Naomi gave Mike and me a note a couple of days ago. It's on a sheet of wide-ruled paper, folded into 8ths and addressed on the outside like a letter, complete with a hand-drawn stamp with a heart on it. She gives us notes often, usually with butterflies and hearts, so I was expecting the same thing. Here's what it says: (spelling amd caps are hers)

Dear: mommy & daddy

I realy love you. I'm realy sorry When I do Bad. I am tring to do the right thing but it seems to come out the rong thing. when you want me to do the dishs or some thing els When I am in the middle of doing something by myself and i poute it means I'm trying to be by Myself where nobudy is Because I am trying to controle myself and so I will not run off and hurt a animal or eny body.

love
Naomi

The day before we got this note, Naomi'd had a bad day. She'd scratched herself twice to make herself bleed, thrown herself, screaming, onto the floor of a doctor's office and kicked me, and generally been hard to be with all morning. In the afternoon I was running to the store and took her with me. On the way there she began to cry and I pulled over. She had her head down and her knees drawn up. I asked what was wrong. She said, "Why don't you just dump me on the road and leave me to die? I'm no good for anyone. I'll never go to the Celestial Kingdom because I did too many bad things. Way too many. If I try to be good it turns out bad. I can never know how to do good things."

She cried and ranted for about 30 minutes. I said she *was* good for someone-- she was good for me. She answered, "That's only what *you* think."

She's had such a hard life-- and she only turned 9 this week. Sometimes she cries about how hard her life is and says, "And I have so long to go! A really, really long time, and it's so hard!" I can only cry with her and tell her I'm sorry.

While crying in the car she told me, "I just wish I didn't have a family. Then I could be all alone." But later she said, "It's so scary to be a child, because your parents are old, pretty soon they'll be really old, and die. And then I'll be all alone, and it's so scary."

Huh. Who'd have thought.

She also said she wishes she were an only child so all the things at home would be hers and she wouldn't have to have people around all the time, but later said, "And the other kids (siblings) don't even like to play with me! They just leave me alone!"

So that's how life with Naomi is going lately. Public school starts soon and hopefully the structure and time away from home will help relieve some of her stress-- (not to mention ours.) In the mean time she goes from drawing us butterflies and hearts, to yelling and screaming in public, to sobbing about bad choices, to asking if I'll buy her a pretty purse because she hasn't done anything bad the whole time we've been in the store.

Life is never dull.

Book recomendation of the day: Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children, by Daniel A. Hughes. Describes life with Naomi.

Good news! I am the proud owner of a new laptop! =) It's an Apple (of course) MacBook, white, and wonderfully portable. No more sitting at gymnastics, play practice, dentist's office, etc, thinking, "I could be getting something done..." Now I can write! On the down side, it has so many fun programs I spend way too much time playing with them. (Garage Band is really cool. Compose music, transpose, add other tracks... all while you should be working.) And it came with a free iPod and printer (fine print: after mail-in rebate.) =)

As I sat in Elizabeth's violin lesson last week I saw a yellow leaf drift from the trees onto the grass. The first one of the year. In Minnesota I feared this time of year. It meant 9 months of snow and ice and never being warm enough. But I've been gone long enough that I'm beginning to get over the panic of impending arctic winds, and to appreciate than fall lasts longer than a week in some places-- Virginia included. I'm actually looking forward to getting past the 98 degree humidity and being able to wear sweaters again. I have a deep love for sweaters, undoubtedly founded in the same memories that make me panic about approaching winters, and I feel like a person can never have quite enough warm, fuzzy, wool sweaters. But I don't love wearing them enough to decide to return to Minnesota. (Wonderful people there, probably because they have to join forces against the elements.)

I am working on writing 100 stories, and thought you might like to know how it's going. I'm on book 24 at the moment, and have several I'm working on at the same time. Some of them include:
-a 3 board book series (for toddlers) about Noah and his dog Ruff
-3 easy-readers about Jacob, his best friend Harley, and their adventures (including a "magic" cape, a swallowed tooth, and some chickens)
-a novel about a young American girl living in Saudi Arabia
- The Princess, the Pea and the Returned Missionary, a road-show script which our ward produced
-Going Up?, a short, funny novel about a girl who gets stuck on an elevator with the boy she's secretly admired for years
- The Apparent Insanity of Manda Hill, a novel in which the main character dies on the first page
- Raining on the Playground, a poem for several voices
- Rush, a Christmas picture book (it has nothing to do with shopping)
- The Other Side of Jacob's Peak, a novel I'm still working on and don't know how to describe. I hope it turns out well. (It's hard to write this one.)
-Claremont, USA: A Fable, about the education of gifted kids in America. (One of the fastest stories I've ever written.)
-and last, but not least, Skye Girl, a middle-grade novel I'm still working on that takes place at my elementary school, about a girl who writes a blog, loves science, and finally slaps the bully back. (Nothing auto-biographical. Trust me.)

There are others, of course, but I won't bore you with the whole list. I'm mailing like crazy, and proudly collecting rejection slips from editors across the country. I file them away and send the stories out again. If persistence doesn't pay off, at least I'll have enough letters to wall-paper the house. =)

Book recommendation of the day: Everything on a Waffle, by Polly Horvath. Our family read this together years ago and we still laugh out loud about it. It's about a (possibly) orphaned girl living in Coal Harbor, British Columbia, and it won the Newbery Honor-- although I think it should have gotten the Newbery. (A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park won that year (2002), and it was good, too. But I liked Everything on a Waffle better, probably bacause I love to laugh.)

I have a good friend named Karen who happened to be driving me to a meeting this morning at about 7 am. (yawn!) We were discussing Enna Burning by Shannon Hale and Karen said, "I don't know why she chickened out on the ending." I agree with her. If the book is about addiction, the ending doesn't work. (Read the book and tell me what you think.)

After church this afternoon I went back to bed to have a nap. I was dreaming about something totally unrelated, when this picture of Karen sitting in her car popped into the middle of my dream. She said, "I don't know why she chickened out on the ending." Then I suddenly saw an ending scene for a book I'm writing. It was so completely NOT what I'd planned to write and it hit me so hard, I was thrown out of my dream and into awakeness.

I lay there thinking about this new ending. It changes the whole meaning of the story-- from a cheerful, cute tale to something very different. Not necessarily bad, but, to me at least, surprising. It's just so NOT what I'd planned. And it's very much an ending I'd like to chicken out on. Uncomfortable, but thought provoking. But then, don't uncomfortable tales haunt us, make us think about them, keep asking to be resolved?

I think I'll write both endings, then I can let them both sit for a while, ripen in my desk drawer, so to speak, and look at them again when I'm not shocked by the new ending, to see which is better.

A big thank you to Karen for her simple but true comment.

My daughters showed this to me tonight and we had a good laugh. I thought you might enjoy it also.

From the back of a bottle of bright red nail polish we bought in Korea:

nail enamel which has a lot of

beautiful colors is a long lasting style

This will be able to dry quickly

Also it doesn't easy to remove from nail

It is comfortable to use and you

don't need to put several times

for making fine color

This is just how many Koreans talk (which is much better than I do in Korean, I might add.) Several times while we were there I'd walk into a shop and ask, "Do you speak English?" They might look at for me a moment, then say, "No. Why do you ask?" --or-- look at me for a moment, then shake their head 'no' with some long string of syllables that sound nothing like language to me at all. We'd proceed to communicate with some universal but ineffective form of sign language for about 20 minutes, after which they'd break down and say in perfect English, "Why don't you just tell me what you are looking for and maybe I can help you find it." For some reason, even though I am the foreigner, they speak my language, not the other way around.

Book recommendation for the day: When You Look Like Your Passport Photo It's Time to Go Home, by Erma Bombeck. I read this for the second time while sitting in Joshua's hospital room in Saudi Arabia surrounded by women dressed all in black pouring tea and staring at me. I laughed till I cried, and I'm sure they thought I was insane. By the way, under their black abayas they wore miniskirt and fishnet tights, or jeans and t-shirts. This book is way too good to miss, especially if you've ever traveled overseas.

Happy as a clam.... what exactly does that mean?

Yesterday we attended an HTT reunion at a local park and had a wonderful time. I brought sandwiches (with delicious smoked Gouda cheese) and Propel bottles and sat under the trees and talked with other homeschool moms while the kids ran around on the grass and waded in the Potomac River.

When we got home I discovered that Bethany had brought along a large clam from the river. She and her friend were trying to pry it open in the bathroom sink and got squirted. I told them it had an animal inside, apparently still alive, and that they ought to leave it alone. They were surprised to find out there was a living animal in the shell, and disappointed to learn that it does not make pearls. They were about to take it down to the lake to "let it go", but we got to wondering-- do clams live in lakes? Or just in oceans and salty Potomac Rivers? We had no idea, but since we've never dug clams at the lake, and have at the river, we figured it would be happier back in the river.

Bethany put water from the sink in a cereal bowl and dropped in the clam. And then I wondered, would sink water hurt it? She asked, "Is this a boy clam, or a girl?" "Do clams even have boys and girls?" "How do clams move?" "What do they eat?" "Do they have a right side up?" "Do they care if they are upside down?" "Do they have eyes?" "Do they have stomachs?"

...ummm... I have no idea. This is why we own encyclopedias.

Here we pause for a commercial break. World Book encyclopedias are wonderful! Everyone in our family enjoys reading them for hours. Their one down side is that it's really hard to look up anything-- not because of some bad alphabetic system-- but because it's so easy to get distracted by other interesting articles along the way. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

We looked up clams and discovered that most varieties do have males and females; they have gills with which they breath, and cilia with which they gather food-- usually plankton, and stomachs where their food is mostly digested. They complete their digestion in their digestive glands, which hang off their stomachs. They move with a muscle called a foot, and they apparently do not have eyes. No mention was made of being right-side up or up-side down, but I can't imagine they would care which way they face. (Actually, they can't "face" any way-- they have no face.)

This afternoon we took the cereal bowl of water and clam back to the Potomac river and plopped the clam into the sandy water. I guess however he feels, he is, by definition, as happy as a clam. =)

Book recommendation of the day: Q is for Quark. by David M. Schwartz, illustrated by Kim Doner. This is an Alphabet book like no other. Find out about Atoms, Black Holes, Clones, DNA, Elements, Faults, Gravity...Xylem, Y Chromosomes, and Zzzzzz (sleep and EEGs.) My kids love it, I love it, even Mike loves it. (Or at least likes it enough to listen when we read it out loud.) I'd love to do this for a book club. It's so completely out of the usual book club realm, but would provide plenty of topics for discussion! What are your thought on cloning?