Ways that 9 year-old son, Aaron, psyches up for big baseball games:
* Wear different colored socks (red and black) and pull baseball pants up to knees to show off the colors.
* Rub Bed Head coconut smelling hair creme into buzz cut to make ends spikey even though he will wear a baseball cap or batting helmet the entire game.
* Go number two.
* Listen to Lee Greenwood’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” as many times as he can until his sister yells at him to turn it off.
My family presented me with my very own iPod, which just ROCKS. It is the smartest machine I own. I feel like a genius just being in its presence. (I guess all the times I said, “No one gets an iPod until Mom gets an iPod,” must have registered.)
My 9 year-old daughter, Kennedy, took me out to breakfast at the 12th Street Cafe, and we had a surprisingly enjoyable discussion about what songs and movies we’d put on “our” iPod.
Spent the afternoon at Safeco Field, watching a Mariners vs. Yankees baseball game with my 9 year-old son, Aaron. We had great seats along the third base line, Aaron got his first ball souvenir from batting practice, and the Mariners won in a pitching duel. What a fantastic game. We screamed our lungs out.
After I put the kids to sleep, I rocked out on “my” iPod, couldn’t contain the overwhelming goodness of it all, and drove to the gym where hubby Tim was working out, just so I could tell him so.
What an excellent day.
I don’t go anywhere in the car with my kids without an audiobook. No personal listening devices allowed. We all listen to the stories together–we crack up together, we talk about what’s going to happen next together, we look forward to the next time we all get in the car together. I can check audiobooks out from the King County Library for thirty days (up to sixty days with a renewal) with just a library card. For free. What a treasure that library is.
Audiobooks have opened the rich world of children’s literature for both my kids, but mostly for my son. The other day he begged me to go to the bookstore to buy him the actual paperback book of On the Banks of Plum Creek, the fourth book in the Little House on the Prairie series. That would have never happened before we listened to Little House on the Prairie on audiobook.
It’s not like I didn’t try to read many of these same books during our nightly bedtime reading. But my son steadfastly refused to listen to me reading them, even though his twin sister would. I used to think that it was the gender divide at work and that my selection was to blame. I must be picking the wrong books, books for girls, and that was the problem.
But after listening to some of these children’s books on audiotapes, I can appreciate the difference between someone like Jim Dale reading a story and me. He is amazing! There are many fabulous readers of audio recordings and they are opening a wonderful world of books to my children in a way that I wasn’t able to do. Not all audio recordings of good books have good readers, however, so you must be choosy, because it doesn’t matter how good the book is, if it has a crummy reader, it’s not going to entertain.
My kids are a much more captive and willing audience in the car than they are at the end of the night after school, when they are cranky and tired (moreso now that they’re in elementary school). Listening to audiobooks in the car helps to relieve boredom and bickering, and I think my kids appreciate that as much as, if not more than, I.
I’m not suggesting that parents stop reading to their kids and substitute audiobooks. My kids still demand that I read to them at night. But what they don’t have the attention span for at night, we listen to in the car. And everyone’s happy.
Children’s books that my children and I have recently enjoyed on audiobook:
Jim Dale reading Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
Cherry Jones reading Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Robery Llewellyn reading Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton
Annie Kozuch reading Becoming Naomi Leon by Pam Ryan
Henry Winkler reading Hank Zipzer by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver
John R. Erickson reading Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erickson
Lana Quintal reading Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park
If you know of any other good audio recordings of favorite children’s books, please leave a comment and share it!
Ever since I quit my day job as uber-manager at a major university and taken on the responsibilities of a full-time stay-at-home mom, I’ve felt my most excellent multi-tasking skill set ebb away. Meaning, I forget stuff all the time, I have become notoriously lax in my obligations to others, and I just don’t have a grasp of the bigger picture like I used to.
Granted, instead of managing a budget of millions of dollars, I now manage a weekly budget in the three digit category; and instead of managing a staff of twenty or thirty wildly diverse people, I share the provocative and enlightening company of my 9 year-old twins pretty much 24/7; and instead of flying around the country, meeting with scientists and government officials, drafting work plans, creating budgets, and writing grants, I meet with brain-numbing control freaks in our school PTA to talk about whether it is appropriate to fund Krispy Kreme donut parties in our children’s classrooms with PTA funds.
But, still, motherhood is a full time job, and it keeps me very busy. So, why does my brain seem to be sprouting more holes than a sieve? Could it be that I’ve contracted a brain-wasting illness? It’s gotten so bad that when I wash my hair, I regularly check the shape of my skull for signs of tumor growth. After all, a tumor might explain why I just don’t seem to fire on all cylinders like I used to.
But recently, I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t there is another explanation. Shortly after quitting my day job, I started writing children’s fiction. I have noticed, over the past few years, that in trying to integrate a creative lifestyle with motherhood, if push comes to shove in a battle over deadlines and priorities, motherhood wins every time. But I haven’t given up. I’d committed to the 10-year plan for writerly success, just like I’d been told to do by countless successful writers before me.
But it isn’t easy being a mother and a writer.
When I go through my richest periods of creative development, and I give myself permission to wallow in my story, to listen to my characters, and to wonder what will happen next, I tend to forget about things like making dinner. Or washing the dog. Or taking a shower. Or remembering my mother’s 70th birthday. I become a combination bag lady, early Alzheimer patient, and sloppy housekeeper from hell. My friends stop calling me because I turn down lunches and retreat into the comforting loneliness of my house. I snap irritably at my husband and children when they have the nerve to interrupt me as I hunch over my laptop at the empty dining room table, the kitchen remarkably free of any smells of food. Can’t they see I’m busy?
I have no idea as to the real cause of this early onset of dementia. Is it motherhood? Is it living a creative lifestyle? I do know one thing, though: if it ends up that I do succumb to a brain-wasting illness, I’m pretty sure that no one will have noticed until after I’m dead.
Susan Patron’s book, The Higher Power of Lucky, won the Newberry Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. That’s why I read it. I’m not sure I would have read it otherwise. At first, the title confounded me, and then, when I read the summary and figured it out, I have to admit, I did this dismissing thing, thinking that anyone writing a book with a 12-step theme is sure to get it wrong. I can’t tell you the number of bad stories I’ve read with a recovery or 12-step theme. And I’m in a 12-step program, so you’d think I’d be more willing to forgive writers whose hearts are in the right place, but who can’t quite pull it off. But I’m not. I’m a demanding reader, even of my recovery material, and I don’t have patience for poor writing or themes that don’t resonate.
So, imagine my total surprise when I couldn’t put The Higher Power of Lucky down. Susan Patron has gotten it right. Viewing 12-step recovery through the eyes of a child works beautifully to capture the messiness, the magic, the irony, of how 12-step recovery works. I’ve read gobs of 12-step books (official 12-step literature only, if you please), but they are only hollow echoes of the actual meetings themselves. The meetings are where the real stories are told. And the best meetings are like those Lucky listens to–meetings where stories are told about hitting rock bottom, finding a higher power, and turning your life over. Although the details of Lucky’s journey to recovery from her painful childhood were not the same as my own, her spiritual journey was the same as mine. It is the same as every person whose life is transformed by the power of the 12 steps.
But The Higher Power of Lucky is not a testament to 12 step recovery. It is an entertaining, beautifully written story about a girl named Lucky. It deserved to win the Newberry Medal. Like many of the stories I hear told in 12-step meetings, it is powerful, bitter-sweet and real. But unlike the stories told in 12-step meetings, this story can be heard by anyone. You should go read it now.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell my mother that I had a blog. I wanted to share it with her. We’re such good friends now, and we live so far apart. Sharing my blog would be a way to bridge some of the physical distance between us, and she could read my stories about my kids, her grandkids.
But we’re talking about the woman who read my journal when I was eleven years old. At the time, I assumed that my journal was private, that my mother would never dream of reading my journal even if she found it. I never even tried to hide it from her. She just stumbled upon it while cleaning my closet.
But then she opened it and read it.
That fateful breach of security compromised my ability to honestly write about my feelings for years afterward. Or at least that’s what I told myself until I turned 35, when I realized that the words “honest” and “feelings” couldn’t really be strung together to describe any part of me or my life. But that’s another story.
Not that I’d been particularly honest in my journal writing, even at eleven years old. At least half of what I wrote were made up stories inspired by Go Ask Alice, a 70s best-selling novel about a drug addicted, sexually active teenager. No wonder my mother been shocked by what she’d read in my journal! But though most of what I’d written in my journal was lies, I’d just been trying to create gritty, compelling literature that would hopefully catapult me into fame some day, just like in Go Ask Alice. I figure I had James Frey beat by about three decades.
After I tearfully divulged to my mother which were the lies and which was the truth in my journal, I still found that I had a bit of ‘splainin’ to do. Like about the part where I stole money from our neighborhood library.
I was one of this library’s most faithful patrons. That library was my home away from home. I checked out books daily, read as many of them as I could, and returned for more. The expression ‘voracious reader’ didn’t really do me justice, because my book addiction wasn’t only inspired by a love of reading. Alcoholism had infilterated our family in earnest, and I hid in my room and read to escape.
But for this escape plan to work, I needed books. Books, books, and more books. If a Sunday happened to roll around and I didn’t have a book to read, I despaired because the library was closed. I tried to make it a habit to always check out tons of books on Saturday, enough to hold me over until Monday afternoon after school.
It was on one such sad and bookless Sunday, that I walked to the library to return some books that I’d already read. I pushed the books through the book slot, but before I let go of them, I stopped. Through the book slot, I spied a heap of already returned books on the book table right underneath the book slot. All I had to do was stick my little fingers through the book slot, pull one of the books off the book table, and my problem would be solved. I would have a book to read. I could hole up in my room and escape happily for hours.
I reached in and grabbed. It worked!
I pulled out several books, just to get a good selection. While rifling through one of the books to see what the book was about, I found an envelope. It wasn’t sealed, and inside the envelope were nestled three dollar bills and some change. An overdue book fine.
I’d felt quite rich enough just having found a way to get some books out of the library on a Sunday. I never intended to steal the books, I would just borrow them, sans library card, until the libary opened again. But that three dollars was tempting like no book could be. Cash! I was still at an age when I had very little, and my allowance barely covered the cost of a quarter candy bar.
I promptly went to my best friend’s house, told her about my windfall, and we went on a Guild Drug Store shopping spree, purchasing hats, candy, and bracelets.
When my mother read about this escapade in my journal, I couldn’t deny it. Because she had been so thoroughly convinced by all my fictional tales of drugs and debauchery, I was forced to cop to what little truth there was in my journal, or risk her going completely overboard thinking that it was all true. I admitted to the library book crime.
She took me to the library, made me apologize to the librarians (all of whom knew me, of course, from my daily visits). She took me to Guild Drug Store and made me apologize to the manager. She even took me to the police station and made me talk to a police officer.
What toil and trouble over journaling!
I’ve long since forgiven my mother her indiscretion for reading my journal. But now that I’m blogging, I couldn’t help but hesitate. Should I risk telling her about it?
The answer was, after some thought, obvious. Blogging is, by definition, letting my mother read my journal. Telling her about it just saves her the consternation of stumbling upon it in my internet closet.
