The Shape Of Things

After spending the majority of my adult life working two, three, and sometimes even four jobs at once, having the opportunity to spend more time with my two year-old makes me profoundly grateful. It also makes me much more keenly aware of the basics--colors, numbers, letters--and how our lives are touched by them. One fundamental concept I haven’t ever spent any real time thinking about (at least not since I was learning it myself) is how shape literally shapes our world. Of course, I know that what shape people are in--thin, fat, tall, short--is socially important, but what I didn’t realize until now is how plentiful shapes are in our daily experience. There are general shape references like shape up, in shape, out of shape, shipshape, shape-shifter, etc. And more shape-centric language like love triangle, square deal, square peg, circle time, circle the drain or the wagons, baseball diamond, the Hotel Diamond. You’re starting to see it, right? Some shape references are more general, like the oval of a track, the rectangle of football fields and basketball courts, and the highly recognizable octagon of the stop sign, and some are very specific like the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the Bermuda Triangle. Perhaps you have picked up on the prevalence of shape stuff in your life, but this is new revelation for me. In Judy Schachner’s Skippyjon Jones Shape Up, the spunky chihuahua finds out shapes are everywhere. And so did I now that my experience has come full circle.

http://www.amazon.com/Skippyjon-Jones-Shape-Judy-Schachner/dp/0525479570

http://www.judithbyronschachner.com/skippyjonjones/

Naughty Baby!

I say it a hundred times a day: some babies are naughty. I also say some babies are sad, some babies are tired, and some babies are mad. But mostly some babies are naughty. It is a tongue-in-cheek way of coping with the frustration of being responsible for a small human who throws fits when you stop them from doing all kinds of stuff they want to do but shouldn’t. And that’s a lot of stuff. Keilana destroyed all my Madonna cassettes one day by irretrievably tangling all that fragile tape. Connor went through a maddening stage of throwing everything--jewelry, toys, food, rocks--down the toilet. Just yesterday Scarlett finger-painted a tube of Desitin on the T.V. screen right after she dumped out all the DVDs and right before she broke six eggs on the kitchen floor. But the worst culprit was Addison. When Addie was a toddler, if you couldn’t see or hear her, the news was very, very bad. Her most frequent naughtiness was to smear an entire cube of butter in her hair several times a day. Every day. She shaved off her own eyebrows twice. She mixed purple Playdoh and apple juice to spread in my friend’s costume room. She squeezed a Costco-sized baby powder over the bathroom like snow. And unrolled every single roll of toilet paper ever made. Naughty baby. In Judy Schachner’s Skippyjon Jones in the Dog-House, Skippyjon is a sassy Siamese kitten who fantasizes he is an untamed Chihuahua crime fighter. Naughty kitty.

http://www.amazon.com/Skippyjon-Jones-Doghouse-Judy-Schachner/dp/0142407496


http://www.judithbyronschachner.com/bio.html