Five People In Tiny Spaces

I love my children and all, but there is such a thing as too much togetherness. It's what I imagine living in Tokyo feels like--never more than 10 feet between you and another person, and much of the time, less.

I had packed all sorts of goodies into the kids' backpacks to keep them out of each other's hair (and ours) during the two seven hour road trips--art supplies, movies, books, toys--but this only worked for about 300 of the 400 miles. You can guess the kinds of observations/complaints/ questions we covered along the way:

"How many more hours til we get there?" This was approximately 15 minutes after we vacated our parking space in front of the house. After hearing this four or five times, Mr. Peevie and I took to pointing to the trip timer, after telling the kids not to ask again until the timer displayed seven dot dot zero zero.

We also had iterations of the following:

"I spilled ______ on my pants!"

"I have to go to the bathroom!"

"He won't let me have a turn with the neck pillow!"

'Her I-pod is too loud!"

"The movie is too loud!"

"Ewww! Somebody farted!"

"He keeps putting his feet on my armrest!"

"Turn it back on!" "I don't want to see the scary part!!"

"His feet stink!"

"What's a 'Cratchet'?" Some of the vocabulary from Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol, that we were listening to on CD, was unfamiliar to the short people.

Finally we reached our intermediate destination. We had requested adjoining rooms; they gave us adjacent rooms. I envisioned kids sneaking out and heading down to the lounge for a late-night Shirley Temple. We moved to adjoining rooms. This was the most separation we'd have the entire trip. I treasured it.

Day two: We drove through constant rain and thick fog, which made our close mini-van quarters seem even closer. More than six hours later, we arrived at our hotel home for the next four days, and discovered that our suite was an excellent size...for two people.

I do not parent well in tiny spaces. Too much proximity shortens my frustration fuse and diminishes my tolerance for noise, especially the bickering variety. My vocabulary withers to terse commands, primarily "Stop!" and "Don't!"

We tried to moderate our loud family dynamic to fit the various cubicles we found ourselves confined to--cars, hotel rooms, restaurants, and my parents' small-for-10-people living room, but in the end we just annoyed our family members and frustrated each other. We're like a herd of wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti: we need our space to roam and run and roar.

Thank the little baby Jesus--we finally made it home. I practically wept. I do love my kids, I swear--but any more togetherness, and I'd be posting this from Crazyville.

I hope your holiday travels and family times brought you great quantities of joy.

What I Read in 2007

The 34 titles on my 2007 book list have the following characteristics:

I enjoyed most of my reading this year, awarding four or five (out of five) stars to nearly 60 percent (20 books). Only one was a complete dud; I reviewed it here.

Nineteen are non-fiction, 15 are fiction.

Eleven are faith-related, and of those, five were commentaries or sermons specifically related to the Sermon on the Mount.

Nine books I had read at least one time before this year.

Nine have been made (or are being made) into movies. One--Candide--is also an opera by Leonard Bernstein. Nicole Kidman played Isabel Archer in the 1996 adaptation of Portrait of a Lady.

Seven are memoirs, or at least memoir-ish.

Four were gifts; 10 I bought for myself. The others I borrowed, stole, or already had in my library from long ago.

Four are classics, including the Christian classic A Short and Easy Method of Prayer by Madame Jeanne Guyon.

Three are novels by Jodi Picoult.

Three were book club selections: Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (actually, I’m still working on this one); Candide by Voltaire; and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Three were written particularly for a younger audience: Bridge to Terabithia, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Golden Compass.

Two are by Barack Obama.

One is a self-help book on organizing and decluttering. Not that I'm making any promises.

My award for number one new read of the year goes to The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This memoir was so good that I read it again about a month after I finished it the first time. The author relates the horrifying, mystifying, confounding, and unpredictable events of her life story with a sort of non-judgmental detachment, with a voice that is neutral and yet engaging at the same time. Any story that begins with the sentence, “I was on fire” has a lot to live up to—and this memoir did not let me down.

My 2007 book list does not include the dozens of little books I read with my kids, like the tales of Pippi Longstocking and Junie B. Jones, and The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (which makes me cry every single time I read it, and then that little stinker A. Peevie laughs—laughs!—at me.)

Being a LibraryThing-er has really enhanced my ability to track and categorize my annual reading lists and my library as a whole. If you’re a reader, or a book-lover, or a book collector, check it out if you haven't already.

Click here to view my online catalog; and click on the tag "2007" to list only the books I read this year.

What did you read this year? What are you recommending?

Top Ten Miscellany of 2007

Do you love top ten lists? Here’s a Top Ten buffet that will keep you mouse-clicking contentedly for days. Time Magazine online offers the year’s best in news; arts and entertainment; science; business, tech and sports; and pop culture.

I haven’t made it through all 500 items yet, but here are my Top Ten Top Ten List Items From Time.com’s 50 Top Ten Lists of 2007:

10. Under the heading Top Ten Man-Made Disasters, the Minneapolis bridge collapse came in as number 5. I include this because we received a letter from an acquaintance that said he had been walking on that bridge half an hour before the collapse; and we were grateful he was spared.

9. From pop culture, #7 on the list of Fashion Must-Haves: a fedora. No lie.

8. “Put your big-girl panties on.” U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling encouraged deputy press secretary Dana Perino with this pithy proverb as Perino prepared to step in for exiting PS Tony Snow. #4 on the list of Top Ten T-Shirt Worthy Slogans.

7. In the science category, coming up #4 in the list of Top Ten Scientific Discoveries: Scientists announced that they had discovered 700 new species of organisms, including a new leopard, monkey, and sea cucumber. Honestly, this just blows my mind. 700 new species. I don’t know what it means, or even how to get my mind around it; only that describing the complexity of life on planet Earth keeps staying out of reach.

6. “I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon, but I want to stay alive.” Quotable Madonna, #10 in the Top Ten T-Shirt Worthy Slogans. Me too, girl; me, too.

5. Another science category item, and also listed in the Too Good to be True category, #6 on the list of Top Ten Medical Breakthroughs: No more periods, thanks to Lybrel, the first continuous-use birth control pill that eliminates monthly menstruation.

4. From Top Ten Sports Moments, the truth-is-better-than-fiction 15-lateral winning touchdown scored by Trinity University against Millsaps College. Even non-football fans can appreciate the cosmic combination of goofy good luck and heads-up footballing that made all the pieces fall into place on this play.

3. Mother Teresa shocks the world but testifies to the real struggle that people of faith endure when her letters disclose that she often did not feel the presence of God. This took the #1 spot in the list of Top Ten Religion Stories of the year.

2. “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s turns up as #7 in the list of Top Ten Songs of 2007. I was captivated by it and didn’t know why when I first heard it on the radio this year; but now I’d say it’s the simple sincerity of the lyrics and the sweet raspiness of Tom Higgenson’s voice.

1. My Number One Top Ten List Item of 2007, from the pop culture category, #9 on the list of Top Ten Buzzwords: Vajayjay. I know the feminists don’t like this one, but I can’t help myself. Call me immature, but I think it’s funny, and it has some kind of strange hold on me.

What are your top ten whatevers from 2007?