Gifted

One year during elementary school, my brother and I attended a magnet school for gifted children. It would be more accurately described as a twisted little torture factory staffed by bureaucratic minions where clueless stage parents sent their self-obsessed, horrible children. But I digress… I knew I should feel fortunate, especially since it required sacrifice on the part of my parents, but I hated it there. Those kids were from a different world and their parents were attorneys and surgeons not blue-collar beat cops and stay-at-home moms. I didn’t speak their language, wear their clothes, or fit into their caste system. There were only two bright spots in my genius-academy experience: I was a teacher’s aide in the kindergarten class, which sealed forever my desire to teach, and we had a college student helper who could see things for what they were, often standing between me and the in-crowd. Like during track-and-field day on my mom’s birthday. I mostly dreaded those kinds of contests, but this day was different because the winner of each race would get a prize and I needed a present for my mom. I got my heart set on a ring with Ronald McDonald’s face on it--knowing my mother would love it. The race was run, I lagged miserably behind, and the kind student slipped me the ring for “Best Effort.” Present problem solved. In Vera B. Williams' A Chair For My Mother, a girl desperately wants a present for her mom. It’s a daughter thing.

http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-williams-vera.asp

http://www.amazon.com/Chair-My-Mother-Vera-Williams/dp/068800914X

The Stuff Of Dreams

Someone told me there’s a law saying that a person cannot be held legally responsible for anything they do in the first thirty seconds after waking, but I’ve never been able to find proof of it. The idea seems loaded with opportunities for abuse--the “Drowsy Defense,” maybe?--but there is something about it that makes sense. How many times have you had that waking instant when you didn’t know where you were? Sometimes even in your own bed. It is an unsettling feeling when you can’t find your bearings right away. It’s also weird to encounter someone who is still very much asleep but their subconscious didn’t get the memo. A few years ago, I woke in the middle of the night to Nick rummaging around in the dresser making an ungodly noise. Annoyed at being roused by such bizarre behavior, I asked him what in the world he was doing. He kept slamming drawers and said, “It’s the way they market the music!” Then I realized I was dealing with a sleeping Beatles fan who’d been reading too much John Lennon biography before bed. I told him we’d work it out and to come back to bed, which he did, but I have reflected many times on how very asleep he was and how that might have manifested itself in other circumstances. In Robert Munsch’s Get Out Of Bed!, Amy has a hard time falling asleep, but when she does nothing can wake her. I wonder how she feels about the Beatles.

http://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Bed-Robert-Munsch/dp/0439388511

http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00001772.shtml

Everybody's Somebody's Baby

Perspective. It’s easy to lose in the hassle of everythingness--particularly as a mother. But every once in awhile, something comes along to put things back into perspective. At a recent family gathering, Scarlett’s Auntie Liz, devoted first-time mom to our beloved cousin Baby Simon, remarked on how surprised she was at the morbid worry tendency of moms, while reeling off a litany of traumatic scenarios constantly looming in her imagination. And, instead of being able to allay her fears with the promise that it gets better as they get older, all the mothers in earshot had a moment of perspective. I realized, again, that, no matter how much time passes from when they show up earthside, each child in the world that belongs to you, by birth or by import, walks around their daily life with a fragile piece of your heart in their possession. And it gets worse as they get more autonomous, when you can’t hold them every minute and oversee everything--which is accelerated when you have an independent one. I knew from the time Keilana got here that I had better learn to let her go. She’s the only child I know who cried when she got picked up from preschool and declared her day at kindergarten “private.” In Nancy Tafuri’s Have You Seen My Duckling?, Mama Duck has seven stay-at-home babies and one wanderer--who sparks a book-wide search. My duckling is now a beautiful swan…but I still wish I could tuck her under my wing sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Have-You-Seen-My-Duckling/dp/0688148999

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/contributor.jsp?id=3676

Who's The Boss?

One of the most random, yet fascinating, speech topics I’ve heard lately is the complex social structure of vultures. It turns out those hideous birds actually have more rules than most human societies, and far more than any NFL team. And one of those rules determines alpha leadership, like in packs of wolves and guys at the gym during open-court basketball. I never knew you could be head vulture, but I know you can be alpha hamster. It sounds crazy, but hear me out. Years ago, Keilana talked me into bringing home a hamster. Now, granted, Star was a rodent and rodents can be seriously annoying, but this particular hamster was a punk. Despite our best efforts at compassionate pet ownership, that little son of a gun would bite like a fiend every time she got picked up. Until one day she disappeared. Assuming she had gotten out and met an untimely demise, I didn’t mention it to Keilana so that I could delay the inevitable “talk.” But Star showed back up, gentle as a lamb. When I asked Keilana about it, she said that she got tired of the hamster being such a jerk so she shoved her in the plastic Barbie stove. For three days. And Star, recognizing Keilana’s new alpha status, was well-behaved forever more. In Patty Wolcott’s Where Did That Naughty Little Hamster Go?, the title rodent doesn’t mind being beta as long as it means he gets a cozy hamster-sized bed. Even hamsters need leadership.

http://www.amazon.com/Where-That-Naughty-Little-Hamster/dp/0201142457


http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Patty_Wolcott-mcid_2281736.html?isrc=b-authorsearch

Color Coded

My generation are the television cusp kids. The biggest changes and developments in television viewing have happened in our lifetime. Think about it: we went from three channels and endless hours of shouting out the window to direct our dads which way to turn the antennae, to a million channels and endless hours of watching anything we want on our kids’ XBox 360. Although the biggest leap was the one from grey-scale to color. Remember? When we were really young, most programs were still taped in black and white, which worked very nicely because no one had color sets anyway. But then things changed drastically. If you were lucky enough to have a color television, turning on the set was like Dorothy stepping into Oz. The networks scrambled to best the competition with their prismatic line-up. Programs even boasted of their technicolor triumphs in the opening credits. And the one I remember most is the bold banner proclaiming “In Living Color” across the bottom of the screen when “Batman” came on. Not having a color set, and not realizing it was the box rather than the broadcast that determined what I saw, I would feel my heart race each time the words unfurled. Only to be disappointed, of course, when what appeared were still black-and-white images. I rejoiced when the new television showed up and never took a single, vivid POW! for granted. In Ellen Stoll Walsh’s Mouse Paint, some mischievous rodents color-rock their monochromatic world. Now that’s living color.

http://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Paint-Ellen-Stoll-Walsh/dp/0152002650

http://www.teddarnoldbooks.com/ellen.html

The Good Book

Perspectives on the historical accuracy of the Bible seem to run from those who don’t buy any of it, to those who find it useful, to those who believe it is the honest-to-goodness, inerrant word of God (but only to be followed in specific instances). There was even that wacky guy who spent a year living by all the rules in the Bible, including not touching anything touched by a woman during “that time,” but whose wife promptly paid him back by touching all the chairs in the house so he had to spend the rest of the year sitting on the floor. With me having grown up in a religious tradition that allows for translation errors and Nick spending his childhood as a “gypsy Christian” never settling anywhere, we are still deciding whether we think all the events of the Bible could have literally occurred or not. We like the book, especially the New Testament with its messages of “be kind to others” and “care more about your own mistakes than those of others.” But the Old Testament is not as warm and fuzzy, is it? When you got in trouble back then, it was serious. Just ask a Babelite or anyone who wasn’t part of Noah’s crew. And don’t even get me started on that whole pillar of salt thing. In the Bendon Press version of Jonah, one guy in particular had some time to think about bad choices. Now that was a time out of biblical proportion.

http://www.amazon.com/Jonah-Bible-Board-Book-4/dp/B001L59SII

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=26522939

Size Matters

I have to laugh when people talk about how sweet and innocent children are. And not a gentle, “so true, so true” kind of laugh. A wry, derisive laugh often accompanied by some sort of grimace. It’s not that I don’t find truth in such a remark, it’s just that, as a blanket statement, I don’t find it particularly accurate. Kids (well, some kids) can be angelic and endearing, but they can also be snarky little mean machines with barracuda-like instincts. Have you ever hung around a kindergarten playground for any length of time? Better yet, have you ever been five years old yourself? It’s a jungle gym out there, with survival of the fittest reigning supreme, and you don’t want to be caught at the shallow end of the gene pool. Any perceived weakness can work against you--glasses, overweight, smart, fashion-impaired, athletically-challenged--but the thing most likely to tip the victim vs. victimizer playground scale is the evolutionarily prescribed bigger is better. Job titles and trophy wives will come into play down the road, but, in third grade, you want to be or be friends with someone who is furthest from the ground. When tennies hit asphalt, whether you get to play or eat your lunch in peace or keep your stuff is determined by a hierarchy slanted toward the big kids. In Martha Alexander’s Blackboard Bear, one little boy has to draw himself a big, furry friend to get some attention. I could make a fortune off that chalk.

http://www.amazon.com/Blackboard-Bear-Martha-Alexander/dp/0763606677

http://www.charlesbridge.com/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=157