Anticipation

An experienced expectant-mom friend and I came to the agreement that what you think having a baby is going to be like while waiting for your first bears only the slightest resemblance to what having a baby really turns out to be. Which is not really news, but the things that end up being the most different aren’t what you’d think they’d be. And one of the most surprising realizations is, despite fantasizing over how amazing having a tiny, new creature all to yourself will be--with their sweet smell, precious mews, and bitty toes--that when they first get here, they don’t do a lot of interesting things yet. They are miraculous, true, but the real fun stuff doesn’t start showing up for several months, and the most captivating behavior is still a couple years down the road. I remember worrying during my pregnancy with Keilana how I was going to feel about the baby once she got past the infant stage and became a toddler. The second time around, I fretted about how to get through that helpless infant stage while anticipating the fun and funny toddler age. It works that way for older siblings, too. Everyone in the house is so antsy to get the new baby here and then there’s not much to do with them when they arrive. In Alyssa Satin Capucilli’s Biscuit Wants To Play, our doggie friend can’t wait to play with the new kittens--but they aren’t much fun for awhile. That’s how babies are.

http://www.amazon.com/Biscuit-Wants-Play-First-Read/dp/0064443159

http://www.alyssacapucilli.com/

Content In The Chaos

Ten years ago, I thought I had it figured out. I knew what the landscape of the rest of my life looked like, and I was content in having all the loose ends sewn up. I was married to the person I would always be with, I had the only three beautiful children I was destined to bring into this world, and I was teaching part-time, sure that as soon as a full-time position came open, my career would fall into place as well. As a driven Type A experienced in more chaos than any healthy person would see in ten lifetimes, getting my life ducks in a row was of paramount importance. No surprises, just synchronized success. Yeah, right. One of my best friends (who also happens to be my fellow Type A mother-in-law) was given a magnet by her most capricious son that says, “We plan, God laughs.” Fitting, don’t you think? Of course, not everyone believes in capital-G God, but almost everybody attributes some sort of orchestration of all that is to some force--karma, Allah, Zeus, the Force---and acknowledges that power at work. So, the universe listened, chuckled, and blew every single plan I’d ever made right out of the cosmic water. But gave me in return an amazing husband and a tiny Scarlett to create our new little triad. In Louise Fatio’s The Three Happy Lions, a duo becomes a trio and everything works out much differently than planned. Thank goodness something is directing all this.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Happy-Lions-Louise-Fatio/dp/B0007EBL52

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

Buyer's Remorse

I’ve been thinking about getting my hair cut lately, but I know if I do I won’t like it. It’s not so much that I can never be satisfied (claims of voices from the past notwithstanding), it’s just that I immediately realize all the great things about the way things were--even though I couldn’t come up with any then. If I chop my hair off because I can’t stand the sheer presence of it, I instantly want to braid or bun or ponytail it and can’t. If I whack some bangs with the idea of framing my face for a better look, I can’t bear the claustrophobia of all that hair in my eyes. It goes on and on. Trust me, anyone in my life for about five minutes can attest to how neurotic and annoying it is. And it’s even more frustrating for me. I most often just end up wishing I had kept things the way they were to begin with. If you’ve ever been the muscle for someone who gets a burning desire to rearrange the furniture into ten different configurations before deciding the room looks best the way it was when you started, you probably know how that feels (and have contemplated homicide). I guess that kind of angst happens to you no matter who you are. In Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar’s Picnic, Queen Celeste is looking for the perfect picnic spot. It turns out she didn’t need to look any further than her own backyard.

http://www.amazon.com/Babars-Picnic-Laurent-Brunhoff/dp/0394805828

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

Out With The Old

Years ago I found myself in a brouhaha without much context for the issue. It was the early ‘90s and Chico Unified School District had chosen to switch to a new math curriculum called “Math Land.” As the mom of a kindergartner, I was new to the public school parent advocacy game, but it seemed as if I should be concerned if everyone was in such a tizzy. I attended a “Parent Information Meeting,” that felt as hostile as a lynch mob, and tried to keep up. A near as I could tell, the parents were mostly freaked out because the new system wasn’t the old system and comfort-zone cages were being rattled. I don’t remember the specifics, but I do remember that “Math Land” is very heavy on the “manipulatives“--teacher talk for stuff you can hold in your hands. There were lots of those little plastic bears for counting and weighing, and those brightly-colored “Base 10” blocks for I don’t know what. Other pieces were collections of geometric shapes referred to by people in the know as tangrams, which I’d never heard of and didn’t know how to use. It turns out the shapes are not only an early introduction to geometry, they are also part of an ancient Chinese storytelling art. I only know this because Nick read Grandfather Tang’s Story by Ann Tompert to Scarlett and then helped her make her own set of tans. It’s amazing what you can learn when you’re open to new possibilities.

http://www.amazon.com/Grandfather-Tangs-Story-Dragonfly-Books/dp/0517885581

http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/birthbios/brthpage/01jan/1-11tompert.html

Opposite Day

Living with a two year-old can make you feel psychotic sometimes. Never mind the sleep deprivation and mind-numbing repetition that come along with those in the terrible time, the sheer lunacy of their every-day-is-opposite-day mindset will drive you over the edge. We spend the first year of any child’s life anxiously engaged in the business of teaching them to talk, and then once they can, they use their new skill for the Dark Side and start busting out opinions and preferences all over the place. Which wouldn’t be so terrible if there were some consistency to them. But bi-polar mind-changing is the toddler name of the game. The only guarantee in the whole process is that, regardless of what they liked yesterday or five minutes ago, whatever you want them to do or eat or wear will be the very thing they have just decided they will never do and it becomes a fight to the (metaphoric, hopefully) death. And you can’t win because even though you are big enough to force them to get dressed or eat breakfast or stay in the carseat, an obstinate, hysterical two year-old puts up a fuss no one can ignore. Those little suckers will even turn down something they want--a movie, a story, a bath--just to assert their independence and not go gentle into that dark night of giving in. In Rita D. Gould’s Disney Babies at the Big Circus, Mickey and friends show kids what “opposite” means. Like they didn’t already know.

http://www.amazon.com/Disney-Babies-Big-Circus-Opposites/dp/B000AO2O9Q

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Rita-D-Gould/author/

Smarty Pants

It makes me sad, and not a little exasperated, that “educated” has become synonymous with “undesirable.” Your immediate reaction might be to argue that stance with me, claiming that my status as an educator gives me a heightened sensitivity to such things, but, think about it, everywhere you turn people who have formal, advanced schooling are suspect these days. They are elitists who eat arugula and listen to NPR. They are Wall Street, not Main Street. They don’t plumb or actually work. They aren’t in touch with the real America. They have book learning but no common sense. And so on. As a natural knowledge-seeker, I find that tragic. As an academic, I find that deplorable. As a parent, I find that terrifying. If the message my children are consistently getting from their world is that being smart means being shunned, what can I do to convince them otherwise? What should I do? In times like these, it feels like raising bright kids is almost doing them a disservice. When I read articles showing that people who were in the Greek system and have minimal education are twice as likely to get hired as less-hearty partiers with PhDs, I wonder if I would give my kids more of an advantage by teaching them which letter of the Greek alphabet Pi is rather than what the square root of pi is. But it’s all I know. So, we read Sarah Phillips’ My Picture Encyclopedia and I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Picture-Encyclopedia-Sarah-Phillips/dp/1846104459

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Sarah-Phillips/author/

My Life In The Anthill

Coming from a religious background where nobody gets paid to do anything, I was taught early and well that group gatherings were never really over until the place was cleaned up. However, this message doesn’t get through to everyone. So, at the end of every function, it was always my family and a handful of other families putting away chairs and running the vacuum cleaner. Which I resented a lot. It bothered me that other people were allowed to make a big mess and a small crew of us with uptight parents would have to clean it up. Then I became a parent myself and heard my kids doing the same griping. One time after our church group attended a baseball game, I made my children pick up trash so that we wouldn’t leave a bad impression in the community. They hated it and I remembered being the kid of a cleaner-upper. But somebody has to keep the place running even if others benefit by being lazy. I thought of this at storytime the other day. The sweet librarian is big pregnant and starting to show the strain of combining excessive cheerfulness and procreation. It always makes me sad when parents and kids rush off and leave the craft-time devastation behind for her to take care of. Unfortunately, it’s just the way communities seem to work. When reading Henry Pluckrose’s Ants, I couldn’t help but feel kinship with those worker ants. It’s thankless work, but somebody has to do it.

http://catalog.tempe.gov:90/search~S7?/sSisters./ssisters/25%2C-1%2C0%2CE/exact&FF=ssmall+world&1%2C4%2C

http://www.jacketflap.com/persondetail.asp?person=61682

An Apple A Day

It is interesting, and vindicating for moms, to see how often wives’ tales and superstitions are shown to have real-world application and scientific benefit. For instance, it is wise not to walk under a ladder not just because it is bad luck, but also because ladders can come tumbling down on unsuspecting heads, sometimes bringing heavy things, including people, with them. You get the idea. An especially useful piece of folk wisdom is the one about eating apples and keeping doctors away. In times before common nutrition knowledge and readily available medical care, staying healthy was not only smart but absolutely necessary. I like apples in most forms--sauce, pie, sliced, dried--but I’ve never really known much about them. Since Scarlett and I have been working together at home, we began at the beginning with “A,” which naturally led to paying attention to apples this week. And even though Scarlet is the student, I’ve learned a ton. Did you know that the channels where apples keep their seeds are called carpels? Or that over 250 million bushels of apples are grown in just the United States every year? Apples, which seem so American, are not native to this country, and all apples, despite their seeming variety, are some combination of red, yellow, and/or green. Fascinating. Well, it has been for me, anyway. In Apples, written by the number one children’s nonfiction writer Gail Gibbons, I found out why apples are such a big deal. I think I’ll go have a snack.

P.S. Happy Anniversary, Oba and Grandpa Dan!

http://www.amazon.com/Apples-Gail-Gibbons/dp/0823416690

http://www.gailgibbons.com/

In The Treetops

You can’t stop a climber. If you’ve got one, you know what I mean. Of my four children, two are climbers and have occasionally scared me witless with their antics. If you don’t curtail the scaling of climb-prone kids, lots of people--friends, family, and strangers alike--will weigh in with both warnings and critical clucking. Addison was a runner and Keilana was a good-senser (I had to go to the tops of slides and retrieve her until she was six), but Connor and Scarlett are my monkeys. Today Scarlett, clad only in a diaper and bedhead, wedged her tiny toes into the crack between the tops of the cabinets and the bottom of the silverware drawer to heft herself up onto the counter that is higher than her head. When I asked her just what she thought she was doing, she said, “Go way me! I climbing!” Obviously. It’s no use arguing, apparently. My mother has always said I was a climber, and I believe it considering how much I love trees. Not in a tree-hugging way (well, not just in a tree-hugging way), but in a get-my-hands-dirty-pulling-myself-off-the-ground way. As a child, I spent far more time among the branches of the trees in our yard than I did earthbound--and my mom got to hear all about what a terrible mother she was from the neighbors. When we read Margaret Hodges’ The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed, I couldn’t help but feel glad that my mom never listened to the naysayers.

http://www.amazon.com/True-Tale-Johnny-Appleseed/dp/0823415090

http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/hodges/hodgesbio.htm

I Want To Grow Old With You

Connor once went through a phase of intense concern over what would happen to me when I got old. He would tell me every day what provisions he would make for my golden years--bring me groceries, buy me a house, take me to the doctor--and how he was going to pay for these plans. Just to yank his chain a bit, I told him that sometimes old people have to wear diapers and asked if he was going to change my diapers one day. Not expecting such a dilemma, he pondered a long time for a four year-old. Thinking he might have forgotten the original question, I asked him again if he was willing to do old-age diaper duty. He looked at me so innocently and said, “No…but I’ll pay someone else to do it!” Which sounds like a solution we can all live with. It’s hard to contemplate the aging of our loved ones, and fully absorbing mortality is almost impossible. As a girl, my grandmother made me promise that, when her time came, I would make sure she was sent to the next life with her toenails painted their customary red. I made the commitment never realizing that one day I would actually be insisting on it during funeral preparations. But insist I did. And prevailed. In Angela Johnson’s When I Am Old With You, a little boy projects into the future where he and his beloved grandpa will age together forever. I wish that could truly happen.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Old-You-Orchard-Paperbacks/dp/0531070352

http://aalbc.com/authors/angela.htm

Differently Abled

On July 26, 2010, the Americans With Disabilities Act celebrated its twentieth anniversary. While it’s pretty amazing to contemplate the protections the act has afforded the differently-abled, it is also mind-boggling to realize it took so long for such protections to find their way into law and that twenty years just isn’t very long. To put it in personal perspective for me, that means the act has been around less than half my life and the opportunities and rights I have always enjoyed having been blessed with a sound mind and body have only been mandated for everyone for two decades. I have a kid older than that. Having worked extensively with the disabled population for the last three years, I have been afforded a first-hand look at the challenges they face--and also the gifts and talents they possess. It’s often hard for people who don’t know and love these kids to interact with them. I forget this until we go on outings and see the varied levels of comfort people have with the unknown. Some do great either naturally or because of someone in their life, most experience good-intentioned awkwardness, and a very small few exhibit some malice. But mostly, people just want to know they are interacting properly with a population they know little about. In Stephen Cosgrove’s Fanny, a three-legged cat is sorely misunderstood by the barnyard, until a little puppy who doesn’t know any better makes friends. Sometimes different is just different until it becomes familiar.

http://www.amazon.com/Fanny-Serendipity-Stephen-Cosgrove/dp/0843114606

http://www.stephencosgrove.com/

Where Did You Come From?

If you read comic books or have seen a superhero movie in the last few years, you’re most likely familiar with origin stories--those tales of how a well-known character came to be. Some of the characters we feel attachment to rely heavily on their beginning as part of their narrative. For instance, we know in great detail what happened in the infancy of Harry Potter and his story depends on it. On the other hand, some characters spring to life fully formed and defined without much in the way of backstory. And sometimes that works just fine. We don’t need to know what Rocky did in second grade to understand his present-day egg-drinking, stair-running self. But, occasionally, we want to know more about what forces and events shaped a certain character, what brought them to now. The success of “Origins: Wolverine” and “The Dark Knight” would seem to support that idea. I would think creating an origin story would be tricky business--you have to be true to what has already existed while providing new detail that could be rejected. Especially if the character is a firmly established part of popular culture. Even more so if it is part of kid culture. It is the rare American child who is not familiar with Emily Elizabeth’s giant canine pal, Clifford, but one day Norman Bridwell decided to write Clifford The Small Red Puppy to let us in on what it was like when he first got here. Everybody has to start somewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Clifford-Small-Puppy-Norman-Bridwell/dp/0590442945

http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/bridwell

It's Complicated

You’d think being a teacher by profession would make you a natural for teaching your own kids. While it’s true those called to teach have a certain approach to the world inevitably shared with the children they’ve brought into a family, the complicated nature of formal teaching (and the complicated nature of parent-child relationships) can challenge even the most skilled educator when it comes to their own small people. Much like any part of parenting, each parent has to choose a method that works for them. Sometimes you can teach any kid anything--except your own kid. I tried to work in Keilana’s classroom from preschool all the way through sixth grade, and we never could quite make it work. There was something about my presence in her learning domain that just brought out the most frustrating aspects of our relationship. Connor, on the other hand, would completely revert to earlier days and spend the whole time being my “baby” instead of branching out and participating. Addison, my strict little fraulein, had/has such a need for control, that having another person telling her what to do during the learning process was one person too many. So, despite having taught over three thousand other peoples’ children, the first three of mine have been unimpressed with my academic credentials. And now there’s Scarlett. We’ve been working together a lot lately and I think it’s going pretty well. In Susan Hood’s The Schoolhouse, Elmo and the Sesame Street crew go to school…without their mommies.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sesame_Street_School

http://www.jacketflap.com/persondetail.asp?person=148275

What's In A Name?

I think there’s a case to be made that some attitudes are nearly universal. Most everybody thinks baby things are cute, smoking is bad for you, and three-day weekends rock. And every woman I know has different reactions to being called “Honey,” based on the age of the caller and the circumstances of the calling. Little old guy who needs help with his groceries? Fine. And adorable. Any other guy you don’t share a name or a bed with? No bueno. And not even a little bit adorable. Which is strange in a way. It’s the same word, regardless of who uses it, so why does it matter? It just does. If we’ve learned nothing else from Romeo and Juliet and rap music, it’s that names, and who calls who what, matter very much. If you’re still not on board, just think back to how you felt the first time some kid bagging your groceries or making your sub sandwich called you “ma’am” or “sir.” I still don’t like it, and I have kids older than some of those kids. There’s also a spectrum of rationality for our reactions to the things we are called, as well. Sometimes we just don’t like being called something (chick, baby, dude, kid), and sometimes we object because the name isn’t even accurate (Mrs., fireman). In Conrad J. Storad’s Don’t Call Me Pig!, a feisty javelina tries to set the record straight. Good luck with that ’cause accuracy is hard to come by sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Call-Pig-Javelina-Story/dp/1891795015

http://www.conradstorad.com/about.php

Words

Language is tricky. As a speech person and avid big mouth, I have years of talking experience and research behind me, but the wonder of the whole thing still leaves me, well, speechless at times. The encoding and decoding process of verbal and written communication is so complex, it’s a miracle we ever learn to do it at all, let alone with some proficiency (provided you think there is any proficiency--and looking at my students’ papers, sometimes I wonder…). It’s even more bizarre that babies can do it. In fact, they come here with the tools for language already in place and start dipping their pudgy toes in the convoluted communication waters before they can barely focus one eye at a time. Beyond the technical skills needed to produce language, there is a whole cognitive obstacle course to navigate--context, interpretation, cultural influences--before the magic of meaning happens. Which is another aspect of communication that kids do in their own small-person way. Years ago we were visiting friends with a four year-old daughter who mixed up her shoes in the on-putting process. When her father told her that her shoes were on the wrong feet, she looked up at him, so innocent and sincere, and said, “But, Daddy, these are the only feet I have.” And that prankster called language scored again. In Tedd Arnold’s Even More Parts, the poor little narrator gets worked over by simile, metaphor, and symbolism. Words are crazy. It’s enough to make you lose your mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Even-More-Parts-Tedd-Arnold/dp/0803729383

http://www.patriciamnewman.com/arnold.html

Boob Tube

When my brothers and I were growing up, there were only three television channels which constituted the sum total of viewing opportunities. And that was only when the antennae was in exactly the right spot after an hour of shouting adjustments to your dad on the roof. Given these factors, I never developed much of a relationship with TV and sometimes even felt a bit wary of it--cartoons were violent, soap operas mind-numbing and crime shows too scary for kids. But I am often not the only decision-maker in my house, so television has been more of a presence at some times than others. Until I get fed up again and throw it out again. I spent one evening almost twelve years ago flipping through the channels during “family viewing” time and could not find a single thing that did not offend me. So, I got rid of it all. No cable, VCR, antennae. Nothing. And that lasted quite a few years until I loved somebody with a TV habit again. Since then, the television has come creeping (sometimes bulldozing) back into our daily lives. Sadly, even reaching the toddler. The other day, Scarlett woke up and the first thing she said was, “I need to watch Dora.” Like TV was her coffee…or heroin. That was the last straw and the TV is objecta non grata again. In the Berenstain Bears’ Too Much TV, Mama puts her paw down and turns off the tube. Oh, that’s what quiet sounds like…

http://www.amazon.com/Berenstain-Bears-Much-First-Books/dp/0394865707

http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-berenstain-jan-stan.asp

Mama's Gonna Take You For A Ride In The Park

Sometimes we want things so badly that we call in favors from the universe and will our desires into reality. It doesn’t always work, and the results aren’t always spectacular, but every once in awhile thinking makes it so. And if we give the universe a little nudge with our own actions, so much the better. I changed the words to “Hush, Little Baby” when Keilana was tiny. Partly because I was a single mom and it seemed unfair for “daddy” to get all the credit, and partly because I’m just that contrary. Since Keilana was an angel as long as someone was paying attention to her (a bit like now), I did a lot of singing, dancing and reading with her to keep the peace. I sang the modified, mom-centric lyrics so often during those first years of parenthood that I forgot there were any others, and the first time I heard someone sing the classic version again, I had a moment of cognitive dissonance. I had literally created an alternate reality where the words to the song had always been about babies and mamas, so someone crooning about daddies and mockingbirds did not compute. So, even now when I sing to Scarlett after all these years, I still get to be the song’s good guy. She likes my version of the song, but she’s also open to mixing things up a little--which is why she likes Sylvia Long’s unique interpretation of Hush Little Baby. And so do I.

http://www.amazon.com/Hush-Little-Baby-Sylvia-Long/dp/0811814165

http://www.sylvia-long.com/

Stool Pigeon

From upstairs, I heard that sound every parent dreads. The I’m-so-hurt-not-a-lot-of-sound-comes-out cry. As I fought to get over the baby gate, I was met by Addison hip-carrying a distraught Scarlett down the stairs. While I tried to figure out what had happened, Addison claimed she had “no idea” why Scarlett was so upset. Which might have worked except for one thing: Scarlett reaching enough verbal maturity to rat mean big sisters out. As Addison continued to feign mystification, Scarlett pointed to her sister, with a finger still bearing the telltale red welt of being recently pinched, bellowed “Her hurt me!” and began relating a story of little sisters wanting to get into places big sisters didn’t want them and the painful results. Miraculously, just then Addison regained enough memory to admit that she might have “accidentally shut the door on Scarlett’s hand.” Coming on the heels of an afternoon of bickering over babies being allowed to do anything they want, the accidental component of Addison’s story rang a bit hollow. And so it goes for little siblings everywhere. It’s nice to be the baby and get all that attention, but you take some abuse. In families, the proverbial you-know-what rolls you-know-where--and the shortest ones are at the bottom of the sibling hill. In Kathleen N. Daly’s Little Sister, Liz feels cheated when big brother David ditches her for the older kids but realizes he still loves her when he comes to her rescue. I guess blood is thicker than squabbles.

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Sister-Big-Golden-Books/dp/0307682560

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

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/

Now Hear This!

My husband says I don’t “translate well to cyberspace.” Mostly what that means is that, contrary to general popular belief and the attitude of my ex-husbands, I am less offensive when you can actually hear my voice as opposed to just reading it. Apparently, my husband is not the only one who thinks that. My dear friend Christina, upon seeing an email reply I had drafted to a student once, said, “Man, you are a…well, let’s say ‘witch.’” I prefer to think of myself as succinct and forthright. I try to tell my students that email is a concise form of immediate communication--and IMing and texting shouldn’t happen at all--and if they want in-depth conversation to come to class and we’ll bond. Which we do because I can talk at length in a lecture (by definition) and they can hear my tone, inflection, pace, and pauses (unless they are being fiendishly clever by hiding their Ipod earbuds under their hoodie). And that makes a big difference. I get in “trouble” all the time because it seems the average person’s eye is not calibrated to pick up sarcasm. If they don’t hear it, they don’t get it. Honestly, sometimes if they do hear it, they don’t get it, but there’s a better chance if I’m actually vocalizing. I’m a speech teacher and an actress--sound is vital to performance. In Al Perkins’ The Ear Book, tribute is paid to those little speakers on the sides of our heads. All hail the ear!

http://www.amazon.com/Ear-Book-Bright-Early-Books/dp/0394811992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Perkins_%28children%27s_author%29