Last week I started Bamma's Book Club.
We have a couple of reluctant readers in our group. I suppose those are the ones I'm targeting the most, but really I want them all to read.
- I printed up a couple of pages of favorite books for each age and asked them to help me make the list longer
- I brought out favorite books from my shelf that their mother and father loved
- I told them I'd pay them each $10 for one finished book during a month
- I offered the $10 to their parents as well
For the 3-7 year olds the money seems like a lot. For the 10-12 year olds the money seems like a nice perk. For the 14-year-old the money isn't incentive enough to spend time reading.
I know a 7-year-old and a 12-year-old have already finished their book for the month. We'll let you know what happens with everybody else.
I live in a well established neighborhood with all the usual cars and trucks and families. Deer live here, too. This is a mountain side, but still I am surprised after all this civilization time that the deer really live here in our midst.
For the past month or so I've been aware that a mother deer lives in the thicket of oak brush just across a busy street. This year she has twin babies. Two small replicas of herself with dappled backs that look like the sunlight pours onto them through the trees even when they are out of the thicket.
She must have kept them hidden for weeks, because they already have a bit of size to them. What is it about two of them that makes them so much more intriguing? In fact, yesterday, just happening to look out my front window, I see the mother and both fawns cross the street and linger on our side to feed on the neighbor's grass. They are so beautiful that the next two cars come to a complete stop just to look at them. I see the passengers in the cars pointing and talking and being sure little people within see them, too.
When the resident deer eat my tulips to the ground, leave droppings across my yard, bound through my pristine snowscapes, I sometimes think they are a nuisance. But when I see two babies with lengthening adolescent legs back and forth from the thicket to the yards I worry about that busy street and the cars that whiz up and down this hill will someday intersect. I hope not.
In the balance of things I am grateful for their presence, their beauty, their promise. I hope they stay.
