10 Reading Recommendations from Tiny Humans

The kids, as they are every day.

I’ve been so remiss with my kid-book posts here that we have a huge backlog of beloved books. Thus, this truncated version, in case anyone happens to have an almost-two-year-old boy and an almost-four-year-old girl who need to be distracted from the hypnotic, unending horrors that are the Dinosaur Train books (how do they always find those at the library anyway?).

Alton’s Top Five Books for Little Boys With Even Littler Attention Spans:

1) Snuggle Puppy. He loses his mind over this book, he really does. There is nothing cuter than an almost-2-year-old’s “Oooooh…I yuv oo!”

2) Bus Stop. Any book with a vehicle is good with this kid. But this one actually doesn’t make me want to scream. The illustrations are beautiful, with lots of things to find on each page. I mean, “yots.”

3) Brown Bear, What Do You See. Still.

4) Let’s Go For a Drive! Does he really get this book? I have no idea, but it does crack him up. “WAIT!” Maybe he just knows that Brooklyn kids are contractually obligated to love Mo Willems.

5) Mr. Gumpy’s Outing. Highlights: the goat and… the goat. Just the goat, actually.

Mr. Gumpy and the goat. And some other things, whatever, who cares GOAT!

Harper’s Top 5 Books for Precocious Preschoolers Who Adore Sitting Still:

1) Look… Look Again! We’ve only had this from the library for about 2 days, but Harper has declared it her favorite ever. It’s full of illustrated riddles that make her snort with laughter. Except the one where the pizza eats the chef. That one is scary!

2) Mary and the Mouse, The Mouse and Mary. I’m so glad to tell you that Harper has inherited my childhood love of stories about miniature creatures. This beautiful book is perfect for before you’re old enough for The Borrowers.

3) Jumpy Jack and Googly. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Harper laugh so hard at a book. (And no, she doesn’t find it all ironic that this book is about a monster who’s afraid of everything.)

4) The Snow Globe Family. Ditto. Tiny family sledding in a snow globe! What the what!

5) It’s a Secret.  If you love cats, and dressing up, and little girls having adventures (check, check, check), this is your book.

I didn’t even notice, somehow, that this book is also the work of John Burningham! YOU KNOW THE MR GUMPY GUY! How cute is it that the kids have each latched on to their own his-and-hers John Burningham books? I CAN’T STAND IT IT’S TOO CUTE

Happy Sibling Propaganda

The Adventures of Harper and Ollie in Prospect Park

A dear friend of mine just had her second child, and, as is already family lore, her older son gazed upon his new brother and welcomed him with a “No. No. No. No.” The mysteries of sibling relationships have been of particular interest to me, obviously, for the past, ohhhh almost 2 years I’d say. I recently met a grown brother and sister who were hanging out together, as they do every weekend, and I asked them their secret. They shrugged and said that their parents always told them it was important for them to be friends. Could it be that simple? Can you make your kids get along with each other?

Now, my children could not be more different in temperament. Every morning Ollie grabs his shoes and stands by the door and points and pleads, “Down!” The great loves of his life are going places, running, yelling, smashing things, kicking things, and trains and also trains. Harper’s favorite thing is to stay in her nightgown all day and to cry, when anyone goes near the door “I’m not going outside!” Left to her own devices, she prefers: sitting quietly and looking at books, sitting quietly and playing with paper dolls, sitting quietly and doing art projects. They do have some common ground in their shared love of jumping up and down, which I’m sure our downstairs neighbors find incredibly charming.

Just in case we have some say in the matter, ever since Ollie was born nary a fortnight after Harper’s second birthday, we have been waging a full-on assault of sibling-relationship information warfare. The thought is, if kids become what they are told, or even if any of it rubs off a tiny bit, might as well tell them over and over: “You are best friends. Brothers and sisters stick together. You are a team. Not only that, you are psyched to share a room. GO FAMILY!”

In this vein, we bombard them with the ruthlessness of communist USSR propogandists. I’m not talking about “there’s a new baby in the house” type books, most of which take a “and that’s a bummer” tack. I mean just nice models of nice siblings.

Books:

Harper still loves everything Charlie and Lola. (Saw the cartoon once, wasn’t terribly interested. But the books! Oh the books!) Siblings who share a room and are nice to each other. Check.  Big sibling looks after little sibling. Check check. So we assign Charlie and Lola studies at least once a day.

The Magic Treehouse books, which I mentioned in my roundup of chapter books, features a non-squabbling brother/sister pair who goes on great adventures together. Perfect. I like to throw a little notebook in a backpack and tell Harper she and Ollie are Jack and Annie and goodbye, have fun with the dinosaurs.

Runners-up: Max and Ruby, though Ruby is a bit bossy if you ask me. But Max, with his non-verbal, grinning mischeviousness, is a pretty good stand in for our own baby brother character.

Multi-media:

We’ve just discovered the Olive Us video series and are all pretty obsessed. These lovely, under-5-minute videos show an adorable family of 6 (!) siblings having sweet, wholesome fun together while wearing really cute clothes. Mountain picnics. Making cookies. Washing the car. The best.

Learning by Rote:

Adam brilliantly instituted a program called “The Adventures of Harper and Ollie on Earth.” This started off as a simple homemade binder to hold drawings we collaborate on, of adventures Harper and Ollie had, have, or may someday have, and has really taken off. Harper always wants to draw Harper and Ollie stories (sample quote: “Ollie! Get away! I want to draw a Harper and Ollie story!”), about, say, when they are grownups and live together in Manhattan, where it is fancy, and ride their scooters together to the café. Or else, when they go skydiving together, holding on to a rope that is taped to the sky. Now that she is starting to draw figures and faces herself this is even less work for us, and the result is a cuter-than-cute scrapbook of hypothetical sibling adventures dreamed up while one sibling was napping.

Any other happy sibling propaganda we should check out? We’re committed to making this life-long psychological experiment work. I’m pretty excited to meet them in Manhattan for lunch circa 2033.

 

3 Chapter Books for 3 Year-Olds

I wrote here a while back about how Harper and I fell hopelessly in love with the Winnie-the-Pooh gang.  What I haven’t mentioned is that this sent us on a wormhole-ish hunt for toddler-friendly chapter books. It is really so fun to read chapter books together – the curling up, the flicker in her eyes as she pictures a scene, or asks me to repeat a detail so she can really really picture it — and it is also, I’ve found, really hard to find just the right books that she can follow, aren’t too dark or complicated, and have enough pictures but not too many. And that don’t involve dying parents. Or dying anyone. We’re just not there yet (thankfully!). I mean, Harper thought the Heffalump was terrifying.

Here are our findings so far:

1. Jenny and the Cat Club, by Esther Averill

“Time is nothing to a cat when he is dancing.”

This is, next to the Winnie-the-Pooh books, our biggest hit so far. Harper has been playing Jenny Linsky, drawing Jenny Linsky, telling stories about Jenny Linsky, ever since she recovered from the shock of receiving this (deceivingly!) boring-looking chapter book as a Hanukkah present. Esther Averill’s stories about Jenny Linsky, a shy yet brave little black cat who lives with her master, Captain Tinker, in Greenwich Village, are just nonstop charming. There is nothing scarier than a mean dog who steals Jenny’s signature red scarf – this episode made Harper hyperventilate with anxiety, both at the meanness of the dog, and the great crime of a theft of an accessory. Throughout these sweet stories, Jenny deals with issues like her shyness, smallness, and learning to be generous, all big issues in a preschooler’s life.

For here is the rub – I find that other chapter books, probably naturally, address questions Harper hasn’t even started to consider yet, like getting teased by mean kids. I am so thankful, particularly in the face of horrifying recent events, that this is so – that Harper still lives in a sweet little bubble where her biggest issues are her brother, Hair Puller Extraordinaire, and that sometimes her annoying mama wants her to brush her teeth, and that the meanest person she knows is her imaginary friend Murray. So in that vein, I find that older books, somehow, are the only ones that can manage to be innocent enough for this highly sensitive kiddo. Isn’t that a little weird and sad?

Anyway, good thing this book has been reprinted by the excellent New York Review Children’s Collection, and is just such a lovely object, full of charming drawings, that I find myself looking through it again and again (and unable to choose illustrations to share because they are all the best one). Best of all, this is part of series, so we can read even more about our dear little J. Linsky, as Harper likes to call her.

2. The Magic Treehouse: Dinosaurs Before Dark

I heard about Mary Pope Osbourne’s insanely popular series on, who knows, probably Pinterest. Apparently all kids everywhere love it, though I, elderly ignoramous!, had never heard of it. Harper and I had a very lovely afternoon at a local coffeeshop having hot chocolate and tearing through chapter after chapter of this first book in the series, Dinosaurs Before Dark. She liked studying the pictures, and most of all she liked the idea (as did I!) of this magic treehouse full of magic books (!!!!!!!), and the brother and sister who have adventures together. She was carrying around a notebook and backpack for a few days, just like Jack and Annie in the book. I thought we were really on to something. But somehow the next books in the series have not held her interest. I think they’re a bit too complicated – there’s all this business with magicians and Merlin and legends. But that first one, wow, what a page-turner it was! And we love happy-sibling-propaganda. So this was a good one too.

3. A Bear Called Paddington

I’m cheating a bit here, because we’ve only read one chapter of this book, which Harper’s grandmother gave her for Christmas – Harper’s daddy’s childhood copy! This has been fun for me to discover too, though, since somehow I missed the whole Paddington phenomenon as a kid. Were you aware Paddington is a real bear? From Peru? (Excuse me, darkest Peru?)Who comes to live with a family in London? There aren’t quite enough pictures for Harper’s tastes, and there is that problem familiar to us from our painstaking attempts at Stuart Little of the humor being largely pitched to witty adults, but one chapter in, so far so good. I even heard some stories being muttered about darkest Peru in one of Harper’s marathon story-telling-sessions. Chapter two happens tonight. Wish us luck!

Any other good chapter books for the very wee we’re missing? I have been remiss, by the way, in not thanking lovely commenter Genevieve who this summer led us to many awesome wordless picture books, including our favorite, You Can’t Bring a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum. Genevieve, are you out there? Do you know about chapter books too??

The Read Balloon: Virginia Woolf for Little Wolves

Virginia Wolf, written by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, just especially for me. Wasn’t that nice of them?

I fell in love with this book the moment I saw its title: Virginia Wolf. Never before has a picture book seemed so obviously created specifically for me. I had this crazy friend in high school who did too many drugs and, worse, read too much philosophy and became convinced that the he was the only person who was actually real, and that the world he knew was an elaborately designed set (this preceded The Matrix, mind you), and every once in a while something would happened that, due to some strange serendipity, would seem to him to be proof that this was so. Anyway, I thought of him, the dear fruitcake, when I happened upon this book in the library – I actually looked around, like, really? This book is happening to me? I love Virginia Woolf. No, like, LOVE love. I love the Bloomsbury Group, the art, the thinkers, its shocking sexy-bookishness back when that had the ability to shock, all of it.  I love pretty picture books with extravagantly colorful illustrations, particularly if they concern strange little girls, especially siblings. Hello, book! Thank you for existing!

This book is a loose interpretation of the relationship between Virginia Woolf, grumpy writer, and her sister, Vanessa Bell, painter and proponent of the everything-beautiful life way before Pinterest. So I would probably like it anyway, but I am particularly charmed by the poetic text – I love kids’ books that don’t talk down to kids – and its portrait of sisterhood, and the idea that connecting with things that make you happy can lift you out of a wolfish funk. (And I’m so pleased and not at all surprised to see that this beautiful book has just won some fancy-shmancy Canadian literary award.)

That said, I couldn’t really get Harper to comment on this book. She very much enjoyed the trick of Virginia’s wolfish ears transforming into a point hair bow (we all have those days), but other than that I have to admit she wasn’t as in love with the book as I was. When pressed, she said only, “She says too many mean things.” So I said, “Honey, you don’t have to be nice and happy all the time just because you’re a girl, you know. It’s okay to have wolfish feelings, to need help dealing with them.” JK, I sighed and said, “Fine, you don’t have to help me write my blog post. We can play with Photo Booth instead.”

But the book is, in truth, not only more fun than playing with Photo Booth, it’s also led me to the other works of Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault. Don’t you love that buzzy feeling when you’ve discovered some new (to you) artists?

Here, a lovely book trailer that doubles as some good advice for wolfish moods.

The Read Balloon: Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, and Harper’s first serious crush

A Map of Prospect Park.

Tonight at dinner-time I read the kids the last installment of The House at Pooh Corner, Chapter 10, in which “Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There,” which really ought to be subtitled, “Fuck You, Mama’s Mascara.” Ollie has not been privy to most of the Pooh-readings (for this concludes our first reading of the entire series) but for some reason I felt he should be there for this story, snortling into his macaroni, maybe to protect me, the way Harper always squeezes his hand and tells him she’s helping him to be brave when she’s afraid of something. “Christopher Robin was going away,” the story begins. That was about when I started crying.

This all started because of a bookmark. Harper and I were whiling away an Ollie-nap by going crazy on Mr. Printables, an amazing site full of adorable (free!) paper dolls, coloring pages, and lo, bookmarks. Harper wanted to know what they were, these mysterious bookmarks, and what kind of book you would need to keep a place in, and I explained, and she asked if we had any chapter books, and I said that we did, and that we could read a chapter of one if she wanted and then hold our place with the bookmark, and she felt extreme enthusiasm about this concept. She’s very into accessories.

So that night at bedtime we began reading the first Winnie-the-Pooh story. I approached the familiar stories with some cautious optimism, not quite sure she was ready to listen to so very many pages with so very few little scratchy pictures. But man, was she. She is now obsessed, with the wonderful, all-consuming Harper-passion that has previously been directed toward The Ballerinas, Charlie and Lola, Special Baby, Murray, and other luminaries. I do believe she is in love with Christopher Robin.

I’m so glad she wants to read the stories all again, as she has announced, but there was something really special, like Special Baby special, about that first time, about hearing her crack up at the funny parts, and furrow her brow and ask for clarification regarding all the spelling jokes, and exclaim, “Oh, Christopher Robin!” when he’d do something terribly kind and wise, as he tends to. I keep catching her poring over the illustrations, studying Christopher Robin in particular. In the middle of nowhere she’ll say, “I think Christopher Robin might be a tiny bit older than me,” or, “Wasn’t that so funny when Christopher Robin said x?” She’s been wandering around the apartment or community garden or park or wherever we are, whispering to Christopher Robin about this or that, and singing Pooh-inspired “Tiddly-Pom”s as she goes.

Look, the real, original Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger, and Eeyore! Guess where they live? THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY! Even though this is, as Harper says, “very far away in Manhattan,” I’m thinking field trip.

First we read through Winnie-The-Pooh, and then one day last week I got The House at Pooh Corner from the library when Harper was at school. She walked into the living room, saw the book lying on the couch, screamed, clapped her hands, and did a somersault. I’m not kidding. We’ve since gone on Winnie the Pooh-themed picnics in the park. (I asked Harper if she could find the Hundred Acre Wood and she assured me it would be easy, and it turned out it was.) Actually, everything has been Winnie the Pooh-themed.

My point is, this child lives in an enchanted world, in which she is most happy when play-acting some private story. So this last Pooh story, about Christopher Robin leaving the forest, seems custom-built for stabbing me in the heart. How long do we have? How long can she play, completely unself-consciously, in these elaborate worlds, populated by imaginary people and her “cubbies”?

Christopher Robin, according to Ernest Shepard

Toward the end of the last story, Christopher Robin and Pooh are lazing about in the enchanted place when Christopher Robin says, “’I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’

‘Never again?’

‘Well, not so much. They won’t let you.’”

Directly beneath this is an illustration of Christopher Robin lying on his stomach, kicking his legs in the air, studying something on the grass in front of him: that pose of relaxed, busy, focused nothing that is I think the essence of childhood. It’s just such a heartbreaker. And even though Harper’s not setting off for English boarding school anytime soon, it’s inevitable, the Growing Up.

Ugh, so what I’m saying is, read these stories to your magical little preschooler. Read them on a day when you’re so tired from all the early waking and tantrums about shoes and sticky floors and more tantrums about other shoes that you have been praying for the era of Full Day Kindergarten or even fantasizing about English boarding school, when the drudgery of all the work that comes along with them has momentarily clouded the sheer ridiculous shiny glory of their mysterious, curious beings. Read them to your children while they eat dinner so that you can get all weepy and when they both refuse to eat the macaroni and cheese they demanded and request little cups of applesauce instead you won’t even care and you’ll uncharacteristically let them have them and it will seem suddenly beautiful and not maddening the way they shriek with excitement and set about smearing the applesauce across the table like adorable monsters, and you’ll think, Yes, cups of applesauce are totally completely the most thrilling things on earth! Read them before they’ve seen the cartoon versions. Read them in an enchanted place, if you can find one. And then read them again.

Christopher Robin, according to Harper.

 

Kitchen Table Math Drop-Outs

Another rigorous day of G&T test-prep!

In the process of creating and maintaining our amazing, spectacular, splendiferous playschool co-op, the mothers of Greenwood Playschool (nee Tomb Tots) and I have had the good fortune to have several meetings with Peggy Reimann, an education consultant with a passel of brilliant ideas about nurturing a love of reading and even encouraging an understanding and sense of friendliness with – gasp – math. She urged us to quit cold turkey anything like flash cards, and the strange but common process of quizzing little kids about books, i.e.: “DO YOU SEE THE COW? WHERE IS THE COW? WHAT DOES A COW SAY? GOOOOOOD A COW SAYS MOO!” Rather, she urged us in her gentle and wise manner to look at pictures with our kids, to move our fingers across the page, to talk about what we see together — and this process seriously changed completely the way Harper and I experience books and images and was utterly amazing.
So, now that Harper is a sage 3.5, I figured it was time to dive into Peggy’s math curriculum.

All summer I tried to introduce pattern sorting. I’d put Ollie down for a nap, make us some milky tea, and set the scene for something VERY SPECIAL. There – the paper with the circles on it. There – the colored pieces, in our case buttons. The idea is that you make it a kind of a game to make patterns together, to sort out the colors, and eventually start talking about quantities. “So!” I’d say brightly, like Peggy instructed, “I’m going to put the blue button here.” “Okay,” Harper would respond. And then, having found the thimble among the buttons, she’d switch into a high-pitched fairy-voice and offer a button some tea out of the thimble, and then the button would squeak, “Oh, yes please!”

And so on.  Pasta-shape-sorting turned into an elaborate story-play of Jack and the Magic Pasta-Seeds-Beanstalk. Absolutely everything becomes a game of pretend with this kid, even bath time turns into a 3-hour-long sessions of making bath-rice-pudding for bath-Foofa’s birthday. Of course I find this to be wonderful, and in my sick writer’s mind can’t think of anything better than an almost-absolute break with reality. But still, I really like the idea of appealing to some other corners of her busy, buzzing mind. And in classic parenting “it’s actually my issue not yours” fashion, I am eager for her to avoid the gut-wrenching math anxiety that to this day has me reacting to the words “fraction” and “division” with an outbreak of hives.

So today I tried an activity that looked so cute on Pinterest (I could probably just copy-and-paste this every night “It looked so cute on Pinterest but didn’t quite work out as well for me…”) : writing numbers (or I also tried dots) on craft sticks, and then sticking the numbers in order into a big snake of playdough.

First: excitement. “What’s this? A project?” My explanation was met with a “talk-to-the-hand” type gesture. “Nah, let’s make these sticks into people!”

“But, it’s a cool project!” I tried changing my tactics. “It’s a really fun big-girl activity. Um, it’s a game. It’s a puzzle.” Nothing. “You know what this is? It’s math!”

“I DON’T LIKE MATH! I ONLY LIKE DRAWING PEOPLE!”

And that, folks, is genetics at work. So much for instilling an early love of numbers. One thing I really feel that I have succeeded at, though, is encouraging an early love of tea parties, fairies,and flitting around singing little nonsense songs, all of which are sure to be very helpful in really any field Harper chooses to pursue.

The Read Balloon: Jennifer A Bell, Illustrator Extraordinaire

Lately we’ve been reading the adorable Too Shy For Show-and-Tell over and over, and discussing it at unexpected times. “Why did Otto say ‘weaf’?!” Harper will demand out of nowhere, requesting a millionth read.

I was shy as a kid, so I know there’s nothing worse as a shy kid than having someone order you not to be so shy. It’s basically a guarantee that you won’t be able to speak for at least 15 minutes. So I respect Harper’s occasional bouts of bashfulness, and was relieved to find Too Shy For Show-and Tell, which offers a gentle way to discuss the idea of shyness. Sam, sweet giraffe, bends his formidable neck and goes silent when faced with the prospect of… dun dun! SHOW AND TELL. Shivers.

Too Shy For Show and Tell, Illustrated by Jennifer A. Bell, my friend. And written by some lady too.

But let’s get real here. What we love most about this book are its incredibly cute, amazingly expressive illustrations. And not just because they were done by my dear friend Jennifer A. Bell.

Some facts about Jenny:

1. She was my husband’s friend from high school who I stole when we all ended up living in Minneapolis at the same time. I had moved there for grad school and didn’t know anyone so I forced her to be friends with me. We spent many a snowy Minnesota night over at her family’s apartment, eating her freshly baked cookies, drinking wine, and getting into winding debates about I have no idea what with her intellectual husband.  She also taught me to knit. They were good times. And really good cookies. I miss those guys so much! The people that is. Okay, and the cookies.

2. Jenny has a son who is now a man of 11, but who used to be our child-crush before we had our own. We still say “Not idea!” all the time, which was his way of disapproving of things when he was 3.

3. Jenny has the prettiest eyes in the world. I know that’s not relevant here but thought it might be interesting to note.

and, to get back on task here, 4. She can draw anything at all. Truly. I’ve seen her artwork and it’s all great. In recent years she’s focused on illustration, probably because she has an uncanny knack for drawing animals that are so cute they make you want to die. See more of Jenny’s eyeball-exploding work here.

Harper was very intrigued by the fact that I know the illustrator of this book which she so adores, so she told me to ask Jenny some questions that had been on her mind. I transcribed the questions verbatim, and Jenny’s lovely, patient responses are below.

H: Why did you make David a turtle instead of a crocodile?
J: I thought that since David brings his socks for show-and-tell that he needed to be a turtle because honestly I’d love nothing more than to see a real turtle wearing socks. I think that would be ridiculously cute. It’s funny too because David is the only animal who never has clothes on!

H: Why does Sam have a striped shirt instead of no shirt at all?

J: Why not? If I were a giraffe I would always wear stripes.

H: Why does his mama have a long neck and also a cup of coffee?

J:Mama giraffes always have long necks. I also thought it would be fun to make her neck really long so it could stretch all the way across the page. I gave her coffee because most of the mamas I know (including myself) like to drink a lot of it.H: How did you get the words for the book? I think it’s because you’re so smart. [Ed. Note: I tried to explain that another person wrote them and probably emailed them to Jenny or something, but Harper figured we should go ahead and find out from the source.]
J: I wish I wrote this story! A lady named Beth Bracken wrote it.

H: Why is the back of the book different from the front? [Ed. Note: meaning the covers]

J: When the back is different than the front you get more pictures to look at.

H: Did you make the dots [on the endpaper]? Why are they different sizes?

J: I did make the dots! The giraffes have different size dots on their necks too so I wanted copy that pattern.

I asked Harper if she was sure she didn’t want to ask something like how Jenny does her illustrations. She shook her head and said, “I think she does them on a computer.”

And there you have it! Check out all of this prolific lady’s books: the complete list is on her website.

I’ll leave you with this ridiculous display of adorability:

An illustration by Jennifer A. Bell, for your squealing pleasure.

Puppets, Finger Paints, and the Jackson 5: Our Year In A Co-op Playschool.

Harper got her diploma from playschool yesterday. I arrived to pick her up a few minutes before the end of class and could hear Cyndi, their awesome teacher, calling their names to get their certificates, and I thought about how the school year was over, and how our little dudes had just completed their first school experience, and how hard we all worked to make the school happen, and how we’d talked so long ago about what we wanted it to be and then made it just that, warm and nurturing and imaginative and positive, and how they loved it so much, and what a nice group of increasingly civilized little beasts they were… I really was about to tear up – and then Kim, the mom who was the helper, popped out of the school room with some empty snack cups, a harried look on her face, and said something like, “Oh man. They are so baaaaad today.” Oh well. That’s kids for you. Just when you’re so full of the purest love, so full you think you’ll float to the ceiling and then burst, they act like total dicks and just chew on your heart for a while. It’s probably for the best. Otherwise we’d be so lovey and goony and overly permissive and we would never let them sleep.

I feel so thankful to have gotten connected with all these awesome families and kids.  And I’m so glad we did the co-op. Harper definitely was ready for something schooly, and really has thrived with the structure and socialization and color freeze dance. The half-day ended up being perfect for her, too – she’s pretty strung out after those three hours, and basically unable to deal with anyone other than Murray for a while. (Murray who has been stomping into the apartment and threatening to steal princess bandaids, by the way — what a jerk of an imaginary friend he is sometimes.)

The Best Things About Greenwood Playschool:

1)   It is the prettiest playschool in the world. I mean, if you were 3, wouldn’t you want to go to school in a lovely house with a yard full of play equipment and fluffy hydrangeas? And, ah, across the street from a cemetery? OBVIOUSLY YES.

2)   Circle time. Harper rushed home to play circle time with her cubbies every day after school for about the first four months. (Now they’re more into this psychedelic mashup of ballet, Cinderella, getting married, and Miss Spider’s tea party.) Sitting on the adorable quilted spots our host mother (that makes us sound like leeches, which we are…not?) made, fighting over the pink one, discussing various topics of great importance like the color of the week or the weather, and hearing a story? Does it get better? I ask you.

3)   If you ask the kids, the answer to that last question would be: yes, it does get better. AT SNACK TIME. These kids, several of them avowed non-eaters, get crazy with snack time. Snack time is the greatest thing ever. It’s like the toddler equivalent of going for drinks with friend; they all get happy and solicitous all the sudden. It’s funny to me now at first we marveled that they sat at the table and ate their crackers and drank water from their cups without lids. That just shows me how far they’ve come, that in September that seemed impossible. What monsters!

4)   Music. Whether it’s free time, dance time, jump-up-and-down time (an important part of the curriculum particularly in those wilder times of the first semester), or that precious color freeze dance time, these kids regularly rocked out to The Ramones and The Jackson 5.  And that is a Brooklyn playschool co-op for you right there.

5)   Cyndi. I mean, she made this school what it is: fun, playful, high energy, imaginative. Every time I was the helper I was amazed at her patience with dickish kid moves that made me immediately slip into pissed-mom-voice. She’s so good at what she does. And obviously she’s also a comic, a puppeteer, and fluent in Spanish. And she thinks of really good art projects.

Which makes me extra happy that we are rebooting for next year.  I can only assume that our experiences with Brooklyn pre-K, public schools and beyond will be just as sensitive, imaginative, nurturing, and joyful.  Rrrrrrrright?

Girls’ Night

Sometimes on the days when I work Harper and I have a girls’ night dinner. I put Ollie to bed and then Harper and I eat dinner together, complete with a candle, and ice waters for toasting. She’s a pretty good date, at least until she has a tantrum about hair-brushing. So anyway, tonight she asked me what I wrote about at the coffee shop (she is the only one who ever asks me this, by the way) and I was explaining a post I wrote about Martha Gellhorn’s favorite getaways.

Me: “She loved to travel all over the world, and then she’d write about it. So I wrote about some of her favorite place to go. She was a very cool lady who had lots of adventures.”

Harper: “…and children?”

Me: “Well actually no.”

Harper: “Oh, that’s good.”

Me: “Why?”

Harper: “I’m worried if she had lots of children they would grab her glasses. Did she wear glasses?”

Me: “No, I don’t think so.”

Harper: “Oh, ok. Well I’m still glad she didn’t have children because then I’m worried they might try to come with on all her adventures and think they were writers too.”

Me: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It Happened to Me

Harper at the Children’s Museum. (Photo somehow in LlGC ~ NLW’s Flickr photostream)

Who remembers the “It Happened to Me” column from Sassy magazine? I always wanted to contribute, but sadly, nothing ever happened to me. No abusive boyfriends, no messily divorced parents, no getting sold into slavery, UGH.

Once you’re a parent, however, there are many more opportunities for terrifying and dramatic things to happen, and/or for small things to suddenly become terrifying and dramatic.

Here’s one thing that happened. It was a few months ago, and I think my heart JUST now stopped racing from it.

Harper got lost.

At the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

For, like, five minutes.

It was just how you think something like that will happen. I was bent over putting Ollie’s shoes on, and a noisy Catholic school group of older kids swept by like a flock of geese in plaid, and when they were gone, so was Harper. My friend who I was there with and I looked at each other, looked around. “Harper?” I peeked around the corner.The looking-at-bugs-with-magnifying-glasses section? Nope. The pretend-pizza-shop? Nope. Huh.

My urge to be a calm, collected, non-freaking-out mother has me constantly quieting my brain’s urge to panic, so I stuffed Ollie into the carrier and started fast-walking around in a sort of hectic fake-calm, calling Harper’s name, looking around, garbling incomprehensible things at bystanders: “Did you see my? Dress and braids? Harper?” After a minute, my friend and I exchanged a look, and I commenced internal freakout.  I just KNEW she’d been SNATCHED BY AN EVIL CHILD-SNATCHER who would obviously pay admission to get into the Brooklyn Children’s Museum just to CAPTURE INNOCENT BABIES.

I raced to the admissions desk by the front door, and sputtered: “Child! Missing! Girl! Mine! Blond!” A young man nodded and said, “Ma’am, it’s all right, it’s only that you’ve endangered your child by blogging about how adorable she is, you fool, don’t you know that only creepos read the internet?” “Excuse me?” I said. He repeated himself: “You stay here. We will find her. This happens all the time. Don’t worry.” Then he said into his walkie-talkie, “Code 3″ (or something.) For some reason it was very reassuring to me that they had a code for this. Oh, so it’s just a thing that happens so often they can’t even be bothered to say it! That’s good!

I stood at the desk mournfully watching the door and the busy street beyond it for an excruciating 20 seconds or so. Then another employee called out, “Found her!”

And there she was: happily driving the city bus, a few feet away. “Hi Mama!” she chirped. I threw myself on her, squeezing her with crushing freakout-love, causing her to wiggle away and look at me like I was crazy. A nearby nanny I know from around the neighborhood told me she’d recognized Harper and told her to stay put until her mommy found her. I fought an urge to smother the nanny with hugs and kisses too.

Turns out, Harper was completely unaware that I considered her lost. “But I knew where you were,” she explained. “YES BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE TOO,” I said, squeezing her hands as I did for the next three days. It did make me realize this was a conversation we’d never really had: what to do if you’re lost. My friend shared what she’d heard, which was to tell your kid that if she is lost she should find a lady or a mommy to help her. In my day you were supposed to look for a policeman or someone official looking, which actually sounds ridiculous now, which is sad, but whatever.

Now whenever we are somewhere crowded I remind Harper in a strained, trying-to-sound-nice-but-really-still-freaking-out voice, that she always has to be able to see me. The other day at the botanic gardens she made a point of walking backwards while drilling my eyes with hers for a good minute before she forgot and started running after a bird. Whatever. I remind her now and then about the “find a lady” rule, and try to still not freak out about things too much, and to remind myself of how in the end, that was a pretty good way to learn that lesson — in a protected, indoor place for children, where they even have a code for it.

So here’s another thing that happened: we had a fire in our home. (I already blogged about it over at the day job blog, in a post that actually sort of had a point.) Yes, home, the home we just PURCHASED. It was pretty sweet. I’m super glad we didn’t burn the building down. The co-op board just hates when that happens. So, yeah, this ceiling fan we’d inherited (whatever, it was ugly) had stopped working, but apparently deep in its tinny guts it was still trying to work, and sort of, like, exploded? All of the sudden, flames were shooting out from the ceiling. I was kidding before when I said it was sweet. It sucked.  But again there were many “thank goodnesses.”  I was home with Ollie while Harper was at school, so she didn’t have to be freaked out by it. Again, it could have been so much worse. I was right there. I was holding Ollie. I saw it happen, was uninjured, called 911, they arrived in a split-second, there was only a bit of smoke-damage.

And on the upside, I got to answer for myself the question: what would you grab in case of a fire? Our carefully-curated “fire folder”, containing our birth certificates and wedding photo negatives and such? Nah. The kid and the dog. That’s it, not even my wallet, oof. But hey, at least I took the dog with me to freak out in the lobby while greeting the firemen with a quivering “There! Up! My kitchen! Fire!” When I told Adam the whole story he said, “Hey, you took Quimby! Nice!” with just a touch of surprise.

So anyway. Those were the scary things that happened, and you know what? Even though I’ve now been able to write this “It Happened to Me,” I think I’d rather just keep having a boring life where nothing really too bad happens. I’m a fiction writer anyway.

(Which reminds me…the last round of revisions of the novel have been turned in! So I can once again spend my evenings doing relaxing things. Like finishing moving in. Yes, it’s been two months. Shhh we’ve been busy.)