Library Lady raises her own kids

Blog post: Library Lady is bringing up her kids

As someone who used to do library storytimes as a children's librarian and is now bringing her own child to library storytimes, this post resonates with me. There are no good terms for parents who work for a paycheck outside the home, those who work for a paycheck inside the home, and those who work without ever seeing a paycheck. "Working mom" implies that mothers who don't get paychecks aren't working, and "full-time mom" implies that mothers who work for paychecks outside the home aren't their children's mothers all the time. More important than labels, though, are the choices we've made, the decisions we've had to make, and the challenges that come up no matter what we do.

I'm going to do my best to avoid articles that lay guilt-trips upon mothers who work for paychecks outside of the home regardless of why they do it, or upon the mothers who work as parents without the benefits of paychecks, health insurance, etc. I'm also going to stop trying to justify the professional and personal choices I've made. All along, Bede and I have worked to make decisions that were best for our family.

I'm curious... when someone tries to undermine a decision into which you've placed a lot of thought, how do you respond? When it happens, I'm so taken aback that I come up with my witty response long after that person has gone on to something else.

Children of Summer, by Mariah Boone

Mariah Boone of LoneStarMa has a pertinent article in We the People News about The Children of Summer:

...Summers are sweet when you’re a teacher and a parent because you finally get to try to make up to your children all that time that you spent grading and planning and going to other kids’ extracurricular activities when they really wanted you at theirs....

For far too many other parents, however, summers are a special kind of nightmare. Working parents of school-aged kids who do not have handily unemployed and loving relatives nearby do not have many attractive options for keeping their kids cared for in the summer.

For the whole article, please visit this page.

Crafty Thursday: Math Gnomes

I know, it's Friday. Between having my daughter with me all day long until French camp begins next week and preparing songs for French camp, I've had a full schedule. I've also started getting up early in the morning to exercise. That means going to bed early. Here and there, I've had some time to sew, and thus I finally created a set of royal "math gnomes" inspired by the Waldorf tradition of math education. While many math gnomes sets have the four processes of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division as subjects of King Equals, my mom told me about the story setup of the royal math gnomes: King Addition loves to collect things, Queen Subtraction likes to give away her wealth, Prince Multiplication likes to do things fast, and Princess Division is a staunch social advocate who wants the resources to be divided fairly. Lucia came up with the idea of Equals as a Jester. Here is Lucia's drawing of the Royal Math Gnomes:



Here is the set I've made for the family:





If you do a search for "Math Gnomes" on Flickr, you'll come up with some other lovely representations like this one and this one. Two nice sets I've admired on Etsy are by julieblanchette and mamaforearth.

If I post a set of math gnomes in my shop, it would definitely be a big-ticket item. I don't really know what the market is for math gnomes. Of course people admire the sets, but chances are that the people who need math gnomes the most are probably working with small budgets. I've joked about branching out into having different singular math gnomes be available to provide encouragement for teens working on Algebra, Geometry and Calculus homework:

Newsflash: Children Want More Bedtime Stories

This just in from GrowingYourBaby:

Study: Kids Want More Stories at Bedtime

New research shows that almost two thirds of children want their parents to read to them more often.

While I question some of the statistics uncovered by Disney/Cars Storyteller’s Collection, the premise seems to be so obvious at first. Of course children want their parents to read to them. Of course they want more stories. But then, I have to remember that I'm trained as a children's librarian and am the daughter of a children's librarian. I'm thinking from a position of privilege:

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a mother who read to me.
-- Strickland Gillilan (1869-1954)

Add "father", "aunties", "uncles" and more benevolent grownups, and that poem pretty much sums it up for me.

Make of this article what you will. Spread the good news.

Thanks to Mama Lisa's World for the link.

Birthday Party Favors

After my post on the Self-Budgeted Birthday Party, I asked Vivian of HipWriterMama what she used for the birthday party favors to which she alluded in the comments. With her permission, I shall share with you what she wrote:

Here are some party favor ideas--I start shopping for these a few months ahead of time, so I can catch sales and have time to make things, if needed.

Paint pens are awesome, because you can personalize anything--which goes a long way. Plastic containers, cosmetic bags, etc.

For the younger crowd:

-Plastic pencil boxes in different colors (from Target, Staples, etc.) - on sale, you can get them for around 50 cents to $1.

-Box of 24 count Crayola crayons - again, you can get these on sale for less than $1.
-Assorted Sticker Sheets

I assemble these little goodies in the box and then paint the child's name on the box with the paint pens. Once the paint is dry, gift wrap and you're good to go. This usually costs less than $3 per child.

Beauty goody bag:
-Nail polish
-Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker
-Special Playlist CD's (you can make cool CD labels with the birthday child's name and date, etc.)

Cosmetic Bag ($1 bin at Target)
-Paint name of child on it.
-Add something simple in it. Lip gloss, nail polish or something unusual a child can collect in it.

Journal goody bag:
-Cool pen
-Journal/Notebook/Diary
-Special Playlist CD

Rock Star goody bag for the younger crowd:
-There are these great plastic microphones over at Target about $2 each.
-Add special CD and you're good to go.

Books (Check for book sales, Amazon, Scholastic Book Club, etc.)

Use your imagination! You can find lots of great things for small $$, if you plan ahead.

What are your ideas? Please post them in the comments. As I told Vivian, other than the one year we handed out little harmonicas, party guests have always received seed packets.

A Father's Day Story by Amish Guitar

Amish Guitar writes about how he spent Father's Day with his father. By the time I read the last paragraph, I had tears in my eyes:

What I did for Father's Day with My Dad

Song of the Week: Five elephants on one spiderweb

I'm learning French songs for my summer French camp gigs. In two weeks, I'll lead 2 storytime circles twice a week for 20 minutes apiece. Many of the songs have 2 or 3 chords, but a song like "Le Bon Roi Dagobert" for Bastille Day has a bouncy, boisterous rhythm with not much repetition, so I'm definitely stretching myself. My French is not spectacular (my college professor can attest to that), but I know enough to compose simple songs. If I can ever figure out my new video editing software, I'll share my new composition about colors and clothes.

In the meantime, thanks to the fabulous Mama Lisa's World, I rediscovered a variation of a circle game song I learned in Cote d'Ivoire called Un éléphant se balançait ("An Elephant Was Balancing on a Spider Web"). You may listen to the MP3 here. The midi is the more standard tune, but I really like the jazzy version as sung on the MP3, and that's what I've based my guitar chords upon:



Translation:

An elephant was balancing
On a web, web, web, a spider web,
It was a game that was so much fun
That he called.... a second elephant.

How many elephants can balance on a spider's web? I hope that the humor of the setup will be apparent with the felt-board figures I'm planning to make.

Some of you may be familiar with Sharon, Lois and Bram's recording "One Elephant, Deux Éléphants" which had a variation in both English and French to the tune of "Five Little Ducks Went Out to Play":

One elephant went out to play
Upon a spider's web one day
He had such enormous fun
That he called for another elephant to come.

Deux éléphants allaient jouer
Sur une toile d'araignée
Ils s'amusaient tellement bien
Qu'ils appelaient à un autre, viens!

Three elephants went out to play
Upon a spider's web one day
They had such enormous fun
That they called for another elephant to come.

Quatre éléphants allaient jouer
Sur une toile d'araignée
Ils s'amusaient tellement bien
Qu'ils appelaient à un autre, viens!

All the elephants were out at play
Upon a spider's web one day
They had such enormous fun
But, there were no more elephants left to come!

The Self-Budgeted Birthday Party

The birthday budget: By letting her kids plan their own parties, this mom helps them learn the value of a dollar, by Pauline Childs:

[Emma] really wanted a store-bought Barbie cake (with a real doll in the middle!). It would cost $40 and serve just eight people. I tried to explain how extravagant this was when you really thought about it, especially since we'd need to buy another cake to have enough for everyone. She looked at me and said, "But it's my birthday. How come I don't get to decide what to spend money on?"

She had a point. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me: why not just set a party budget and let the birthday boy or girl decide how to use it?

Thanks to Lisa Kothari of Peppers and Pollywogs for the link.

So far, we've not had many issues with keeping Lucia's birthday parties small and simple. She's certainly had ideas for larger parties after attending other people's more elaborate shin-digs, but for the most part, has been fine with our simple affairs.

I haven't had a birthday party gig in quite awhile. While that's not great for my business, I do hope that it means families are discovering creative ways to celebrate birthdays that are both enjoyable and inexpensive.

The Little Match Girl--A Disney/Pixar Film

This weekend is Bede's third annual GoPlay Northwest gaming convention, and while he's come home late at light, Lucia and I are pretty much on our own during the day. School's out, camp hasn't yet begun, so I decided we'd do something we don't normally do: watch movies!

Lucia saw Disney's version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid for the first time on Friday, and we found this short film on the DVD based on Andersen's The Little Match Girl directed by Roger Allers, with music by Alexander Borodin:



You may read more about the film, including an interview with Roger Allers, in an article by Ron Barbagallo called "Shedding Light on the Little Matchgirl." The rules and copyrights on that article is so extensive and detailed that I've decided not to link to it just in case I inadvertently break a rule. You should be able to find it easily in an internet search.

School librarians reassigned to classrooms

From the Seattle Times article Reassigned school librarians get attention beyond Bellevue, by Katherine Long:

[Sandy] Livingston, the Sammamish librarian, echoed UW professor [Michael] Eisenberg's analysis: that a library without a librarian is just a depository of books. Among other things, school librarians help guide students to credible sources of information on the Internet, and teach them how to decide if a source they've found online is legitimate or not.

When I worked for King County Library System, I visited the Bellevue, Washington elementary public schools for summer-reading program visits. The librarians were knowledgable, in touch with their students, and maintained excellent library collections. Many of the students were avid readers. Had I gone the school librarian route, the Bellevue School District would have been a dream location.

Once upon a time.

Science to Science-Fiction to Silliness

New York Times article: Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data, by George Johnson:

Last year, in an opening address at a conference in Rome, called “Science 400 Years After Galileo Galilei,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Vatican, praised the church’s old antagonist as “a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.” In May, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, a Jesuit cultural center in Florence conducted “a historical, philosophical and theological re-examination” of the Galileo affair. But in the effort to rehabilitate the church’s image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, say, The Astrophysical Journal or The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While we're on the subject of outer space, let me call attention to a poem about the astronomer Tycho Brahe that my mom reintroduced to me during my Santa Fe visit: The Old Astronomer, by Sarah Williams. I suspect my first exposure to the poem might have come through Madeleine L'Engle in one of her Crosswicks journals, but I'm not sure. (Those of you with fresher memories, do you know?) The lines that resonate:

Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

When we were in Santa Fe, Bede and I went out one night to look at the stars. We could see them clearly as we were far away from the city lights. Like so many others, we wished we could go out to the stars. We're convinced we're not alone in the universe, but think it's probably no mistake that we're all so far apart. Look what we do on our own planet.

Speaking of our own planet, I just picked up The Many Colored Land, by Julian May. It's a science-fiction novel published in the early 1980's about people in the future who decide to travel back in time on a one-way ticket to the Pliocene epoch in the hopes of living out the rest of their lives without being pestered. Instead, they encounter enslavement by an alien race that landed on Earth as part of their own exile. It's up to our intrepid heroes to save Earth from those dastardly aliens so they don't ruin it for the humans millions of years later.

I'm surprised that no one has yet made a television series out of this concept. I suspect that if they did, they'd change the epoch so they could fit in dinosaurs somehow a la Land of the Lost.

Young Enough for Nancy Stewart

From a conversation I had with Lucia yesterday evening:


Me: Nancy Stewart is coming to the Madrona Library on July 1. Do you want to go, or are you too old for Nancy concerts?

Lucia: I'm still young enough. [Pause.] I will never be too old for Nancy concerts. I will be one hundred and two.

Fairy Hut and Double Rainbow

I didn't take many photos of Santa Fe this time around. However, I did document my first clay fairy house:


Only my 2 inch child-sized dolls fit in the house


The roof comes off

On the way home from a potluck, we saw a double-rainbow break forth from the clouds. Photographing rainbows is rarely satisfying, but I couldn't help trying nonetheless:


Can you see the second rainbow? It's outside of the main rainbow.

Santa Fe 2009

Greetings from Santa Fe, New Mexico! The first few days we spent in recovery mode: recovery from sickness, financial stress, the long lists of things we have to do, plus the long months of soggy coldness that have pervaded Seattle (though the last week of school was quite warm). We've gone to a birthday party and a potluck. Sunday, we went to Mass at the beautiful St. Francis Cathedral, which so far is the only Catholic church I've visited that rings bells during the Consecration of the Eucharist. (Last year, I had to ask Lucia not to sing along with the bells.) Yesterday, we visited with two of my mom's colleagues and worked with clay. I created a small fairy house with a removable roof, which I had been planning ever since I found out that we were going to have Clay Day. I'll post a photo after we return to Seattle.

Today, we walked two miles in a nature conservancy and tomorrow we're going to Canyon Road to look at art galleries and visit the Tea House. For Canyon Road, Bede and I are planning to leave Lucia with her grandma while we explore.

I've worked on some dolls while I'm here. I finished the Night Queen with her Star Child, and made a Cloud Child for the Day King. I've also stitched my first saint doll: St. Rose of Lima, patron of embroiderers, needleworkers and gardeners. In the St. Francis Cathedral, I noted that Rose of Lima was depicted holding a guitar. It turns out that in addition to her other talents, she was noted for composing mystical poetry and playing it on her guitar. Take a look at this photo, and you'll see the icon. It's second from the left on the top row.

Song of the Week: Quelqu'un m'a dit

I heard the music of singer/song-writer Carla Bruni four weeks ago in a local shop. She was born in Italy, but became a French citizen. Two years ago, she married the French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Her music has been circling through my brain, and in particular, the song "Quelqu'un m'a dit" has taken up residence. Here is Bruni performing the song live:



I found an English translation of the song which you may read here. While the particulars are helpful to know, I don't think one needs the translation to understand that the song is about hope and longing.

Next week's postings will probably be sparse as the family is going on vacation to Santa Fe for a week. However, I plan to spend some time with my blogroll and catch up on your lives and books.