Thursdays

Thursdays are my favorite day. It's our official library and farmer's market day. The farmer's market is right in the plaza next to the library so it makes sense to do both at once. (Although we do go to the library more than once a week.) We are in the middle of a transition right now, so it made this Thursday even better. Even though it was pouring, Madeleine and I picked up some fruit, eggs, and flowers. I love the familiarity of it.

After we ran to the library before we got too wet. 

We have been reading some seriously awesome books lately.

Madeleine's books are some of my favorite. I've been on a biography kick, and children's biographies has to be one of my new favorite genres.

These are the three we have this week. All of them are good. I like Firebird by Misty Copeland the best. The illustrations are pretty and the words are a poem. Madeleine's favorite is Me, Jane since it has a monkey in it. If you have any biography children's books you love, send them my way! I'm trying to get my fingers on Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova next.

I've been reading three books this week. 

This book has been a crash course on music and movies for me. I love it, but it's taking me forever to read through it since I don't understand 70% of the references. But if you want to know the history of the hipster (or nerds), like punk music, or 80s movies, you'll probably like this Twee book.

I'm also almost done with this book. I've read a chapter every two days. It's a heavy read and I can't mentally take more than half a chapter a day. With that said, it's been one of the best books I've read in a while. It's helping my reading and I can't wait to use her questions for book club.

Lastly I'm reading Emily of New Moon for book club. I'm almost done.

Matt has also been reading. He read The Way of Kings last week and now he is starting on Emily of New Moon.

 What have you been reading? Any traditions you particularly like?

March's book club

March's book club was awesome. We read Free-Range Kids. Only 2 people came and my husband but we talked about the book for over an hour and half! On top of that, I had a chance to discuss it with a few more members of book club outside of the meeting and even more members gave me extremely positive feedback about reading it. So I'm considering this month a win.

We had a great discussion about how we were raised, the role of parents, the role of police and social workers, and how different children have different needs. It pretty much was exactly what I wanted my book club to be when I was thinking about it. We stayed on topic the whole time and we never ran out of things to say. I also liked the fact that people said that they kept bringing it up in discussions with other people. That was one of the reasons I chose this book. After I read it, I wanted to discuss and talk to people about it.

Here is my review from the first time I read it.

"This book was amazing. Funny how the "world's worst mom" wrote the best parenting book I've read (and I read a lot of them). One of the lovely things about this book it doesn't matter what your parenting style is...this book will still work for you. With that said, it's only kind of a parenting book. People that don't have kids should read it too. The goal of this book was to examine our generations perceptive of "safe" and it takes the whole community to change not just parents to make a large difference in our culture."

Next month is one of my favorite books - Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. Most of the people haven't read it before, and I think it's really quite a special book. I love the perspective and the message.

Any suggestions for other book club books? I have the next few months planned but I'm still looking for more.

Book club

I was so nervous about book club for a lot of reasons.

1) Our home is small.

2) I had never hosted a group this large.

3) I have never hosted a book club.

So I was learning a lot of new things.

First thing I did was clear the living room. Thanks to our anniversary dinner, I knew that our couch could fit in the closet. So during nap time, I moved all of our living room furniture out of the room. The kids had so much fun playing in there. We kicked balls and painted it was great!

Then at 6, Baby X got picked up and I got to work. Matt had come home a little early to grab chairs that we were borrowing from the community room. We only have enough seats for 4 people, so it was either that or sitting on the floor. It worked great! 

Matt tried to put Madeleine down for bed before leaving to teach a class. Madeleine popped out of bed right before the first person came. Out of 20 people that signed up for book club, 7 came. That's pretty good right? 

We discussed the basic rules of our club and then started chatting about the book. I had notes and questions prepared beforehand, but we ended just talking about whatever we felt like in the book. This book has so many different discussion topics and we had plenty to talk about. We talked for an hour about it before people needed to go home. Most people told me after that they still had a lot that they wanted to discuss. That's good right? 

I'm not sure if everyone liked it, but I enjoyed it. I think the lack of structure would have not done as well with even a slightly larger group. I'm not sure how to handle that in the future. I think I'm going to drop in on one of the library's clubs and see how they handle it. The only one I can go to is the mystery one, which is one of my least favorite genres.

The book we are reading next month is Free Range Kids. It's technically a parenting book but I think it says a lot about our culture's lack of media literacy. I'm excited for it.

Any tips for how to run larger groups? What have you found is the best way to have discussions?