Put Up Your Dukes

In an apparent tribute to the days when knights jousted in contest for the favors of fair maidens, Scarlett’s new favorite thing is for us to “fight” over her. As soon as there are two big people who love her in close proximity, she plunks herself in the middle demanding that one person “hold my feet” and the other “hold my hands.” Then she gives the final direction: “Now say ‘mine’.” So, we grab hold of the proffered bits and begin an epic mock battle for Scarlett Supremacy. We pull back and forth, hollering out our claims to her, until someone finally “wins” and gets the baby for their own until the next round. And she squeals with maniacal laughter the whole time. Since kid reaction is usually pretty authentic, there must be some primal need we have to know that we’re worth fighting for. And since parents are the ones most heavily tasked with meeting the needs of their children, we spend much of our parenting time doing just that. We feed them and house them and clothe them, sure, but we also take care of their spirits, even when they’ve grown. I have one “baby” who’s older now than I was when I had her, but I still worry every day about her happiness. And I always will. In Sam McBratney’s Let’s Play In The Snow, a mama rabbit gives it her best to tell her baby bunny all the ways she loves him. He really likes that.

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Play-Snow-Guess-Storybook/dp/0763641081

http://www.answers.com/topic/sam-mcbratney

Girls Gone Wild

My mom is one of those big idea people who come up with some notion and then never let it go until it either becomes reality or breaks their heart with its impracticality. And for a really long time she had her mind made up that one day all her double-X chromosome family would get together for what she dubbed the “Girls’ Trip.” She talked about this trip for years before anyone even considered it, and then talked about it some more before any actual plans were made. In all that time, she never let go of the dream that one day she, her sister, her niece, her only daughter, and her (at the time) only granddaughter would pile into a car, forget about personality conflicts, aim toward the horizon, and go. And she knew just where she wanted us all to end up: the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Now, my mom was born in Tennessee, but she got the ocean in her veins as a teenaged transplant to Southern California and developed a special fondness for water animals, especially the cute ones, so her choice was no surprise to anyone. Thus, we decided to grant her wish. All of us, that is, except my aunt, who declared the whole thing madness. But go the rest of us did and, despite a few bumps, brought the Girls’ Trip into being. In Victoria Miles’ Pup’s Supper, two Monterey Bay seals get some chow. But I think one of them was a boy.

http://www.amazon.com/Pups-Supper-Victoria-Miles/dp/1878244221

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Victoria-Miles/author/

Trouble Brewing

In the Small Group Discussion class, we frequently talk about how various issues and concepts affect group dynamics. One of the most easily recognizable influences is the idea of synergy--that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Everyone has those synergy moments, times when group chemistry just clicks and the end product is much better than anything any one person could have envisioned. But, like most everything, there is a downside to the idea of synergy, times when things go much, much worse in the group than they would have solo. That concept is referred to as negative synergy and it can take down sports teams, prom committees, think tanks and just about every other type of small group there is. You know there’s a group of people you get in more trouble with than any others, and you probably have the stories (and maybe tattoos and mug shots) to prove it. The comedian Jeff Foxworthy claims that your best friend can never bail you out of jail because, if they are truly your best friend, they are in there with you. And while negative synergy is often bad for a group’s productivity, it does seem to carry with it a chaos component that makes things a bit more exciting. In Richard Egielski’s 3 Magic Balls, a trio of rubber balls on the toy store shelf comes to life as three bouncy brothers bent on causing mayhem. They drive Rudy crazy, but he buys them anyway. Mischief managed.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Magic-Balls-Richard-Egielski/dp/0060260327

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

Amnesia

One thing you forget as your children grow older is how excruciatingly long it takes to do anything with a little one. Once the youngest gets into all-day school and can undo their own seatbelt, you get amnesia about the way an errand that should take five minutes becomes an agonizing study in how much human patience can be tested without disappearing completely. They resist the car seat, get spaghetti legs in parking lots, dash away at the front of a long line so you lose your place trying to retrieve them, touch everything, and altogether refuse to make even the simplest tasks easier. It’s as if they have boundless energy, the ability to teleport, and wiles far beyond their years. And getting back into the parenting game at forty, ten years after thinking I was done, not only gave me plenty of time to get a foggy memory, it also gave me a decade to get more easily prone to exhaustion. The other day I made the mistake of ignoring my instincts and experience and took Scarlett with me to do a little running around. Boy, was I sorry. I could swear when I left the house she was an ordinary little girl but, by the first stop, she had morphed into a naughty, mischievous, trouble-making monkey. And I came home a stressed-out wreck. In Jane Belk Moncure’s One Tricky Monkey Up On Top, Melissa spends the entire book trying to corral one monkey. I know how she feels.

http://www.amazon.com/Tricky-Monkey-Magic-Castle-Readers/dp/1561893765

http://www.janebelkmoncure.com/fsrsbbhome.htm

Word Power

At a baby shower recently, one of the gifts was Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends. The first thing the mother-to-be did was open the front cover and say, “Oh good, you wrote in it.” And I reflected for a moment on all the inscriptions I’ve seen this year during our reading experiment--some written in crude baby letters, some written by beloved people long gone, some wise and profound, others silly or cryptic. I’ve had so many sweet moments this year turning to flyleaf pages as the faces and voices of dear people have come to life again, that I wish I’d done this sooner. But one aspect I did not expect was to encounter the sentiments of so many folks I’ve never met. In order to keep our stock replenished without breaking the bank, we did a lot of shopping at thrift stores, checking out offers on Freecycle, and rummaging through yard sale stacks, so we brought plenty of previously-owned reading material home. And it made me sad how often these books had heartfelt inscriptions now cast aside. I can’t imagine discarding a book with the words of someone I love inside, but, on the bright side, the books we added to our collection have found new life and become valuable again. My Hidden Treasure Chest’s God’s Special Gifts To Me was designed specifically for one little girl named Chelsi. I don’t know how her book ended up at the thrift store, but it’s got a new home now.

http://myhiddentreasurechest.com/personalized_books

Memory Maker

I get nostalgic over mildew. Well, more accurately, I get nostalgic over the smell of old buildings, which is largely caused by mildew. It sounds strange, I know, but if you have ever been to or lived in the South, particularly if all your warm, fuzzy grandparent memories fall squarely on the Confederate side of the Mason-Dixon Line, you know what I’m talking about. It is so damp there so much of the time, being as close to a tropical climate as that area is, that kudzu flourishes, humidity is queen, and every building material with the possible exception of the ubiquitous red brick is doomed to the kind of deterioration that makes old buildings smell like old buildings. My grandmother once sent me a box of family history paperwork that I have yet to photocopy because when I open the box, I still get a moment of being in Tennessee when that old-building attic aroma sneaks out. I’ve heard many times that scent is the sense most closely aligned with memory. I don’t know if that is generally scientifically accurate, but I do know it is true in my personal history. It is not unusual for me to stop what I’m doing until I can identify whatever is causing me to experience a “scent memory.” And to make everyone else stop with me. In Al Perkins’ The Nose Book, we get to see all the good things about having a built-in nostalgia device. Appreciating old buildings is my favorite.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Grandpa! I miss you more than you could ever know.

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Early-Books-Beginning-Beginners/dp/0394806239

http://www.librarything.com/author/perkinsal

Walt Disney World

When I think of how much influence Walt Disney has had in my life, it’s strange to realize we never shared the planet. My earliest memories, like most people my age and younger, center around things Disney, yet Walt passed away several months before I was even born. We all grew up in pre-VCR America watching the old-school classics like “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Bambi,” every seven years in the theater. And there was a certain magic to those films that I believe came from the vision of Walt Disney himself, because it just wasn’t the same for a long time after he was gone. The last animated feature to have been produced under his watchful eye is “The Jungle Book,” which hit theaters Christmas 1967, not quite a year after the House of Mouse lost its master. Then came a pretty extended dry spell broken only by the undersea adventures of Ariel and her crew a generation later. The touch of Walt Disney is easy to see in the telling of Mowgli’s story--examining the definition of family, stressing the importance of loyalty and relationships over conforming to societal norms, well-meaning but often bumbling good triumphing over sleek yet heartless evil. It took more than twenty years after Walt Disney’s death for the studio to remember that those themes have a purity and clarity of purpose any generation can relate to. In the Random House version of The Jungle Book, all our favorite characters are present. As it should be.

http://catalog.ebay.com/Walt-Disneys-Jungle-Book-Rudyard-Kipling-1974-Hardcover-Illustrated-/2664903

http://www.randomhouse.com/