making space for creativity
I’ve made it through 50 Newbery books! The good news is that they really do keep getting better. I stopped at the first 25 to offer up my favorites and general recommendations for those early Newberies (1922-1946) fully in this post. Picking my favorites for this second set of 25 (from 1947 to 1971) is…
Our little Lily arrived at 6:30 pm right smack on her due date May 12th. This was especially awesome since beginning at 37 weeks my blood pressure started to inch up, and words like preeclampsia and gestational hypertension started floating around my doctor’s office, both of which could mean, besides the obvious health risks,…
The 50th Newbery Award went to Betsy Byars’s coming of age tale, The Summer of the Swans. The story follows 14-year-old Sara Godfrey who is deep in the middle of some quality teen angst (Are her shoes too big? The wrong color? Why does everything make her mad, and sad, and blah?) over…
Last month, I found a board book at the library about Easter for my two-year-old son Jackson. Honestly, he was most interested in the pictures of the spring bunnies and ducks, but when we got to the bit about everyone being sad that Jesus died, Jackson said “sad” in a solemn way. He’s been…
William H. Armstrong’s 1970 Newbery Award Winning book, Sounder, is not really a book to like or dislike per se. If it weren’t based on a true story, maybe it’d be easier to like it or dislike it. But instead it just is. It’s the evocative and very difficult story of a…
I’m about three months from my due date for baby number two, and I alternate between feeling that is a crazy short time or an incredibly long amount of time. It seems short when I think about my sweet newly 2-year-old Jackson, and long when I think about how much Wisconsin winter we have…
The 48th Newbery was such a treat for me to re-read: the last book in one of my favorite series The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander: The High King. This is the very last adventure of Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, Gurgi his furry mostly human loyal companion, Flewddur Fflam the exaggerating…
This year for my birthday we had our 20 week anatomy ultrasound for our second baby! It was a fantastic way to celebrate being 33. I can’t remember looking forward to my birthday more. I loved keeping Jackson’s gender a surprise for his birthday, but for this baby we decided to find out. It…
This is my fourth year of compiling a book list for my birthday. Every year I can’t believe that the books I read in January were part of this year; that feels so long ago! My very top favorites for this year are probably Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, A Gentleman in Moscow, Baby Catcher,…
Now this is the book I have been waiting for! I mean literally this particular book. I know that my husband (and Jim from the Office in episode 2.18) loved this book. But also just that I was hoping, when I dove into this Newbery project, that all the books would be these…
I loved putting together my somewhat organic & minimalist list of favorite baby registry things, and as Jackson grew into a little toddler, I thought I should put together the toddler version. As with the baby registry, I love the idea of everything organic and minimalist, but the realities of budgets or gifts (or…
One of the wonderful bits of living in Milwaukee is that we can jet down to our alma mater Wheaton in less than two hours if traffic cooperates. This Fall has been unusually full, but we carved out a great day to go down for homecoming. Last fall we went down for Evan’s 10-year…
The 1967 Newbery, Up A Road Slowly by Irene Hunt is a portrait of seven-year-old Julie who, upon her mother’s death, goes to live with her Aunt Cordelia in the country. The novel traces Julie’s childhood from wild grief and disdain for her proper schoolmarm Aunt to the threshold of adulthood at age…
Over the last year and a half we’ve been so blessed to be able to take our baby to both coasts to meet great-grandparents and enjoy the ocean. We first took 4-month-old Jackson to Southern California for Spring Break last year and then this summer for our 10th anniversary we took the then 18-month-old…
Elizabeth Borton de Treviño’s 1966 Newbery Award Winning book, I, Juan de Pareja, de Treviño creates a beautiful story of the real life slave of seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. Using the few written records available (those relating to Velázquez inheriting the young slave from relatives and giving the old slave his freedom) and a…