Parts Is Parts

No matter how many small people we bring into our lives, it is always a wonder to watch them discover their own voice and identity. We get excited over each new accomplishment and anxiously anticipate the next milestone. Sometimes, though, we get so caught up in what will happen next that we forget to fully experience the amazement of what they’ve accomplished so far. And amazing it is. As a communication person, I can’t spend too much time thinking about the massive leap small people take from not knowing any language, at all, even one word, to speaking words and possibly phrases in just one short year, or I’ll go cross-eyed like when I ponder time travel in movies. The amount of work, processing, and just plain growing a small person’s brain goes through is so mammoth that it will never happen again in all their lives--just this small window and that’s it. And sometimes what they know surprises us. When Keilana was a toddler, she showed me where her nose was without prompting from me. So, I decided to see what else she knew and proceeded to ask her every basic body part I could think of and she got them all--even the hard ones like “chin” and “elbow.” I didn’t even know she knew all those. She gathered that information all on her own like a little sponge. In Sandra Boynton’s Horns To Toes And In Between, the little monsters learn new stuff. Their brains are growing, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Horns-Toes-Between-Sandra-Boynton/dp/0671493191

http://www.sandraboynton.com/sboynton/index.html

Monster Mash

When I was little, the “Boogie Man” was represented by the cartoon devil from the Underwood Deviled Ham package. Don’t ask me how that happened. I had nightmares of him hovering over our house in a helicopter, lowering himself down by a rope to pluck me out of bed and take me away forever. The shapeless “monster” of finding myself separated from loved ones turned into an actual dancing devil monster. I’ve only had one child given to night terrors, but that was enough. She would enter that shady twilight between waking and sleeping and begin screaming about “mah-sters.” My son potty-trained himself at eighteen months, but went right back to diapers when his sister told him that the faint clinking sound in Nana’s bathroom vent was monsters. Even though most of my childhood fears have morphed into adult-sized monsters, I still can’t stand right next to a bed while getting in and it’s not just for the kids that a nightlight gets left on. Because we all have scary stuff to deal with, popular culture often works at helping us face our fears--or at least desensitizing us to them. Case in point: the runaway success of slasher films. For the preschool set, Sesame Street has fully reclaimed monsters, turning them harmless and endearing. And Tedd Arnold hijacked the familiar song about monkeys and jumping and beds for Five Ugly Monsters. The illustrations are great but the best part is getting to open up a can on the naughty monsters.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedd_Arnold

http://www.amazon.com/Five-Ugly-Monsters-Tedd-Arnold/dp/0590222260

The Big Brother Conundrum

When I was nine, my parents decided to give us the good life in the suburbs. Which meant I was going to have my own room. Which meant I wouldn’t share with my brothers anymore. Which meant I spent the entire first night in my expensive new bed crying. My life was and has been largely defined by being the sister of my brothers. I desperately wanted a little sister until I became familiar with some of my friends’ sisters and realized that being the only girl isn’t so bad. So, I understood the dynamics when I made my oldest a big sister by giving her a brother, but was more at a loss when I made him a big brother by bringing home a baby girl. He seemed perfectly at home with his role as older brother--for about a month. He then came and said it was “time for her to go home now,” and I realized he had just been playing the good host. When I explained that she was ours forever, he gave me one of those preschool looks that projects horror. Thinking back now, he may have had a premonition. In Niki Daly’s Monsters Are Like That, Leo doesn’t want Fran to play with his toys, but Fran is resourceful and gets into his stuff anyway. She paints her face, finds monster hands and lies in wait. The joke is on her, though, because it turns out that Leo likes his sisters on the scary side.

http://www.childlit.org.za/ndaly.html

http://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Are-Like-That-Storytime/dp/0744509823/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265785241&sr=1-1