Hey
everyone! Sorry I'm not on the ball this month but the book I have
chosen is "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet" by Melissa Faye
Green. It is one of my favorites ever! So funny and touching. I will
find a synopsis somewhere and post it below.
Also not sure what date I will pick yet. I will get back to you!
-Emily Judd
NO BIKING IN THE HOUSE WITHOUT A HELMET
“This is my twenty-first year in elementary school,” the story
begins. “For twenty-one years, I’ve carried in cupcakes, enclosed
checks, and provided emergency phone numbers. I have staple-gunned and
hot-glued. I have given standing ovations, volunteered at the school
library, and stood in the cafeteria line as the servers dropped balls of
Thanksgiving-flavored foods from ice-cream scoops onto my wet tray.”
Melissa Fay Greene is known for award-winning nonfiction and eloquent
journalism, but she is also a mother. She and her husband Don Samuel are
the parents of four children by birth and five adopted as older
children from foreign orphanages.
As the younger non-English-speaking ones multiplied, Donny began
referring to their end of the upstairs hallway as “the international
concourse.” And if one child complained and a second one piped up, he
observed: “Another country heard from.”
“While parents our age graduated from elementary school,” writes
Melissa, “we—like the dimwitted students of yore—have been held back,
forced to repeat grades with people a lot younger.”
This wealth of experience has given rise to insights of the minor sort:
“I can state with some confidence that the elementary school musicals repeat once every five years.
“Because this is our fourth Cinderella.
“And only one of our nine children ever got a speaking part.”
And it has given rise to wisdom:
“We’ve steered by the light of what brings us joy, what makes us laugh,
and what feels right and true. In shaky times, I’ve thought, ‘Did we
take on too many?’ ‘Is the whole family at risk of capsizing?’ ‘What do
the experts say?’ But we and the children seem to be thriving; it seems
we have been right to trust love, laughter, and happiness.”
