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Author and Illustrator Blogs

• Elizabeth M: I think sometimes I sound like a commercial talking about this book — but it completely changed...
• Carlie: So fabulous! Haha! I might have to get that book.
• beth: Thanks for this one! I loved The Gammage Cup, and enjoyed the sequel, but I never heard of anything else...
• DnSmum: Mmm… just went to amazon to “preview” this book. Noticed that there is a second book by...
• teresa: We have tried several of these. The rye is awesome. Basic Boule is great. One time, after doubling we only...
• Nancy: Blacky the Crow by Thornton Burgess. For that matter, ANY book by Thornton Burgess. There are a whole bunch of...
• coffeemamma: The whole wheat sandwich bread is Hubby’s favourite! He rarely uses it for sandwiches, though-...
• KC: I buy my yeast in big packages from Sam’s.

• Yeah, We Could Live on This
• From the Archives: The Firelings by Carol Kendall
• How Rose Is Feeling
• Better Yet, Please Pass the Lemon Curd
• Please Pass the Butter
• Crowing over Crow Books
• Snippets
• From the Archives: A Child’s Delight
• Fascinating Live and Dead Things
• Cheered by Crows

Every day is complicated, messy, and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess because writing time is fleeting and precious—and childhood even more so. I’d rather capture the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don’t take time to set them down in words.

(Excerpt from this post about Real Life, quoted here because I don't want anyone to be under the impression that things are always perfect around here! Heaven knows we are anything but. Perfect, frictionless, orderly? Nope. Happy? Most of the time!)

Be like the bird
Who, pausing in flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way beneath her,
Yet sings,
Knowing she has wings.

—Victor Hugo

“Exploration,” says John Stilgoe, author of Outside Lies Magic, “is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.”

Yes: it is so, so much fun, and that is why I write these posts all chattery with excitement over this or that connection the kids made today. (Or that I made myself!) I know I get carried away, but that’s the point, isn’t it, that way leading on to way has carried me away?

And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?

(from a post called Way Leads on to Way)

Six Things to Include in Your Child's Day:

meaningful work
imaginative play
good books
beauty (art, music, nature)
ideas to ponder and discuss
prayer

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