When I was fully engrossed in the Hunger Games trilogy, one of the things that kept flashing in my mind was that the basic plot of playing a “game” where you were just trying to stay alive felt very reminiscent of the movie The Running Man.  You remember this film, right?  Arnold Schwarzenegger starring as a wrongly-convicted man who has to run for his life in a televised game show where his hunters are not trying to capture him, but kill him. I knew somewhere that this had been a book, but at the time, and even years later, there was no desire on my part to go read the actual book. Fast forward to my recent obsession with dystopian novels, the similarities to the HG, and this got added to my never ending “to read” list.

The Running Man, written by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman, is a gritty, fast-paced, action filled, intelligent novel of a dystopian time where the world is controlled by the Network who provides Free-Vee to the masses and airs various game shows as a way for the poor to plead for money. The twist with the shows is that they are sadistic in nature – for example, one show has a man with a heart condition see how long he can stay on a treadmill until he has a heart attack, making $10 per minute.

Ben Richards, the main character, is one of the many down-on-his-luck people who is out of work with no hopes of another job (having basically been blackballed for not wanting to keep a job that was making him sterile) who has a very sick child in desperate need of medicine and a wife who pimps herself to pay for groceries. In a world of extreme haves and have-nots, Ben Richards falls way into the latter category. When he finally decides he can’t take watching his daughter suffer anymore, he heads to the games headquarters to wait in line for hours to attempt to get cast on some show, knowing he will probably never see his family again.

Richards turns out to be the exact specimen that the show likes to use for their most popular game, The Running Man. On this specific show, 3 men are sent out into the public to see how long they can stay away from the hunters, earning $100 for every hour they manage to stay alive. This show is also a game with audience participation. For a sighting, the public can earn $100. For a sighting that leads to a kill, it is $1000. The contestants are shown to the audience as horrible, brutal men, whether or not that is true. The Network aims specifically to get the audience worked up into a frenzy of hate and rage aimed at these contestants rather than actually realizing that it is the powers that be who they should be mad at.

Along the way, Richards winds up getting assistance from unlikely sources. One source gives Richards a lesson in just how messed up the system is and how the masses are being duped. From the mindlessness of Free-Vee to the rampant air pollution that is quietly killing off those without access to expensive filtration systems. Richards tries to use his required air-time to bring this information to the public and is quickly drowned out by the Network.

I found myself reading this book as quickly as I could, grabbing any chance that I could to sneak in another chapter (or two since they were very short). It keeps you on the edge of your seat, with little chance that it is going to “end well” for anyone. In a post-9/11 world, the ending was somewhat jaw-dropping, but absolutely spot on.

The only warning I will add is that many people have said that if you are reading a new version of the book, do not read the introduction until you have finished it as it gives away the ending. I read part of it before I saw that.

Not the world’s best book, but a great read and interesting to see the correlations to reality and current dystopian issues given that it was written in 1981.

I finished this book a few weeks ago but recently wrote a review to be included in our temple newsletter. I highly recommend this book.

How do you forgive someone who has committed a horrendous crime? A war crime against a family member and a war crime against a race? Can you really forgive someone if you are not the actual party who was wronged? Is forgiveness yours to give? These are some of the themes that Jodi Picoult tackles in her latest book, The Storyteller.

For those unfamiliar with her work, Jodi Picoult likes to address big topics – school shootings, complicated medical procedures, custody battles – and turn them into best-sellers. In her latest novel, she takes on the Holocaust from the perspectives of a relative of a survivor, a survivor, an SS guard and a Nazi hunter. She manages to do this without turning anyone into a caricature. The story is powerful and haunting and demands to be read.

Sage Singer is a loner. She is physically and mentally scarred and still reeling from the death of her mother to an accident of some kind. She befriends Josef Weber, a retired teacher and little league coach who is beloved by her small community. One day, Josef shocks her by asking her to kill him and then revealing that he was a Nazi SS guard and killed more people then he could possibly count. What he doesn’t know, is that Sage’s grandmother is a survivor of Auschwitz and Sage is so startled by the request that she contacts the FBI to make them deal with the war criminal.

 

What makes this book so remarkable is not Sage’s story and her attempts to grapple with forgiving or condemning this man, but rather in the stories that both Josef and Minka, her grandmother, tell of their experiences during the war. Josef tells of how a young boy could become a Nazi. How a boy who was always in trouble suddenly found a way to outshine everyone else. How brutality became a way of life. Minka tells how she managed to survive when all around her were dying. How a story that she began before the war even impacted her ultimately saved her life. 

 

In the telling of their stories, Jodi Picoult managed to keep the reality of the atrocities alive. There were passages of this that were incredibly painful to read, but the story must be told and retold lest anyone forget.

I love broadway. I love musicals. Somehow I got away from that for a really long time. However, I’m finally getting back to my roots due to some good stations I’ve created on Spotify. Yesterday a great song came on that I oddly really like, yet have never actually seen the show.

 

On the flip side, it makes me think about a fantastic scene from “Sweet Charity” which I have seen a number of times.

 

Man, I love music from the ’60s and ’70s. Don’t you?

Do you watch Smash? I’m totally addicted and I’m enjoying this season so much more than last season. Yes, some of the characters are annoying, but I love “Hit List,” the musical within the show. I have purchased a number of songs from this season and love it when they pop up on my ipod. Here is a favorite.

(note – if you don’t watch the show, the dancers are supposed to represent “obstacles to love”)

I’ve been listening to a lot of new music lately. I have this urge to share it, but haven’t figured out exactly how to do it yet. A blogger that I follow recently started a tumblr account (called Kitchen Tunage) to share her music finds and I was thinking that I wanted to do the same thing, but I haven’t figured out exactly where I want that site to be. I started my own tumblr account, but have a feeling that it would be better just to leave it at this site, it is random musings after all. I’m going to post them here under the category “music is my joy.”

Anyway, I recently downloaded a bunch of songs to create a new playlist for the girls that I wouldn’t get so sick of and honestly, some of them rock so much that I’m happy to listen to them on my own. This is one of them. Absolutely awesome!

Sara Bareilles – Brave (Lyric Video) (by SaraBareillesVEVO)

This is one of those posts that I’ve been meaning to write for a seriously long time. One of those things about blogging is that you get ideas as things happen in your life, but trying to find the time to actually write about them is a whole different story. This one has been percolating since February!

Typically, I am a very left-brained individual and J takes after me in that sense. I like logic. I like numbers. I’m really good at reading a map or building things if given instructions. I love to knit and crochet because you create something beautiful from following a pattern. Create something completely out of the blue? Not my thing. I probably never made it all that far with jazz or a cappella partially because I didn’t stray to far from the written note. So as much as I would love to instill a sense of creativity in my children, that is definitely an area I’m not overly comfortable with myself.

So even though we have always had legos aimed at kids from 2-5 in our house, they were rarely played with. Sure, we built some extraordinarily tall towers with them, but that’s about it, there were never actual buildings built. Fast forward to J’s 6th birthday. One of my closest friends bought her a set from the lego friends collection. I had been looking at the collection myself and almost purchased the Lego Friends Brickmaster set as a way to use J’s love of books to encourage her to play with legos as well, but she had enough gifts that I held off. Well, the set my friend sent sparked a serious love in her.

The thing that I was most amazed with was how different legos are from when I was a kid. My recollection, and I admit I could be totally off base here, is that we had boxes of legos and were left to our own devices to create something. Now legos seem to come in sets and have instructions for budding engineers.  To the left-brained mommy, it seems great – give me something to follow. But for the mommy who wants to encourage right-brained thinking, it seems kind of sad. There is also the feminist argument against pink, but I’m not going there. To J, these sets are just awesome.

The thing is that they are encouraging the kids to build really elaborate items, which isn’t as organic as the legos of my childhood. The set that we got featured a jeep, horse carrier, bridal station, horse and doll.

What is really cool about them, however, is that J sat there spell-bound and did most of it by herself. The only bummer came when she was almost fully finished with the jeep, had an issue, and I had to take the whole thing appart to fix the error that happened at the beginning. But she loved it. She then spent $20 of her birthday money on the Brickmaster set I had found earlier. A nice thing about this set is that you build various items as the story progresses and have to take some of them apart to build a different thing, which I believe teaches them that the sets are not built once and then only used as another toy to play with. There is less fear that a piece will break and it will take another 45 minutes to fix it.

Since February, she has purchased two additional sets with her own money – one large set with a treehouse “so the friends can have their clubhouse meetings,” and a small set with an outdoor bakery. The idea of meetings is hers, developed from the story line in the brickmaster book. Each set comes with a different doll, so she now has 5 dolls that can play among her various sets. The first week after purchasing them, she would come home after school and go straight to her room in order to play with them – any mother’s dream.

We also were early purchasers of a great product called Goldieblox. I had purchased it when it was still in prototype phase and had hoped to get it in time for her birthday. That didn’t happen, but by March our product had arrived and it is another great building toy encouraging little girls to consider engineering by combining building with a story. This isn’t as fun for J as the legos, but it is a hit. Yet another way to move away from the fairies and princesses while still staying in a comfortable place.

When we were at Disneyland in April, we stopped at the Lego store before dinner.  J happily posed next to a life-sized Mia made out of legos. We are definitely hitting Legoland rather than Disneyland the next time around.

Every once in a while I find a website that just amazes me. Recently, a friend posted a link from A Mighty Girl on Facebook and once I was able to actually take a look around, I was highly impressed. Apparently the site has been around for a year and I wish I had known about it sooner.

So what is A Mighty Girl? According to their website, this is the answer:

“A Mighty Girl is the world’s largest collection of books, toys, movies, and music for parents, teachers, and others dedicated to raising smart, confident, and courageous girls and, of course, for girls themselves!

After years of seeking out empowering and inspirational books for our four young nieces, we decided to create A Mighty Girl as a resource site to help others equally interested in supporting and celebrating girls. The site was founded on the belief that all children should have the opportunity to read books, play with toys, listen to music, and watch movies that offer positive messages about girls and honor their diverse capabilities.

Girls do not have to be relegated to the role of sidekick or damsel in distress; they can be the leaders, the heroes, the champions that save the day, find the cure, and go on the adventure. It is our hope that these high-quality children’s products will help a new generation of girls to grow and pursue whatever dreams they choose — to truly be Mighty Girls!”

How have I found it useful? There amazing lists of great books that don’t adhere to some of the more mundane ideas about how girls and boys are supposed to act. They encourage kids to be empowered and to be kind and they have books on historical figures and events that sometimes get overlooked. Everything is curated in a marvelous way with categories based on topic as well as age-group. There are also many “best of” lists with great topics like bullying, environmentalism, school stories, Halloween and Winter holidays.

In addition to books, they have toys, games, music, and movies that encourage kids to be more and do more. I found some great new music that my daughter is thrilled with too.

While they are in some ways “aimed” at girls, any parent can get something worthwhile from this site. I highly recommend checking them out. You can also follow their pins on pinterest.

A few weeks ago, my little girl turned 6. I still can’t really believe it. Sometimes she completely acts her age, and sometimes she is 6 going on 13. I generally don’t write specifically about the girls much on this blog, but I know that there are moms out there always looking for inspiration for birthday parties and after all was said and done, I was pretty happy with how her party turned out.

Because she has a February birthday, it is a challenge to pick a location for her party. We need a place that is indoors, isn’t overly expensive, can handle a fairly large party for my social butterfly, and is fun for the birthday girl. J gets really focused on having a “theme” for her party. I think for her that really means what is going to be on her cake, as her 4th birthday was at Sandhills Academy of Gymnastics and she still considers it her “Ariel” party because we had an amazing cake with Ariel on it. Anyway, just like her Halloween costume, this year’s party went from Pippi Longstocking to princesses to Rainbow Magic Fairies. When she kept going with the idea of Rainbow Magic, I got the idea to use those as a jumping off point for the rest of the party.

If you are unaware of what Rainbow Magic is, this is a series of early chapter books about two little girls who wind up helping the fairies get back some object that Jack Frost has stolen which impacts the fairy world and the human world. The series is divided into sets of 7 books that follow a theme – rainbow colors (the first set), days of the week, jewels, sports, etc. A friend of ours got us hooked on them a little more than a year ago. I told J that she needed to pick one set that we could run with and I was thrilled when she picked the ocean fairies. This managed to combine two of her biggest loves – books and marine biology. I promised her that we would come up with a bunch of fun games that had some kind of ocean theme and that we would also find a way to incorporate the fairies.

With that thought in mind, we decided to have it at First Health for the second year in a row. This allowed me to plan a number of games and just do it all myself while not having to have it in my own house. Normally the fabulous party queens of First Health do the party for you, but I was happy to sort of run it myself.

The first step in the party was cupcakes for J’s class at school. We kept with the fabulous ocean theme and had a ton of fun making cupcakes with fish. I made these cupcakes from scratch with an awesome recipe for simple vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing. Blue sprinkles made them look like ocean scenes and we decided to use Swedish Fish to give it flair.

For the party itself, I focused on having games that had something to do with the animals in the Ocean Fairies books – dolphin, seal, penguin, turtle, starfish, whale and clownfish. I came up with some fun games that we did during part of the time and then just allowed to run around and just be themselves.

One game that we did was a bean bag toss in a board that I made which also wound up doubling as a photo opportunity. We painted on an ocean scene dominated by a starfish with three openings for the kids to try and throw things through. Rather than using bean bags, I used three ocean shaped sponges that we happened to have – dried out of course. One of our party goers really enjoyed this station and played at it long after others had moved on.

Another station was an art wall for kids to create their own mural. On the top of the craft paper I wrote out “Help the fairies bring the ocean to life” and printed out all of the ocean fairies so that they would be included in the fun. Then I placed foam stickers and crayons for the kids to decorate the scene.

We let the kids run around on their own for a while and then got them back together to play our own version of “musical chairs.” Since the space doesn’t really have enough chairs for all of the kids and bringing them downstairs would have been way too much of a pain, we put down circle spots so the kids could walk/skip/run in a circle until the music stopped. Of course, I had to come up with an “under the sea” playlist to go along with it! The most amazing thing is that as each child got “out,” there was no complaining or throwing of fits. The kids really impressed me.

Our final game was help the baby sea turtles get to the ocean, our own version of pin the tail on the donkey. We should have done a few things differently, like start them further away and not have it on the mirror (they felt around), but all in all it was great.

I had purchased a ring toss on the dolphin but it got left at home when E was playing with it before the party. Oh well!

Once we finished with the games we swam back upstream to the party room for cupcakes and other snacks. The bakery department at Lowe’s food did an outstanding job of creating an ocean scene cupcake cake and I rounded it all out with whale crackers, penguin crackers, Swedish fish and chocolate sea animals.

The kids had a blast and I know that I helped make J’s party memorable.

Merriam-Webster defines strategy as “a careful plan or method.” It is also “the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions.” These are truly important skills that we want our kids to learn. But how in the world do we teach them? Teaching a kid strategy isn’t something that can be done with systematic steps. Luckily for them, teaching kids the important lesson of how to strategize is best done with a board game.

The first board games that we play with our kids are of the “luck” variety – candy land, chutes and ladders, high ho cherry-o. These are games where you pick a card, flick the spinner, or roll the dice. They are great for teaching important lessons like number or color recognition, counting, following directions, taking turns and good sportsmanship. These games also get rather boring after a while. Kids enjoy the luck aspect of it, but as a parent, there is no challenge to them. Once they start to get into kindergarten, it feels like the best we can do when playing those games is to encourage our kids to not be sore losers and to accept that once in a while they are going to lose a game. This concept by itself is a tough pill to swallow in my house, but I digress. Then this amazing thing happens – they get older and the games start to get more challenging. Rather than just playing games of luck, they start to actually play games that require some skill.

A strategic game is one in which “the players decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome.” I found a game for J that she loves that has made teaching strategy relatively easy and it is a great game of American geography. I bought the game from a sample sale (no recollection which one), but you can buy it on Amazon.

So the idea with this game is that you are given 5 postcards to start with and need to travel across the United States in order to visit the location and “flip” the card over. Each time you flip a card over, you get another, and the goal is to be the first to flip 10 different postcards. The board has landmarks and cities that you travel to and colored paths that you have to follow. There is no “start” location on the board, but rather, you look at your first five cards and decide which city would be the best place for you to start. For this reason, every game is different because your path depends on the postcards that you pull from the deck. You move around the country, and the lower portion of Canada, by rolling dice with colors and airplanes on them.

When J first started playing, she would start on the city that she liked the most, not necessarily the city that made sense for the cards that she had. She would then randomly decide to travel from one landmark to the next and would be frustrated when the adult playing with her would rack up the 10 postcards first. It was often things like picking Kennedy Space Center just because she likes space even if she had a bunch of cards together in the Pacific Northwest. I quickly decided that this would need to be the time that we discussed strategy.

In one of our many marathon sessions of the game, I walked her through a way to look at her cards, organize them and then plan her moves. So rather than haphazardly placing her cards in front of her, she now takes her five cards and organizes them by location – east coast, west coast and in the middle. She still gets excited when she gets cards of favorite locations like NYC, Los Angeles, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Kennedy Space Center, but she also has discovered that there are some spots, especially on the east coast, where you can quickly rack up postcards if the luck portion of the game is on your side. She has gotten quite good at moving across the board and only every once in a while to I ask her if she really wants to make various moves. She has also learned a lesson about making it harder for your opponent to flip a card – since there is the option to steal a competitor’s card if you roll double blacks, she has learned to not only pick the postcard that could help her, but to aim for the one you seem to be headed towards.  

I’m a big fan of board games (and card games, puzzles, logic games, etc) so these are fun things for us to be able to play together. We have a few other games we really love these days, but we are always looking for more. Do you have any games that you really like to play? 

Happy Gaming!

One of J’s best Hanukkah gifts this year was an awesome book called Cool Biology Activities for Girls. Not that boys couldn’t do any of these experiments, but the idea is to “appeal to girls with bright colored, flowery covers and pictures of girls and women” and to encourage girls to realize that science can be fun for them too. We also started getting a subscription to Kiwi Crate and were pleasantly surprised to find that not only were there two art projects in each box, but experiments to go along with the theme. Needless to say, we spent a good part of our 2 1/2 week vacation doing some cool experiments.

The first experiment that we did from the Biology book was truly disgusting and not very hands on, but J wanted to start and it was the only experiment that I had all of the materials for at home. Did you know that it was possible to dissolve an egg’s shell without harming the membranes that protect the egg? That was something that I was perfectly happy to be in the dark about, but these are the things that we learn in the name of science. Turns out that the acid in the vinegar breaks down the calcium carbonate that makes up the shell. From there, we allowed the naked eggs to soak in water and corn syrup (separately). I don’t understand the scientific reasoning behind this (you can read about it here), but the egg in water plumped  up and the one in corn syrup shriveled up. J’s favorite portion of the experiment was playing with the naked egg post water and corn syrup and then watching them go down the drain without breaking.

Our next experiment was the one J wanted to start with – flower water absorption. For this one, the concept is to use colored water to understand how flowers drink water and then how the excess evaporates. It is a pretty straightforward project, but what is great about it is that you can watch what happens and see the reactions at different time intervals. The book called for using any white flower but noted that carnations worked best. I could only get my hands on one carnation and the others were daisies, but it all worked out in the end. This is a great experiment for getting kids excited about science.

a few hours into the experiement

the next morning (blue)

the next morning (green)

finished product!

Once we were done with the flowers, we moved on to playing around with the items from the Kiwi Crate. The theme for the month was Antartica which meant that we got to experiment with ice! The experiment that they suggested was one where you take two pieces of ice. Leave one plain and wrap the other in either tin foil or newspaper and see which melts faster. Well, we took that one step further and used both the tin foil and the newspaper. I didn’t get photos of this one, but I was actually surprised that the order was (from faster to slower melt times) air, tin foil, newspaper. I didn’t realize that newspaper was able to help retain the cold so well. While in the midst of all of this, I also came across an image on Pinterest about ice melting with water, air, salt and sugar and decided to try that one. With this one, we found that the order was water, salt, sugar and then air. Interestingly though, the sugar started out pretty fast but stalled along the way and was over taken by the salt. Salt of course makes sense given that it is utilized to de-ice roads. We also followed the kiwi crate instructions to make a piece of string stick to a piece of ice.

the scientist

the ice cubes before they started to melt

2 minutes in

after 20 minutes

water melted the fastest

salt came next

sugar was third

plain old ice melted the slowest

I think that both J and I are really getting a kick out of this science thing. She likes seeing things as black and white so this is an interesting game for her. I am continuing to find other cool experiments and keeping track of them on pinterest (of course). I think that we are going to attack this “salt painting ice sculptures” one from kiwi crate next!

Happy learning!