meanwhile...back at the baby

Today I noticed that while I've been busy slugging it out with this god awful month, Ramona has grown a lot. While I gossiped and lamented with fellow grownups, let my driver's licence expire,watched my car break down, and got sick, Ramona has grown another month older.

She has begun to eat solids, she can roll around on the floor, turn herself on her tummy in her crib, and sit up without help. She grabs things with her hands! She splashes and swims in the bathtub!

She did this all with sweet, diligent practice. Calmly ignoring her crazy mom.

Friday Night Book Review - The House in the Night

So......tonight I'm going to talk about The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson (Illustrated by Beth Krommes). This picture book was the Caldecott Winner last year and the pictures are obviously wonderful, but the illustrations are not the only great thing about The House in the Night.

It's like a traditional poem with a cumulative pattern. Here is the key to the house.....in the house burns a light....In the light rests a bed.....and so on. In the beginning, Swanson simply references concrete objects, but as the pattern grows the objects are less literal and more lyrical:

On that bed waits a book.

In that book flies a bird.

In that bird breathes a song...

all about the starry dark.

Read this to your children. They will want to hear it again and again.

this lower form of UN-happiness

It was brought to my attention by my mother that this family happiness that I've been experiencing is very nice, but that in a Buddhist sense, it's a lower form of happiness. It's not as low as the happiness of excess (you know, sex, drugs, rock and roll), but it is still a happiness that is rooted in attachment. That it's not an enlightened happiness and that it exists only when things are "working".

Goodness, she's right. For about the last two weeks nothing has been working and I have not been happy. I really think it all goes back to two Fridays ago when I listened to a "demotivational" speech. By coincidence, it's all been bad since. I think I'm going to write a book called Nova and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad MONTH.

There is the matter of my expired drivers licence (gosh darn it people, I GET IT, don't write about illegal actions on the internet, I GET IT, I GET IT. But it's really taken a toll on me and it's FIXED so I'm going to talk about it), and then work being very stressful, and then me getting sick, and Ramona and the not sleeping at night thing.

I feel so far away from my family. I feel like a bad mom. I feel like a bad wife. I feel like a bad teacher. And I also feel like a big, fat whiner.

ramona and her father

I'm feeling a little under the weather. I'm not sure if this is a little thing, or something that is turning into a big thing, but this has caused me to do something I have not done in the 4 months of my daughter's life. I took the evening off.

Since my Ramona is nursing, I did that part, but I left everything else to her dad. All the playing, entertaining, holding...he even gave her a bath.

I just laid around. I rested and read. I also noticed. I noticed something that I had been suspecting for the last week or so. Ramona is a daddy's girl. My first clue was when I picked her up from daycare last week. This is usually Brian's job, but he was working late. Our daycare person had told me before that she loves seeing how happy Ramona gets when Brian shows up. So, she made a huge deal announcing my arrival...."Ramona, GUESS WHO's HERE....It's your mama!!" Despite the nice intro, I didn't get the excited face. She was very busy looking at the carpet.

This is a new development. For the first three months of her life I was IT. I was the only one that could soothe her when she was super fussy, the smell of me calmed her immediately. I found it absolutely exhausting and it was hard to hear my husband say "I think she hates me."

So, let's hear it for Ramona and her father. Thank god.

Friday Night Book Review - Not a Box!

Sometimes I get to the end of a lesson in the library and I've run out of steam, patience, or stuff to do. When I taught first grade everything was paced differently. It was like marathon running, where as teaching in the library is like sprinting.

This week during a kindergarten lesson (dear god, kindergarten teachers should get paid more than the rest of us) I just gave up. I had about 10 minutes left and was tired of doing what I had planned for them. I grabbed Not a Box by Antoinette Portis and we had a ball with that silly thing. I love books that encourage shouting, like the Pigeon books by Mo Willems. It just cracks me up when little kids get indignant about the antics of line drawn characters.

In the book, a bunny pretends to do fun stuff with a box and the kids get to shout at the book to make guesses about what the bunny is pretending.

This is how it works:

Librarian : Why are you sitting in a box?........... Oh, it's not a box?

Kids: It's a SPACESHIP!!!!

The illustrations are very plain, quite like a cardboard box. It's a fun, easy book. Now I just need to go buy Not a Stick.

when wednesdays attack!

Yesterday was a bad day. Sometimes tragically funny.....mostly just god awful.

Stupid things happened, along with lots of little tiny things that have been piling up. Also, I have a lot more work to do than time to do it and people are sad/mad at me all the time.

Rather than go on and on about all the things, I'm just going to provide a snap shot of yesterday's crap fest.

I owe T Mobile a phone. I've been absent minded and busy. No kidding, they have been calling me at least 10 times a day. It's demoralizing.


Other things happened too, things I really shouldn't write about on the internets....the whole day was not good. I was so busy holding the pieces together I didn't get to eat lunch or pump the milk!

Today wasn't that much better. It was a mess, minus the hilarity. I stayed a few minutes late today and made a Covey's Quadrant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things_First_(book)
My plan is to do one thing at a time and get it done, or not. I'm going to use the weekend to cuddle my baby and get my milk supply back up. And above all, not indulge in the drama of everything going wrong.

Artemisia Revisited

On Friday, a student came to the library to discuss the book, Paint the Wind by Pam Munoz Ryan.
http://novabradfield.blogspot.com/2009/08/horse-books-and-hormones.html
She said Artemisia was her favorite character because she was "wild and free". I told her that my heart broke when Artemisia's baby was found out in the wilderness, dead.

Then to my surprise, the student said "I didn't really get the point of the foal, and nether did my friends". This completely floored me. "What do you mean you didn't get the point of the baby horse??"
But I realized, that a 10 year old girl is wild and free too. And isn't that wonderful.