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Blake is so sexy. LOL

Bring on the girls!

Filed under: Photos, {this moment}

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Yes, I signed up again.  I like events and challenges--more than I like competition but also more than I dislike competition. I also rather enjoy being called an "authlete."

I received my word in the Think, Kid, Think March Madness Children's Poetry Tournament on Monday evening (our last and let's hope LAST snow day) and then completely forgot about it all day Tuesday.  I had a rough draft in mind by Tuesday night but forgot to send it in by the deadline (that'll cost me some late penalty votes!); I pulled it all together fast on Wednesday night and sent it in, and then realized I used the wrong form of the word.  Somehow I am not disqualified....thank goodness.

Now it's up for voting through 4pm on Friday--but it will be tough for you Poetry Friday people, because my "opponent" is fellow PF'er and teacher Linda Baie (who, curiously, also wrote a funny dialogue between mother and son.  How does that happen?).

And here is my poem, in its rushed and raggedy glory...
*****************************************

 
Enjoy the hijinks of Poetry Friday with Julie at The Drift Record.

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The One series continues with a debut author.When I tell you that this debut author is my wife, I say it from the vantage of a blessed and fortunate man. Not only does she support me in my writing, I suddenly discover this new side of her. What she reveals in her story, Questions, in some ways is new to me too. We are coming up on our fourteenth anniversary and now I get this glimpse of a person filled with faith and enchanted by the simple magic around her. It truly is my privilege to present this new voice to you.

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Put first things first and take a writing/blogging sabbatical for a couple of months.

New Year's Note to Self, long version:
Yes, Heidi, you are a poet & teacher who practices her arts blah blah blah, but you are also a parent--the parent of a kid who has distinct executive function challenges that keep getting more pronounced as life gets more complex.  But just like you told said kid, when you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, you don't sit back and say, "Oh, these things are hard for me so don't expect me to do them well."

Instead, top to bottom ed/psych testing is an opportunity for everyone to practice using their strengths to develop their weaknesses.  Right?  So you the parent need to model this.

Weakness:  responding flexibly when things don't go smoothly, efficiently and according to schedule.
Strengths: "goal-directed persistence,"  organizational and time-management skills.

You the parent need to temporarily clear the decks and free up some time and attention to focus on this child who needs extra frontal lobe in order to cope with the demands of 4th grade.  If you keep doing everything you're doing all at once, there's no frontal lobe to spare for him. 

The poetry will still be there in 60 days. (Heck, it holed up and hibernated circa 1985 and then popped out full of spring sap 15 years later.  Not to worry.).  But two months is a long time in the life of a 10-year-old who needs more patient reminders and less frantic screeching about missing homework and undone chores.

So, give it two months and see where the family gets.  Check back in around March 1.  "Everything will be all right in the end.  If it's not all right, it's not the end."

Love,
Heidi

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I'm so behind blogging...so much to do, so much to say.


I have more pictures to post of my visit to Crestview and Indian Hills in Clive, Iowa, but I'll do that after finishing final grades....this is too time-consuming.

I do, however, want to mention that after Lois Lowry's live online booktalk through School Library Journal, I quickly ordered Gathering Blue (which I had started and never finished), Messenger, and her latest novel in the series, Son. 

Image lifted from Amazon, obviously:

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know these four books were a series. Not having gotten far enough in Gathering Blue to see the connections (which were sort of magically aha-inspiring when I got there), I didn't know that an answer existed in the universe as to what happened to Jonas and Gabe at the end of The Giver, which I've read many times. I love that book so much, I even required it a few times when I taught Humanities Critical Thinking at SCC, in hopes that the idea of treasuring knowledge and learning might sink in.

So, in between grading and the frantic pace of December in a college, I did plow through the last three books. Lois Lowry is a master of character and what I would call magical realism. She creates a dystopian world but makes the characters so heroic and human, even with their gifts, that I couldn't put down any of the books.

Son was truly a crowning end to the series. It's an epic struggle of good-heartedness against controlling society and against evil (is there a difference?). In the Ceremony of "Twelves"--the ceremony where Jonas was named "Receiver" from the "Giver," Claire is named "Birthmother." Birthmothers' job is reminiscent of "Handmaid's Tale" by Maraget Atwood. When something goes terribly wrong with the birth, Claire is deemed unfit for her position in the community and cast out of the birthmothers' dwelling. In a new position, no one remembers to give her the daily pill that eradicates emotion and desire. Hence, she longs for the son she's never seen. The longing leads her on a quest that reaches the edge of the Community and beyond.  Gripping, chilling, delightful, tragic, and heart-warming. Worth every second of reading.

The novel is richer if you've read the whole series--or at least The Giver, but it's a stand-alone story if you haven't.

I wished for just a little more conflict toward the end of the book, even though the tension all the way through made me want to yell the truths at the characters (the only book in the series where dramatic irony pulls us along--we know much more than the characters in this story). So the wish for more conflict wasn't due to a lack of it in the book. It's just that the final "battle" seemed almost too easy...I wanted it to demand just a little more...but who am I to be in the least bit critical of a master storyteller like Lois Lowry????  The book was masterful, powerful, horrifying and wonderful.

Any fan of The Giver should read the entire series.

I think I admire her so much, and love her characters and stories so much that she may have moved up onto my pedestal with Harper Lee and Barbara Kingsolver Dennis LeHayne and Marguerite Henry and Lois Lenski and Carol Ryrie Brink and Mary Calhoun and Astrid Lindgren and Sarah Pennypacker: enduring, forever-favorite writers of stories I love.

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Every year at our congregation there's a holiday party between the two services, which offers kids the chance to make cards for sick kids, donate mittens to the mitten tree, roll up little goodies in crepe paper streamers that become Joy Balls intended for parents' stockings.  But you know what they head for first, don't you?  It's the graham cracker "gingerbread" house station, which gets its own whole room.

Both kids took quite a bit of time and effort over theirs this year (Duncan's being thatched with red licorice whips and then further shingled with brown M&Ms. There has been a lot of damaging weather this year and you just can't be too careful in a time of climate change), and on the way home in the car ("MOM!  Would you mind driving a little more carefully!") they commented on the less designed, less elegant approach of some fellow architects. 

"Most of them end up looking like sheds more than houses!"

***************************


all you did.
gumdropsskittlescandycanes--
your eyes say “Rush me to Insane.”

Heidi Mordhorst 2012
DRAFT


Postscript:  Duncan pronounces this "the best thing you've written in a long time.  It rhymes and it tells the ideas in a way I can comprehend!"  I guess my campaign in defense of sensitive free verse for children is not over.

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The book is arriving soon. Really soon. Before you know it, I'll be asking you to fork over some of your hard earned cash to read it. 


Until then, here's some free stuff.

16. TEMAZCAL 
   The heat was sweltering. The summer had been particularly rough and dry, and altogether uncomfortable. This was an angry heat, tailor-made for the suffering of those forced to live through it. In the backyard of the Jarvis family, tucked safely beneath the shade of a thick-trunked Oak Tree, sat the house of the family dog, Mr. Button. Built when Button was a pup, the years were noticeably rough on the modest dwelling. The rain had warped its walls and rusted the nails holding them perilously in place. Once a crisp, almost blinding shade of white, the paint had been peeling away for quite some time, exposing the worn and damaged wood beneath in softball sized clumps of pure ugly. The roof was little more than ragged jumble of partially rotted materials, and the likelihood of the structure's collapse grew substantially with every passing day. So pathetic was this shell of a once proud doghouse that Mr. Button had taken to lying outside rather than in. Even he was capable of understanding it was a disaster waiting to happen. 
   Despite the heat and the ever-present fear of being buried beneath a heap of rotted wood, jagged sheet metal and copper colored nail chips, eight year old Tommy Jarvis had been sitting cross-legged inside the funky-smelling piece of construction for hours. His hair was soaked with perspiration, his clothes drenched so thoroughly they could literally be ringed out. The dirt beneath him transformed into a moist, muddy-wet stew of yellow-tinted sweat and soil that smelled as bad as it looked. His throat was dry and his lips cracked to the point that that act of running his tongue across their surface no longer accomplished anything at all. 
   Despite his aching bones, and the fact that his vision had begun to blur, young Tommy had no intentions of leaving. 
   He was determined to remain exactly where he was. He wanted to sit there, and stay there, and keep himself angry, because anger was what he was feeling, and because it was all he wanted to feel. Would it have been possible, Tommy might have sat in that exact spot forever, until his skin peeled away, caught the breeze and fluttered off, until his bones turned to dust and became indiscernible from the ground beneath. 

0 Comments on ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS SAMPLE CHAPTER! as of 1/1/1900

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Those zebras are going to have to wait yet another week, because suddenly, after 20 years and two children together, my darling and I decided to tie the knot --you know, officially and publicly, with a license--because who knows how long same-sex marriage will stay legal in D.C., and who knows how long until it's legal in Maryland?  So the big day will take place down in the big city and the ceremony has been hastily cobbled together this week around the theme of  "unconventional"--best expressed by our 8-year-old son's decision to wear a black tuxedo, accessorized with a sombrero.  Really.


Here are words I find appropriate on such a momentous little occasion.  I just read that e. e. cummings was criticized for his failure to grow as a poet, and one reviewer called him "a case of arrested development."  But I'm with Edward Estlin: I say that keeping that beginner's wonder at "the root of the root and the bud of the bud" through decades is what grows the tree called life [called love] so sky high.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
.............................................i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e. cummings


Visit Kate for more poetry love at Book Aunt, and think of the Spice Girls (spouse girl + spouse girl = Spice Girls) on Saturday morning!

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I have taught sizeable classes of 2nd graders, more than once, and I don't remember it being as challenging as parenting a single 2nd-grade boy. I have carefully avoided teaching a class of 6th graders, or any group of kids older than 11--once they grow underarm hair my sense of control erodes quickly--so I was not prepared for the joy of parenting a single 6th-grade girl.

We have on our fridge a set of children's poetry magnets which usually say things like "did we eat green and blue monkey dog cheese?" (The set does not include punctuation, so the question mark there is my addition.) That 6th-grade girl, who lives daily in her sense that things are changing, that childhood fleets away, left the following on the fridge this week. Up high.

ask mom
by dmmg, age 11

will she shine

are books alive

is this good

where is my home

do flowers sing in water

are sundowns too fast

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My son is 8 and although he knows a lot about the world, I'm sometimes surprised at what I assume he knows and doesn't. We had another 2" of snow overnight on Tuesday and therefore (somewhat absurdly) a 2-hour delay on Wednesday, so we had time to gear up and head out to the bus stop half-an-hour early. It wasn't great snowball snow--fine and flaky and extra-sparkly in the sun--so we found other ways to amuse ourselves, like shaking snow off branches (and is there anything more beautiful than dark branches frosted in sparkling snow against a blue, blue sky?) .

"Look at all the buds," I said. "They know spring will come again even though it doesn't feel like it now." I bothered to say it out loud because this knowledge added to my hopeful, sunny, fresh-air feeling. Duncan looked up and said, "What buds?" You know, like he'd never heard of buds. I pointed out the little textured teardrops at the end of each twig on the--actually I don't even know what kind of tree we were standing under. "Each of those is a tiny beginning of a leaf, just waiting for the weather to warm up." "Really? Cool," he replied, and went to jump daringly into the snow from a wall which is rumored to contain a snakehole.

There was time when I eschewed exclamation marks as a sign of weak writing in need of bolstering by flashy punctuation. Frank O'Hara changed my mind about that (and has inspired many others), and see how WCW uses one surprisingly! in this otherwise softspoken poem. I think it renders perfectly the feeling we have when we can cross something big off our to-do list, relax and store up wisdom. Hm. I miss that feeling...

Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Enjoy Poetry Friday today with Laura Purdie Salas at Writing the World for Kids--and congratulations indeed to Joyce Sidman for her Newbery Honor medal--it'll look great on the cover of Dark Emperor. Go Poetry!

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Last Friday I was fortunate to take part in an event sponsored by Kappa Kappa Gamma, the sorority I belonged to at Duke. We visited K through 1 kids in the after school program at the George Washington Carver Center in Norwalk, and gave them books to keep of their very own from the organization so near and dear to all of our hearts, Reading is Fundamental. (BTW, if you haven't responded to RIF's latest action alert, please do so NOW by clicking here.

From Blogpics

Dr. Susan Weinberger, (aka "Dr. Mentor") a former assistant Superintendent of Schools in Norwalk and founder of the Mentor Consulting Group read the featured book aloud in such an engaging way - she had the kids wagging their fingers and responding to the book's signature line with brio.




Before rewarding them with cupcakes, we did a craft. I'd suggested something that we have them make their own books, which they could write a few reasons why they loved someone special in their life and give it to them as a gift. My kids had done something like that for me at their age in school, and I still treasure those books - especially the observations like: "My mom is always reading books"and "My mom makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the whole world." :-)

As I moved around the room helping some of the kids to write, what became heartrendingly apparent were the stories between the lines of what I was writing. The stories where Mom and Dad didn't really figure - but thankfully there was an aunt or a grandparent who was a steady figure for the child. I wanted to hug all these kids but I also wanted to thank the person they were having me write to for being there for them.

Well, last night for Hanukkah, my son gave us a book of his own. I got all verklempt reading it, because it was about this:



Son is clearly thinking about the creature comforts that will be lacking in a college dorm, because the first few things were:




See - everyone thought that when I put chauffeur in my author bio it was a joke. They were WRONG!!!
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I’ve spent the last few weeks trekking around various institutions of higher learning with my first-born in what my friend Jody half-jokingly calls “The College Death March.” It’s been quite the eye-opener, and not just from the sticker shock when you get to the “annual costs” part of the info sessions.

One thing I really can’t get over is the food. Gone are the days of “mystery meat” and “turkey tetrazzini” (or as we called it, “turkey tetrachloride”). Nope, it’s gotten to the point where I’m worried my son is going to choose where to spend the next four years solely based on the availability of sushi. Pretty much every college we went to offered not just vegetarian options, but vegan, gluten-free & kosher. And heaven forbid the little darlings should be without their lattes and macchiatos. Back in my day we had those big urns of coffee and teabags that you had to leave to steep for half an hour before they even turned the water brown. But since the annual tuition these days is what my parents and I paid for an entire four-year stint, I guess colleges have to provide a whole lotta lattes to provide a sense of value.

The technology is another thing that brings home just how long it’s been since my days in the ivory towers of academia. Forget the whole “looking books up in the card catalog” thing – I saw a quaint historical picture of that on a wall of one of the college libraries and wondered if they should frame me too. At one college you could look up online which washers and dryers were free and the machine would text you when your load was finished. When I was in college we went to this place called Suds, or “Wash and Slosh” as it was affectionately known, where you could do your laundry and drink beer at the same time.

Another college actually offered a laundry service. “OMG!” I exclaimed to another mom. “How spoiled can these kids be?” Then Jewish Mother brain kicks in: Well, at least that way I’d know he’d have clean socks and underwear. Sensible Mother Brain: The kid is gonna be 18. He’s going to COLLEGE. It’s about time he learns to do his own freaking laundry!

Lest we be concerned that all work and no play will make our Jack or Jill a dull kid (do parents actually worry about that when they’re paying so much in tuition?) kids have clubs we never dreamed of available. I’m fascinated by the proliferation of a cappella groups on college campuses. Every college tour emphasized the number of such groups as if it were a major selling point for the school. The Glee effect?

As big Harry Potter fans, after visiting a few schools we also started to ask the “Quidditch Team” question. Yes, dear Muggles, there’s now a rapidly growing International Quidditch Association complete with a Quidditch World Cup, which will held in New York this November 13-14. Call me a geek, but I am so there. Who knows, if they’d had a Quidditch Team when I was in high school, I might have ended up a jock. That’s if running up and down a field with a broomstick between your legs qualifies you for jockdom.

But the one that had me really bemused was “The Vagina Club”. As I tweeted along with a picture of it on the list of college clubs, “They definitely didn’t have this when I was in college.” I wondered what one did at such a club. Was it co-ed? The mind boggled. Further research revealed that the club had the noble purpose of educating about violence against women and “to work to reclaim the words that have been made taboo or insulting.”

After visiting nine schools, I still have so many questions. Do the tour guides have to take lessons in walking backwards? Am I ever going to get more feedback about our college visits from my son than a shoulder shrug and “I dunno”?

But most of all I wonder what happened to my little boy. And I ask myself if I’ve given my son the kind of upbringing so that he when

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My preference is usually for "uplifting" poetry, that which (along with everything it does for cognition and imagination by sounding good to your ears and feeling good in your mouth) leaves me with a reverberating sense of wonder at the goodnesses of this world, kind of like the ones I posted back in January that suggested some animal spirituality.

I'm having trouble therefore understanding why the poem below keeps me coming back to it. I received it courtesy of The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day service. The pain barely contained in it is enormous and frightening and wonderful.

Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72
by Charles Harper Webb

May there be an afterlife.

May you meet him there, the same age as you.
May the meeting take place in a small, locked room.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves tipped with razor-
blades and acid.
May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands.
May the glass in his car window, which you smashed as he sat stopped
at a red light, spike the rifle butt, and the concrete on which you'll
fall.

May the needles the doctors used to close his eye, stab your pupils
every time you hit the wall and then the floor, which will be often.
May my father let you cower for a while, whimpering, "Please don't
shoot me. Please."
May he laugh, unload your gun, toss it away;
Then may he take you with bare hands.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail
and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw....

Take a deep breath and read the complete poem here. Poetry Friday is hosted today by Breanne at Language, Literacy, Love.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy left me devastated and depressed, but in a way that was acceptable. It was a horror story of what may come without the creepy crawlies and bogeymen.

I had the pleasure (?) to read this story not knowing a single thing about it. I had read no synopsis, nor had I heard anything specific about it from any friends or colleagues. I had simply heard of it often enough to know it was a worthy read.

And boy, was it! At first it seemed to move at a slow pace, but I was intrigued by the language and style of it. I had never read anything written quite like this before. McCarthy's lack of quotation marks and non-use of names had me reading whenever I got a chance. I couldn't put it down. Literally. I finished a good chunk of it in the first sitting and I was itching to pick it up again and disappointed each night when I couldn't keep myself awake long enough to read more.

The horrors in the book weren't so much horrifying as chilling. The "bad guys" were never explained in any manner besides being bad guys. The good guys did some gruesome things, but never as bad as the bad guys. The good guys did what they had to in order to get by, but the bad guys did terrible things to children and anything that crossed their paths. Or so it would seem from the brief conversations between the man and the son. No explanation was ever given for why the world was the way it was. No explanation of why the good guys who carried the fire were going down south except for the fact they wanted to keep warm. Not even any real explanation as to when this apocalypse came to be.

Lately I seem to have fallen into a rut of reading books that are depressing. I've read books from the minds of serial killers, first time killers, people trying to escape Big Brother, and others that left me feeling down-right depressed. This book trumped all those. It addressed issues I never would have thought of on my own. What would you do if you had a child in a time where there was no food or shelter for anyone? Where the bad guys were constantly after you? Where there was no break from the cold? Where the life you once knew would never be again? Where you had stories you could share from your childhood with your child but he would never understand such happiness and ease? What would anyone do? Would you be a good guy? Or a bad guy?

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Poetry immersion continued this week with more children's choices: "Nightmare," a spider poem from Hey There, Stink Bug! by Leslie Bulion, chosen by Christopher; Sophia's selection "I Know Someone" by Michael Rosen collected in My Song Is Beautiful; and Kate's choice of "Violets, Daffodils" by Elizabeth Coatsworth from a lovely large-format collection that I'll get back to you on. Rafael chose "Schools Get Hungry Too" from Kalli Dakos's The Bug in Teacher's Coffee which I'll be going back to when we talk about voice, and yesterday Ella picked "Monday's child is fair of face" collected in The Barefoot Book of Rhymes Around the Year, which I've owned since my years teaching in London. We all enjoyed coming back to this one which popped up in our read-aloud Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, a classic English series by Catherine Storr which is not well-known here but very worth tracking down.

Meanwhile, there's some poetry action going on in my son's own first-grade classroom and as a result I enjoyed a peak moment this week: close to an hour snuggled in bed on a rainy evening with my two children as we all simultaneously wrote color poems following a form that Little D had used in class--he in a brand-new writing notebook, I in my umpteenth writing notebook, and Bigger D on her laptop (when did she learn to type so fast?). This is the one he brought home from school, specially copied out for Mommy the poet.

Black and Me

Black is the deep black night and Great Ape's
pound

Black is a great wolf's howl

black is a spider creeping

black looks like a slick fur coat

black sounds like an echo in a neverending
hole

black smells like smoky black coal

black feels like the threatening black spikes on a
steel gate

black tastes like the smoky taste of smoked
salmon

black makes me feel brave and swift

black is an old ghost in a tavern

~Duncan, age 7

Much later I realized I had missed Glee....like that mattered.

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I was finally able to finish this one up last week. Overall, I don't hate it. Is it the best in the series? Naw. Is it the worst, Naw. It's decent, and decent is good enough for me at the moment.

It was sort of an uneventful weekend for me. The wife and I didn't really do much. I've had to take a bit of a break from writing the book in order to get some other stuff done, but hopefully I'll be able to get back to it sometime this week. I'm at a point (somewhere in the middle of the story) that has me a bit stumped. I know how the story is going to end, but I've written myself into a bit of a corner and I'm having trouble getting over a hump. I had hoped that taking some time away from it would help me sort things out in my head, but it really hasn't worked.

Not exactly the most well thought out plan, I know.

I saw a really good movie called "Son of Rambow" over the weekend. A really sweet little story, well directed, funny, had everything really. It didn't change my life or anything, but without a doubt it was a good flick.

Steve~

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My first son was born on Valentines Day and so this day is one of a kind and very special for me. He has his own home now so I called him to wish him a happy birthday much earlier than I normally would. I knew he was not awake and had every intention of leaving him a voicemail. I was quite silly in my message and I told him that prior to his birth he had kept me up all night and what time he was born, very early in the morning, so I thought I would call and wake him up to tell him how much I love him and I wasn't about to wait a minute longer. He said he really enjoyed my message and said he didn't know what time he was born at that time in the morning. In his baby album we even have a photo of the clock at that exact time. Funny, I guess I never told him. I think I will get the kids baby books out and share some other facts with them that they don't know surrounded the time of their births.

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Author: Gavin Curtis
Illustrator: E. B. Lewis
Published: 2001 Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
ISBN: 0689841159 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

In this touching tale, a frustrated and distant father comes to see his son through new eyes. Mark loves this one.

Tags:acceptance, ages4 8, appreciation, baseball, book, boy, children, compassion, confidence, family, father, forgiveness, music, patience, perseverence, picture, podcast, resilience, reunion, review, son, sports, tolerance, violinacceptance, ages4 8, appreciation, baseball, book, boy, children, compassion, confidence, family, father, forgiveness, music, patience, perseverence, picture, podcast, resilience, reunion, review, son, sports, tolerance, violin

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