As I wrote this post in my head, I kept thinking of a chicken with her head cut off. When I searched for pictures that went along with that image, they were pretty gross so you’ll just have to imagine and be satisfied with the crazy chicken instead.

I am so incredibly overwhelmed right now that I look like a… well, you know.  I took on many small commitments that have all blended together into super duper crazy. Case in point… I couldn’t find our land line phone tonight and it was in my purse. I have been trying to figure out what to get off my plate and I’m really struggling. I’m struggling because I like all that I am doing. Work is fascinating. I am organizing events at church on the topic of education justice, a cause this is dearly important to me. And I am volunteering at the girl’s school all the time. I am a library aide, an art aide, an art docent, a mystery reader. Tomorrow I will be in Caroline’s class to help the kids build terrariums to house spiders. You get the idea.

This morning I was reminded of why I may just have to be the crazy chicken for a bit longer.

When I told Caroline I would be with her class for art today she replied, “Just don’t do anything.”

When I looked a bit confused she said, “You know, anything embarrassing.”

I had been warned that this would happen. That the girls would not want me in their classrooms anymore. I found this difficult to imagine. It now appears that the days of embarrassment are upon me.

So thank goodness I am running around like that chicken now while I still can. I’m pretty sure the only thing worse than a chicken with her head cut off is an embarrassing chicken…

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I love seeing new e-mails appear in my inbox from Choice Literacy.

To quote their website,

Choice Literacy is dedicated to providing innovative, high-quality resources for K-12 literacy leaders. Founded in 2006, the website has grown to include over 700 professionally produced and edited video and print features from top educators in the field, as well as promising new voices.

We believe literacy change that endures comes from within schools. We honor and support local literacy leaders by supplying them with the practical resources they need to mentor colleagues, design demonstration classrooms, lead study groups, and assess literacy learning.

Professionally, I go the website frequently to watch videos of techniques I might introduce to teachers or to listen to podcasts by experts in the world of literacy. As a mom, I often check out articles that include book lists of the latest and greatest.

Each weekly e-mail from Choice Literacy contains a word of wisdom from their senior editor, Heather Rader. I have included this week’s e-mail below…

My daughter Ahna and I have a favorite ritual on the mornings she takes a bath.  She bathes in a room we’ve nicknamed the “Frog” bathroom, and it can be chilly in the morning.  Years ago I started popping a towel in the dryer a few minutes before she got out so it was extra warm.

 When I hear “Mommmm . . .,” I grab the towel, help her out, and dry her off with a heated hug. 

 One morning last year I didn’t put the towel in the dryer and told her to use one off the rack.  She was obviously distraught as she ate her breakfast.  That afternoon she told me she’d been cold all day in first grade.

“I really think that towel in the morning makes a difference,” she explained.

 I’m sure she’s right.  That warm towel is connected to her well-being.  Ahna is a good role model for me.  I’m tempted this time of year to cut back on my exercise, movie watching, and pleasure reading time: the ingredients of my joy.  There are many things on my task list, and they all deserve my focused time and attention. 

 In the past when I’ve decreased my joy ingredients, perhaps I’ve started out completing more tasks, but I ended up unbalanced and wondering where my groove went.  Just like the towel in the dryer, I pay attention to those things that bring me joy and try to do more of them, not less, when things get busy.  What’s your towel in the dryer? What fuels the best version of you?

I shared this story with a group of teachers today and asked them to reflect on their towel. What was missing in their lives. I did this after reading surveys I had asked them to take during one of our first meetings. On these surveys, many teachers reported that they didn’t have a favorite author, didn’t know their preferred genre and couldn’t name a favorite book. Almost all the teachers told me that they just didn’t have time to read for pleasure.

I know that with full time work and full time families, reality sets in and there are only twenty four hours in the day. But… I have made it my mission to get this group reading again. To understand that as the literacy leaders in their classrooms, they have to remember what it means to be a reader. As the literacy leaders in their rooms, they have to come in on a Monday morning and tell their kids how they finished an entire book over the weekend because they just couldn’t put it down. They have to be able to talk with their kids about how they choose the titles they read. They have to be able to discuss when to persevere through a tough book and when to decide that enough is enough.

In order to do all of this, you have to read.

So, here’s to your ‘towel in the dryer’ being a good book.

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When I give presentations to parents, I talk a lot about how a love of reading is caught not taught. If we are telling our children how important it is read while sitting in front of the tv it’s just not going to work.

Inevitably, I will have a mom who hopes that I will side with  her in a marital disagreement. The question will go something like this, “Yeah! I tell my husband he needs to read more books. The kids think he only reads newspapers and magazines. They’re not going to see him as a reader, right?”

Wrong.

And it’s super important that they see him reading his newspapers and magazines. If the girls relied only on me, they would think that newspapers and magazines were things that sat on the living room table until I got sick of looking at them. I really only seem to make time to read books. And the internet, of course. But it is so, so important that children learn the importance of other mediums for reading.

Thanks to Rob, Caroline now sneaks out in to the dark, bare footed to collect the newspaper. I won’t let her on-line in the morning, so how else is she going to get her sports scores!

 

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How did I miss this guy? Bob Shea is my new favorite author and now that I’ve found him, he’s showing  up all over the place. He has a funny clip going around on Facebook and one of my favorite kidlit bloggers, Jules of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, not only wrote about him this weekend but hosted a session with him at The Southern Festival of Books.

Katherine checked out Oh, Daddy! from the school library on Friday leading to a weekend full of Bob Shea fun. I had passed on Shea’s books like Dinosaur vs. Bedtime and Dinosaur vs. the Potty thinking they would be too young for the girls. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. The stories are just the right type of funny for Katherine and they are Read Together Books!

Each time I read (and there were many requests for ‘One more time!’), Katherine became more familiar with the repetitive lines in the story and after a few readings she was taking over the parts that became ‘hers.’ And with each reading, more and more parts became ‘hers.’ Now she asks to read Oh, Daddy! all by herself. While she still can’t tackle all the text, as is often the case with Read Together Books, her understanding of many of the words multiplied significantly with each reading and she has a great sense of accomplishment.

Today I went to our public library and checked out all the Shea books I could find. Tonight we have Big Plans  to tackle a Dinosaur. I think we are going to win… ROAR!

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I had to buy two birthday party gifts today so I headed off to my favorite children’s book store. As soon as I walked in, I knew I would be walking out with more than my two gifts. Sometimes my will power can be pretty strong and I am able to leave only with what I have come for but not when Sally is there. And Sally was there today. Sally’s recommendations are always great and I know if we start talking about books, I will end up buying one (or more!).

Today Sally asked me if I had read Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu. When I answered in the negative, she said, “Oh, ok.” but what her voice really said was, “What!!?? You call yourself a literacy consultant, a lover of children’s literature and you haven’t read Breadcrumbs!!!”

Having only just begun and stumbled upon a passage like this,

People were always doing this sort of thing to Hazel. Nobody could accept the fact that she did not want to hear about gaseous balls and layers of atmosphere and refracted light and tiny building blocks of life. The truth of things was always much more mundane that what she could imagine, and she did not understand why people always wanted to replace the marvelous things in her head with this miserable heap of you’re-a-fifth grader-now facts.

I think I understand why Sally was so appalled.

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“One of my reading memories was when I read to my sister for the first time. I remember I read to my sister after breakfast one morning. I read to myself many times before, but this was the first time I had read to someone else. I was shivering with excitement. I don’t remember what the book was called.”

I think I am shivering with excitement too… I love that Caroline’s favorite reading memory is sharing books with her sister. Because I truly believe that sharing our love of reading is what it’s all about…

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I feel so lucky to have had a family that read to me.

I can still hear my mother reading the poetry of  A.A. Milne and I can picture this cover

 

of the World of Christopher Robin: The Complete When We Were Very  Young and Now We Are Six. The sounds of “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree” play in my mind any time I meet a person named James and I can’t put butter on bread without thinking of the King’s Breakfast.

And then there are the Dutch Twins

who my grandmother brought to life as she read the story again and again.

And how fortunate I was to not only have strong women readers in my life but always my father. Not a reader himself until much later in his life, he read and read and read to me. When I think of the Little House series,

 I think of my father.

And now my girls too are blessed to have not only women readers in their lives but also their dad.

How lucky we are…

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Every other week I drive Katherine and three other five year olds from their pre-school enrichment program to kindergarten. Today I was reminded of why this is a good use of my time.

Overheard:

Boy #1: “Girls can’t marry girls.”

Girl #2: “Yes they can. Some girls marry other girls.”

Girl #3: “It’s true. My mommy said so.”

And Girl #4 (a.k.a. Katherine): “But you can’t marry anyone in your family.”

And that’s my lesson learned for today…

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I love it when life itself teaches you a lesson.

I typically run the same route every morning. And I almost always see the same man walking his terrier. I always wave and say hello despite getting very little to no response in return. The other day, I had had it with my usual run. I was tired of seeing the same houses, same people, same landmarks. I was feeling off and knew that without some new distractions the rest of my run would not be fun.

So I turned right where I usually go straight. And as I rounded the corner of this new street, I saw the man with his terrier. Before I could even say hello, he looked me in the eye and happily said, “A different route today? ” as if we were the best of friends who chatted all the time.

A new route and a new attitude. May I always remember the benefits of straying from the path every now and then…

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