Obligation 1: Read Aloud To Your Kids

My son is growing up, and I don’t always handle it well. I look back on his early years with rose-colored glasses, I’m sure. Time has a marvelous way of erasing memories of tantrums and replacing them with images of familial perfection.

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One of my perfect, rosy memories is the quiet time I spent reading to my son. In the beginning I’d read to him before settling him down for a nap or bedtime. He was always a busy, physical, moving boy, and reading books together calmed his active muscles. He would stop moving to focus on the sound of my voice, the words I was reading, the story I was telling. Often I’d read aloud a book I was enjoying, not a children’s book, and his eyes would drop closed as I softly crooned the writer’s prose.

As he grew older, we began reading in the late morning after my chores were done. We would read in the late afternoon when he’d just woken from a nap. We’d read after a warm bath, right before bedtime. He munched his way through board books, and I rejoiced when he graduated to ripping the pages of only every third picture book. Gifts of books from family and friends were essential in those days, as were large quantities of scotch tape.

He began requesting personal favorites. We memorized Golden Books about bulldozers and backhoes. His favorites were different from mine. I never got tired of Ox-Cart Man, Make Way for Ducklings, or The Big Snow. He wanted to hear all about the latest exploits of Rosemary Wells’s McDuff and laughed uncontrollably at the antics of Alexandra Day’s Carl. We shared affection for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

I owe Ms. Wells and Ms. Day, Virginia Lee Burton, Donald Hall, Robert McCloskey, Berta and Elmer Hader, and so many other children’s book authors such gratitude. They brought laughter and excitement to my son’s eyes. They were his first excursion into the vast, exciting world of words. They sparked his imagination and instilled in him a love of reading. And they gave me such wonderful, rosy memories of quiet mornings, afternoons, and evenings cuddled together with my son and a pile of books.

(This post was inspired by Neil Gaiman’s lecture at The Reading Agency.)

The Obligations

Author Neil Gaiman recently gave a lecture at The Reading Agency. He spoke about the importance of libraries and reading, and specifically how essential to our human society it is to foster the love of reading in our children. You can read his lecture here. As often happens to me when I read something powerful, Mr. Gaiman’s lecture got me to thinking about my own experience. I agree wholeheartedly with him that we need to preserve and support our public libraries.

I visit my local library several times a month to prevent withdrawal symptoms. They have what I need and a steady supply of it: books.

During the years I homeschooled my son, our favorite excursion was our weekly trip to the library. It beat out park days, museum visits, even a day at the zoo. Our book bag was never large enough to carry all the treasures we discovered. At first all of our books were borrowed on my library card. But at the tender age of six, my son insisted he have his own card. From then on, he had no difficulty approaching the librarian with a request for a specific book.

These days he mostly asks his school librarian for suggestions, but on the occasional lazy Saturday he’ll ask me to take him to our local public library. He browses the stacks for books his school doesn’t have and considers himself a renegade if he borrows a (gasp) book for adults.

Back to Mr. Gaiman’s lecture. He spoke about the “obligations all of us—as readers, as writers, as citizens” have. He says we are obligated to read for pleasure, in both public and private places. He says we must read aloud to our kids and use our language. He says we have an obligation to use our imaginations. And here’s me again, thinking about my own experience. Do I agree that these are meaningful responsibilities? Yes, I do. And I’ll reflect on them in upcoming posts.

Snickerdoodles and Other Silly Words

It’s another cookie baking day. The boy politely asked for snickerdoodles and though they are my least favorite cookie to eat, how can a mother refuse? Especially when the word “please” precedes the request. As I stood in my kitchen rolling boring, bland cookie after boring, bland cookie, it occurred to me that the most interesting thing about this particular treat is its name. Snickerdoodle. Who thought up this ridiculous name? It’s not even listed in my giant-sized Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.

I found snicker, “to laugh in a disrespectful manner” and snickersnee, “a knife”. Did some mother in generations past make a grave error in her recipe and leave out the flavor? Upon eating the insipid cookie, did she make a self-deprecating remark comparing herself to a doodle, “a foolish or silly person?” Rather than kindly eating the cookie, did her family snicker at her error?

This is just one of the many, many silly words I adore. What’s not to love about kerfuffle, “a commotion”; rigamarole, “an elaborate, complicated procedure”; or hullaballoo, “an uproar?” I called my son doodlebug, “the larva of an antlion” for the first year of his life. Don’t even get me started on scallywag. You have read The Pirate’s Booty, haven’t you?

Naughty Angus

Angus and Ivy have been plaguing me this week. I've been scribbling diligently for the past five days working on the second book in my Inventor-in-Training series. Angus has landed in a strange new world and I am so looking forward to sharing it with my readers. But the naughty twosome has not been playing nicely. I had planned how book two was going to progress. Organized, plotted, great stuff. I had worked out all the challenges they would face and how they would overcome them. But if you know Angus and Ivy at all, you know that they are willful children who do exactly as they please. They will not listen to the wisdom of their elders (me) and they are fouling everything up! If only they would behave like nice, well-mannered kids.

In a flash of frustration, a burning need to get away from the two of them, I peeked in to visit my good friend and illustrator Jennifer L. Hotes at her blog. In her recent post "Why I Read Books S-L-O-W-L-Y" she wrote:

Darroch captures the spirit of everyone’s favorite nephew in Angus Clark. He dares to dream, then duct tapes the parts together until something sizzles and pops. He’s the boy we love having over to our house to play with our children, but then need a long pull on the wine bottle after the door shuts behind him. 

And that's just it. I do love having Angus come play but because he lives in my head I won't be able to "shut the door behind him" any time soon. If he was any other type of child he would never have wound up in his current predicament. Why do I think he's suddenly going to start doing what I tell him? Guess I'll just have to trust him to clean up the lovely mess he made today.

Cookie Math

Can someone tell me why cookie recipes promise the mother lode but actually deliver a few tailings? It’s a cool, rainy spring day here so naturally it’s a cookie-baking day. The boy and I compared our available ingredients with several recipes and decided gingersnaps would be both aromatic and delicious. This particular recipe claims to produce six dozen cookies. I’m fairly good at my 12 times tables and know that means 72 cookies. I am the perpetual optimist but I’m not insane, so I knew we’d be lucky to get five dozen at best. And if you’re as good at your math as I am, you’ll know that equates to 60 cookies.

Now, I confess to a little dough munching despite the raw egg my mother always said will make me sick. But it was like, literally, half a cookie. And the boy got a little overeager with the teaspoon size on the first cookie but reined himself in on all future cookies. So tell me, why do the people who write recipes get our hopes up like this?

Not 72 cookies.

Forty-four cookies people. That’s it. That means we got a return of 44 out of 72 promised cookies. That’s 62% of what was promised. Recipe writer person, I give you a D. These will barely last me through the weekend.

Our First Author-Illustrator Visit

My wonderful illustrator Jennifer L. Hotes and I spent a fun-filled morning at Chestnut Hill Academy talking about writing, painting, and pirates. After listening to a chapter excerpt, the kids broke into author-illustrator pairs and worked on their own stories. I’m looking forward to reading their tales and seeing their illustrations. What a great bunch of smart, creative kids!

Danelle and Jenn at CHA

The Smell of Spring in the PNW

The calendar says spring began a week ago. I consider that a mere suggestion. After all, the calendar says that summer solstice is June 21, and anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest knows that summer doesn’t officially start until July 4. “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” and “April showers bring May flowers” are aphorisms for East Coast life. Out here, March comes in like a torrential downpour and goes out like a less torrential downpour. And April? That month lasts through June. But at least we don’t have to wait until May for our flowers.One of the many glories of living in this drizzly part of the world is the natural beauty everywhere you look. If you enjoy sinking your hands into the earth and conjuring up flowers, fruits, and vegetables the way I do, the appearance of daffodils, primrose, and hyacinth reminds you that you need to put in that seed order and start tilling soil ASAP.

But as vibrant and deep as all the colors are in spring, what sets spring apart from every other season in my opinion is the smell. I wish I could post the odors of my backyard for you. The sarcococca doesn’t look like much, but its fresh vanilla scent in January gently coaxes, “Don’t worry. Winter is almost over. Spring will be glorious.”

The daphne odora is slightly more daring with its demure pink flowers: “Tee hee hee, don’t look at me, but isn’t my fragrance lovely?” And the purple hyacinth trills its RRRs: “Arrrent’t I rrravishing darrrrlink?”

The calendar says spring began a week ago. I didn’t believe it until my garden told me so.