isn’t a far step from my usual parenting style anyway, I just spend a little more thought on how we spend the two and a half hours set aside each morning for “work” (meaning academic work, though all day long we are working and learning in all kinds of ways). We follow a schedule every day, and I don’t mind sharing it with you:

Wake Up

1. Make your bed. 2. Clean up your room. 3. Eat breakfast. 4. Clean up the dining room. 5. Brush your teeth. 6. Get dressed. 7. Read quietly in your room.

9:00

Quiet Individual Work Time

11:30

Lunch/Clean up dining room

12:30

House Cleaning Time

Josiah calls this “Cinderella-ing.” But hey, scrubbing things is VERY Montessori. That’s what I’m gonna tell the authorities, anyway.

1:00

Afternoon Activities (different every day)

4:30

1. Supper/Clean up dining room 2. Evening Activities (different every day)

6:45

Begin bedtime routine.

“Afternoon Activities” might be continuing a project begun in the morning (Alice took all day). Or it might be free play in the girls’ room or a trip to the playground.

About once a week, Nat and I make a trip to the grocery store that entails a list of “things we need” and a list of “things we want” and a budget. Nat adds up the price of each “need” item as we put it in the cart and figure out how much we can afford from the “want” list, once we’ve got what we need. I sort of orchestrate this so that we can never get everything we want. This is probably good for me, as I haven’t been able to “afford” my favorite potato chips in weeks.

In a couple of weeks, the kids begin a soccer program that just teaches the game without any competition. This is good because my kids are not athletes just yet (Selina may well become one though). Chicago Parks and Recreation has all kinds of introductory sports programs and I just want them to get the basics of many things and see if any in particular strike them as special. They are doing dance on Saturdays too. Really, they need (Nat especially really truly needs) an hour of high-aerobic activity every day, but that’s a tough one for non-sporty me. We joined the Y too, though, so when the weather is too cold for the playground we can go there.

I could probably go on about this for another six posts, just about our first six weeks or so of earnest homeschooling. But I’ll wrap this up for now and check in again in a few weeks.

A Homeschool Post at BlogHer

Why do people tend to jump to the conclusion that homeschooled children will grow up to be anti-social freaks? Here’s my response to that assumption.

 

 

Selina’s Favorite “Green Soup”

This is easy-peasy, delicious and super healthful. Selina begs me to make it.

Green Soup

1 head of cauliflower

2 heads of brocolli

1 large onion

1 large potato

1 quart of broth (any kind–I’ve used chicken, veggie and mushroom–all are good)

4 or 5 tablespoons of butter

salt and pepper to taste

Put the broth on the stove to heat while chopping all the veggies. Toss them in the pot and cook until they’re all soft. Puree with a blender or food processor. Add the butter and stir until melted. (You can skip it if you’re vegan or something, but it really makes a difference.) Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve!

Home Again, Home Again…

For those of you who haven’t heard it yet via the grapevine, or Twitter (which is the grapevine), I have news: We are homeschooling next year. And we might be homeschooling for a year or two, or three, though at this time, we are hoping to put the girls back in the school we have come to love, once it’s within our economic means to do so again.

The bottom line this year, is that we just can’t afford tuition.

I admit that there is that perverse part of me that enjoys being the wrench in assumed binaries like pro- versus anti-homeschooling. You and I both know there are strong feelings and opinions at the far ends of those supposed poles. But in our case, an initial plan to homeschool was changed when we found a school we really loved and could afford. Now we can’t afford it and have jumped onto the homeschooling track again.

I have always held that all good parents homeschool, they just think of it more or less as homeschooling, per se, depending on their position between those assumed opposite poles. So we’ve been homeschooling all along, and now we are stepping up the “school-like” nature of home to transition the girls to leaving school for awhile.

It’s funny, really. One of the things I like best about their school (which is an intensive Montessori, preK-8th-grade, private school), is that it seemed, as I put it only days before I realized we would be coming back home “like homeschooling off-site.”

Maria Montessori set up her initial school–which was in fact a residential facility for needy children–as a “children’s house” and much of the Montessori “work” in classrooms is based on life skills and the work of running a home. In the girls’ school, for example, there are not only table-washing, and buttoning “works” in the preschool classroom, but a full working kitchen (sans dishwasher, because doing it by hand is part of the lesson!) in the upper elementary (4th-6th grades) classroom where children frequently make meals for themselves and/or the school faculty and staff.

So home fits a Montessori style and/or a Montessori style fits home. And since we do hope to send the girls back to school, we won’t be quite “unschooling” as we had initially planned, because I want to keep the Montessori vocabulary and work style familiar to the girls. I have set up a new bookshelf with shelves labeled for each of the girls and some labeled “share” and have already put some “works” there and the girls have been working at home quite happily when they are not at school. I plan to gradually step this up to a more formal level over the summer, week by week until we are doing about two hours of free-flow “work” in the mornings, then doing field trips, outside lessons and household work in the afternoons by autumn. I plan to change out the works available as needed, probably every week or two.

Of course, who knows what will actually happen. But given the good work the school has done in preserving the kids’ self-motivation to learn and produce work they are proud of, taking advantage of that for a homeschool year or two will be easy enough, as long as I keep a close watch on their interests and learning-style preferences.

One of the pros about coming home is that we will be able to do more activities. Both of the girls have really been enjoying ballet lessons (which sort of shocks me, as I had never planned to put them in ballet. It just sort of came up on a lark and now Nat, especially, really loves it). But that hour on Saturday morning, and two hours of church on Sunday have been all the kids could handle after 6 hours/5 days of school for Nat and 3 hours/5 days of school for Selina. School wipes them out completely. But Nat has been asking for a violin for a while (which gratifies me because I did always plan to put her in Suzuki music lessons) and now we can A) afford it and B) have time for it without exhausting her. We will also probably do either swim lessons or some introductory martial arts or perhaps both, depending on how things go.

So, after fretting about finding a better job, with super-flexible hours so I could continue to solo parent in the coming academic year during the weekdays when Cole is out of town at work, I am now off the market. Suffice it to say, I have a job. And we have reduced financial pressure, so I can breathe easier about that job paying $0. The girls will undoubtedly miss school, because they love it to death. But they love home too, and we will hold onto the friends we’ve made at school for play dates  and summer camps and whatnot while finding a bit of flexibility in the business of making some new friends in new venues.

And that is our biggest news of late. Now you know!

I think this is what I’m going to make with my silk. I found it here.

I also got a 1950′s shirtdress-ish thing from the same site. I have some checked, polished cotton to make that.

Wish me luck!

UPDATE 28 November

I just cut out my shirt dress pattern. Get this: in 1950 I am a size 16. SIXTEEN. Now, I’m a 4 or a 6 depending on the label. Ha! I knew they had changed sizes over time but wow.

Lunch Wars

I just finished reading Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children’s Health by Amy Kalafa. It’s one of this month’s BlogHer Book Club books.

I am an armchair food revolutionary, so I was immediately interested when the book came up on the listserv and I jumped to participate. I have to admit, the book itself disappointed me, though I still find the topic–and lots of the information in the book–fascinating. My main problem with the book is its haphazard organization. It jumps way too much from sound-bite to sound-bite, with loads of “sidebar” stories interrupting the flow. In a way, it reads like a book written by a filmmaker, which is exactly what it is.

(Before writing the book, Amy Kalafa made a film called “Two Angry Moms” about her own battle for better food in her kid’s school, as well as similar battles throughout the United States. I still haven’t had a chance to see it, but Kalafa suggests screening it and/or other films as one way to launch your own lunch war in your own school.)

To be fair to the book, it is all about the byzantine National School Lunch Program. It is hard to imagine how any writing on that topic could flow neatly and clearly from beginning to end, because the system itself is such a big wad of conflicting interests, history, multitiered regulation and red-herring authorities. Most of Kalafa’s side-bar tales of local activists and professionals trying to improve school food are chock-full of road blocks due to arcane, out-dated regulations, deep-frozen stored commodity food from the government that no one can afford not to use, chasing the wrong person or the wrong committee for months before discovering the real power lies elsewhere and other Kafkaesque frustrations.

As I read it, what it all boiled down to, for me, was money. As with so much else about public education, we just aren’t willing to pony up the money it takes to do right by our children. Kalafa explains that the average school lunch budget is limited to one dollar per meal for lunch and less for breakfast in schools that also offer it. She also mentions that school cooks–or nugget defrosters, as the case may be–are usually the lowest paid people at a school–lower paid, even, than the maintenance/cleaning staff. Asking such ill-paid workers to do much more than heat up a “cheese substitute” pizza for a thousand kids a day isn’t really reasonable without skill training, more staff, and the pay a truly skilled worker deserves.

Much of the book focuses on that kind of training–and how to cover the costs of training. Many schools also need equipment and more hands on deck in order to achieve better results on the lunch tray. In addition, schools often can’t afford to turn down the surplus commodities the government gives or sells them very cheaply. Those commodities might have been a lovely boon in the 1950s, when the apples were apples, but nowadays, government commodity “apples” will more likely come in the form of apple sauce full of added sugar and preservatives, sealed in an individual-sized plastic container.

With so many problems, where the heck do you start your own food revolution? Kalafa suggests you begin by having lunch with your child. Head to the school and join the kids for lunch. Invite other parents to come along. Kalafa says that it will only be through the desire of enough parents that change will come–hence her film’s title. And some change has come in some places. Even given the herculean difficulties, many school systems have improved their food, even if they haven’t made it all the way yet. Kalafa’s book has useful information on where the real power lies in most school food systems, how to approach (and perhaps more usefully, how not to approach) the people you will need on your side and all kinds of suggestions for small, immediate changes you can push for right away, (like getting your kid’s teacher to stop giving food as a reward for academic achievement in the classroom).

We’ll be talking about the book and about school food in general, for the next few weeks over at BlogHer. Come join the discussion and share your own perspective. Kalafa’s book was certainly an eye-opener for me. We are lucky that our kids go to a small school where everyone brings lunch and the food culture is healthy and even reasonably refined, for a bunch of 6-year olds. But I plan to look for and start supporting the Lunch Wars for better public school lunches in my own area, now that I know what’s out there. Whether or not you have kids in the system (or kids at all), you might find you want to do the same.

BlogHer.com paid me a pittance to write this review. Don’t worry, it wasn’t nearly enough to influence my true opinion.

I Used a Pattern!

I have avoided sewing for years, because I just can’t wrap my head around the language of patterns. But once it occurred to me that I can see how a piece of clothing goes together, I decided to try a pattern and fill in what I didn’t understand with instinct/vision.
I found a pattern that required nothing but thread (no zippers, buttons, anything but seam-sewing required) and knocked it out in three days with the same muslin I made that last dress with. (I have enough of that muslin to make underwear for an army.)
I did pretty well, though I won’t be cutting the silk I am sitting on anytime soon.
With this dress, I dyed it in tea to a nice sepia tone. Next I’m going to take some photos of this really nifty urban scene down the corner from our street, photoshop them up a bit, print them in black and white onto iron-on fabric and put them all over my dress.
Meanwhile, I’m going to try yet another pattern or maybe the same one in different fabric before I do my silk dress.
What silk dress? You ask?
I have raw silk left over from a number of sources (one was my first wedding at age 23) in a number of close, but not matching shades. I am imagining a very simple, A-line dress with the different panels made of different colors of this silk so that it has a subtle color-block effect.
A dress like that should be lined though, and I think I mentioned I don’t line things.
So I will either end up making it badly or won’t be making until I’m out of practice muslin.