Category Archives: How To

How Clean Is Your House? by Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie

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Read: 21 March, 2013

“Slovenly” would be a very kind word to use for my housekeeping skills, particularly when I first moved out from under my parents’ feather duster. I got a lot better when my son was born and I was on maternity leave – not only because I had a lot more time on my hands, but also because I had an added incentive not to let yummy edible dust bunnies accumulate. Still, though, there were/are a lot of gaps in my knowledge about how to properly take care of a home.

So I took to one of my parent groups and asked if anyone could recommend a good “quick and dirty” beginners’ guide.

I’d tried to flip through a few housekeeping books in the past, but they all assumed a level of proficiency that I just didn’t have. They would skip over the basics, or they’d just go into so much detail that I felt overwhelmed.

The first response in my request was that I should pick up How Clean Is Your House? A few people offered practical advice of their own but, mostly, everyone agreed that I should pick up Woodburn and MacKenzie’s book.

Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print, at least in Canada. But I did find a really cheap copy on Amazon’s “New & Used” section.

And it’s exactly what I needed.

I think that it would be far too simplistic for someone who has already been caring for their home for a while, since they really do only cover the very basics. In fact, the amount of text in the book is quite limited – most of the page space being taken up by photos of Woodburn and MacKenzie wearing rather ostentatious rubber gloves and posing as they look in disgust at something off-screen, or close-up photos of cleaning implements or objects in need of cleaning.

If I’d paid more than $10 for the book, that might upset me. But considering that I paid less than $4 including shipping, it’s not a big deal. And, in fact, the focus on only the most vital information was precisely what I had asked for.

The book is divided into sections for each room in the house, plus a bit about “getting started” and a special section for all the lovely messes pets make. Some sections have a little information about how to deal with the big accidents, but the focus is mainly on what to do for normal day-to-day maintenance (plus a bit in the “getting started” about what to do when conquering a house that hasn’t been cared for in a long time).

Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the section where they break down a daily, weekly, and monthly routines, plus a checklist of those special “once a year” type of chores. This was perhaps the most helpful section for me in the entire book.

I think that this book would make a fantastic gift for someone about to strike out on their own for the very first time. I wish someone would have given it to me so I wouldn’t have spent all of five years wallowing in my own filth!

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How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren

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Read: 28 March, 2013

This book was recommended to me by a homeschooling mother, and I can certainly see why. It’s a wonderful little primer on how to read books in such a way that the reader is able to get as much from the experience as possible. It covers how to make notations in a book, how to write an outline, how to use external materials effectively, and how to engage in a conversation between reader and writer. It even has a section where it goes into the specifics of how to read different kinds of texts.

I think that it would be a fantastic foundational text for a high school level English class – whether in a classroom or a homeschool (or, even, to be read by an industrious individual looking for a little self-improvement). It’s not a book best read at once, but rather digested chapter by chapter over the span of, say, a school year. It’s a little dry, so if you’re planning to use it with students, be prepared to liven it up with fun exercises, conversations, and sample readings. But taken in smaller chunks, it shouldn’t be too painful, and I think it would be well worthwhile.

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Building Green: A complete how-to guide to alternative building methods by Clarke Snell & Tim Callahan

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Read: 15 August, 2012

I’ve read a few books about sustainable/green building, and I must say that this one is the best I’ve seen so far.

It covers the usual range of green materials – such as cob, cordwood, and straw bale – of course, but where Building Green really shines is in its discussion about general building principles. There’s information about load distribution on the frame and foundation, on proper water drainage to prevent damage to the structure, and on passively regulating temperatures.

I also rather enjoyed that the sections on building materials gave an honest appraisal of the downsides to each, something that I’ve found many authors would rather gloss over.

While I’m not actively planning to begin a construction project, I was able to learn quite a bit about the principles of construction (and of physics, more generally). And oooh are cob houses ever gorgeous!

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The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise

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Read: 19 August, 2012

I’ve found this to be a fantastic resource, whether you’re homeschooling or not. The book is divided by age, and offers a sample schedule and resources for each of the core subjects for that grade level (math, science, history, etc.). Even Preschool and Kindergarten are covered, so I’m already making use of it.

The philosophy of the approach is that education should take place in three parts: Grammar (focus on memorization and absorbing as much information about the world as possible), Logic (learning how to reason, building on the accumulated facts of the first stage), and Rhetoric (learning how to express the ideas developed in the second stage).

It’s an interesting idea that focuses on many elements of classical education that have been (or are being) dumped from public school curricula, such as the study of Latin, the emphasis on proper handwriting, etc.

One aspect that I really like about the approach is that while each subject is taught separately, they are also integrated so that each subject tackles the same general topic from its own unique vantage.

For the homeschooling family, the book provides sample schedules and inspiration for developing curricula. For the family sending children to be educated in a classroom setting, the resource lists can still provide a lot of ideas for additional learning in the evenings or on weekends.

There were some iffy moments, such as the discussion about teaching religion in the Grammar section that started getting dangerously close to proselytizing (“Do fathers love their babies because of the urge to see their own genetic material preserved or because fathers reflect the character of the father God?”). It was completely gratuitous. But at least the authors do seem to acknowledge that some of their readers may be secular/atheists/other-theist and they do give warnings when a resource they are listing is God-heavy.

My last complaint is with the lists of famous people through history to learn about. These lists are titled as “Great men and women to cover,” but many of them have very few – if any – women. And it’s not like no women were doing important things during those time periods, so examples could have been found if the authors had bothered to look.

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed the book and, as I said, I’ve already started to make use of it. It’s written very much as a list of prompts and resources, so there’s plenty of wiggle room to substitute your own materials as you please and to design your own curricula. I definitely recommend that all parents at least pick it up from the library and read through the section for your children’s grade levels.

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The Medieval Cookbook by Maggie Black

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There are a few “medieval” cookbooks floating around, but this is the best I’ve seen so far. It’s the kind of cookbook that you can actually sit down and read through.

The recipes are divided by era, social class, and function. There’s a chapter on foods that were primarily associated with the cloister, for example, and a section for remedies. There are simple dishes with few ingredients that would be most appropriate for a side-dish or breakfast, and there are elaborate meals that belong more properly to a great feast.

Each recipe comes with a short introduction or with a contemporary passage describing the dish, followed by the ingredients list and instructions. Some license is taken with substitutions – sometimes multiple substitutions are indicated for choice – to deal with the fact that many of the ingredients are hard to find these days or no longer exist at all.

illustrations from contemporary sources are plentiful and printed in full colour, making this book a lovely source of medieval art as well.

I’ve tried a couple of the recipes over the years and enjoyed them. I’d love to throw a “Period Party” someday to really make use of this book.

Get cooking! Buy The Medieval Cookbook from Amazon to get started on your feast!

Raising a Secure Child by Zeynep Biringen

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Read: 13 September, 2011

Raising a Secure Child starts from the same Daniel Goleman research that informed Emotionally Intelligent Parenting. Since the two were so similar in many ways, I can’t help but to review the former in light of the latter.

I complained that Emotionally Intelligent Parenting provided sample dialogues to illustrate their points that were clearly idealized and read like something from the Stepford Wives. It was almost creepy. Raising a Secure Child, while making much greater use of dialogues and sample situations, did a much better job. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this was one of the book’s most positive features. Every major point was backed up with a short vignette of a family either doing it right or doing it wrong that helped me see what the point should (or shouldn’t) look like in practice. I found these to be a huge help in visualizing how I might out the advice into practice.

While Emotionally Intelligent Parenting focused on always saying the right thing, the focus in Raising a Secure Child was much more on the non-verbal interactions between parent and child. In other words, really meaning it is seen as more valuable than always having the right script handy. This made a good deal more intuitive sense to me.

Both books had the same emphasis on being emotionally present for kids (although, again, I felt that Raising a Secure Child made the point in a way that felt more practically applicable), and both talked about the importance of structure and limit-setting.

Raising a Secure Child spent a good deal of time on helping me to analyse my own upbringing to help me see how that might affect how I interact with my son. While it’s something I have thought about a lot, I still found it helpful to go through in a more methodical sort of way.

And while it isn’t applicable to my family, I do think the sections on children with special needs and getting through a divorce could be very useful.

Both books covered the full range from baby to young adult. I think that both are worth reading, but Raising a Secure Child is by far the better of the two.

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Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth

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Read: 9 September, 2011

There’s a trick to reading parenting books: Never read them reactively.

It’s a rule I’m normally really good at following, but I broke it when I picked up Health Sleep Habits, Happy Child. To make a long story short, my son sleeps wonderfully at night but is a terrible day napper. This often leads to some horrific bouts of crankiness, so I looked up infant sleep books at my local library to see if I could find something to help.

The central advice of Healthy Sleep Habits is to have babies take regular naps (and he does emphasize the “regular”). Great! I agree! Now how do we accomplish this?

Well, that’s where the book starts to fall apart. Weissbluth recommends a sleep routine that may include things like reading a bedtime story (which excites my son because books are OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a bath (which excites my son because water is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), a massage (which excites my son because physical contact is OMGWTFAWESOME!!), and a lullaby (which… Yeah, I think you get the point).

I realize that my son is a bit weird. The grandson of two professional track-and-fielders (one of whom held a world record for a year) and a professional mountain climbing instructor, he’s predisposed to some rather heightened energy levels. Not only is he an unstoppable force, he’s also hitting all of his physical milestones on the very early end of the spectrum.

So Weissbluth’s advice doesn’t seem to work for our family (and I refuse to even try the cry-it-out method that he says may help if the stable bedtime routine fails). Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a huge deal. I don’t know any adults who need nipples in their mouths to fall asleep, so I can reasonably assume that TurboKid will eventually grow out of his sleep problems, like I did. I could just keep trying with the routine and that would be the end of it.

The problem with Weissbluth is that he peppers his book with comments like:

I think it possible that unhealthy sleep habits contribute to school-related problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities.

and:

Warning: If your child does not learn to sleep well, he may become an incurable adult insomniac, chronically disabled from sleepiness and dependent on sleeping pills.

These sorts of friendly reminders are helpfully printed apart from the text, presented in bold and segregated in little boxes, lest you fail to notice that you are irrevocably breaking your baby.

There were aspects of the book that I enjoyed, such as the breakdown of strategies by age. But these were so overshadowed by the fear-mongering that it’s hard for me to write anything other than a negative review. It’s bad enough that I’m dealing with a cranky baby and that I can’t get the method to work. To add a level of desperation, to make my failure something that will turn my precious babe into a disabled drug user, is just cruel.

Bad, Weissbluth. Bad.

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Emotionally Intelligent Parenting by Maurice J. Elias, Steven E. Tobias, and Brian S. Friedlander

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Read: 26 August, 2011

Since my son is now moving from the “pooping lump” stage into the “destroyer of worlds” stage, I figured that it was about time I start reading some books to help me control this little monster. So apologies to anyone who isn’t particularly interested in parenting books, but I’ve got a stack to get through. Then it’ll be over for a while, I promise!

Emotionally Intelligent Parenting has very little fact in it. For the most part, it’s just a discussion of strategies that the authors think are beneficial and how to execute them. I found it rather worrisome, however, that when facts were presented, they were incorrect. It started early, in the introduction by Daniel Goleman, when he says that parents today “have less free time to spend with [our children] than our own parents did with us.” I’d say that’s intuitively true, one of those common sense things, but it’s factually false.

So that made me wonder about the advice given in the book, which, for the  most part, seemed intuitively true. Plus, there was something about the repeated advice to talk about feelings that doesn’t sit too well with my old New England Protestant family upbringing!

A lot of the advice was centred around acronyms like FIG TESPN, which is supposed to remind you (and kids) of how to work through problems. It seems to me that this is needlessly complicated and of dubious worth – not to mention absurd to implement on a daily basis.

My final major complaint is that I really wasn’t wowed by the dialogues in the book. These were usually there to illustrate how to put the ideas into practice. Thing is that it made the parents sound like robots and I’m pretty sure that any kids subjected to these kinds of speeches would interpret them as insincerity. And then, to illustrate how well the method supposedly works, the  dialogues invariably end with kids saying: “I never really thought about it like that [...] Can we talk later? I have to do my homework now.” Yeah right.

That’s not to say that the book was all bad, not by any means. There were some gems, such as the parenting Golden Rule to “do unto your children as you would have other people do unto your children.” There was also a lot of emphasis on modelling, so making sure that you display the behaviour you want to see in your children. And the last bit that really resonated with me was the advice to focus on goals. For example, focus on specific behaviour that you want corrected and work on that, or think about whether punishment is really the most effective means of prompting change.

Overall, I’d say that this was an interesting read and I did get some ideas, but I found that most of it was not realistically implementable. It also lacked evidence to back the assertions made.

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How To Have Your Second Child First by Kerry Colburn and Rob Sorensen

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Read: 25 August, 2011

As a new parent, it seems that I’m always one step behind my son. Just as I’ve figured out how to deal with one of his quirks, he passes into a new phase and my awesome new strategy is no longer useful.

That’s where How To Have Your Second Child First comes in. The idea is to have parents who’ve already been through the process ‘spill the beans’ so that first time parents can avoid making all the mistakes that first time parents always make. For example, how important is it to warm your baby’s bottle? Does a household really need to be kept in total silence while the baby is sleeping? Does everything your baby might touch need to be sterilized?

The book is organized like a list of lessons, each with some explanation and quotes from ‘experienced’ parents. Like most of these books, it’s a mix of really good advice and advice that may simply not fit your family. So I’ll give the same speech I always give for parenting books: Have a read through and take away what makes sense for you, ignore the rest.

That being said, I do think that the book’s underlying message is incredibly important. Don’t sweat the small stuff, you won’t break your baby.

My son is nearly six months old, so I definitely read this too late for it to be of much help. It would be far better as a baby shower gift, or a 2nd-3rd trimester library take-out. I do think it should be on every parent-to-be’s reading list.

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Shoot-It-Yourself Wedding Video by Andrei Filippov

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Disclaimer: The author is a relative, so I’m incredibly biased.

A practical, non-nonsense guide to shooting wedding videos. While I’ve only been on the other end of a wedding shoot, I can easily see how useful this little handbook would be. It is divided into situations (the bride getting ready, the couple at the altar, etc.) and the author explains concisely all the most important aspects of each of these scenes. These can sometimes be counter-intuitive, especially for a guest who is “in the moment.” It’s true that what we notice when we are in a situation is not always what will look good on tape 20 years later!

I had the good fortune to have the author himself shooting my wedding and the end product was a classy movie I could send out to all my family members. Andrei Filippov is an artist with the camera and his skill shines through in his writing.

Portions of the guide can also be found on the author’s website: FAQ Video.

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