Archive for June, 2012
10:15 a.m. The Saturday-morning breakfast rush is past and I’m ready to dive back into the Book Challenge. My 48 hours are ticking away rapidly. I pick up Wise Child, a book I’ve been hankering to reread and which happens, serendipitously, to be the June selection for the Wisteria & Sunshine reading circle—a fact I discovered just minutes ago. I’d been rooting for it.
10:16. Literally one minute later. In comes Huck.
“Mommy, listen!” Hiccup. “You hear it?” Hiccup. “Me got ’cups.”
“You’ve got hiccups?” I echo, putting down my book.
“Yes!” Hiccup. “Hurry, come!” Hiccup.
“Come where?”
“To the kitchen.” Hiccup. “Me hungry.” Hiccup. “Hurry before another ’cup comes.” Hiccup.
He’s hungry. He has spent the last two hours eating.
He points at the package of animal crackers on the counter. “Me need some.” Hiccup.
My book beckons. This’ll buy me five minutes, at least. I dole out a generous handful. I’m back in my room before he’s polished off the first elephant.
10:19. Yes, really. Wonderboy appears in the doorway bearing a huge grin and a new book. My book, in fact. It’s the unbound preview of Fox and Crow Are Not Friends that my editor sent a few days ago. I am always an easy mark for a child’s read-to-me request. When the book in question is one I wrote? Fuhgeddaboudit. I pat the bed beside me. My boy clambers up. Huck joins us midway through Fox and Crow’s first fight, wiping lion crumbs off his face.
10:29. We’ve finished the book. I can’t help but note the discrepancy between the time it takes to read an early reader (ten minutes) and the months I spent laboring over it. But the kids laughed at all the right bits, so my efforts have been amply repaid. The boys migrate toward the foot of the bed; Huck begins wrestling an invisible opponent—perhaps the ghosts of the menagerie he has so recently devoured. I reach for Wise Child once more.
10:29 and 30 seconds. Enter Rose and Beanie. Beanie is brandishing a fat Heroes of Olympus book, groaning in melodramatic anticipation of finishing it shortly and then having to wait until October for the next in the series. Rose warns her against continuing. She’ll regret it, cliffhanging all summer. Beanie points out this is her second time reading the book. She’s been in the delicious agony of suspense for months already.
Huck has noticed that his sisters are somehow failing to focus all their attention on his antics. He steps up his game: he’ll be the lion now, up on all fours, crushing my foot beneath his terrible lion-paw knees, lunging forward to butt heads with Rose. Er, so maybe he’s a goat. My quiet reading haven has become an arena, where the roar of the crowd comes in guffaws, and the defeated lion-goat flops limply on his back in an unnervingly realistic faux death. Even Scott, passing through to deliver clean towels to the bathroom, is impressed by Huck’s convincing corpse impersonation. He stops to admire and prod—and pounces, roaring, on the lion-goat’s exposed underbelly. The girls and Wonderboy are shrieking with laughter. Wise Child falls off the bed.
10:47 a.m. The vanquished lion-goat resumes boy form and trundles off, possibly in search of a bear or zebra to eat. Feigning death works up an appetite. The other kids drift out. Nope, Beanie’s back; she’s curling up beside me, her book open.
“Mom, want to see yet more evidence of why Rick Riordan is a genius?”
Of course I do. (The Lost Hero, p. 6, where Leo Valdez makes the coach’s megaphone say “The cow says moo,” if you’re curious. Well played, Mr. Riordan.)
10:56. Beanie returns her attention to the book. Here’s my moment. I retrieve Wise Child from under the bed and brush off a dust bunny. Where was I?
10:57. I sigh, push the book away, reach for my laptop. This time I can’t read because, it turns out, I have a pressing need to write. I open WordPress, click “Add New Post.” Why I Read So…
At least Beanie can concentrate on her book.
P.S. In the 48 minutes it took me to jot this down, I’ve intervened in two kid squabbles, devoured half a leftover Thai peanut noodle salad, enjoyed Jane’s photos of the Colorado River on my cellphone, admired no less than eleven identical LOST signs for a fake credit card Rilla is desperately seeking, and listened to half a dozen extracts from Let’s Do Nothing, whose art Rilla correctly identified as the work of Bink and Gollie illustrator Tony Fucile based on one character’s facial expression—an observation that so intrigued me I had to confirm it on the Google. This is why reading isn’t the only thing I do slowly.
P.P.S. Wonderboy says he’s hungry.
June 9, 2012 @ 8:12 am | Filed under:
Books 
After I signed in at the starting line around 7:15 last night, but I didn’t actually start reading until after 8pm. (Too busy tracking Jane’s flight to Texas. Happy to say she arrived safe, sound, and on schedule, and is delighting me this morning with photos of the Colorado River.) 13 hours later, I’ve clocked 2 hrs and 20 minutes of reading time, and I finished The Year of Learning Dangerously. About which more later. I was already on p. 144 when I started, so I only have 67 pages to put toward my Challenge tally—unless I count double all the pages I immediately reread, this time out loud to Scott to explain why I kept guffawing. Quinn Cummings is one of the funniest writers on the planet.
The Challenge allows you to count a certain amount of social media and blogging time toward your total. I’ve accrued about ten minutes on Twitter, and this post is another five.
This year, the Challenge is doubling as a fundraiser for RIF. (Details here.) Like many participants, I’ve pledged a dollar an hour. Better step up my reading pace if I want to help out my favorite literacy organization!
Now I’m off to visit the blogs of a few other participants—cheering each other on is part of the fun—and then it’s back to the books. Ah, bliss.
I’m a longtime fan of the Brave Writer writing program for homeschoolers—as this gushing review from (gasp) 2005 will attest. I’ve borrowed many an idea from Julie Bogart’s The Writer’s Jungle and I’ve ordered a number of issues of The Arrow and The Boomerang over the years. These monthly newsletters, which you can purchase individually or by subscription, are focused around a particular novel that you read aloud to your kids. For each book, there are copywork and dictation passages, a discussion of a literary element that appears in the reading, and writing prompts for your students. For my kids, I’ve found these downloads to be great discussion starters—and for me, they’ve been an easy way to introduce my kids to the tools of literary analysis.
So it’s a tremendous honor to see one of my own books on the list of Arrow titles for 2012-2013. The Prairie Thief, which comes out in late August, will be the October selection. Thanks, Brave Writer!
Julie Bogart has some fun plans in mind for October, such as a podcast interview with me…I’ll keep you posted!
P.S. Here’s next year’s Boomerang list (aimed at ages 12-15), if you’re interested. The Arrow is for kids ages 8-12. And this year Brave Writer is adding a new tool for early readers: The Wand.
Me: Here, why don’t you wear the sparkly dress today?
Rilla: Ooh, Twilight sparkle!
Okay, I am well aware that “six-year-old” is synonymous with “information sponge,” but this one surprised me nonetheless. We’re far from a Twilight-drenched household here. Jane has read the books (and peppered me with snarktastic commentary), but that’s it. So it was with some surprise that I asked Rilla how she knew about Twilight sparkle.
Rilla, in an “I should think it’s obvious” tone: My Little Pony, of course.
Ohhhh, that Twilight Sparkle. It all becomes so clear. And sparkly.
June 6, 2012 @ 6:07 am | Filed under:
Books 
Seventh Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge | MotherReader.
Every year, I pine to take part in this community reading binge. I’ve done my bit as a cheerleader on the sidelines, but “I have six kids” and “I’m going to do NOTHING BUT READ for two solid days” tend to be mutually exclusive assertions.
June 8th, the start date, is rather an eventful day for my gang—we’re seeing Jane off on her Texas adventure that day HOLY COW THAT IS TWO DAYS AWAY HOW DID THAT HAPPEN???—but the rest of the weekend may allow for some bookbingeing. Perhaps I’ll aim for the 12-hour level. Poring over Brambly Hedge with Rilla counts, right?
There will be fun, booksy prizes, as always, and this year organizer Pam Coughlan (aka MotherReader) has added a worthy cause:
New this year, we’ll be making ourselves a real readathon with a dedicated beneficiary. For the last few years we’ve been able to connect the 48HBC to charitable causes, while not officially being a fundraiser readathon. I would like to do so now with a pledge to Book People Unite and collect money for Reading is Fundamental. All participants should sponsor themselves with a pledge for the number of hours spent in the 48HBC and donate that amount directly through Reading is Fundamental This donation is on your honor and at your financial comfort level. You many also look for additional sponsors in your online and “real” life, which if nothing else, promotes the ideas of us book people, you know, uniting. While there are many great libraries and literary causes that need help in these difficult times, I think the timing of the Book People Unite is perfect for us to join forces for the greater good.
How about you—planning on participating? Occurs to me this would be a fun way to kick off Girl Detective’s aforementioned Summer of Shelf Discovery.
June 6, 2012 @ 5:33 am | Filed under:
Links Girl Detective – Summer of Shelf Discovery: Start Reading!
Are you in?
I feel like I deserve a medal today because I took Jane shopping and scored her two pairs of shoes and a summer wardrobe for under a hundred bucks. THIS NEVER HAPPENS TO ME. I am the worst, the very worst, at shopping. It is an activity I loathe so intensely, I’ll fling ill-fitting, excessively wrinkle-prone clothing and random credit cards toward the register to buy myself egress five minutes sooner. It doesn’t help that I have all the fashion sense of a chimpanzee. Actually, any chimp with access to an Old Navy could undoubtedly put together an outfit with more panache than I.
Fortunately, Jane does not seem to have inherited my fashionblind eye.
So that was a big chunk of my day. This is a crossing-things-off-the-list kind of week, busy and clerical, and everywhere I turn, books are beckoning. My garden is withering. Where is that nurturing tender of the earth who inhabited my skin in March? This is why novelists shouldn’t plant vegetable gardens. It doesn’t matter if your flowers go to seed while your mind is elsewhere. But you turn your back for one measly chapter and suddenly your arugula has bolted and the tomatoes are limp.
On the learning notes front, I’m thoroughly enjoying my middle daughters’ immersion in German (a language I kinda sorta speak a little) (a very little) via the Living Language app and some Pimsleur CDs we got from the library. Beautifully illustrating the importance of individualized learning methods, Rose prefers the former (more visual) and Beanie the latter (auditory). Jane is hooked on Pimsleur too, but for her it’s Japanese. (Actually, Beanie seems to be listening to both sets. She’ll either turn out a polyglot or a muddle.)
Rilla and I are still luxuriating in Brambly Hedge, and I’m reading Wheel on the School to Bean and Rilla. Wonderboy (who is a dignified eight now and deserves a more mature blog name, but this is no easy feat) falls asleep with Little Bear or Owl at Home on his face every night, and I melt. Huck is madly in love with the new Amy Krouse Rosenthal/Tom Lichtenheld book (but of course—all his favorites are Lichtenheld books), Wumbers. I narrated a gigantic portion of the Quinn Cummings book to Scott today, in the car on the way to the library to pick up a Veronica Mars DVD since the DVR ate the Season One finale and we MUST finish it before Jane heads off to Texas. And that’s about it for our Tuesday!
It’s Monday again. Another week has zoomed past. We’re all in a whirl here, the usual year-end activities (how is it that even when you don’t live by a school calendar, you live by a school calendar?) and a bundle of errands as our Jane prepares to fly the nest for the summer. At the end of the week she’s off to Texas for a big adventure: an internship at a software developer. We’re thrilled for her and of course wondering how we’ll survive without her. 🙂 But mostly thrilled. She’ll be staying with friends, a perfect arrangement that sets this mama’s mind at ease. My own parents put me on a plane to Germany at age fourteen to spend a summer with a family they’d never met—and they didn’t have the internet for keeping in touch with me. I marvel, now, at their cheerful confidence and hold it as a model for my own attitude about my kids’ adventures, which are bound to come faster and carry them ever farther in the years ahead.
In eighth grade, a year or two before my Germany adventure, I had to choose a poem to recite aloud in class. I knew immediately what it would be: the various verses of Bilbo’s “Road” song in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—ending with the verse that gives me the same thrill up my spine today that it did when I was twelve:
The road goes ever on and on,
down from the door where it began;
now far ahead the road has gone,
and I must follow if I can,
pursuing it with eager feet,
until it joins some larger way
where many paths and errands meet—
and whither then? I cannot say.
(Happy sigh.)
The rest of us will be homebodies this summer, more or less (and there’s a happy sigh in that, too). I imagine we’ll spend a lot of time at the Y, swimming and whatnot. I love the YMCA because my older kids can swim, my little ones can play in the playroom, and I can (gasp) go sit alone on an exercise bike—an activity I enjoy not because of the exercise (ugh) but because it means twenty uninterrupted minutes of quiet listening time. To an audiobook, a lecture, the News from Lake Wobegon. We let our membership lapse last summer, but this year we’re back and I’m thrilled.
Later this month I’ll venture to Anaheim for ALA—just an overnight trip for me, but it’s bound to be a fun one. And then fast on the heels of that convention will come Comic-Con. Plans are already buzzing for that one, and I’m realizing I have a lot of pre-con reading to do…
Speaking of reading, I’m still savoring The Scent of Water in small morsels at a time—and devouring, in enormous, greedy bites, an advance copy of the new Quinn Cummings book, The Year of Learning Dangerously, which is as wickedly funny as all of Quinn’s writing, and is about one of my pet subjects, and in which I have a cameo—but that last reason has little to do with my immense enjoyment of this book. You could change “Melissa” to “Melanie” and I’d be just as riveted. I haven’t even gotten to the bit about my group, is what I’m saying. By page three, I’d snickered two or three times and laughed out loud, an honest-to-goodness laugh, once—the first of many audible guffaws that made Scott look up from his book with a quizzical “Yes?” So then I read the funny bit to him, and he laughs out loud too, and then the children want to know what the heck is so funny. When I read Quinn’s first book, Notes from the Underwire, her voice was so wry and smart and laugh-inducing that it sent me to her blog in search of more. Her writing made me want to know her in person, and luckily she was in the middle of researching Learning Dangerously and my Shakespeare Club was gearing up for its big spring performance, and it helped that we happened to have a mutual friend in the awesome Karen Edmisten. Serendipity. Usually it transpires that I make friends with a writer via writerly circles and then hunt up all that person’s books. This time it was the other way around—her writing made me want to be her friend. Because the internet is magic, I got my wish.
