Music Tuesday/30 Day Music Challenge: 10,000 Maniacs – These Are Days

This song reminds me of hanging out in my driveway during the summer as a kid.  Why was I hanging out in the driveway?  I have no idea.  But I would listen to my walkman and be super cool.  And this song always reminds me of that.  And now that I’ve seen the video, I am convinced it is the cheesiest video in existence.  Please watch it so you can experience Natalie Merchant awkwardly dancing around on a building or statue or something in her sweater and long skirt.  Pure magic.

day 01 – your favorite song
day 02 – your least favorite song
day 03 – a song that makes you happy
day 04 – a song that makes you sad
day 05 – a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 – a song that reminds you of somewhere
day 07 – a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 – a song that you know all the words to
day 09 – a song that you can dance to
day 10 – a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 – a song from your favorite band
day 12 – a song from a band you hate
day 13 – a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 – a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 – a song that describes you
day 16 – a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 – a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 – a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 – a song from your favorite album
day 20 – a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 – a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 – a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 – a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 – a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 – a song that makes you laugh
day 26 – a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 – a song that you wish you could play
day 28 – a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 – a song from your childhood
day 30 – your favorite song at this time last year

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speech therapy

On Friday, we took Jonah to Children’s Therapy Team for a speech therapy evaluation.  We’ve been worried about his lack of speech for some time, and the evaluation confirmed what we had been thinking.  Jonah’s receptive language skills are great, maybe even a little ahead of his age group, meaning he understands so much of what we’re saying to him and can follow through on things we ask him to do, etc.  But his expressive skills (i.e. actually talking) are pretty far behind, at around 12 months.  He’ll be 19 months old tomorrow.  I’ve only ever heard him say five different words, but I haven’t heard some of those words in months.  He only consistently says “uh oh”.  He doesn’t call us mama and dada.  He doesn’t even have his own names for things, or try to say something but says it wrong.  He babbles, but not even a lot.  By the time kids turn two, they should have about 50 words in their vocabulary.

The lady who did his evaluation wants him to come in twice a week once everything gets finalized.  I’m so glad that we were right, and not just being crazy parents.  I’m so glad we worried enough to get him checked out instead of ignoring it.  She said it seems like we’ve been doing everything right, which makes me feel a lot better, even though I still worry that somehow it’s my fault, since I’m the one who’s home with him most of the time.  Hopefully, if (when? when!) he makes some progress, I might stop feeling like this.

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Music Tuesday: Toni Collette and the Finish – Look Up

Before I miss another Music Tuesday, I thought I’d do a very quick post with a fun video.  This is Toni Collette and the Finish.  I love Toni Collette so much.  She is one of those chameleon actresses that can adapt to whatever role she’s in, which is why United States of Tara is perfect for her.  If you aren’t watching that show, you should be.

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Backyard Fun

Very sorry about the lack of updates.  I just finished with spring semester, and the last two or three weeks were full of crazy final assignments.  And since I was so busy with school, I don’t really have that much to write about.

I enjoyed my second Mother’s Day, even though Jonah didn’t do anything for me.  Can you believe it?  It’s as if he didn’t even know it was Mother’s Day.  Aaron made me an awesome card, though.

Over the weekend, Aaron and I managed to get the backyard cleaned up so Jonah can go play back there.  We went out this morning with Rory and he had so much fun.  I took some photos, and they’ll have to do until I do something fun or interesting that I can talk about.  ;)

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book meme

So this is one of those fun (to me) things that I find on the interwebs that I then feel compelled to put in a blog post, especially because I missed Music Tuesday again and I have been so busy with the last couple weeks of school that I don’t really have anything else to write about, anyway (how’s that for a sentence?).  It’s that BBC book list that’s been floating around for a couple of years that I’m not sure is even really from the BBC.  But apparently they think that most people have only read 6 out of these 100 books.  I think I will have read more than that, but probably only because I took AP English classes.  Let’s see, shall we?

Instructions:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Star the ones you loved.*
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.
4) Underline those you have partially read (series) or gave the OCT (Old College Try)

001 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
002 The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkien
003 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
004 Harry Potter series- JK Rowling (I read the first 40 pages of the first book and was SO BORED)
005 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
006 The Bible
007 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
008 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
009 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
010 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
011 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
013 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
014 Complete Works of Shakespeare
015 Rebecca- Daphne Du Maurier
016 The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
018 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
019 The Time Traveller’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch – George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
022 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
023 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
024 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
027 Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
028 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
029 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
031 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
034 Emma – Jane Austen
035 Persuasion - Jane Austen
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
037 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
039 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
040 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
041 Animal Farm – George Orwell
042 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
045 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
046 Anne of Green Gables- LM Montgomery
047 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
048 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood *
049 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
050 Atonement – Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
052 Dune – Frank Herbert
053 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
054 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
055 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
057 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
058 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley *
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
062 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road – Jack Kerouak
067 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
069 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
070 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
071 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
072 Dracula – Bram Stoker
073 The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses – James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal – Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession- AS Byatt
081 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
083 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
084 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
085 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
086 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
091 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
092 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery *
093 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
094 Watership Down – Richard Adams
095 A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
096 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
097 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
098 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Only 16…not too great!

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