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

Security Guard

The Peanuts character I have always identified with most is Linus, with his fervent security-blanket commitment. As a baby, I was given a lovely blue blanket made of silky material. Not realizing how rabid I would become about my “personal blanket,” my mother let me sleep with it once. And then everything changed. I could not be separated from the blanket, even to wash it, and would stand banging on the machines crying until it was back in my arms. I slept with it every night of my life until I was a senior in high school (seriously) and it accidentally got taken with the motel laundry on a school trip. I got it back, after some hysterics and a sweet boyfriend who was willing to search the laundry room, but decided not to risk losing it again and put it away for safekeeping. It is now a sad, grey rag, recognizable only to me. And I still love it. When my son was little, he became so attached to his blanket/stuffed animal combination “doggie night-night,” that I had to go to the gym in the middle of the night and beg them to open the childcare to get it back and stop the sobbing. Patty, a sweet friend of mine, gave Scarlett Sandra Boynton’s Dinosaur’s Binkit, a favorite book of her children and grandchildren, about a little guy making a big roar to get his beloved blanket back. And made Scarlett a cozy red blanket to go with it.


http://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs-Binkit-Sandra-Boynton/dp/0689822030


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

Testing, One, Two, Testing

It’s testing time and testing will never change--the teachers are diligent with their “Testing In Progress” signs on the door and stern directives to put pencils down and the students send up a collective groan at the process. As I watched the seventh graders reluctantly shuffle to their multiple-choice doom, I was having flashbacks to the innumerable hours I have spent taking (read: surviving the mind-numbing boredom of) standardized tests. One of my least favorite aspects of these tests is the section where you are asked to choose the “best” title for a passage. I remember balking at this while still a grade-schooler. Even at that young age I was keenly aware of the power of interpretation and tried to convince a teacher or two that the question was inherently unfair and biased. Then, and frequently now, I kept getting the sinking feeling that bureaucracy was king and inertia its queen. It’s just a semantic issue, but an important one. If they asked for the “most accurate” or “most descriptive” title, I could live with that. But they always make you choose the “best” title, and it is too subjective for me. So, with this whole carousel of baggage, I read Sandra Boynton’s Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs to Scarlett. The book presents non-controversial dino opposites like “dinosaurs happy and dinosaurs sad” but gets into iffy territory with “dinosaurs cute and dinosaurs not.” I think “best” title and “cute” dinosaur are recklessly relative-- and I just won’t do it.

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

https://www.discountbooksale.com/store/productView.aspx?idProduct=1502744&ec=1&ProdId=112&AWTrck=1044954844&utm