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Over at GeekMom.

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Season 3, Episode 3, over at GeekMom now.

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New comic at Into the Thicklebit today, and it’s one of my personal favorites.

And I’ve got a review of kids’ math apps at GeekMom. Fun stuff!

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The Earworms app continues to be a great vehicle for Rose and Beanie’s German studies. They can now order a beer in any German restaurant with complete confidence.

We spent much of yesterday morning cataloguing the contents of a number of monthly subscription boxes for a big GeekMom series I’m doing—services like Knoshbox, Wonder Box, BabbaBox, La Bella Box, and a bunch more. BEST JOB EVER. Rilla spent all afternoon busy with art projects from the various kids’ boxes. I developed an immediate and passionate addiction to the Just Good snack mix in the photo, thanks to Sprig Box. ::shakes fist at Sprig Box:: ::kisses Sprig Box::

Of course the best part of the day, the best part of any day in which it occurs, was the reading of Miss Suzy, which I really think my be my favorite October book. Not that it’s only an October book, but that seems to be when I think of pulling it out. (The best part of my Miss Suzy post is when the author’s granddaughter leaves a comment!)

The girls finished Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (the Wii game) yesterday—a feat years in the making. “I still remember the day the package arrived,” said Rose. “Cold and rainy and miserable. And then suddenly we were in that lovely village, throwing chickens.” (Cue gales of laughter from Bean.)

I added yet more entries to the Giant List of Book Recommendations yesterday. Still a chunk of archives to go. Boy do I talk about books a lot.

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I reviewed a Knoshbox for GeekMom. It contained bacon peanut brittle. Words can’t even.

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Over at GeekMom. Care to join us? I have many theories. ABOUT EVERYTHING.

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A GeekMom Guide to Google+ Part One—the first in a string of Google+ how-to posts I’m writing for GeekMom. First topic: circles. (They spin me right round, baby, right round.)

In future posts I’ll be tackling profiles, privacy, and how to find your friends. If you have any other questions do please pop over there and leave me a comment!

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Today at GeekMom I’m tackling Google+ profiles and privacy.

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Part Three of my GeekMom Guide to Google+ is up today! This time we tackle: how to find your friends there.

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In the meantime, please click through to GeekMom to see my photo-essay of the streets of San Diego Comic-Con. Rose and Beanie were as wowed by the outside-the-con sights as the inside-the-con spectacle.

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My review of First Second’s wonderful Nursery Rhyme Comics is up at GeekMom.

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Occurs to me I forgot to share yesterday’s GeekMom post, a follow-up to recent posts here on Bonny Glen: Why Curated Content Matters.

My Diigo share widget is working quite well. It’s a satisfactory way for me to share links with others, although it lacks the reciprocity of Reader Share; you can’t comment back on my links. But please always feel free to come here to discuss anything I’ve shared, eh?

Now what I need to know is this: where are YOU sharing curated links now that your handy Reader Share button is no more?

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Maria asked about the book Beanie was poring over in this photo. I replied in the comments, but in case you missed it: it’s the Mouse Guard role-playing game manual, a gorgeous hardcover, fully illustrated book by David Petersen, published by Archaia.

You may recall my gushing about the Mouse Guard graphic novels many times over the past several years; Petersen’s artwork is phenomenal and my children, especially Beanie, have thoroughly enjoyed the stories and have reread the books many times.

We’ve had the RPG manual for a couple of years and I know Beanie has put dozens of hours into creating characters and backstory. I’m not sure how many campaigns the kids have actually run but we’re planning to launch one soon. Beanie has been regaling me with her character’s family history…her young mouse soldier has apiary and insect-lore skills, and hails from a small village in the west.

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In other news: Big doings for GeekMom this week; we’ve moved to Wired.com! Here’s a piece I wrote earlier this week on German language apps for kids.

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I’m proud of my piece at GeekMom today: An interview with my friend Holly Miller, who battled her school district for three years to get necessary Braille instruction for her son, Hank. Hank, like my own Wonderboy, has oculocutaneous albinism—in Hank’s case, the effects on his vision are severe. He is legally blind. But the school district considers him a sighted reader and opposed teaching him Braille. Holly and her husband Jeff took the case to court—and won. I hope you’ll click through and read the article!

In a Digital Age, Braille Is Still Important | GeekMom | Wired.com.

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I have an article up over on GeekMom today, discussing the Seven Different Intelligences; what they are and how to use them to help kids connect with areas they don't have strength in.

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I am often invited to schools to do presentations or author visits, usually with the hope that meeting an author will help get kids fired up about their own writing. Whenever I do these visits, I always ask the students the same question: Who likes to write? Around 50% of the kids raise their hands. When I ask the question again, this time adding, “Who likes to write if you get to ignore all the rules,” 98% of the kids raise their hands. Hugely different response!

The following tips are designed to help remind your child—and yourself—that writing can also be a form of play; to help turn them into a story geek rather than a writing robot suffocating under too many rules. The goal is to reinforce those parts of writing that equal play in your child’s eyes and ignore the rest.

1. Let them give rein to their natural enthusiasm and sense of play by ignoring the writing rules that make it feel like work. You want them to get in touch with that intuitive part of themselves that recognizes that writing and creating can be play. Rules can always be taught later, but a sense of joy, once lost, is very hard to recapture.
2. Invest in nice quality notebooks and pens. It’s easy to dismiss the very kinesthetic pleasures of writing—the feel of a silky pen flowing across thick, smooth paper. High quality pens and notebooks can bring that extra pleasure to the act of writing. Plus it signals to them that this is a valued activity, one that can feel good physically and one that the adults in their lives value enough to indulge them in.
3. Give them permission to not show anyone their work if they so choose (even you!). Some people need absolute privacy in which to experiment and risk failure, especially children who are used to doing exceptionally well at things.
4. Do not critique their writing, even if they beg you. If they are dying for feedback, let them know what they did really well. Or better yet, ask them which part they had the most fun doing.
5. As hard as it is for us adults, do not weigh down your child's writing with your desires, dreams, and ambitions. If you child loves to write and spends hours writing, do not begin pushing them to become a writer or enter writing contests or in any way burden their writing with expectations of careers or publication. Let writing be one area of their lives that is process oriented rather than result oriented.

[Originally posted at GeekMom.com)

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As a writer, one of the things I am most fascinated by is human behavior, the choices we make, why we make them, what calls or pushes us to one action and prevents us from making another. What drives the human psyche?

Wikimedia Commons

Because the truth is, our preciously held and highly valued ability to make free, independent decisions might not be as clear-cut as we thought.
For the longest time, human actions and choices were viewed in the simplest of terms: good versus evil, right vs. wrong. To early church fathers, free will was a hotly debated topic. If all events had been predetermined by an omnipotent god, how can our wills ever be free? In medieval thought, a human’s will was very much a battleground between God vs the Arch Fiend as they wrestled for a man’s soul—and the ability to make his choices for him. During the Reformation, Martin Luther declared free will a fiction as all human actions were predestined by God.

In the 20^th century, our understanding of will took on entirely new layers and complexities with the birth of psychology. With the work of Freud and Jung, much of what had once seemed like willful bad choices or evil, now had an explanation in the intricacies of the human mind: unconscious, subconscious, repression, and transference, not  to mention the id, ego, and super ego.

But modern sciences have come to shed even more light on an already vastly complex subject. It turns out that our wills are not nearly as free—or as independently minded—as we once thought. Highly complex creatures that we are, we are subject to a host of signals, input, feedback, and influence that we never suspected.

Wikimedia Commons: Wapcaplet

We now know that we are greatly influenced by the people around us; their actions affect our actions in ways we are often not even aware of. In a famous experiment conducted by

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Now I am also a GeekMom.

I’m delighted to say I’ve been invited to contribute to one of my favorite spots on the web. (I’m sure that bonnet photo had nothing to do with it.)

I’ll be sharing my San Diego Comic-Con experience over there in July. Here’s my first post, in which I contemplate the fact that the con is less than two months away.

If you have any thoughts about what kind of Comic-Con coverage you would enjoy seeing, I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment over there!

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New post at GeekMom: Let the Speculation Begin: Pottermore Is Coming!

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In honor of my annual summer clean-up-the-art-bag endeavor, I’ve got a post up at GeekMom about how the backyard art bag came to be. Go see!

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This week at GeekMom, I take a peek at Thomas Dolby’s mysterious new online game. Go see!

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