No Biking in the House Without a Helmet e-bog

Dispatches from the new front lines of parenthoodWhen 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, "e;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."e;Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. She's been praised for her "e;historian's urge for accuracy,"e; her "e;sociologist's sense of social nuance,"e; and her "e;writerly passion for the beauty of language."e;But Melissa and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "e;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."e;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 "e;snot"e;) had led to fistfights; and four non-native-English-speaking teenage boys were researching, on Mom's computer, the subject of "e;saxing."e;"e;At first I thought one of our trombone players was considering a change of instrument,"e; writes Greene. "e;Then I remembered: they can't spell."e;Using the tools of her trade, she uncovered the true subject of the "e;saxing"e; investigation, inspiring the chapter "e;Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn't Spell."e;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.