Fuzzy Love

Indulge Me, Please

It is a flippin' freezing day here, with snow and rain and biting wind. You know what this sort of day is good for, right? Curling up under a warm blanket with a good book, of course! Now, throughout the course of this moving thing we're supposedly doing, I've noticed a small trend on my bookshelves: children's chapter books of the elementary-school sort. Without really thinking about it, I've been picking up new copies of my childhood favorites (most of my beaten-up originals are in a box in the basement) in anticipation of reading them out loud to my kids. It's one of those parenting fantasies to which I am prone: just imagine the four of us curled under a warm blanket next to a warm fire, taking turns reading aloud, the kids asking for pleeeease just one more chapter....  Anyway, I started thinking about the books I adored, I made a list, and I thought I'd share it with you all.

Sooooo, if you have a favorite that I'm missing, could you please tell me about it? I promise I'll read it if you do; I already picked up a copy of Mr. Popper's Penguins at the library on my friend Sara's recommendation - I swear, she positively glowed while talking about it. That's the kind of book I'm looking for. I just wasn't expecting penguins.

Okay, here they are, complete with old covers because pictures are more fun:

Pippi Longstocking: the super-strong parent-less girl who lives alone with a monkey and a horse and a suitcase full of gold. There's a new version out last year with illustrations by Lauren Child, the Charlie and Lola author.

Anne of Green Gables: I've read everything that Lucy Maud Montgomery ever wrote, including her diary. I've seen the Anne of Green Gables movie, I've been to the play, I've even been to her "home" in Cavendish, PEI. And I'm going to drag my husband and children there this summer and take pictures and buy a huge boxed set of the Anne series as a souvenir. And what a great time to do it - the book is 100 years old in 2008.

Charlotte's Web: Who didn't love this book? (If it was you, don't tell me.) A pig makes friends with a spider...look, you all know it, don't you?

The Little House on the Prairie: Same as the show but without Michael Landon. I ate up the whole series.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and especially Revolting Rhymes: Anything by Roald Dahl, really, although these are the three I remember as my favorites.

A Wrinkle in Time: I'm not quite sure how to describe this one, but it was my favorite when I was ten and for a while afterwards. It's another one with Christian under-themes, but I certainly didn't know that as a child.

Socks: Beverly Cleary wrote a lot of books, but this was by far my favorite. But I need to re-read it; all I remember is that it's written from the cat's point of view.

Do you see Liam getting into that one? Anyway, anything by Judy Blume, really. (except Forever..., which I bought by mistake as a child and hid under my mattress for years).

The Princess Bride: I'm not actually sure that this is a children's book, but if Peter Falk can read it out loud to a kid, so can I. By the way, although I adore the movie, the book is even better.

The Phantom Tollbooth: My favorite teacher of all time (Mr. Willett, grade six) read this to my class. When a young boy is very very bored, a tollbooth appears in his bedroom. He passes through and ends up in an entirely different world. Lots of wordplay; for example, he visits the Island of Conclusions, to which he must jump.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: A brother and sister run away and hide in a museum. They take baths in the fountain and collect all the change. I thought seriously about if I could make this work, but was thinking more along the lines of a department store. With a toy department.

The Hobbit: I would never have picked this out for myself, but I got it as a birthday present and loved it. Dragons, treasure, wizards: what's not to love?

Island of the Blue Dolphins: I dare you not to love this book. A 12-year-old Indian girl, during the evacuation of her village's island, jumped ship to stay with her young brother who had been accidently left behind. He died shortly thereafter, and she fended for herself on the island for 18 years.

In reality Liam and I are reading his first chapter book together now. It's Stuart Little, which is a very good first chapter book - there are little drawings on almost every page. So far so good.

So come on; whatcha got?

Coping

Well, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I haven't been doing all that well lately. To-be-expected not well, out-of-touch-and-hermitting not well, a smidge-bit-manic-and-a-smidge-bit-depressive not well (although as I say that I point you back to the phrase to be expected). But, for some reason, I'm feeling much better as of last weekend, so I thought I'd tune in and let you all know that I'm still here, if any of you are still out there to hear it.

I went home for the last week my Dad was alive. It was a very good visit. I got to take care of him a bit, which is something I'm very grateful for. He was very much himself and lots of friends and family were around, so it was a week full of visits and stories. I wanted to be there at the end, but I believe he didn't want James or I there as he died in a rare moment when we weren't around. I came home for a few days and then Mark, Liam, Olivia, and I went back to Nova Scotia for the funeral. I didn't take any pictures, but my brother's girlfriend did (thank you Sam). Here is James with the kids and me on the day of the funeral.

We were in Nova Scotia for a week, have been back for almost three weeks now, and I've really been out of touch with every thing and every body ever since. I'm about a month behind on all the blogs I read, so I'm sorry that I haven't been commenting lately. I've really not been online very much at all (not even to Ravelry) and I haven't been paying much attention to the phone either. Like I said: hermitting (hermiting? I'm not sure how to spell this word I made up).

Thank all of you for your sweet comments on my last post. I did read them all as they appeared.

One reason I haven't been posting is that I have been lacking the relative optimism that I had after my mom died. Some good things have happened, but they have honestly been overwhelmed by my sadness. Also, Liam is having a difficult time coping with this second loss in so few months. Add to that a LOT of travel and separations from me (it's never good when the four of us aren't together) and it equals a huge fear of monsters that has him afraid to sleep at night. So I suppose I've been overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion as well.

Some books that we've gotten have helped. We aren't religious people, so we really lacked the stories that bring kids comfort (well, adults too, I guess), but we found some that we are comfortable with. The Fall of Freddie the Leaf is completely non-religious, although it does talk about being part of something bigger (uh...the tree). In Badger's Parting Gifts Badger goes down a tunnel, but the book is really about the parts of people that we carry with us. But Liam's favorite (and mine) has been The Mountains of Tibet, which offers reincarnation as an option - with many choices - and I think makes Liam feel more in control. Speaking of which, Go Away Big Green Monster has also been read a lot lately around here.

Little fun things like Popsicles on the deck seem to help too.

Not a lot of knitting has gone on. My friend Kelly told me once that she can tell how stressed I am by how much knitting I'm doing: more stress = more knitting. I haven't knit at all over the last month (who knows what that means) but I did cast on for a new project on the weekend. I had too; I was attending a knitting event. But more on that next time.

And next time will be much sooner, I promise.

Scottsdale Ho!

We're off for Arizona this evening! And just in time (yup, it snowed this week).

But honestly, packing for our trip to Scottsdale is not going as well as I'd hoped. I know that I do have summer clothes, I'm just not really confident on where they are or even what they all look like. So I've been digging through my drawers looking for shorts and shirts and skirts to take, then trying them all on because god knows what still fits, and then washing them because they're wrinkly from being stuffed in a drawer all winter (iron? I think not). And I'm trying to remember what shoes go with these things and where those shoes are, and then remembering that I threw out all my flip flops because the cat systematically clawed them to death.

At the same time (and this is in the category of TMI) I've discovered that I really need new bras. I'm still wearing the cheap crappy ones I bought after weaning Liam. You see, my theory was that, since I would be getting pregnant again sometime soon and who knows what size I'd be after a second child, there wasn't much point in spending much on bras until all the babies were here. And since my cute little pre-baby bras certainly didn't fit (and they're long gone now), I bought a few cheap crappy ones. This post-nursing, pre-second-pregnancy state only lasted nine months, so it seemed like an okay plan. Well, Olivia has been off the boob for four months and I'm not getting any smaller, but I'm still wearing cheap, crappy, and ill-fitting bras. The point of all this is that thin summer t-shirts really show off how ill-fitting they are. Sadly, the bras are much too big and the word "baggy" would not be inappropriate here (please be clear that I'm talking about my bras, not my boobs. I'm not going to take on that issue right now).

And have I mentioned just how pasty white I am? And that my nicest bathing suit is a maternity one (and that I half-considered taking it anyway)? And that I can't remember the last time I shaved my legs?

Note: it sounds like I'm complaining about all this, but really I'm just taken by surprise. Like I am every spring.

Packing for the kids is easy, though: since they require entirely new wardrobes every six months (at best), I pretty much just had to take the tags off.*

Just to throw some extra chaos into the mix, we spent too much time yesterday looking for The Paper Bag Princess (just to find it at our favorite store, where we should have gone in the first place). Liam's friend Emma is having her fourth birthday party this afternoon and it is a full-on princess tea party. Liam will not be the only boy there (one of two, I think), and he's excited to wear his prince/knight costume, complete with sword.

Emma has entered the princess phase that seems to be so popular, but in her heart she is a wild child, and she tells her mother she is, in fact, "a hero princess." So Emma must have a copy of the Paper Bag Princess, and today she will. It's by Robert Munsch, who is a superstar in Canada but sadly is not nearly as widely read down here. If you've heard of him at all, it's probably because of his other book I'll Love You Forever, which I have NEVER been able to read to my kids without disintegrating into a snotty cry. I highly recommend pretty much everything he's ever written. But then I have an extra soft spot for him as he came to read to my elementary school class when I was a kid.

Anyway, tonight the kids and I are off for warmer places. Mark joins us on Wednesday night since he's short on vacation days, and we're all back in a week. It will be good. We could really use some quality time with parental figures and Mark's parents are fun to hang out with. Liam is wildly excited because their condo has a pool. Maybe I'll get a chance to lie by it?

I'm not sure if I'll be posting, so have a good week everybody. I hope you all get some warm days.

* Well, packing clothes for the kids is straightforward. Let us not forget the pack 'n' play, a car seat, a booster, sippy cups, books for both kids, and enough toys to keep them reasonably entertained in their grandparents' apartment for a week. The toys have to meet two criteria: they have to be versatile  and they have to be small (such as Olivia's funny face blocks). Of course Olivia will provide much of her own entertainment by spending much of the week emptying out all reachable cupboards and drawers, so we'll just have to spend a lot of time outdoors. One nice thing about Arizona is they do provide shade around the playgrounds.

Books-A-Plenty

Liam brought home one of those Scholastic book club pamphlets a few weeks ago and I went a little nuts. Although I loved getting those when I was at school, I mainly associate with Scholastic a feeling of immense frustration at being forced to choose one or maybe two books each time. So, now that I am the adult, and am able to do things my way (more or less), I went crazy choosing books for Liam.*

What's exciting is that the Scholastic books are really inexpensive and, at less than three bucks each (on average), I was able to get him fifteen books. As I found out when they arrived on Wednesday, they are also, well cheap. Most of them seem to be just a couple of steps up from being run off a color copier at Kinkos. But there are cases where quantity wins over quality and, since we read at least six picture books a day, this is one of them. I fall asleep often enough while putting Liam to bed (just to have him wake me up each time by patting my cheeks and saying sternly, "Mommy! Mommy! Read dee story!") without the mind-numbingness of reading the same book for the twentieth time in so many days.

And Scholastic, once you weed through the Dora- and Disney-themed crap, has some really good books. Liam got some classics, like The Little House, Madeline, and Blueberries for Sal, and some excellent newer books, like Alphabet Adventure and Llama Llama Red Pajama. But it was a bit strange to pick up Liam's sizable pile of books at school only to discover that only one other kid in his class had ordered a book. And by that I mean a book. At least our bed time is exciting again.

*Although Liam really does enjoy reading time, I admit there is a bit of the stage-mom/football-dad syndrome coming out here. I tried to get Liam to pick out books with me, but he was more interested in kazooing loudly in my face at the time.

Not Yet...

Reading, that is. But Liam has an interest. For a while now he's been pointing out the letters he knows (which is about half at any given moment, but not always the same ones) and asking me, "Mommy, whassat word?" And usually I read to him about an hour a day. But just recently he's been wanting to read books to me. By "read," I mean that he recites entire books back to me while looking at the pictures. Wait, that's overstating it a bit: he probably remembers about two-thirds of the book, including most of the phrases and all of the point. It's so damn cute I have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing, it makes me so happy. He even remembers words that I don't think he understands. So, since he's about to turn three, I  thought I'd share a few of his favorite picture books of the moment that you might not know about.

1. Those Messy Hemples As the Hempels clean up their messy house in search of a whisk to make a cake, the reader is invited to participate in deciding where various objects belong. Liam loves a good mess.
2. Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me Monica's father fulfills her request for the moon by taking it down after it is small enough to carry, but it continues to change in size. Some pages fold out to display particularly large pictures, which is always a hit.
3. Buzz Buzz Bumble Kitty Kids flip the top or bottom half of any page, and the big, color illustrations change into all kinds of silly new things. A cowboy suddenly gets a striped kitty's chin and whiskers. A queen wearing her royal crown finds herself wearing a pineapple top on her head.
4. Muncha Muncha Muncha After planting the garden he has dreamed of for years, Mr. McGreely tries to find a way to keep some persistent bunnies from eating all his vegetables. We got this one free from a Cheerios box.
5. Zoom When Lauretta tries out a 92-speed, silver and gold, dirt-bike wheelchair, she gets a speeding ticket but also helps out her brother. Actually, anything by Robert Munch is a hit right now (especially Mmmm, Cookies).
6. Bark George A dog can't seem to bark right; for some unknown reason, he makes all sorts of other animal sounds. And then we spend the next twenty minutes pulling animals out of Liam's tummy.
7. Leonardo the Terrible Monster Leonardo realizes that he might be a terrible, awful monster-but he could be a really good friend.
8. That Pesky Rat A brown street rat, who longs to be someone's pet and to have his very own name, gets lucky when he meets a man in the pet shop who has extremely poor eyesight. By the woman who does Charlie and Lola, this might be my favorite of all his books.