Tag: Lydia

The Lydster, Part 87: The Book of Acts

I like that Lydia has three syllables but only five letter; very efficient.

Very early on in this blog, I laid out the rules for naming the daughter, most of which were negative:
*No name in the top 10 in the Social Security list of most popular names for the most recent year available.
*No naming after any family member, living or dead.
*No unisex names…This comes directly from the fact that my father AND my sister were both named Leslie.
*No single-syllable names; it had to have two or more syllables, to balance off the shortness of Green.
*No names that easily went to the nickname.
*It should have a recognizable spelling.
*No names beginning and ending with A. We have nieces named Alexandria, Adrianna, and Alexa.

But I should have emphasized more how much I liked the name, Lydia. I like that it has three syllables but only five letters; very efficient. I actually didn’t notice at the time, but I like that she has the same initials as my late father.

And I like that it’s not only a Biblical name but a New Testament name.

From Acts 16 (NIV):
13 On the Sabbath we [Paul and his companions] went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

So Lydia was a woman of means, she was hospitable and she had faith, something I hoped for my daughter, who seems to have the latter two, and she likes purple to boot.

Father’s Day 2011

I appreciate the fact that the Daughter makes me something each of the last couple years.


The interesting thing about my mother’s internment this year is that it became the first time that my daughter had had the opportunity to see where my father was buried. She has seen pictures of him, and she talks about him fairly regularly, surprising considering the fact that she never in person. Somehow, it seems as though he became a bit more real to her. And this made me happy.

I also appreciate the fact that the Daughter makes me something each of the last couple of years, and takes pride in creating it. Maybe it’ll be a craft or a drawing – she’s actually a quite talented artist – but it comes from her own initiation. That makes me happy too.


***
From the Census Bureau:
The idea of Father’s Day was conceived slightly more than a century ago by Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Wash., while she listened to a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909. Dodd wanted a special day to honor her father, William Smart, a widowed Civil War veteran who was left to raise his six children on a farm.
A day in June was chosen for the first Father’s Day celebration, 101 years ago, June 19, 1910, proclaimed by Spokane’s mayor because it was the month of Smart’s birth. The first presidential proclamation honoring fathers was issued in 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson designated the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. Father’s Day has been celebrated annually since 1972 when President Richard Nixon signed the public law that made it permanent.

Pictures c 2009 Alexandria Green-House

The Lydster, Part 86: Homework

I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities, and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when when grading the assignment.

As I’ve noted, I tend to be the one who works on the homework with the Daughter. She even had an assignment during the week off from school for Passover/Easter. Only 7 of the 24 students actually did the assignment, and Lydia was the ONLY one to color it, as requested, albeit on a Monday morning she was returning to class.

On the weekly homework, there are 10 spelling words to copy plus a bonus word. She’s quite good at this; I don’t think she’s gotten worse than a 95 on her weekly test. The homework also includes writing sentences and some math.

Occasionally, I find the exercises with the graphics to be a bit obtuse, but never more so than earlier this month.
The exercise:

“When y is at the end of a word, it can stand for the long sound of I as in dry, or the long sound of e, as in pony. Say each picture name. Circle long E or long I to show the sound of y in each picture name.”
You may not be able to see the graphic clearly, but I was having difficulty discerning what was being asked for:
2. city or sky?
5. cry or baby?
6. why (that’s a REALLY subtle concept for a first grader)
8. sunny or sky?
9. shy or boy (shy is REALLY subtle here)
10. heavy? (pry is the answer, again not a concept my daughter knew)
15. cloudy or sky?


And the next page
4. sleepy or yawn?
So I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when grading the assignment.

That very evening, I got a note back from the teacher, in which she, working 1-to-1 with another student on the homework “realized the difficulty and confusion with this worksheet page.” She promised to remove the assignment for next year’s homework, and that the Daughter wouldn’t be penalized for any errors.

I think it’s very comforting that her teacher, who I’ve met with a couple of times, was so responsive.

The new Mother’s Day reality

The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son.


Someone sent me this picture some months ago. I thought it was rather funny. Specifically, it reminded me of the Paul Simon song Mother and Child Reunion, which is based on a chicken and egg dish that Simon had at a Chinese restaurant.

Then my mom died, and it’s my first Mother’s Day without her. The visual is still funny but in a more melancholy way. Melancholy humor.

I’ve discovered that Mother’s Day ads REALLY irritate me lately, more than Father’s Day ads did 10 years ago. Maybe it was because it was longer between when my father died until the next holiday (August to June) than it is for my mom (February to May). But probably it’s because I get more e-mail solicitations than I did a decade ago, and they are more difficult to ignore.

The picture above is of my mother with her favorite son many years ago in front of 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY USA; the house and the trim, BTW, were green. The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son. She was generally polite enough not to mention that I was her ONLY son.

Last Sunday, there was a Mass for Mom at the Mission San Diego Basilica de Alcala in San Diego. As my sister Leslie reported, it was “beautiful. It was the regular Noon Mass, but it was announced at the beginning that this Mass was for Trudy Green, mother of Leslie Green, who is a member of the Mission Choir.” I will be getting a copy of the event. “It was a packed house on a beautiful day.”

The bottom picture is of my daughter with her favorite mother. Carol is, among other things, a good mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers, and all of you who have or had mothers.

 

The Lydster, Part 85: Peanut free

What’s odd is that, as a kid, I LOVED peanut butter. But I must have ODed on it, because the smell now makes me nauseous.

As some of you know, the daughter has a peanut allergy, discovered when she was given a peanut butter cookie shortly before she was three. Interestingly, she didn’t have the typical symptoms of swelling. Instead, she vomited – several times. And she has been tested about a year ago, and she is still allergic.

I’ve noted here in the past that there are basically two kinds of people when it comes to food allergy safety; people who have a family member with an allergy, and the pretty much oblivious. Because there’s so much cross-pollination with them, the daughter avoids tree nuts as well as peanuts, even though she is not specifically allergic to them.

I remember a couple of years ago that we were invited to the house of a friend for lunch. We gave the hostess the information beforehand. What did she serve? Nutella sandwiches with nut bread we couldn’t let her eat either.

Likewise, at a party Lydia attended just a couple of weeks ago, the cake had no peanuts or nuts but was processed in a plant with nuts. Fortunately, we always pack alternatives for such an occasion.

Fortunately, she’s not allergic to airborne peanuts, as some people are. The first time Lydia ever flew on a plane, a couple of years ago, the flight attendant, passing out peanuts and another snack, practically passed out when I mentioned my daughter’s allergy. I was appalled by this story about a restaurant chef lying about the fact that the foods were “gluten-free” when, in fact, they were not; highly irresponsible.

I am comforted by the fact that, at least at this point, she won’t take peanut butter deliberately. She was writing her homework, and she had to just WRITE the words “peanut butter” and she complained how awful it tasted, even though she hadn’t ingested it in over four years.

What’s odd is that, as a kid, I LOVED peanut butter. But I must have ODed on it because the smell now makes me nauseous. Meanwhile, my wife really rakes in the Halloween candy, just on the peanut butter products alone.

Pictures c 2009 by Alexandria Green-House

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