making space for creativity
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,…
…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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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. …
King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, Marguerite Henry’s 1949 book and the winner of the 28th Newbery, spins the tale of mute stable boy Agba and his beloved colt Sham as they are bought and sold, forgotten and celebrated throughout North Africa and Europe. It is one of the Newberys…
I’m nearing the end of my second trimester now, but during my first trimester, in a very unscientific survey (in which I googled “paleo” and “pregnancy”), I found two common themes. Number One, the paleo pregnancy panacea, in which said woman felt awesome all the way through her pregnancy via eating paleo, no morning…