Wednesday, June 25, 2008

sweet daughter

What do you say to your child when they just want to eat dinner naked!!!
I mean it is a great expression of freedom and I love that my five-year-old loves
to be naked but suddenly I might have a thirteen-year-old boy wanting to do the same and
I think dinner might turn into anarchy even for our family!!
So I pose the question again, What do you do when your 5 year-old wants to eat dinner
naked??? Because my answer caused a huge flood of tears, luckily she recovered in about 15 minutes.

Peace like a river


This is a book I've been meaning to read for several years and I loved the characters. Leif's tale just trots along taking his reader on an unexpected journey through one moment in their lives. Life is like that where one incident can overshadow all other expectations for a person. We see it today in the crazy debates about Obama's patriotism, wearing a lapel pin or not.

South Dakota

We've already taken our one big summer road trip vacation and it was great. We traveled across the state of South Dakota, site-seeing along the way. We saw the Corn Palace in Mitchell, a great Sioux museum in Chamberlain and of course, Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse carving, which was fascinating even though it wasn't finished. Even as a work in progress it has an extensive museum attached and was very informative and the kids loved it and well, isn't that what we are aiming for when we set off on these long voyages in the station wagon!! It certainly isn't the fancy motels or the screaming in the back seat. At the Crazy Horse museum I purchased a book called Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog. Combining work with play I read it throughout the rest of the trip. Very good read about how our ancestors continued to be cruel to our original Native population through the 60's and 70's. Of course, most of us really smart people already knew that but this book helped me see just how senselessly cruel we were and are still probably. I of course grew up wanting to be a Native American...I wanted to belong to a tribe...I loved our family trip to Pipestone. And now I know that at the same time I was wanting to be an Indian, Indians were being subjected to awful abuses on their own small reservations. I recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn more about the Sioux Nation history including Leonard Peltier.
With all my ramblings I didn't even get to all the fun we had in Denver, CO for the second leg of our journey!!