making space for creativity
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…
William Pène du Bois’s 1948 Newbery winning book The Twenty-One Balloons tells the story of a math teacher – turned amateur balloonist who ends up stranded on the supposedly uninhabited Pacific island of Krakatoa right before its fated (and real-life) volcanic eruption in 1883. The majority of the book takes place on (and the…
Somehow, miraculously, I have arrived halfway through this pregnancy. It has been both slow, especially those first exhausted weeks, and at the same time so fast, particularly the second trimester with its summer trips back to DC and up north to the shore of Lake Superior. Overall, I would highly recommend the…
The 26th Newbery, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey’s 1947 Miss Hickory, is a quirky, but fairly charming, tale of a wooden doll’s extraordinary year when her little girl moves away, a chipmunk takes over her home, and she’s forced to fend for herself in the great New England woods. Similarity to other…
Amazingly, spring is nearly over here in Wisconsin. The tulips and daffodils are long gone and even oak trees have leaves out now. I am climbing out of the hibernation of first trimester—today I’m fifteen weeks pregnant, and I am slowly feeling better. This week was also the last week of my sister-in-law’s fulltime job,…
The Joy. After seven months of trying, the end of the month was drawing once again to a close. I was that guarded hopeful that I had come to know, counting the days until it would be “reasonable” to take a pregnancy test. That month (March) it was Evan’s birthday, five days after…
At the end of January, my friend, and recommender of fabulous books, Loren, went to the American Library Association mid-winter conference. I too was invited to trek down to Chicago and drool over the hundreds of 2015 upcoming releases in the exhibit hall, but for various boring reasons, mostly having to do with grading…
Twenty-Five Newberies in, I thought I’d pause and reflect on a quarter century’s worth of award winning children books from 1922 to 1946. I started this project with pretty high hopes about the delight of reading so many wonderful children’s books. However, it became apparent only a few books in that this was going to…
We’ve been trying to conceive for six months. Six months is a funny amount of time. It’s both short: only half a year. Yet it’s also long: 26 weeks, 182 days. And every one of those days I’ve thought about it. Some days in tears, a few days in calm acceptance, most days…