Two Birthdays, Three Books

My two oldest grandchildren, Matthew and Jonah, had their birthdays this past week.

Matthew turned five and started a new school. In Minnesota he can start kindergarten, so Bobbe and Justin enrolled him in a Waldorf school. According to Wikipedia, the Waldorf school "approaches learning through imitation and example. Extensive time is given for guided free play in a classroom environment that is homelike, includes natural materials and provides examples of productive work in which children can take part. Outdoor play periods are incorporated into the school day, with the intention of providing children with experiences of nature, weather and the seasons of the year. Oral language development is addressed through songs, poems and movement games. These include daily story time when a teacher usually tells a fairytale, often by heart. Waldorf kindergartens discourage exposure to media influences such as television, computers and recorded music, as they believe these to be harmful to cognitive development in the early years." Matthew plays outside in the snowy, cold weather, listens to stories, and, according to Matthew in a phone conversation with grandma, "plays hide and seek with 100 girls and two boys."

In the mail this week, Drew and I received our certificates showing our designation as Matthew's Godparents following his baptism.

Jonah turned four in the middle of the week in Lafayette. His celebration had to be postponed due to the fact that he and his father, Andy, were sick.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading a series of books "Tales of the Forgotten God" by Dan Hamilton, a living Indiana author who Drew and I know from Bobbe's days at Taylor University and the C.S. Lewis club we used to belong to there. Mr. Hamilton has edited some of the Scottish author George MacDonald's novels into everyday English. Along the way he also wrote these books of his own. They are very MacDonald-ish and Lewis-ish in the way they are written and in the fact of them being stories with God interwoven into them. One needs to read them in their order of "The Beggar King," "The Cameleon Lady," and "The Everlasting Child." They were easy and quick to read. The plot isn't transparent so I didn't want to put the books down. There are a lot of characters but they are given names during the story to help one remember who they are and what their position in the story is. I bought the books in 1998 at the local Christian book store, four years after they were published, for less than $10 for the set. I am glad I finally got around to reading them.