Thank You and Gary Paulsen

First of all, thank you for all your kind comments both here and off-line after my post yesterday. I am going to attribute my relative melancholy and Sophie's increased seizures to solar flares and Mercury being in retrograde, because why the hell not?

I posted that photo of Oliver above because it captures perfectly what sort of boy he was and continues to be. Looking straight at you, right? He's the cleverest of children and always has been -- that's why his difficulty reading was so difficult for me to understand at first. When he came home from first grade, so many years ago, and claimed that he was a bad reader, I knew that he needed to be removed from Catholic school where rigor and conformity were prized and individual learning abilities not celebrated. He attended a wonderful constructivist public elementary school for four years where he was diagnosed with some auditory and visual learning issues and where he thrived despite an ever-growing dislike of books and reading. Middle school, though, was a disaster, much of it chronicled here, and last year about this time, Oliver's unhappiness reached its near peak, and I pulled him from school to begin our homeschooling adventure.

Last night, I downloaded the sixth or seventh Gary Paulsen book on Oliver's Kindle. Over the summer, he read four books, which I can honestly say is probably the most books he's read in his life. He read them on his own, listening to the audible version while he read and exclaiming after each one how much he loved it. It seems like a small miracle that my boy is reading and loving reading. That he reached this at the age of thirteen is perfectly fine. I shudder to imagine what might have happened had I left him at the Catholic school or even the middle school that had departed so dramatically from its original constructivist intentions. Every now and then I feel a bit of panic about what we're doing and how it's all going to shake out. We did the right thing, though. Oliver is reading with joy -- something I had imagined when he was a little guy but had thoroughly lost as he grew. And thank you, especially, to Gary Paulsen.

Literary Supper

This picture makes our bungalow look a whole lot bigger than it actually is!

Last spring The Husband and I offered to host a literary supper for our charter school's fundraiser. People sign up and pay to attend a small gathering, and all the money goes to the school. Last night, we had about a dozen people over, some we knew and some we didn't, including our school's principal who led us in a great discussion of Toni Morrison's powerful, spare novel Home. The Husband made an amazing stew of lentils, sausage and chicken with a big green salad and crusty bread. We drank wine and laughed and talked -- a lot about the book and a lot about the world in general. We ate Hallelujah Cake and talked some more before everyone left around 10:00. It was a wonderful community gathering and made me grateful, again, to live in such a diverse city and to be a part of such a progressive school.

Here's the recipe for Hallelujah Cake, which I've posted before and which comes from my Texas friend Johanna. It's a weird recipe that goes against the pastry chef in me's grain, but it works and it's incredibly good. Evidently, it's named for the exclamation one makes when you take a bite.

Hallelujah Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Butter a cake pan. I used a large oval Le Creuset, but you can probably use a 9X12 rectangular

Sift the following ingredients together in a mixing bowl:

2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
pinch o salt

Melt together in a microwave:

1 stick of butter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
6 heaping T of good quality unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup of water

Pour that wet mixture into the dry mixture and then add:

1/2 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Mix well and pour into baking pan.
Bake for about 30ish minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

When cool, spread with this icing:

Mix the following together and beat in an electric mixer:

1 stick of butter, melted
8 heaping T good quality unsweetened cocoa powder (I use a very dark Belgian one)
1/3 cup milk
1 box of powdered sugar