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5 Stars Silly Frilly Grandma Tillie Laurie A, Jacobs Anne Jewett Flashlight Press 32 Pages Ages: 5 and up Inside Jacket:  Sophie and Chloe are lucky that their Grandma Tillie knows how to be royally silly. To their delight, whenever Grandma Tillie babysits she seems to disappear, only to be replaced by a parade of [...]

Last year I illustrated a picture book titled, A Caring Deed For Becky for Featherweight Press. It was written by Susan Wigden.

I've spelled her name "Widgen" incorrectly at least a thousand times, but that's neither here nor there.

In any case, Susan is currently making the rounds with the book and I thought I'd post a video of a school reading she did earlier this year.

 Want a copy? Of course you do.

Get it through Amazon HERE and Barnes and Noble HERE.

By Kathy Jandric, mother of three, grandmother of 6 It was about 4:30 in the evening on a wintry December day and the temperature was 4 degrees. Often when it gets this cold in Minnesota, all we want to stay home, put some soup on the stove and keep warm. I had started a fire in [...]

I come from a long line of people who do not believe in treating children like delicate china. I am the product of generations of pragmatic, keen-witted, and sharp-tongued folk telling it like it is and expecting kids to keep up. Nowhere is this more evident than in my relationship with my paternal grandfather, John Edward Rives. This is a man who never let me win at anything just because I was young or cute or inexperienced. He always paid me the respect of holding me to the same standards he would any adult, and, even though it took years, I have an abiding appreciation for that now. I lost at cards, got my fingers routinely snapped in the elastic-pulling game, and had to improve my storytelling ability in order to keep his interest. Mine has been a bring-your-A-game grandchildhood, because there is no minor league in this family. On the other hand, I learned to walk on the stilts he made me, knew a pretty impressive adult-stumping card trick at seven, and discovered the power of the narrative from the master. I chose to read Barbara Borack’s Grandpa to Scarlett as a tribute to her paternal grandfather, who has connected with his only granddaughter on a level only they truly understand, but found myself with quavering voice and wet eyes thinking of my grandpa, now ninety-one and in a battle with time, age and illness, sitting in my grandma’s red and white kitchen telling the “hush puppy” story just one more time.

As a postscript:When I sat down at my computer to post the day's blog, I received a message that my grandfather had peacefully slipped away in the early hours of this morning. I pray (or whatever else will work) that there really is something after this and that they are together.


http://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/2683915/used/Grandpa.

http://www.lincbook.com/ap_barbara_borack.html

Shortly before Keilana was born, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses set off a firestorm of controversy over an author I had never heard of before. When he began getting death threats, the popular media aimed the spotlight on Rushdie for his fifteen minutes. I particularly remember one interview where he said that, in his family of origin, the written word was so sacred that if someone accidentally dropped a book, they had to pick it up and kiss it in remorse. That kind of commitment made a soul-deep impression on my young, pregnant self and I vowed to teach my soon-to-be child an appreciation for books. I took a whole stack of them with me to the hospital and began reading to her the moment we were alone. I read to her every day, including the day we sat in the pediatrician’s office for her two-week checkup. When I told the doctor that his staff spent our entire wait mocking me in quiet nurse-y voices, he asked me if the baby listened when I read. Defensive, I launched into a detailed description of how Keilana’s eyes would get bigger looking at the pictures and how she would sit quietly and…and... When I finished, he just said, “Well, then, it doesn’t matter what they think.” And we just kept reading. So, it touches my heart when I watch my first baby, now a beautiful woman, share Phoebe Gilman’s Grandma and the Pirates, or any of her childhood favorites, with our little caboose.


http://www.amazon.com/Grandma-Pirates-Phoebe-Gilman/dp/059043425X


http://www.phoebegilman.com/home.html

The super-duper people at Highlights For Kids commissioned me to do the illustrations for a mini-book entitled, “A Busy Day” (by Karen Thompson) for the October 20011 issue of High Five magazine. I enjoyed working on this a few months back, and now it’s in print. I will be posting samples of the story during the month of October.

To start,  below is the layout of the mini-book with my art. It’s a front and back on one page-deal which you fold to make a booklet (see illo on the second image as to how to assemble). Cool, huh?

And for those of you who like to see roughs and such, I have included the AD’s sketch with the final layout. If I recall, there were very few (if any) changes from the roughs I sent. I will include some of those later, too.  Below are the covers:

(All Images Copyright Highlights for Children, 2011)

I had fun with the style, by the way. I am playing with looser line and using washes (all digital, as usual). I really like the affect over-all and it feels easy-going. It all makes for a happy illustrator!

I spoke about those memories of Grandma, as opposed to Granny, who was Dad’s mother. Have to keep those straight, you know. I’d like to talk more about my maternal grandmother for one more day.

She was a tiny lady, who loved to shop when she had the opportunity. By the time I knew her she was already in her sixties and had triumphed over many obstacles and trials during her life. She had the soul of an artist, of a healer, and of a naturalist. Bundled within the diminutive frame resided a wicked sense of humor and a passion for professional wrestling.

Of course, the weekly broadcast of wrestling took precedence only when Perry Mason or Oral Roberts were not.

Her faith kept her going, I think, through all the lean years. In short, she was indomitable. What I learned from Grandma was reinforced by my own mother. She reflected many of her mother’s traits and strengths.

I will admit that oddities abounded around the little woman. Two massive native persimmon trees kept sentinel at the rear of her yard. In the spring, beneath those trees, grew mushrooms, morels to be exact. Those wrinkled beauties returned each year, spring and fall.

“Fall?” you ask. “Yes,” I reply. Morels aren’t known for appearing in the autumn, but hers did. The brilliant yellow buttercups would act as backdrop for them in the spring and the hickory nut bounty would accompany them in the fall. Sort of a two-fer event for the equinoxes.

She also had a passion for flowers and plants. Zinnias were her favorite annual, and she worked for years to develop a pure white zinnia. She didn’t get her project finished before she died. The ten thousand dollar prize must have gone to someone else, because not too many years ago such a flower was introduced to the public.

Grandma wanted a blue rose, as well, long before they were bred. My grandfather couldn’t find one for her and so settled for a favorite fruit tree instead. He brought her home a larger sapling peach tree. The first year it produced peaches, we were taken to see the tree. There, sprouting from the base of the tree was a blue rose; not a pale purple one, but a blue one.

At least that’s the memory of I have that event. She was ecstatic with her “miracle.” I can’t remember any other time seeing her that happy. Something precious had been validated for her that day, having to do with that rose. The rest of the adults seemed more stunned than ecstatic.

Grandma was one of those people who believed in all things being possible within nature. She could be staid, practical to a fault sometimes, and definitely opinionated, but for her things were always possible if she believed strongly enough.

She had her rules to live by and taught them with quiet modeling. If we were lucky, we got to learn those rules and emulate them within our own lives. That’s quite an accomplishment for anyone on this earth, I think.

Maggie and I visited the bees this weekend. She’s five and wants her own hive. No one ever told her that she’s supposed to be afraid.

We cleaned the hive, inspected for mites, and took out some honey frames. Her family watched proudly from a safe distance, and took this picture of Maggie pointing out a drone.

Life is good.

Erica said, on 5/7/2007 8:10:00 AM

Maggie and I visited the bees this weekend. She’s five and wants her own hive. No one ever told her that she’s supposed to be afraid.

We cleaned the hive, inspected for mites, and took out some honey frames. Her family watched proudly from a safe distance, and took this picture of Maggie pointing out a drone.

Life is good.

Erica said, on 5/9/2007 4:29:00 PM

Erica! Where ya been?
Glad you asked.

I’ve been off avenging. Specifically, I’ve been avenging the less-than-impressive webhosting capacity of my former ISP-who-shall-remain-nameless. I switched to GoDaddy recently, and spent a good amount of time cleaning everything up, updating, and migrating my databases. I also spent a good amount of time berating the salesman about GoDaddy’s stupid ads which seem to assume no women could possibly be potential customers. Can you say heteronormativity? GoDaddy sure as hell can.

Three things I learned from migrating a self-hosted WordPress site over to GoDaddy:

1. You’re going to need a static IP address if you want to get everything set up and see how the site looks before switching over your domain name. Otherwise you can’t test your WP install and that my friends is playing with fire.
2. You’re going to want to do it quickly, otherwise you will lose people’s comments and you’ll have to keep going back and re-uploading the database. So no slackin’.
3. If you are using OS X (why would you use anything else? silly monkey.), Apple’s native ftp application Fetch is actually really good at grabbing entire directories and recursing them without a lot of permissions/ok buttons to deal with.

So here’s the new site, just like the old site but with better traffic-handling ability and more prominent text-link ads. Yay!
*Thanks sponsors! My car payment thanks you! My cat thanks you! My landlord thanks you!

Erica said, on 5/10/2007 12:27:00 PM

rew sent me a Pastafarian bible. Now I can properly proselytize! Unbelievers beware!

Thanks Drew!

1. Queen Bees are expensive
2. It’s damned difficult to find a cat-sitter in Ithaca
3. Johnathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love me Yet is, so far, an absolutely perfect book
4. Tom Phillips is an artist who did a really great book painting featuring fictional books with titles stolen from Shakespeare
5. Roccapulco is a salsa club in San Francisco. I’m going next week with my friend Jake
6. The Lunch Meeting is the gold standard for interviews at eBay

Oldschool Metadata

Half of you people are still using Internet Explorer. I’m saddened. Please, for the love of all things holy: Use

Erica said, on 5/18/2007 1:06:00 PM

1. Queen Bees are expensive
2. It’s damned difficult to find a cat-sitter in Ithaca
3. Johnathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love me Yet is, so far, an absolutely perfect book
4. Tom Phillips is an artist who did a really great book painting featuring fictional books with titles stolen from Shakespeare
5. Roccapulco is a salsa club in San Francisco. I’m going next week with my friend Jake
6. The Lunch Meeting is the gold standard for interviews at eBay

Oldschool Metadata

You can randomly teleport somewhere in Second Life and end up getting juggled by a large pink elephant

Hotels in San Francisco are way cheaper than hotels in NYC. Jobs in San Francisco pay way better than jobs in NYC.

All it took for me to get my finances in shape was to get some software with a decent interface

The only cure for pregnancy-induced hypertension is childbirth (hi clay!)

My friend Josh has taken over things digital at the NYPL

Adobe CS3 will steal your soul with its compelling beauty

Google Analytics has a new interface that will steal whatever bit of your soul is leftover after Adobe gets done with you

Half of you people are still using Internet Explorer. I’m saddened. Please, for the love of all things holy: Use

Unbelievable! I actually had a few minutes last night, so I thought I'd just play around with the theme. The word "packed" made me think of going places with kids...and all of the "stuff" that goes along with them. I ended up doing something that I actually liked!



Of course, it's only a pencil sketch - no color, no polish. But, that's one of the things I like about it - I didn't take the time to get all fussy about it. So, here it is - as is. I call it "Goin' to Grandma's."

 Older men, younger women. This seems to be the norm, back in days of old when a farmer’s wife died, they took on a younger wife because they were able bodied and child bearing. The younger women could do what we now call “Multi-Tasking”. They would cook, clean, take care of the house, the garden, the yard, the animals, have children and raise them, and service their husband. For many years this was nothing that was frowned upon. Men did this thing all of the time for the benefit of the family. Children were taught to do everything both in and out of the farm. The more children you had, the more help you had. Large families were encouraged.

But Now…

 Old man step aside…Mama wants fresh meat!!! Older women have ditched their “Golf Bags” for the caddies. Gone are the days where older women would rather rock their grand kids to sleep in their rocking chairs. Now they want to go out with their grand kids and hang out with rockers. Gone are the days of identifying a grandma by her polyester pants and tissue tucked sweaters. Grandmas are sporting fake breast and bikinis. Now a days young women can’t hold a candle to grandma.

 This causes a problem. If grandma and grandpa aren’t together anymore, what do they do. Well, grandma’s on the prowl. She’s not looking for money because if she is smart, she got it in the divorce. She’s not looking to marry because if she does that, the money stops. She doesn’t want another old man, that’s why she divorced the one she had. She is looking for a fresh kill. A man who is young, dumb and full of…a head of hair. Grandma knows the game. She is wise and cunning. She knows that all young men want to do is find them a piece, do their business, and move onto the next. Frankly, that’s all grandma’s looking for too. She’s not interested in making breakfast in the morning, she’s done that for too many years. She does’t want to go through the trouble of changing her last name, she earned the one she’s got. She is interested in the thought of love, but only if he doesn’t have his heart set on shacking up in the house she got in the divorce. Grandmas are tired of being put out to pasture, but now that they own the farm they want to run around naked in the freaking corn field.a

Image via Wikipedia

nt a

 Older men, younger women. This seems to be the norm, back in days of old when a farmer’s wife died, they took on a younger wife because they were able bodied and child bearing. The younger women could do what we now call “Multi-Tasking”. They would cook, clean, take care of the house, the garden, the yard, the animals, have children and raise them, and service their husband. For many years this was nothing that was frowned upon. Men did this thing all of the time for the benefit of the family. Children were taught to do everything both in and out of the farm. The more children you had, the more help you had. Large families were encouraged.

But Now…

 Old man step aside…Mama wants fresh meat!!! Older women have ditched their “Golf Bags” for the caddies. Gone are the days where older women would rather rock their grand kids to sleep in their rocking chairs. Now they want to go out with their grand kids and hang out with rockers. Gone are the days of identifying a grandma by her polyester pants and tissue tucked sweaters. Grandmas are sporting fake breast and bikinis. Now a days young women can’t hold a candle to grandma.

 This causes a problem. If grandma and grandpa aren’t together anymore, what do they do. Well, grandma’s on the prowl. She’s not looking for money because if she is smart, she got it in the divorce. She’s not looking to marry because if she does that, the money stops. She doesn’t want another old man, that’s why she divorced the one she had. She is looking for a fresh kill. A man who is young, dumb and full of…a head of hair. Grandma knows the game. She is wise and cunning. She knows that all young men want to do is find them a piece, do their business, and move onto the next. Frankly, that’s all grandma’s looking for too. She’s not interested in making breakfast in the morning, she’s done that for too many years. She does’t want to go through the trouble of changing her last name, she earned the one she’s got. She is interested in the thought of love, but only if he doesn’t have his heart set on shacking up in the house she got in the divorce. Grandmas are tired of being put out to pasture, but now that they own the farm they want to run around naked in the freaking corn field.a

Image via Wikipedia

nt a