Archive for November, 2007
Here’s how to fix a broken link to a Lilting House post:
If the permalink
looks like this—
http://liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house/2006/10/my-rule-of-six.html
—simply replace the
liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house part of the URL
with
melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse
so that the URL reads:
http://melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse/2006/10/my-rule-of-six.html
That URL should take you to the correct post. The date and everything after the date needs to remain the same. Email me if you have trouble!
And if you missed the explanation of what happened to my Lilting House blog, here’s my farewell post:
November 16, 2007
Changes Afoot
A
couple of months ago, I realized the time had come for me to close up
shop here at ClubMom. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here, blogging
at Lilting House, and I am deeply grateful to have had this opportunity
to meet many new readers and writers, and to explore in greater depth
some of the subjects dearest to my heart.
I’m not finished with those conversations. But it’s time to move them back to my original blog, Here in the Bonny Glen.
Pretty much the only aspect of ClubMom blogging I haven’t enjoyed was
seeing certain ads pop up next to my posts. Back in early October, I
began talking to the MomBlog liason at ClubMom about retiring from
blogging here and moving the content to an archive at my other site.
There were some techie details to nail down, and the dialogue took a
while. During that time, the liason left ClubMom, so my move has been
on hold for a few weeks.
Today I learned that ClubMom is going to wrap up the entire MomBlog
program at the end of this year. The ClubMom folks have been extremely
classy in their handling of the details regarding closing the blogs, so
while it’s a move that may shock many readers, I have great respect for
the way the decision has been made.
What’s going to happen with Lilting House is this: this blog will
stay up until the end of the year. But I won’t be posting here anymore.
I have moved the entire blog, comments and all, to The Lilting House Archive.
There you will find all the posts I’ve written here, and I encourage
you to continue the discussions we have going in the comments.
All my new material will appear at Bonny Glen. This includes the
ongoing series I have been doing here—the day planner reviews, the
upcoming sewing-book reviews, posts about speech therapy and special
needs kids, reviews of Latin curricula and other fun learning
resources, and, well, everything I’ve been doing here. I’ll continue to
mine the comments of this blog for new posts at Bonny Glen.
Thank you all very, very much for helping to make the Lilting House
the delightful experience it has been for me. I love hearing from you.
I deeply appreciate the support you have given me (including that blog
award last year for Best Unschooling/Eclectic Homeschooling Blog). You
are a terrific bunch of readers, and I hope you’ll all join me over at Here in the Bonny Glen!
Updated September 2015: High Tide for Huck and Rilla
Since I’ve posted on what I call “Tidal Learning” or “Tidal Homeschooling” both here and on Lilting House, I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of all those posts.
(My favorite kinds of posts are in the Connections category.)
Tidal Homeschooling
What the Tide Brought In (and Carried Out, and Brought Back In)
Tidal Homeschooling, Part 3
The Tide is Going Out
Tweak Tweak
Accidental vs. On-Purpose Learning
A Low-Tide Day
Lovely, Lovely Low Tide (a follow-up to this post about connections)
Radical Unschooling, Unschooling, Tidal Homeschooling, and the Wearing of Shoes that Fit
Way Leads on to Way
Can you tell I really love low tide? LOL!
This post isn’t about tidal homeschooling per se, but it gives a good picture of the flavor of our high-tide days: All Roads Lead to Rome (Even for Bunnies)
November 16, 2007 @ 2:57 pm | Filed under:
Bloggity As I announced at Lilting House today, I’m retiring from that blog and shifting back to posting all my content here at Bonny Glen. All the Lilting House posts I’ve written can be accessed at the new Lilting House Archive.
Lilting House itself will remain up through the end of the year. Comments are open on all posts in the archive, and I’ll be continuing various Lilting House review series right here at Bonny Glen. I’m excited to have everything all in one place again. Um, that is, everything except for the breadbaking posts and our daily learning notes.
If you’ve been a Lilting House reader, thank you so much for your support. I hope you’ll stick around…there is much to discuss here!
Oh, one more note—if you have linked to a Lilting House post and would like to update the URL (since all current Lilting House permalinks will become broken after the first of the year), here’s how to do it. If the permalink looks like this—
http://liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house/2006/10/ my-rule-of-six.html
—simply replace the
liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house part of the URL
with
melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse
so that the URL reads:
http://melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse/2006/10/my-rule-of-six.html
That URL should take you to the correct post. The dates need to remain the same. Email me if you have trouble!
…to Alice the Best!
Card courtesy of Public Domain Images.
Hello, Snow by Timothy Bush
This is the final week of the Blogging for a Cure effort to raise public awareness of the Robert’s Snow snowflake auctions. As you know, I wrote a lot about the auctions in this post. The first auction begins November 19th, so get ready to go snow shopping!
Today it is my great pleasure to feature another one of these amazing snowflakes. When the list of participating illustrators was presented to children’s book bloggers a couple of months ago, I zapped back immediately with my request to host Timothy Bush’s snowflake. We are very, very big Timothy Bush fans around here. We quote James and the House of Aunt Prudence almost as often as we do Monty Python. ("When the bear arrived, of course, there were not enough macaroons to go around.")
Timothy is a gifted storyteller, and his picture book illustrations are enchanting. Each page offers a story in itself. Here’s a list of his books. In addition to illustrating his own stories, he has illustrated the work of such kid lit heavy hitters as Eve Bunting and Marilyn Singer.
Those Capital Mysteries he is illustrating are new to me—they look totally up my kids’ alley. I’ll have to check them out asap.
At the top of this post, what you see is Timothy’s Robert’s Snow snowflake. It’s called "Hello, Snow," and it makes me a bit nostalgic for the East Coast winters we so recently left behind.
Timothy was kind enough to answer a few questions for me about his snowflake, his work, and his taste in books and music.
What was your path to illustrating children’s books?
I always loved drawing as a kid, which I don’t think is unusual. Most kids draw when they’re little. They just give it up as they get older. I had this great teacher in fifth grade who gave me extra credit for my cartoon stories. I think she kept me drawing at that transitional age by providing me with an audience and a motivation (I really needed that extra credit). Telling stories by combining words and pictures is pretty much what I’m still doing.
How did James in the House of Aunt Prudence come about?
I had a meeting with an editor to show her some stories I was working on. She wasn’t much interested in the stories but liked a piece in my art portfolio of a very small boy sitting in a very large, fancy chair. She suggested that I try writing a story about him. JAMES was the result.
Who are your favorite children’s book authors and illustrators?
I think in this field, you get to have two sets of favorites: the old ones you loved as a kid and the new ones you love as a fan of the form and as a practitioner.
In the first category, pride of place goes to Bill Peet, the first author I can remember looking for by name. The easy, loose-elbowed energy of the drawing—an animator’s way of drawing, I later recognized—captivated me. I sent him a copy of my first book when it was published and of my most prized possessions is the letter I got back from him thanking and encouraging me. There were lots of other books and book creators, of course: the manic quality of PD Eastman’s Go Dog Go echoes pretty loudly in my action scenes and there’s no getting away from Dr. Seuss. But the Peet books—unslick as they are to contemporary eyes – were special to me in a way that nothing else was.
In the second group, well… where to begin? So, so many people working now are doing such beautiful work. The spectrum of styles is probably bigger right now than it’s ever been and the level of accomplishment within those styles is extraordinarily high.
Where do you work? What is your studio like?
I work at home, which is a tiny, tiny studio apartment in Manhattan. I’m on the third floor, on the back of the building, which means I get a view of the gardens between my building and the houses on the next street. If you’ve ever seen the movie Rear Window you can imagine the sort of what it looks like. For an urban setting, it’s very quiet and pretty. People can never believe it but New York City is a major stopover for migrating birds in the spring and fall. I get dozens of species coming through. Checking the trees and identifying what I find is always a nice little work break at those times of year.
Do you listen to music while you work? If so, what kind?
Everything. This work can get solitary, so I like to keep a wide variety of voices around. This week’s playlist has included Bollywood soundtracks, Handel operas, medieval chants, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, some hardcore, arty hip-hop a friend gave me and an audio book of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography. And it’s only Tuesday.
What was the inspiration for your snowflake?
I thought it would be interesting to take the basic snowflake shape I was painting on and repeat it a bunch of times to make a snow scene. In the same way that one snowflake in winter isn’t all that exciting, my one little painting isn’t that big a deal. But a whole bunch of snowflakes at once is cause for celebration, whether they’re outside the window of my building or inside the window of my computer screen. So my piece is kind of an illustration of my feeling about the whole Robert’s Snow project.
The boy on your snowflake is alive with joy and wonder. I’ve seen that expression on my own kids’ faces during a snowfall—the upturned face, the utter delight. Were you a big fan of winter as a kid?
One of my earliest memories is a snowstorm in Chicago that buried the whole first floor of our house: we had to come and go through the second-story window. Big excitement, weird behavior, suspension of all the usual rules. What kid wouldn’t love that? New York City in a blizzard is also amazing. Everyone’s out, skiing down the avenues, but the snow muffles all the sound and the quiet of it is incredibly strange and lovely.
Disney has optioned Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter! Congrats. Anything you can tell us about that?
I got a call from the producer a while back. Her son had the book and it was a family favorite. She wanted to know if the rights were available and a conversation started. We signed the contract back in the early spring. The project is in active development, or at least it was until the writers’ strike began. I’m not involved in the day-to-day part of it at this point, but I did get to visit the studio when we were putting the deal together, which was a lot of fun. They really do run around in those little golf carts. There are some pretty amazing people involved and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
You work mostly in watercolors. Watercolors often come across as soft and dreamy, but one of the things I love best about your work is how crisp, vibrant, and lively it is. Your characters have such personality and every page is crackling with energy. Can you tell us anything about how your unique style developed? Who were your influences? Where did you study?
I never really studied art. I just sort of made it up as I went along. I try to find something in every new project I can concentrate on and learn about: contrast or outline or perspective or whatever. Lately I’ve been trying to explore color in a more systematic way.
What are you working on now?
This week I’m finishing up a magazine illustration, then starting the final art for the latest title in the Capital Mysteries series by Ron Roy. I’m also squeezing in time here and there to bring along a new original picture book, the first I’ve written in ages. That’s my baby right now and I’m crazy excited about it.
Ooh, I can’t wait to hear more about that!
Many thanks to Timothy for granting me the interview, and to all the illustrators who have donated snowflakes to the Robert’s Snow auctions. Here’s a list of the entire week’s lineup of snowflake features:
Monday, November 12
Tuesday, November 13
Wednesday, November 14
Thursday, November 15
Friday, November 16
Saturday, November 17
Sunday, November 18
I just finished cleaning out the fridge. Allll the way out. The problem turned out to be a broken starter. We found out a day too late to save the food.
Kids: "Mom, isn’t that all the stuff you bought at Trader Joe’s the other day?"
Me: :::groan:::
But to keep it in perspective, one need only recall that over 1200 families in this county lost their homes and everything in them just a few weeks ago. There are harder burdens than having to pitch a brand new tub of Blue Cheese and Pecan Dip.
There is one defrosted item that need not be thrown out. When the weather got too hot for baking last summer, I froze my sourdough starter. It woke back up yesterday, so we fed it and returned it to its countertop crock. Now we must wait to see how our little bacteria buddies survived cold storage. There’s been some bubbling action in the crock, but only a little so far. We fed them some more. We’re hoping for another vigorous starter this year.
Mmm, I can almost smell that fresh-baked sourdough now.
November 13, 2007 @ 7:09 am | Filed under:
Art Martha asked:
I have a question…
Why use watercolors? Do you also use other art mediums for painting?
Oils? Pastels?
Also what about lead in the pigments? After all the issues with products from China, I’m being more vigilant about this and it’s nearly impossible to find non-china art supplies in my price range!
thoughts?
Wow, good point about the question of where our art supplies are coming from. I’ve been on the toy watch for a long time, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me to look at where our paints were made. I know you can get German-made watercolors from Stockmar, but as you say, those are pricey.
Hmm, this bears looking into.
As for “why watercolors”—for me, there are lots of reasons. I’ve never used oils, but my sense is that they’re expensive and messy and harder to clean up…don’t you have to clean your brushes with turpentine or something? You see how ignorant I am on that subject.
We do use tempera paint sometimes, and my kids love the little jars of acrylics for painting those unfinished wooden things you can pick up cheap at Michael’s. (More made-in-China stuff? Probably. Sigh. Hadn’t occurred to me.)
But we like watercolors best for painting pictures, because of the luminous, swirling colors, the easy blending, the pleasure of watching the heavy paper absorb the translucent paint.
Oil pastels are a rare treat: again, their mess factor is too high for regular use.
My three oldest girls are taking an art class right now, and the medium for many weeks has been chalk pastels. They are really enjoying using them, and they’ve learned an awful lot about tone and shading and texture. I think chalk pastels are an easy medium to use for experimenting with shading techniques. And the cleanup is a snap.
(You can see where my priorities are.)
On the same post, Amy asked another excellent question.
Where and how do you store/display the finished artwork? I find this even more daunting than the creative process. How do you (any of you) respectfully manage the output of your oh-so-productive junior artists? I’d love to hear any thoughts.
Ha! On this topic, my thoughts amount to a dull buzzing in the head. Our current storage method is: pictures hung on the fridge, and a large and ever-growing pile of beautiful finished work on the laundry-room counter, waiting to be hung or stored or something.
When we moved last year, I had to sort through boxes and boxes of such treasures. I tried to pare down to the best or most adorable work, but it was sooo hard to part with any single painting or drawing, you know? The masterpieces that made the cut are now languishing in a box in the closet, most of them.
So I’d love to hear other people’s answer to this question.
Our fridge is on the fritz. At first it was just the freezer side, so yesterday, with all our frozen food rapidly thawing, I cooked all afternoon. The fridge was still working. I filled it with parmesan drumsticks, pork chops, cooked chicken breasts, tortellini salad, and a meatloaf. That’s more than I usually cook in a week. Ha! That’s more cooking than I’ve done some entire months! I felt positively Betty Crockerish.
Then I zipped off to a baby shower for two beautiful friends. Had I realized the fridge was going to go kaput as well, I would have taken all those nice meals with me. Wouldn’t that have been perfect? Some nice meals for the ladies about to give birth?
Alas, Betty Crocker’s vision did not extend past bringing the bag of defrosted strawberries to the shower to puree and serve over the scrumptious almond pound cake we were serving. (It was a Tastefully Simple catalog party as well as a double shower; that was our cover story. Yum.)
Ah well, I’d been needing to clean out the fridge anyway.
Blerg.
November 12, 2007 @ 6:41 am | Filed under:
Books I haven’t been online much lately.
Busy days here, lots going on. Also, I have a whole bunch of great materials to review here, but that means reading them or trying them out first. It’s good stuff: more day planners, the sewing books, a cool art curriculum I’ve had since last year (we needed to give it a good try before I could blog about it), some Latin materials, the delightful new Nancy Brown adaptation of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, the new N.E. Bode novel, a bunch of other books. Some of these reviews belong over on Bonny Glen, so I’ll let you know when they’re up.
Right now I’m tackling email. It, too, has piled up. Some of the questions in my in-box are of a general nature, applicable to broader circumstances, so I think what I’m going to do right now is post some of that Q & A here as I go along. (Names withheld, of course.)
A reader asked for suggestions for comic books suitable for young children. My answer:
I’m afraid there isn’t much to choose from nowadays. Most of the superhero comics are far too adult.
What are good are the new book-length collections of superhero
comics reprinted from the 60s and 70s. They’re called Showcase
Presents. My kids LOVE them. Batman, Superman, Teen Titans, etc.
My hubby occasionally writes an issue of Scooby Doo, and he’s always careful to make it appropriate for our 6 yr old. 🙂
I blogged about Showcase Presents at Bonny Glen here.
Whoops, my time’s up. Didn’t get very far, did I? Well, I guess that leaves more for next time!
