How Will We Remember This L(o)st Year?
March 11, 2021 § 2 Comments
I’ve been accused of using these pages as a kind of glorified baby book, and if that’s true, I appreciate you indulging me. In the trappings of our busy-ness, we don’t take enough opportunities to pause and process our life experiences—the good and the bad, the big and the small—and I have found blogging to be (almost) as therapeutic as a conversation with a good girlfriend over a glass of wine.
But I would argue that children’s books themselves can be gateways to reflection—as much for us as for our kids. Sharing them offers a respite, a chance to connect with our little ones, while their content strips back unnecessary clutter, revealing something of life’s essentiality, its basic truths, through economies of words and pictures. Even when they’re not expressly representing our own experiences, children’s books reflect back the life taking place in and around us.
It has been exactly one year since I sat around a table with my daughter and her classmates to lead what would be our last in-person book club. Several of the children knew almost nothing about the coronavirus that would shut down their school—and life as they knew it—just twenty-four hours later. When I arrived to pick up my daughter the next day, teachers threw hastily gathered notebooks and supplies into the back of our car, and my daughter and her carpool group climbed into their seats looking shell-shocked. Some giggled nervously. One started crying.
How do we want to remember this last year—a year that took so much, that has produced a kind of cumulative weariness we’d like nothing more than to shed, but was also not without moments of profound beauty and growth?
As it turns out, I have the perfect book for memorializing this time, for helping children of all ages process what they’ve seen and felt, done and not done. LeUyen Pham’s astute and gracefully executed Outside, Inside (Ages 3-103) is one that might find its forever home on a shelf beside baby books and photo albums. A book our children might someday take down and share with their own kids—let me show you what it was like when “everybody who was outside…went inside.” Amidst the many new children’s books tackling the subject of lockdown, this one rises to the top. Many would have us believe it was all rainbows, but this one holds the sadness alongside the wonder, the uncertainty alongside the hope. Outside, Inside reminds us that a new day is dawning, but we will never forget how we got here.
« Read the rest of this entry »Sharing a Love of Travel (A Father’s Day Post)
June 11, 2020 § 1 Comment
This Father’s Day, my own father will have been gone for twenty-six years. Twenty-six years. One of the most devastating things about losing a parent when you’re eighteen is that you never get to know that parent through an adult lens. I knew my father intimately, from his scratchy mustache to his eye-rolling wisecracks to his endless patience as I described every painstaking detail of my day. But I knew him as a child knows a parent. How I wish I could have known him as an adult.
In times of great upheaval and unrest, I feel my father’s absence most keenly. Every seismic shift in our world puts that much more space between him and me. How would he be participating in this national conversation about race? Would he be marching with a Black Lives Matter sign? What candidate would he have supported in the last Democratic primary? How would social distancing have impacted his life in retirement—or would he still be practicing law? What kinds of things would he enjoy doing with his grandchildren?
I can’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, though I ask them quietly to myself all the time.
What I do know is that there are certain things which always bring him back to me. And one of them is travel. My father’s love of travel was legendary. When I was very young and he would travel internationally for work, he’d always bring me souvenirs—usually dolls—from places like Brazil, Mexico, and Germany. I loved gazing at the tiny porcelain faces or printed fabric clothes and imagining where they had been. Our house was full of black-and-white photographs from before my time: my father on a camel in the Sahara, my father on a motorcycle in Greece. When I decided to spend a gap year in Vietnam after high school, he jumped at the chance to accompany me across the ocean. When, weeks later, it came time for him to return to the States, his parting words were, “It looks like you’ve got the travel bug now, too.” I beamed with pride.
It seems fated that I would fall deeply in love with Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw’s new picture book, Papa Brings Me the World (Ages 3-7), in which a young girl describes her affection for a father who travels the world and brings pieces of it back to her. I’ve long been a fan of Kostecki-Shaw’s (my daughter still pulls out Luna & Me), but this book positively transported me. Maybe because it’s inspired by the author-illustrator’s own father; maybe it’s because the theme of found objects lends itself beautifully to mixed-media collage; or maybe it’s because the voice of the little girl reminds me of my young self, brimming with tenderness and curiosity and admiration and longing for my father’s stories of adventure.
And Now, We Wait
January 16, 2020 § 4 Comments
Happy New Year! Has anyone else noticed that the New Year always brings a mounting, restless anticipation about things to come? Maybe it’s because January is so much slower-paced than December (thank goodness); our minds naturally begin to leap ahead, craving that next fun event, that next milestone, even when we know we’d do better to slow down and allow ourselves to sink into the calm (dark mornings and grey afternoons included).
In any case, we’ve been doing our fair share of waiting lately. Waiting for snow days. Waiting to get braces off. Waiting for renovations to begin on our house. Waiting for our trip to Disney. Waiting for long summer days. And I’m feeling it as much as my kids. Waiting is hard.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait any longer for Almost Time (Ages 4-7), a new picture book by Gary D. Schmidt and his late wife, Elizabeth Stickney (pseudonym), with art by G. Brian Karas. I don’t think the sensation of waiting has ever been so astutely served up for young children as in this sweet winter story about a boy eagerly anticipating, not one, but two exciting events.
2019 Gift Guide: Picture Books for Ages 3-7
December 1, 2019 Comments Off on 2019 Gift Guide: Picture Books for Ages 3-7
Today is part recap, part intro. To kick off the picture book portion of my Gift Guide, I’ve already told you about my mad love for Home in the Woods and Pokko and the Drum. Earlier in the year in these pages, I sang the praises of Crab Cake, Lubna and Pebble, I am Hermes!, Camp Tiger, A Stone Sat Still, The Scarecrow, and Who Wet My Pants?—all of which would also make fantastic holiday gifts. But if you haven’t kept up with my reviews on Instagram all year long, I thought it was high time I shared some of them here. Because one or two (or all) of these might be perfect for someone on your list.
Digging for Mummies
January 15, 2014 § 1 Comment
While my son and I were on the subject of excavating fossils, it seemed it might be logical to jump from paleontology to archaeology. It didn’t hurt that, over winter break, JP’s teacher had emailed me about tracking down some good books about Ancient Egypt (see list at the end). And so, one snowy night, JP and I sat down on the couch to read the Treasure Trove that is The 5,000-Year-Puzzle-Old Puzzle: Solving a Mystery of Ancient Egypt (Ages 6-12), by Claudia Logan, illustrated by Melissa Sweet.
An hour later, we were still reading it, my daughter and husband had joined us, and I almost couldn’t tear myself away to meet my girlfriends for a scheduled drink. Almost. I can’t think of a better introduction, not only to Ancient Egypt, but also to the painstaking role that archaeologists play in unearthing clues about ancient life. While the American boy and his father in the book are fictitious, they join an actual historic dig, led by a Harvard team of scientists, which occurred in 1924 at the Egyptian site of Giza 7000X, where a secret and unusually well-preserved tomb was discovered. Through a combination of actual historic records and the young boy’s first-person narrative, we learn about the team’s efforts to excavate this ancient site over the course of a year—including their continual revisions to hypotheses over whose tomb it was and why it was constructed in such a way. « Read the rest of this entry »
“Mommy, you know what? You know what? You know what?”
November 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
My five year old loves to tell stories. Most of the time, his stories are a blend of autobiographical truth and nonsensical make-believe, and most of the time they are his way of working through whatever he’s trying to make sense of in the world (“There was this hurricane, and the winds were swirling around outside like a tornado, and then the roofs of the houses blasted off to Outerspace, and then…). As a parent, I know that I’m supposed to dedicate my ears to him when he’s narrating life’s inexplicable phenomena, but golly if his stories don’t always seem to come at a time when I’m desperately trying to corral him into putting on his coat or swallowing a few bites of food (the fork goes up, then stops, millimeters from the mouth, then comes down again: “Mommy, you know what?”). But I get it. I do. We all want to narrate our lives, and we all want an appreciative audience.
That’s why I’m not surprised that JP’s sister, now a full-fledged two year old, has decided that she too has verbal musings of her own to share. Suddenly, our family dinners are filled with Emily’s terrorizing screams—“I talking here!”—followed by JP’s despairing moans, “Emil-ee, I haven’t finished my story yet!”
Alas, tonight seemed like a good time to introduce my clan to the latest treasure from Philip and Erin Stead, the husband and wife duo that wrote and illustrated two of my all-time favorites, A Sick Day for Amos McGee and And Then It’s Spring. Their newest gem, Bear Has a Story to Tell (Ages 2-6), has all of the subtle charm, all of the understated quietness, of their earlier works, and this makes it perfectly suited for the subject at hand: hibernation.
What to Read to Your Kids 