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I come from not-quiet-during-the-movie people. We repeat lines, give encouragement, remark on interesting facts/costumes/discrepancies, and, most of all, make predictions about what we think will happen. We make other people crazy, including and especially Nick, but we would have us no other way. I was trying to trace the origin of this behavior in my own personal history and I think I found it yesterday. The hubby and I were discussing what books we enjoyed as children and what effect they had on us. A number of common titles got tossed around--by Tolkien, Ingalls Wilder, Lewis-- and then Nick asked if I had ever read the Encyclopedia Brown series and a little bell went off. I did read, and love, every page of those kid detective stories, and that is where my fascination with picking up the clues and figuring out the ending started. Not that I didn’t have the family trait before then (I know I’m at least a carrier because my son is a devout movie-talker, too), just that it found its expression once I had memorized the adventures of Encyclopedia and his friends. And now it’s second nature. If I can’t figure out the major plot points and the ending by halfway through any movie, I feel a bit frustrated. Unless they really surprise me, and then I have to give credit where credit is due. In Mary J. Fulton’s Detective Arthur in the Case of the Mysterious Stranger, Arthur gets a big surprise ending. That’s nice.

http://www.abebooks.com/9780307618818/Detective-Arthur-Case-Mysterious-Stranger-0307618811/plp

http://www.jacketflap.com/persondetail.asp?sort=date&category=3&size=25&page=1&covers=&person=107031

When Connor was little he used his diaper like pants pockets. He would tuck all sorts of things in the top and sides of his diaper, and when we changed him, they would all tumble out. The stash was varied from day to day, but by far what we would find most often were folded up pieces of paper with print on them. Pages out of magazines, ads from the Sunday paper, notes with telephone messages, and even an occasional mini-book. The kid loved paper, and his favorite piece of paper was a picture he had torn out of the newspaper featuring Sacramento Zoo’s new red panda (which I never even knew existed until I had pulled the picture out of my son’s nappy a dozen times). And from that time on, Connor has always gravitated toward non-fiction offerings that tell him stuff he didn’t know. Even at the public library or the school library when all the other kids were choosing story books and fairytales, he would flip over a book about planets or mythology or dogs. Or rocks. Lord, the child renewed one book about rocks and minerals about ten times. Teachers would often remark how thoroughly entrenched in non-fiction he was, refusing anything shelved by author’s last name. But I did learn a lot from his choices. In Chris Arvetis and Carole Palmer’s What Is An Iceberg?, we get just the facts, ma’am. Like did you know all icebergs are chipped-off pieces of glaciers? Connor probably does.

http://www.paperbackswap.com/What-Iceberg-Ask-Series/book/0026890097/

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Chris-Arvetix/author/

http://www.librarything.com/author/palmerchrisarvetisan

When I was nine, we moved from the San Fernando Valley (yep, I was a “Valley Girl”) and into Simi Valley a few miles “over the hill,” as the locals refer to the trip through the Santa Susana Pass and back. Before the move, I had, of course, experienced the wind--light breezes catching my hair, packing up and leaving the beach early to avoid the late-afternoon sand swirl, blustery winter and fall storms--or so I thought. The truth is, and any Simi-ite will back me up on this, you have never experienced a windy day until you’ve tried to walk to school down Cochran. When you’re young and thin enough, you can literally lean back with all your weight and, if the Simi Valley winds are at your back, be held up or eddied along like a falling leaf. No lie. I have always heard that “Simi” means “windy valley,” and I whole-heartedly believe it, but I’ve never investigated until now--and, darn it, if the late ethnographer Janet Cameron doesn’t claim that “Simi” is Chumash for “valley of the winds.” There are the remains of Chumash settlements at the edges of the valley, and the description sure does fit, so maybe it’s the truth. But, verified or not, it is one of those legendary references that makes so much sense, no one is motivated to change public opinion otherwise. In Janet Craig’s Windy Day, Penny gets buffeted about a bit, I admit, but she doesn’t know what real wind is.

http://www.thebackpack.com/used_childrens_library_books.htm

http://www.librarything.com/author/craigjanet

I am a picture fiend. Even before cell phones had cameras, I carried a camera around with me at all times to take hundreds of snapshots a year--and that was back in the days of film. When Keilana was eight weeks old, she had been professionally photographed six times. One of my students used my on-line picture posting to do the math, and came up with this astounding figure: In her first year of life, Scarlett had her picture taken ten thousand times. That’s one thousand times ten. I told you, I’m fixated. I thought it would get better when I got a digital camera three years ago and could use the technology to raise my standards for pictures of my kids--keeping only the perfect ones and discarding the weird face or out-off-focus shots we used to be stuck with. Nice try. I have found what happens now is that I take exponentially more pictures, but can’t discard any of them. Even if I’ve managed to catch only my child’s blurry elbow, it’s still one of my very favorite elbows ever and I want to be able to look at it whenever I choose. Besides, their elbow will never be that age again. Disturbing, isn’t it? Another consequence of my addiction is that my kids become junior photographers very early on. Connor could take professional-looking shots by four and Scarlett is catching up fast. In Gary Soto’s Snapshots from the Wedding, Maya shows off her skills. They aren’t half bad.

http://www.amazon.com/Snapshots-Wedding-Paperstar-Book-Gary/dp/0698117522

http://www.garysoto.com/bio.html

Connor came here with a short fuse and an easily-tripped emotion lever. He would be sunny as a summer day, ramp up without warning, lose it and then be irretrievable. I had to anticipate meal times, because if he came up to hungry and did not immediately have something in his mouth traveling to his belly, he could choke to death gargling something delicious and filling five seconds later and never calm down enough to swallow. Sometimes he would be so strongly in the grip of an inner emotion storm that he couldn’t express himself clearly or logically. Keilana once infuriated him to the point of sputtering fury and all he managed to blurt out was, “Cowboy head! Flomp!” Hilarious, right? But, poor baby! Even with the understanding that boys tend to lag far behind girls in emotional skills, it became increasingly obvious as he grew that Connor needed intensive training for recognizing and navigating his feelings in a healthy and productive way. And it worked pretty well. When he was still a little guy, he could pick up on subtleties of emotion in facial expressions he saw in magazines or on television better than many adults, and certainly better than most boys his age. He developed a real compassionate side that connected him to others in a sweet way. In Constance Allen’s Happy and Sad, Grouchy and Glad, the Sesame Street gang run the gamut of emotions through the book. Pshaw! Connor could do that in a commercial break.

http://www.amazon.com/Happy-Grouchy-Glad-Sesame-Street/dp/1403736081

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Constance_Allen

When it comes to not having your nice stuff completely destroyed by small people, there are basically two types of parents: the removers and the repeaters. Some parents (and I am definitely in this camp) just do not feel like fighting the natural destructo whirlwind that is children, and so removing anything you cannot bear to lose is the fallback position. For the other parents (and they are usually the type with a shoes off in the house policy), some force of nature has endowed them with the strength and patience to repeat “Don’t touch that” five million times a day. I am decidedly not one of these people. It has just always seemed simpler to me to remove the temptation in the first place. I once asked the mom of one of my childhood friends how she and her husband had managed such healthy and drama-free relationships with all of their children. She said that their parenting philosophy was pretty straight-forward: save “no” for the really big stuff--drugs, booze, sex--and have a pretty relaxed attitude about just about everything else. From what I could see, it worked like gangbusters and I have remembered that conversation for thirty years. It has gotten me through some tough parent times, but you have to continually re-evaluate and revise your methods. In Nancy White Carlstrom’s Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear, I think they should stop giving him stuff that sprays water if they want him to stay dry. It’s a no-brainer. Duh.

P.S. Happy Earth Day, Rhys! Welcome!

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Not-Get-Jesse-Bear/dp/0689810555

http://www.nancywhitecarlstrom.com/meet.html

I give my college students a religion quiz every semester, and, for a country theoretically operating on Judeo-Christian principles, I’m hard-pressed to find folks who are clear on the Christian stuff, let alone the Judeo. Despite our nearly 80% self-reported Christianity, we don’t really know a whole lot about our own religious history, so how can we possibly be open to and embracing of other worship forms? Growing up in a religious tradition that strongly discourages outside theological exploration, I was always the oddball interested in what everyone else was doing in the worship department. That may come partially from being raised with Southern roots and not being an evangelical. It may come from a natural curiosity. It could definitely be part of my contrary nature. But, at the heart of it, I think my intrigue with other religious traditions started in earnest the moment I opened my first All of a Kind Family book. Sydney Taylor’s series centers on a turn-of-the-century Jewish family, full of children, in working-class Brooklyn. They are devout, close-knit, and have little but each other. I love them and find myself reading about their adventures even as an adult. It is from them and those in their circle that I learned about the forgiveness of Yom Kippur, the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the bounty of Succos, and the sanctity of Passover. In Rabbi Francis Barry Silberg’s The Story of Chanukah, a simple board book tells a powerful story of a great people. Yevarchecha hashem. Amen.

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Chanukah-Francis-Barry-Silberg/dp/0824942256

http://www.ceebj.org/about_us/staff_list/

Six thousand tons of sunscreen wash into the ocean every year, exponentially encouraging the growth of viruses that attack coral reefs and other marine plant life. So, protecting your child’s tender parts as you romp on the beach is potentially contributing to the demise of flora half a world away. I’m not a “butterfly effect” believer--no wing flapping causes a tsunami--but a statistic like that makes you think. Call me an environmental wacko or whatever else means I care about the world I’m walking in and will leave behind, I know there is a cosmic connection between everything and everyone, and it is our job to protect it and our honor to be part of it. This notion of interconnectedness is, in large part, what led to my choice of vegetarianism. I couldn’t keep allowing other creatures to come to harm for my benefit. I thought of the direct link between actions and their impact during a moment of silence in observance of 9/11. My heart kept crying, “I’m sorry!” to all the souls of that day. Sorry for your suffering. Sorry for your death. Sorry for your life lived in chaos. Because of the ties that bind us, the human fabric tore, leaving ragged edges. But if we are united in tragedy, so, too, are we connected in joy. Debra Frasier’s On The Day You Were Born is a message to each little soul that the community of Earth anticipated their unique arrival with wonder. I like that idea.

http://www.amazon.com/Day-You-Were-Born/dp/0152579958

http://www.debrafrasier.com/

I’m surprised anyone ever chooses to be a superhero. It’s a pretty thankless job most of the time. You go around sacrificing your personal life and relationships for the sake of the public good, and, on pretty regular basis, the community turns against you, even demonizes you, for what you can’t do or be for them. Oh sure, you get super powers, but how can it possibly be worth it? Being different just gets you a one-way ticket to social ostracism, it seems. The book Stranger in a Strange Land (which is not what we read for today, incidentally), is pretty widely known, but mostly for its unconventional treatment of less-than-monogamous sex. I think those who bring only that impression away from the book are missing Robert Heinlein’s more profound message of social commentary. Michael Valentine Smith was not like anybody else, but fascinated by what is generally considered mundane. He just wanted to see and experience the simple pleasures of life, and maybe use his gifts to give something back to the human community. If you’ve read the book, you know the thanks he gets for that. And isn’t that sad? It’s just tragic that humanity tends to crush what it doesn’t understand simply to allay the fear the unknown creates. In Tomi Ungerer’s Moon Man, the guy in the green-cheese orb longs for a chance to visit Earth and dance like the people do. When he gets here, the welcome is less than friendly. When will we learn?

http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Man-Tomi-Ungerer/dp/1570982074

http://www.tomiungerer.com/

The alphabet marches on and we have arrived at “B” week. Naturally, there are many words needing our attention this week--bugs, butterflies, babies, bananas--but one is a can’t miss: bees. It’s particularly handy for teaching the letter, being exactly the same and all, but I have a complicated relationship with bees. I really love honey, but have done the whole honey-retrieval process, including suiting up and puffing out eye-stinging smoke, and would never eat honey if that was the only way I could get it. I am a hard-core pacifist, but experience an almost delirious joy at the idea that a bee I’ve just been stung by has ripped its own guts out and will soon die. I can get on board with the queen concept--giving proper credit to those who actually do the work of procreating is an idea humans could learn from--but feel a little uncomfortable with the drone situation for personal reasons (even though I know they are all boys). What to do? Of course, I may be overthinking things in light of the fact that we’re talking about stories for toddlers, but any two year-old who knows the words to both Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Elvis’ “Fools Rush In” is obviously picking up messages we don’t even know we’re sending. Regardless of my relationship status with the bee folk, they are fascinating. In Elizabeth Winchester’s Bees!, we learned that one beehive houses 70,000 bees. That’s how many people go to the Superbowl. Who knew?

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Kids-Bees-Editors/dp/0060576421

http://www.amazon.com/Elizabeth-Winchester/e/B001IR1C6K