Heidi's recovery

Some of our friends are going through a severe trial. Their college age daughter Heidi collapsed as she came out of a dance class at BYU - Idaho with a brain aneurysm. She is making good progress in her recovery, but she has a long road ahead. Most people don't survive. They set up this blog so that family and friends can keep up on her progress. It is very faith promoting to see all the good will and help they have been given by the students at BYU -I and the community up there. Our best wishes go to Heidi and her family. They are wonderful people with five beautiful daughers.

32 years of friendship and counting

Sunday night we had dinner at our home with Karen and Carlos. What a wonderful evening! We enjoyed an evening of visiting, catching up and watching the tail end of the Super Bowl. Karen was my mission companion over 32 years ago. She was my trainer in Resistencia, Argentina in 1976 and we had many adventures together. We became fast friends right from the start. Coincidentally, she grew up in neighboring Heyburn, Idaho, so we knew many people in common.



Karen married Carlos after she returned from her mission. Their story is one for the books! Carlos was a convert from Argentina and they meet at the Church Office Building where Karen was working after her mission. They have had a wonderful life together with their son Jason and now have a daughter-in-law and two grand sons.





In 2003 we were fortunate to have some of the people we taught in Argentina come and visit us at our home. It was a very meaningful reunion and we enjoyed reconnecting with these dear friends who now live in Atlanta. We taught their entire family and they were all eventually baptised. The man in the picture was the single branch president serving at the time we were missionaries. He has very happy that we taught his future wife (the one in black) the gospel. Their daughter (named Karen!) is inbetween them in the picture.




About 14 years ago, Rick and I went on a whirl wind vacation with Karen and Carlos (and two of their dear Argentine friends) and returned to our missions in Argentina (me and Karen) and Peru (Rick). We spent more than two weeks touring Chile, Argentina and Peru by plane, cruise ship, bus, and rickety boat. Carlos is a travel agent in SLC and he set us up with the trip of a life time. Here we are seen in Iquitos, Peru deep in the Amazon jungle. Our plane had just landed and it was pouring buckets of rain. We got off the plane on the tarmac and made a run for shelter. As you can see, we got soaked in the process. Since we were in the Amazon jungle, it was hot and humid that we didn't get cold even though we were soaked to the bone.

Here is a picture of us as sister missionaries. This couple in the picture with us is the same couple shown earlier in our living room. This was their wedding day and our mission president gave Karen and me permission to travel back to Resistencia to attend their wedding. It was a marvelous day!

I love Hermana Karen and I'm so privileged to still call her friend after all these years. We had some of the best times together and we grew to love each other, the country and the people we served. I'm so very fortunate to still have her as a friend through these last 32 years and look forward to that continued friendship with her and Carlos for many years to come!

Reading - Part IV

As everyone knows, the benefits of reading to children are HUGE. This interesting article supports that fact:

"Every parent of a young child should resolve to do one simple thing in 2009 that can change his or her life – read to the child every day. Reading to young children is proven to be the single most important thing a parent can do to ensure his child's success in school. Not only does reading improve children's language development — the strongest predictor of school success — it also brings parents and children closer together.
Yet, a study conducted for Reach Out and Read shows that fewer than half of American parents read to their children daily. Young children who are not read to are at the highest risk of reading below grade level once they begin school. More than a third of American children start kindergarten without the basic literacy skills they need to learn to read."

A young child who had been read to is much more likely to want to continue to read on their own. The more books they are exposed to and the greater variety of books they read will help them gain a desire to read on their own. Making the transition from reading daily to a child to getting them to continue to read daily can be a challenge. I think it is wonderful if parents continue to read to their older children as well, either in the car while traveling or in other settings. The trick is to get the child hooked on books so that they will be motivated to continue to read. Children are much more likely to read if they see their parents reading magazines, newspapers or books themselves. Our example speaks volumes to our children in this area as well as many other ways. Reading increases their vocabulary, verbal skills, writing and spelling skills and awareness of what is going on in the world around them.

Good ole Harry Potter has helped in this regard. The series got children into reading who wouldn't have been interested otherwise. But the cool thing is that there are so many other series and other books that are just as interesting and fun to read as Harry. Every library has book lists for each reading level and type of book sought - such as mysteries or adventures for example.

Here are some good sources for other wonderful books:

Here is a list of all the Caldecott award books. The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. It was named in honor of nineteenth-century English illustrator Randolph Caldecott. Together with the Newbery Medal, it is the most prestigious American children's book award.

The John Newbery Medal is a literary award given by the Association for Library Service to Children of the American Library Association (ALA) to the author of the Outstanding American Children's Book. The award has been given since 1922. Together with the Caldecott Medal, it is considered the most prestigious award for children's literature in the United States. It is named for John Newbery, an 18th century publisher of juvenile books.

Another great source is one my friend Colleen (who has been an elementary school teacher and administrator for over 20 years) shared at our friends group meeting a few months ago. She gave a great presentation on Children's Literature and share this great site for matching books to readers, using leveled books in guided reading. Also look here for other reading resources that teachers use.

We would make many trips to our public library when our kids were young. They could have their own individual library card as soon as they were old enough to qualify for one - kind of a right of passage. In the hundreds of books we checked out, I think we only lost one. Reading to them when they were young lead to them reading on their own which probably helped lead to academic success as stated in the article at the beginning. Our kids are proof that the theory works! I don't think it can be stressed enough - Reading to Children Matters!!!

Reading - Part III

As technology changes and advances, society is moving from a print-based format to a prominently image-based media. This fact is very disconcerting and sad to me. Fewer people read the newspaper (either the paper copy or online) and fewer people read anything very much at all. Books are gathering dust as technology continues to sweep up available time with video games, text messaging, endless TV and other newfangled techno advances. Not that techno advances are bad, but the loss of simple enriching pleasures such as reading, visiting/talking/discussing, playing parlor games and interacting with one another may impact our culture and way of life more than we realize.
I read this very interesting article entitled Why Literature Matters several months ago that supports this idea. It is written by Dana Gioia who is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Here is a talk he gave on a similar theme at Stanford 's 2007 commencement. It's such a good talk and message that it really deserves a blog entry all of its own. It's worth every minute it will take you to read it. You might have a paradigm shift about reading after you've read it if you don't think that daily reading and the arts really matter very much. I'll make reference to the part today that has to do with reading. I quote part of the talk:

• A good book changes as you change. The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life.
• Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. And that is exactly what is happening - not just in the media, but in our school and civic life.
  
• Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.
• The other group also used and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out - they exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group.
  
• What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.
  
• The habit of daily reading...overwhelmingly correlates with better reading skills and higher academic achievement. On the other had, poor reading skills correlate with lower levels of financial and job success...Whether or not people read, and indeed now much and how often they read, affects their lives in crucial ways.

How can we get our families to read more? How do we lead the charge if we feel that there is real value to the activity?
I think one way would be to share book titles that we enjoy and to share a book review every so often if we've read something we've really enjoyed. Here are some of my favorite series that I shared with others who enjoyed reading them as well:

Lord of the Rings - I read the entire series when I was convalescing with my broken leg when I was 20 years old. I suggested them to Dave when he was a boy and he loved reading them as well.

A bunch of the classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick. Our parents collected these leather bound classics in our home and I read most of these the summer I was staying with Lee and Carol when Mom and Dad, Jan and Dave went to England to get Paul from his mission. Sometimes I would read all night. I would love to read them all again and I highly recommend the Jane Austen series!

Anne of Green Gables series and Anne of Avonlea - young married
Centennial and other James Michener books - college age

The Work and the Glory series - read as a young married

Children of the Promise series - read about 15 years ago with Rick. Enjoyed them very much.
Twilight - OK, I know it's not great literature, but it was entertaining!

You can see my Shelf located on the left side to see what I'm reading now. I like a mix of topics ranging from biographies to religious, fantasy, adventure, history, or just something where I can learn something new.

What are you reading now?

Reading - Part II

This editorial in the Church News goes right along with what I've been thinking of this week! It is entitled Good Books, and here are some thoughts from the article:

"Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom" (Doctrine and Covenants 88:118).

While still a young man, Gordon B. Hinckley wrote of his personal love for language and books in 1937:
"It is both revealing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book and mingle with the great of the earth, counsel with the wise of all time, look into the unlived days with prophets. . . . From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. . . . To become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings" (Millennial Star, Dec. 21, 1937).

The scriptures should remain at the top of anyone's "best book" list. They contain the words of the Lord and the sacred writings of His prophets. The scriptures are, at once, personal and communal. They remind us we are not alone.

Check out this interesting site to help you manage and track your scripture reading.