Reading -- not just a contact sport

Yesterday Owen sat through an entire reading of "Goodnight Moon," the bedtime story we've been reading every night, without once attempting to attack the board book. This is the first time he has been so enthralled by the pictures and words of a story that he hasn’t been desperate to turn the pages back and forth through at least half of it. Until now, reading has been a mostly physical sport for Owen. So watching his wide, enthralled eyes and his finally relaxed arms last night brought me real joy. I’ve got another reader on my hands.

(After our story, Owen and I also make a nightly routine of saying goodnight to at least a dozen different objects -- from lamps and chairs to painted cats and wooden frogs – in Will’s room each night. He loves the goodnight tour, and so do I.)

What nighttime rituals help your children transition to sleep?

"Working" with dad

Since Rob’s working this week, we’re spending Will’s spring break mostly at home. But yesterday we got to accompany Rob to one of his more pristine work places. He and other Nature Conservancy staffers had done a prescribed fire on Black Jack Crossing, a beautiful old longleaf pine plantation that is home to gopher tortoises and rare pitcher plants. Rob’s assignment yesterday was to go back and make sure nothing was still smoldering the day after the fire. So we came along and walked the outskirts of the burned section, which looked like this: (Here Rob and Will are examining an old gopher tortoise burrow)

Will was thrilled to just pretend he was driving this four-wheeler. (We didn't have the keys.)

Sandy roads and fire breaks became our hiking trail.

We collected pine cones for Will’s next show and tell.

We could have stayed all day at this little rocky hillside, which was the perfect playground for Will, who collected rocks and explored minor canyons…

and Owen, who reminds me every day that even little things like broken leaves are miraculous.

Horton spooks a Will!

Rob’s been looking forward to taking Will out to the big screen for quite a while now. We finally decided to send them off for their first movie adventure this weekend after deciding that “Horton Hears A Who!” with its G-rating, would probably be a relatively benign movie-going adventure. We’d forgotten about the sinister bird and monkeys in Dr. Seuss’s tale (which happens to be a favorite of mine and of Will’s).

And it turns out the real terror started for Will before the movie, when he grew so frightened watching a Narnia preview that Rob had to cover his eyes and convince him to stay for the feature film. Once they’d recovered from that touchy prelude, Will laughed through the first part of Horton. But apparently even a lively Seuss tale has to have its dark side for good ticket-selling movie drama , and Rob said the bird in the movie version was quite a bit more evil looking than the goofy, grinning “black-bottomed eagle named Vlad Vladikoff” that makes off with the dust speck in the book. And of course old Vlad was blown up to gargantuan proportions and surrounded by darkness and loud, ominous music.

Not that any of this was scary enough to drive the other hordes of toddlers in attendance (many of whom Rob said looked younger than three-and-a-half-year-old Will) out of the theater. But Will’s in a class of his own when it comes to fearing things. And since he watches almost nothing but PBS shows at home, he’s not a seasoned viewer of villainous characters. So when Will said, “Daddy, I want to go,” and Rob couldn’t convince him that it might be worth staying, they made a mid-movie departure.

Next time we go to the movies, we’re going to need to look for something as benign as “Charlotte’s Web,” which Will enjoyed immensely on DVD. And we’ll have to arrive just late enough to miss the previews.

How old were your kids when you took them for their first big-screen movie?

Spiritual parenting

I enjoyed listening to the podcast of “The Spirituality of Parenting,” http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/spiritualityofparenting/ which aired yesterday on American Public Media’s "Speaking of Faith" program. It’s an interview with Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, an Indianapolis-based rabbi and children's book author.

Sasso offers a simple framework for how to think about spirituality in children, regardless of what religious path you follow, and reminds listeners that: “Society does a very good job of teaching us how to be consumers and how to be competitors. The question is how do we not just teach our children’s minds – how do we teach their souls. We want our children to be gracious and grateful, we want them to have courage in difficult times, we want them to have a sense of joy and purpose.”

She offers some simple suggestions for making prayer a meaningful practice for children, and she suggests that taking a bit of time daily for silence and reflection is nourishing for a child. Her suggestion for saying a bedtime prayer with a child: “Ask children if they will tell you a prayer from their heart.” And if they don’t know what to say at first, then offer a model. She suggests saying: “ ‘Well would you mind listening while I say one from mine.’ Name your hopes, name what you’re grateful for, name your fears."

She also offers a list of book suggestions – including children’s literature with spiritual overtones and books on parenting and spirituality.

And while I'm on the subject of spirituality, I’ll mention that this book has meant more to me than just about anything I’ve read in the past few years. It also reaches across faiths -- and it offers some insights about parenting too. More on that in a different post….

Field trip to the farm

Yesterday Owen and I joined Will’s pre-school class for a field trip to Marengo Creek Farms in Opelika, Alabama. Owen was just as thrilled as Will to view the chickens, ducks, rabbits, border collies, Shetland ponies and sheep. Marengo Creek is primarily a sheep farm, and at the end of our tour we got to look on as a hard-working border collie herded sheep up, down and around a field. I realized that I’d never witnessed sheep herding in person before – and it was such a beautiful sight watching that tight cluster of sheep sweep across the field so quickly.
Before that highlight, though, we had to face this daunting tractor.



It was the vehicle powering a hay ride, which was also designed to be one of the highlights of the visit but which Will quickly decided he wanted no part of. Will has a hearty dose of the timid-skittish-shy genes that afflicted me until at least second grade. And he was of course the only child out of well over 30 children who cried at the prospect of the hayride, and at one point even laid himself on the grass in tearful protest while all other moms, kids and teachers boarded the trailers.

So I had to hand relaxed Owen off to Will’s teacher so that I could haul crying Will onto the trailer myself. There I sat apologizing to the moms around me as Will sobbed through the first couple minutes of the hay ride, and as I wondered for a moment if I shouldn’t have pushed him to do it. I knew at this point that his tears were all grounded in embarrassment with himself for having pitched a fit, so after I pointed out that all the other kids were too excited by the hay ride to even notice that he’d been crying, he finally settled down and enjoyed the ride. And I made a note to myself to just drag Will along when these situations come up. Otherwise, as I’ve learned from other experiences, he winds up regretting passing up these “scary” opportunities.

Weekend in review -- on Wednesday

I'm finally going through photos from our long weekend in North Georgia. Here are some highlights: Hanging out with Great Grandpa in Marietta

Rob took the boys and I on our first ever drive up Toccoa's crown jewel, Currahee Mountian, which is adorned with graffiti and four mega radio/tv towers. Obviously this scenic locale gets visited by high school partiers more than nature lovers. Rob remembers a high school gathering or two up there himself. I was almost tempted to go on a beer can pick-up hike with Will, but thought better of it.

We enjoyed our picnic spot nonetheless -- Will most of all because he got to throw rocks off a minor cliff. Although, here I guess Owen tops Will on exuberance.

Then we drove down to the bottom of the mountain and hiked back up. It was the steepest hike Will's ever tackled, so by the time we got to the top he was pooped. And Rob was stuck carrying him like this for nearly the entire trip home. (We'll never force our young kids to hike -- too scared we'll turn them off to a pastime we love.)

Papa reads Brer Rabbit to Will, but calls him "Burr" Rabbit every time.

Will discovers the best-ever pastime for kids in the car. He used his teeth to slowly peel an apple, and collected the shavings in a toy dumpster. I challenge you to suggest a pastime that will engross a kid in a car for as long as this. If we do take that road trip to Colorado, I'm packing the dumpster and several apples.

On our way home, we stopped at Ella's 5-year birthday party and Will and friends frolicked for a couple hours on one of those giant inflatable jumpy, bouncy slide things.

Pricey parenting

As we celebrate April fool’s day, why not take a look at how the baby products industry manages to fool parents into thinking they need things they’d probably be better off without. Here is a quick little interview on Salon.com with Pamela Paul, author of "Parenting, Inc.," a book aimed at exposing the madness behind modern parents’ desires to buy “the best thing for my child” – including flashy “educational” toys that do more to thwart learning than enhance it; posh $800 luxury strollers; and baby classes that Paul said should really be dubbed “child classes for parents” (since they’re unnecessary for the child but a fine way for moms to connect).

And speaking of spending a lot on your little ones, the latest government estimate as to how much you’re likely to spend feeding, housing and schooling a child born in 2007 from birth until their 18th birthday is $204,060. That’s before college tuition, of course. So it probably wouldn’t to hurt to cut some of the fluff out of your baby budget anyway. See the full story here.