No Biking In The House Without A Helmet

Dispatches from the new front lines of parenthood When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia." Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. She's been praised for her "historian's urge for accuracy," her "sociologist's sense of social nuance," and her "writerly passion for the beauty of language." But Melissa and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "We so loved raising our four children by birth, we didn't want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers." When the number of children hit nine, Greene took a break from reporting. She trained her journalist's eye upon events at home. Fisseha was riding a bike down the basement stairs; out on the porch, a squirrel was sitting on Jesse's head; vulgar posters had erupted on bedroom walls; the insult niftam (the Amharic word for "snot") had led to fistfights; and four non-native-English-speaking teenage boys were researching, on Mom's computer, the subject of "saxing." "At first I thought one of our trombone players was considering a change of instrument," writes Greene. "Then I remembered: they can't spell." Using the tools of her trade, she uncovered the true subject of the "saxing" investigation, inspiring the chapter "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn't Spell." A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening—No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.

Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness. Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change. Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.

How adoption and its literary representations shed new light on notions of value, origins, and identity

Includes a reading group guide (p. [311-324]).

Why do we pursue more when we’d be happier with less? In this updated edition of 7, New York Times bestselling author Jen Hatmaker tells the story of how she and her family tried to combat overindulgence—and what they learned along the way about living a truly meaningful life. Simple and Free is the true story of how Jen Hatmaker (along with her family) identified seven areas of excess—food, clothes, spending, media, possessions, waste, and stress—and made seven simple choices to fight back against the modern-day diseases of greed, materialism, and overindulgence. So, what’s the payoff from living a deeply reduced life? It’s the discovery of a greatly increased connection with God—a call toward simplicity and generosity that transcends social experiment to become a radically better life. In this new edition, written not just for readers of faith but for everyone who craves a gentler, simpler life, Hatmaker shares how sustainability and generosity still impact and challenge her today. Annotated throughout with new reflections from the author, this book offers thoughtful insights on the vastly different world of Simple and Free from back when it was first published as 7, and considers the dramatically different space Hatmaker occupies now. Simple and Free is funny, raw, and not a guilt trip in the making. Come along and discover what Jesus’ version of rich, blessed, and generous might look like in your life.

“Traster’s memoir is simultaneously unnerving and inspirational. The adoption world—and everyone surrounding it (meaning everyone)—needs to better understand the realities that affect so many children being adopted from orphanages today.” —Adam Pertman, president, The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, and author of Adoption Nation In this starkly honest memoir, award-winning journalist Tina Traster tells her moving Russian-adoption story, from dealing with the bleak landscape and inscrutable adoption handlers in Siberia, to her feelings of ambivalence at being a new mother in her forties, to her growing realization over months then years that something was “not quite right” with her daughter, Julia. Traster describes her despair as she blamed her mothering skills for her daughter’s troublesome behavioral issues, until she came to understand that Julia suffered from reactive attachment disorder, a condition associated with infants and young children who have been neglected, abused, or orphaned. She describes how with commitment and acceptance, she and her husband have closed the gulf between them and their daughter to form a loving bond, and provides practical advice for parents struggling with attachment issues. Tina Traster has contributed to numerous publications including the New York Times, the New York Post, Huffington Post, Family Circle, and many more. She lives in Valley Cottage, New York. Melissa Fay Greene is the author of five books, including There Is No Me Without You and No Biking in the House Without a Helmet. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

"My mommy didn't carry me in her tummy, she carried me in her heart." Bailey, a 5-years old who was adopted from China. Her story is included in this book. According to People magazine, parents from all over the country seek adoption expert and Worldwide Orphans Foundation founder Dr. Jane Aronson’s help “as if consulting a master detective.” Angelina Jolie praised Dr. Aronson’s “drive and ambition to help children dream” (Elle). Indeed, over the course of the past three decades, Dr. Aronson has touched the lives of thousands of adopted children from around the world and in this inspiring book she presents moving first-person testimonies from parents (and a few children themselves) whose lives have been blessed by adoption. Divided into thematic sections—such as "The Decision," "The Journey," and "The Moment We Met")—each prefaced by Dr. Aronson, this book introduces readers to Claude Knobler, a writer from Los Angeles whose journey to Ethiopia to adopt his son led to an unexpectedly moving encounter with the boy’s courageous birthmother; actor Mary Louise-Parker whose older adopted son’s bond with her newly adopted baby daughter was deep and unwavering from the instant the two children met; and Lynn Danzker, an entrepreneur who set off alone to adopt her son, Cole, and in the process, met and married her husband. The authors of these testimonies range from doctors to filmmakers, from financial consultants to celebrities—all of them bound by their moving and transformative experience as adoptive parents.

Why do we pursue more when we'd be happier with less? This is the story of how New York Times bestselling author Jen Hatmaker and her family tried to combat overindulgence—and what they learned about living a truly meaningful life along the way. Do you feel trapped in the machine of excess? Jen Hatmaker was. Her friends were. And some might say that our culture is. Jen once considered herself unmotivated by the lure of prosperity, but after she was called “rich” by an undeniably poor child, evidence to the contrary mounted and a social experiment turned spiritual journey was born. 7 is the true story of how Jen (along with her husband and her children) took seven months, identified seven areas of excess, and made seven simple choices to fight back against the modern-day diseases of materialism and overindulgence: food, clothes, possessions, media and technology, spending, waste, and stress. So, what’s the payoff from living a deeply reduced life? It’s the discovery of a greatly increased God—a call toward Christ-like simplicity and generosity that transcends a social experiment to become a radically better life. Revised and updated to reflect newer challenges of modern life, 7 is funny, raw, and not a guilt trip in the making, so come along and consider what Jesus’ version of rich, blessed, and generous might look like in your life.