Summer Reading

I've loved to read as long as I can remember. I loved reading books for school and on my own. Growing up, my parents took me to the Brentwood  library regularly in the summer so I could check out a stack of books. I'd read them all, then exchange them the next week for another stack. It was during this time that I discovered my love for Ramona Quimby, Ellen Tebbits, Betsy and her little sister Star, Laura Ingalls, Henry Huggins, the Babysitters Club, the kids from Sweet Valley, and Nancy Drew. I was drawn to fiction, and especially mysteries and series. My love of reading ultimately chose my college major and graduate degree for me - I loved studying history because I loved the stories. Plus everything has a history to study. I could read about my favorite things (music, baseball, etc.) and it counted for class!

One of my goals as a parent is to pass this love of reading onto my children. Elijah and I read together a lot, and we've already read every Ramona book. We read one chapter at a time most nights. Elijah is a fantastic reader. He reads at a much higher level than most other kids his age. He is participating in the summer reading program at the local library. He's already read through all his hours, and he's doing the extra checklists of reading and activities. Though I was (and still am) drawn to fiction, Elijah can't get enough non-fiction. He picks books about weather, natural disasters, the planets, science experiments, and the like. This afternoon at the library he used the computers for the first time on his own, and successfully located a biography of Tiger Woods. (He takes golf lessons, and his daddy is a golf nut.) I enjoy reading children's literature with him so much. It has reminded me about why I began my relationship with books so many years ago.

Today I decided that I would do the adult summer reading program. It consists of reading six books. The world is divided into six regions of literature, and there are several books to choose from in each category. I've read several of them already, mostly because they were on the reading list in high school (for example, Conrad's Heart of Darkness is on the list for Africa). I'm not cheating  by re-reading or checking those regions off the list. :) I picked books from Europe (Push Not the River by James Conroyd Martin)  and North & South America (Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende) to start. I've always wanted to read Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is on the list for Europe, Eurasia, & the Balkans, so I plan to get it next week. I am so excited!

Ethan's New Diet

Today I set out to design a new gluten-free and casein-free diet for Ethan. He has autism, and one of the homeopathic treatments many doctors and experts suggest is such a diet. This means he can't have any wheat, oats, dairy, soy, or many other things all of us eat without thinking everyday. Most of the things Ethan will be eating will be rice-based. So he'll have rice cheese instead of dairy, rice pasta instead of wheat, etc. His favorite food is pizza, so I bought rice flour at The Truck Patch (our local organic and natural foods market) to make gluten-free pizza crust, and shredded rice cheese for the top. He can still have most organic meats and fruits and veggies, so the rest of the pizza will be as usual. I hope he likes the rice cheese. Since he doesn't drink milk (he's had trouble digesting milk since he was a baby, which was one of our first clues to his condition) we won't have to do much to alter his drinking habits. This new diet, though, will be a challenge for us all. It will taste different, obviously, but it will also be a lot more expensive. And since Ethan is fairly set in his ways as far as food choices, it won't be very much fun making the switch. I am interested to see how it works, if it works (I hope it works!). Since his 4th birthday is next month, I already have plans for a gluten- and casein-free cake. Yummy! I hope.