Archive for January, 2011
January 20, 2011 @ 4:21 pm | Filed under:
Bloggity 
Good thing I read The Wine-Dark Sea. Melanie is celebrating her blog’s sixth birthday, and that means Bonny Glen is six years old too. Melanie and I didn’t know or discover one another until later, but we began our blogs on the very same day in 2005.
Six years of blogging. Over two thousand posts. Jiminy crickets, I yammer a lot.
Here’s a big long post I wrote this time last year.
Here’s a link to my yammery archives.
Thanks, all of you, for reading, visiting, commenting, and otherwise encouraging the yammering. You’ve made this lots of fun for me, and I’m mighty grateful.
I keep posting about what I’m reading to Rilla, but of course I’m reading to my little boys too. Huck’s in board book land; you probably have all the same ones. (He’s also big on the Dr. Seuss ABC and Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.) Wonderboy’s a whole different kid in terms of reading and being read to. That’s a post for another day. He listens in to most everything I read his little sister, but he’s much more interested in mechanics than story. When he chooses a book, it’s usually Seuss or Elephant-and-Piggie or the Pigeon or a Boynton. Which is lucky for us, because all those things are fun to read over and over and over and over and…
Anyway, Rilla’s last week-or-so’s worth of read-alouds, often enjoyed with one brother perched on my lap and the other digging a sharp elbow into my thigh. This list goes backward from the past week or so, because I sent the links over from Diigo. This means some of my notes won’t make much sense.
Rilla’s first time. Today we read “How the Whale Got His Throat” and “How the Camel Got His Hump.” Utterly delicious to get to watch a child hear these for the first time, all over again. (And another Kindle-read.) Wonderboy loves them too, the bumpy jumpy cadences.
She begged for this but got stressed out by the King’s threats and fury, and all through the second half she just wanted me to quickly tell her (not read in detail) what happened. It’s always funny to read Seuss’s prose—as much of it as I was allowed to read, at least.
Oddly, we read this on the Kindle—so no art. Beatrix Potter without the art! It’s almost heretical! But, see, I was reading a book of my own on the Kindle, and Rilla burrowed in and started picking out words she recognized, Scout Finch fashion. I asked if she wanted me to find a story for her, and she was rather gleeful at the prospect of reading one of HER stories on MOMMY’S Kindle. I poked around to find some things in the public domain. Potter turned up right away, and fairy tales, and Mother Goose. I downloaded one of each. What she’s enjoying is having me enlarge the font to its maximum size, and she reads the words she knows, and I read the rest, and she’s doing that echo thing where she says a word before I have a chance to finish it. I absolutely love this stage. She’s right on the brink.
A frequent request from both Rilla & Wonderboy. Family favorite since Jane was tiny. Rilla’s at the emergent-reader stage where nursery rhymes are hugely satisfying for her, because she can fill in from memory the words she can’t yet read. (And each repetition nudges her closer to reading.)
Arrived in a goodie package from my agent. What a fun picture book! The other chickens in the coop don’t quite know what to make of this enormous new chick. Is he an elephant? An umbrella? Goofy and giggle-inducing, and wonderful cartoony art. The cover just kills me.
Rilla’s first time! The word games completely bewilder my more literal Wonderboy, but he enjoys seeing Amelia at work.
Our favorite part is the Shivers story…
Such a sweet, simple, satisfying story, comfortably formulaic. And ink-lined watercolors tend to be my favorite illustration style—Elsa Beskow is very Carl Larsson.
Rilla and Wonderboy like this one more to look at than to hear. The illustrations are beautiful—butterflies and caterpillars on their host plants in the garden. A pore-over-and-hunt book.
More books we love here.
Tags: Amelia Bedelia, Beatrix Potter, Chicken Big, Dr Seuss, Elsa Beskow, Keith Graves, Mother Goose, Peggy Parish, Pelle's New Suit, picture books, Rillabooks, Rudyard Kipling
Another quickie post to record some fun learning moments from this morning…I seem to keep doing this lately, these kind of “here’s today’s rabbit trail” posts. Bit lazy of me; I have a separate blog where I (sometimes, sporadically) record these things. Somehow it’s easier to do it here. Never know whether it’s of interest to anyone but our own family, but I kind of like having the archive all in one place.
Anyhoo. We read about Luddites in Story of the World (we’re bouncing, lately, between that and Abe Lincoln’s World and Landmark History of the American People—I may have said this already; and also by “we” I mean mainly Rose and Beanie and me), and then, taking the excellent suggestion of kind Anne in the comments, we visited the BBC Schools website’s section on the Victorians. I had forgotten about this site, which has a smorgasbord of fun stuff. We spent a lot of time there back in Ancient Greece days. Today we mostly looked at the photos and illustrations pertaining to the rise of factories, especially the parts involving child labor. My lasses are fascinated by the contrast between their lives and the lives of, say, an eight-year-old coal-mine door-opener in the north of England, in the days before laws were passed that said you had to be at least ten years old for that sort of work, and could spend no more than ten hours a day at it. Beanie will be ten in just over a week; the notion of spending all daylight hours huddled in a dark coal tunnel caused her eyes to grow as large as if she had, in fact, done just that. Well, almost.
We looked at Victorian architecture a bit, too. And then squeezed in a chapter of Strictest School in the World before lunch.
Speaking of which! Fun news from the author, Howard Whitehouse, who kindly wrote me an email yesterday! He’s offering a very nice deal on the three Emmaline and Rubberbones books: His publisher, Kids Can Press, has made it possible for him to offer a limited number of inscribed, hardcover copies at a much reduced rate:
$5 USD each, plus actual shipping at media (book) rate by the post office. A set of all three, inscribed to whoever you like, would be $21 including a very nice mailer envelope (!) delivered within the US. More outside, obviously.
The books are The Strictest School in the World: Being the Tale of a Clever Girl, a Rubber Boy and a Collection of Flying Machines, Mostly Broken (2006)—a Victorian prison break tale set at a boarding school involving flying machines and pterodactyls.
The Faceless Fiend, Being the Tale of a Criminal Mastermind, His Masked Minions and a Princess with a Butter Knife, Involving Explosives and a Certain Amount of Pushing and Shoving (2007)—in which a master criminal plans to kidnap lovable-yet-deranged Princess Purnah, with Sherlock Holmes, a Belgian Birdman, and an elderly dog.
The Island of Mad Scientists, Being an Excursion to the Wilds of Scotland, Involving Many Marvels of Experimental Invention, Pirates, a Heroic Cat, a Mechanical Man and a Monkey (2008)— where our adventurers are pursued madly, and a whole collection of Victorian scientists (some real, some not) are held captive.
Personally, I think those subtitles alone are worth five dollars apiece. 😉 We already own the first but I might take advantage of the sale to round out our set, and stash the extra copy away for a future birthday gift.
To order, contact Mr. Whitehouse at professorbellbuckle (at) yahoo (dot) com.
Official blogger disclosure notice: Nothing to disclose! Just passing along the author’s kind offer.
January 17, 2011 @ 9:00 am | Filed under:
Television 
Are any of you watching this? We’re only a few minutes into Episode 2, so no spoilers please—but I would love to hear your thoughts on Episode 1 in the comments!
Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater
Have any of you tried out the Potato Chip Science kit? It was one of the coolest things I saw at ALA last weekend and I’ve got one on the way…looks like something my gang will enjoy the heck out of. Would love to hear about your experiences with it. I’ll report back after we’ve had a go ourselves.
And yet there was so much poetry in our day!
Great rabbit trails today. We read Blake’s “The Tiger” this morning because the picture in the anthology (whose name I can’t remember and it’s in the other room–the Oxford Something Something, maybe?) caught Rilla’s eye. However, the shivery language of the second half was rather drowned out by Huck’s Very Noisy Firetruck and also by Very Noisy Huck. Sorry, Tyger.
Serendipitiously, we happened upon a quote from another Blake poem later during a chapter of Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World (Early Modern Times). We’ve been exploring the Victorians, remember, as we enjoy The Strictest School in the World (Rubberbones is just sailing off the roof of the church toward the crowded village green), and today we read a little about the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the smoke-spewing factories blackening the walls of formerly charming English cottages. This grim depiction of the perils of profit-driven industrialization posed an interesting contrast to yesterday’s chapter of Landmark History, in which clever Eli Whitney devises a way to mass-produce guns in a time when foreign armies are threatening this under-armed fledgling country. The ensuing discussion carried us all the way to lunchtime. Rose and Beanie told me this is why they prefer for me to read history books aloud to them—because of our talks. Which of course you know makes me deliriously happy. Even if the firetruck noise is hard to overtop, sometimes.
(I did eventually remember we had newish play-doh and that successfully distracted the young fireman.)
(Who, by the way, turned TWO yesterday. Can you believe it? Seems like only weeks ago I was posting in disbelief about his first birthday.)
There was a bit of Wordsworth in the Bauer chapter, too. And we’ve been revisiting Robbie Burns because of his namesake, the aforementioned Rubberbones.
Meanwhile, Jane finished Othello today. (Speaking of plans ganging terribly, terribly agley.) And Wonderboy enjoyed a nice big dose of Frog and Toad. Because really, who doesn’t?
This morning I was reading some Landmark History of the American People with Rose and Beanie, a quite fascinating chapter about Eli Whitney, and it mentioned an event that happened in 1809. That year always rings a bell for me: it was the year Laura Ingalls Wilder’s maternal grandmother, Charlotte Tucker Quiner Holbrook, was born—the Charlotte I wrote four novels about, and the mother of Caroline Quiner Ingalls (Laura’s Ma) in the Caroline books by Maria Wilkes.
A number of notable folks were born in that same year:
• Abraham Lincoln
• Charles Darwin
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allen Poe (The cast of Snoopy bursts forth into song in my brain: “Poe, Edgar Allen, American poet, born in eighteen hundred and nine…”)*
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Louis Braille
• Felix Mendelssohn
• Nicolai Gogol
…and no doubt a great many other memorable people. A lot of world-changers born that year, eh?**
* Doesn’t matter that I’ve heard the Snoopy soundtrack probably five hundred times over the course of my life (between my own high-school devotion to it and the obsession of more than one of my kids)—I still laugh every single time Charlie Brown chimes in with what he’s pretty sure are titles of Poe’s most famous works, and one of them is “Dickens’ Christmas Carol.” Hee!
** This post doesn’t really have a point. I just like to make lists.
January 12, 2011 @ 6:05 pm | Filed under:
Books 
Have you read it?
Do you want to talk about it?
I read it first on New Year’s Eve, and then again immediately the next day, and I keep returning to sections of it, have found it difficult to shake off. It was strange to find myself completely incapable of committing to any other book for over a week after reading this one.
It’s gotten a lot of buzz, so maybe you know the set-up: it’s the story of five-year-old Jack and his mother, who have been imprisoned in one small room for Jack’s entire life. Even longer, for his brave, broken, amazingly persevering mother.
“We have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back in her saucer on Dresser. Plant used to live on Table but God’s face burned a leaf of her off. She has nine left, they’re the wide of my hand with furriness all over, like Ma says dogs are. But dogs are only TV. I don’t like nine. I find a tiny leaf coming, that counts as ten.”
It’s Jack’s voice that cuts my heart to bits: I don’t think any book I’ve ever read has fostered such a strong visceral, emotional response in me—what I mean is that I kept having to put it down and go scoop up one of my children. The overwhelming tenderness. The ache.
I’m yearning to talk about it but I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, so if you’d like to discuss it in the comments, I’m there.
We’ve been enjoying these two finalists in the CYBILs Early Reader category:
Fly Guy Meets Fly Girl by Tedd Arnold
We’ve been big Tedd Arnold fans ever since Green Wilma. This one is wacky and fun, and just a little gross.
We Are in a Book! by Mo Willems
An instant Rilla/Wonderboy favorite. They have adored every single one of the Elephant & Piggie books & this one—a Geisel Honor book, as announced yesterday—is no exception. Our first time through, I loved the way Rilla gasped and cried out, “They know???” when Elephant realized he was in a book and we were reading it.
Of course this book generates an even more earnest “Again please, Mommy!” than the rest of the Elephant and Piggie series—which is saying a lot—because when you get to the end, Elephant begs you to go back to the beginning. As I remarked on Twitter, this may well be the book that tips Rilla over the edge into reading, because she is determined to read all of Piggie’s lines herself.
(Bet I’d read it six times before I realized that what Piggie is thanking us for in the front of the book is starting over.)
My running Cybils Shortlist Reading Challenge tally: 12 of 76
