She's glamorous.

We've been having lots of fun spending time with Ariel this week. One day, I got to help her bleach her Mohawk.


I think she looks glamorous and beautiful.

Awhile ago, I wrote about beauty and quoted Women Who Run with the Wolves. Clarissa talks about wolves and beauty and says, "They all have their own body configurations and strength, their own beauty. They live and play according to what and who and how they are. They do not try to be what they are not."

Ariel is beautiful.

Goodbye Watership Down

Recently, we finished reading Watership Down. Each of the three years we have been a family, we have read at least one very involved book aloud together. Sometimes it is hard to find a time when everyone is in the mood and available to read but when we all are, it is wonderful.

We miss Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver and their friends.











Last summer, we read The Hobbit. We brought it with us on our family honeymoon and read it together around the campfire.












The first summer we knew Cam, we started reading Eragon together. We took it with us to read in the park by the flowers or to the beach near the lake many times.










We read smaller books intermittently.

Right now, we are reading the Newberry Award Winning yet not so politically correct, Sign of the Beaver.











And we are in the middle of Mary Pope Osborne's Tales from the Odyssey series.

The first book is The One-Eyed Giant. Those Titans were bad dudes.







And I don't think I would have been willing to go to the Land of the Dead.

Sirens & Sea Monsters is next.











We also read books in pairs. Cam and Sam finished the Mouse & the Motorcycle Book that Sam & John started in Myrtle Beach and have continued on the series.

Sam and I are rereading the Spiderwick Chronicles and each of us have our own reading.

I wonder what major book the three of us will share next.

We are all beautiful

Awhile ago, Cam sent me a link to a video from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty and thanked me for buying their products for us. He said he was glad we were supporting this initiative.

The video Cam sent (which is in the posting directly after this one) shows the transformation a model undergoes. After watching that video, I checked out some of the other ones from this campaign. My favorite, "Little Girls," is posted too.

I've been thinking I should write something about these videos and the ideas they represent.

Then, today, I was interviewed by my sister-in-law, Johanna for a paper she is working on for her Women's Studies class. They have just finished reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. The book and Jo's paper will address expectations placed on women regarding their appearance in the workplace. We talked about my experiences and agreed that while we want to be perceived as beautiful, we'd really like to be accepted as we are.

While I was talking with Jo, I picked up my worn copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves, wanting to remember what Clarissa said on the topic of beauty. She says:

"I have been taken with the way wolves hit their bodies together when they run and play, the old wolves in their way, the young ones in theirs, the skinny ones, the fat ones, the long-legged, the lop-tailed, the floppy-eared, the ones whose broken limbs heal crookedly. They all have their own body configurations and strength, their own beauty. They live and play according to what and who and how they are. They do not try to be what they are not."

"To be ugly or unacceptable because one's beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature."

"Women have good reason to refute psychological and physical standards that are injurious to spirit and which sever relationship with the wild soul. It is clear that the instinctive nature of women values body and spirit far more for their ability to be vital, responsive and enduring than by any measure of appearance. This is not to dismiss who or what is considered beautiful by any segment of culture, but to draw a larger circle that embraces all forms of beauty, form, and function."

I agree with Clarissa. Let's draw a larger circle.

I forgot one.

Awhile ago, I wrote about an evening I spent volunteering at a women's shelter. In that posting, I mentioned several books I had read and passed along to the shelter. Recently, when Cam was talking about enjoying California Girl, a novel he was reading set with historical references, I remembered another book I think I gave away that night. That I gave it away isn't incredibly noteworthy but the book is so I wanted to give it a mention.

It is The Way the Crow Flies by Anne Marie MacDonald. Apparently, her first book, Fall on Your Knees was part of Oprah's Book Club. I didn't know that when I picked up this book. I was mostly drawn in by the cover image. This book is told mostly from the perspectives of an 8-year-old girl and her father. It is set in the 1960s so the Space Race and Cuban Missile Crisis provide the backdrop. But what was so captivating for me was what was happening with the family. I don't want to give much away. I just wanted to say I liked the book and remember not being able to put it down.