This past weekend for Pentecost Sunday, Jackson and I got to renew our baptismal vows while spending the weekend down in Illinois with my goddaughter Teresa and her family (Evan was in DC with his students). That is one of many wonderful things about the sacrament of baptism — several times a year as…
Author: Amy Rogers Hays
Newbery Review #34 (Wheel on the School, De Jong, 1955)
The 34th Newbery, The Wheel on the School, by Meindert de Jong is super charming and the sort of book I imaged reading when I embarked on this project to read all the Newberies. It’s set in the author’s native Holland, in a fishing village along a dike the holds back the sea during,…
5 Months into Motherhood
Spring in Wisconsin comes quietly and gradually. Grass stretches and greens up slowly, buds extend off naked branches subtly, and then one day you look around and daffodils and snowdrops and woodland violets are suddenly dotting the ground like little yellow and white and purple fireworks. So it has been with motherhood,…
Newbery Review #33 (…And Now Miguel, Krumgold, 1954)
…And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold is our 33rd Newbery Award winner. It’s about a young shepherd boy who longs to leave home and be fully accepted into a family, which is almost exactly the premise of the previous Newbery Secret of the Andes. Only Miguel Chevez is a middle child in a…
10 of My Favorite Books for Postpartum Care & Recovery
In the bleary few weeks of new motherhood, I have had a number of friends quietly comment that they wished that they had not just read about pregnancy and birth but also read a lot more about breastfeeding. Postpartum can be a bit of a surprise in terms of just how immediately and unceasingly…
Newbery Review # 32 (Secret of the Andes, Clark, 1953)
The 1953 Newbery Award winning book, Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark, follows a young indigenous Peruvian llama shepherd, Cusi, as he seeks to discover why he has been raised by a mysterious old wise man, Chuto, in an isolated Andean valley. Cusi and his companion, Misti the llama, travel first to…
13 of My Favorite Books for a Natural Hospital Birth
For many years I have loved reading books and blogs about babies and birth. Long before I was pregnant, or even trying to become pregnant, I have had a strange proclivity to peruse the 618 & 649 sections of the library, bringing home books on colic, toddler boundaries, and baby brain development, long before I…
Newbery Review # 31 (Ginger Pye, Eleanor Estes, 1952)
The 1952 Newbery Award winning book, Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, is a charming tale of a puppy and his two children. Little Ginger comes to responsible ten-year-old Jerry Pye and his dreamy nine-year-old sister Rachel, only to be stolen a few months later, and the book meanders through the Pye’s home, Jerry’s school…
31 Books For My 31st Birthday
My reading for 2015 was dominated by pregnancy and birth books, and to a lesser extent the great Newbery project which slowed down but kept up a steady rhythm around the blog. Here are the other fun literary adventures that filled up last year. 31 in honor of my 31st birthday at the end…
A Month into Motherhood
Right in between Christmas day and my birthday, there quietly passed the one month mark of having little baby Jackson here with us. We spent the day sleeping and eating, crying and gazing, getting clean and messy again. Which is basically exactly what’s been going on all month. In fact, the month sort…
Baby Rogers Hays : A Birth Story
Our long awaited baby arrived in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning! Tuesday evening, two days past my due date, I felt the familiar tight contractions that had been coming and going, and getting gradually stronger throughout the dark November evenings. It was the night before my husband Evan’s Thanksgiving break, and we watched The…
Newbery Review # 30 (Amos Fortune, Yates, 1951)
Our 30th Newbery is a biographical novel: the 1951 book Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates. Taking her title from his gravestone in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Yates traces and expands upon the real life of an amazing gold coast slave through his various owners, wives, and employments until his death in 1801 at age…
36 Weeks In: On Birth Plans & Beta Strep
A few weeks ago I got a call from my doctor that a routine prenatal screening had turned something up. I had an asymptomatic GBS UTI (a bladder infection caused by Beta Strep that wasn’t causing me any discomfort). In the world of getting news from your doctor about a prenatal screening red flag,…
Newbery Review # 29 (Door in the Wall, de Angeli, 1950)
The 1950 Newbery winning book, The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli, spins a medieval tale about an English boy named Robin, separated from his parents, and crippled by the plague who learns to walk and trust again, eventually saving a castle from the attacking Welsh. What I liked. Even…
Wearing Motherhood: Sharing Maternity Clothes & Community
In the early weeks of being pregnant, I didn’t give much thought to maternity clothes. I was consumed with just the new, frightening, wonderful, exhausting possibility of motherhood. As far as I thought about clothes, I think I figured that I wore pretty stretchy clothes, so I probably could get away with those. …