BC (beloved child the elder) – Page 16

Category: BC (beloved child the elder)

make way for ducklings

Posted on November 24, 2007 by wrekehavoc

okay, okay, preschool book review week starts in earnest with an old chestnut that i feel gets overlooked nowadays — robert mccloskey’s make way for ducklings. it isn’t hip. it isn’t trendy. it isn’t cool.

but boy, is it a great, great book for preschoolers.

the story is one that most little kids can comprehend — duck parents are looking for a good place to raise a family. they finally find one. the dad has to go away. the mom teaches the kids and takes them on a tumultuous walk. dad comes home. everyone quacks happily ever after.

i cannot pick up this book without a few things happening.

1) i imitate an irish policeman whenever i read the voices of the cops in the book. (for you bugs bunny fans out there: “hey clancy, let’s take the boys and surrrrround the house!”)

2) i dissolve into laughter, along with my kids, whenever i have to read the ducklings’ names (lack, mack, quack, pack, oh, who the hell knows them all, i just know they rhyme). and:

3) we end up reading it twice in a row. at least.

the brown-tone drawings are absolutely stunning, earning this bad boy a caldecott. no, they just don’t write them like this anymore.

admittedly, i am a mom who enjoys the hip books; but i must confess that, in the same way i am beginning to rediscover the old, corny Disney movies (hayley mills, anyone?) and enjoying them, i am discovering older storybooks from my childhood, wistfully remembering how it took me longer to wise up and become the cynical chick i am today.

maybe if we read more mccloskey books, my kids will stay younger longer.

Make Way for Ducklings

Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin & Harry Bliss

Posted on November 23, 2007 by wrekehavoc

one more gap-bridging book — one that both BC and jools adore!

people adore the click clack moo books by doreen cronin, and i would agree. there’s something wonderful about subversive cows and ducks taking over the joint. but take a gander (har-dee-har, i’m such a card!) at another book by cronin that makes jools nearly pee himself. ok, so that’s no mean feat, but it nearly makes me pee myself, too!

diary of a worm is a silly little journal filled with deep observations about life as an annolid. so yeah, worms aren’t fascinating, right? well, maybe not, but this little worm, illustrated so amusingly by bliss, makes some observations that are worthy of the monty python troupe. two favorites:

1) when the worm gets in trouble with his mother for telling his sister that her face looks exactly like her rear. (she’s a worm. it does.)

2) when the worms do the hokey pokey. a challenge when you consider how they’re built.

apparently, cronin also takes on diaries of other creeply crawlies. i can’t wait to check them out. that is, if jools ever lets me return this bad boy.

Diary of a Worm

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book by lauren child

Posted on November 22, 2007 by wrekehavoc

alert the media: i am now hereby bridging the gap between tween girl books and preschool books. just cos every now and again, i have to find a book that works for BC and jools. not an easy task, i would add. but someone’s got to figure it out, and why not me!

as you might figure from yesterday’s post, i am a HUGE, and i do mean HUGE fan of lauren child. not even the charlie and lola series, which brought her some bit of fame thanks to disney picking up the cartoon, but all the clarice bean books, which i discussed yesterday.

but if you’ve a kid who either:

a) loves fairy tales;

b) destroys books; or

c) all of the above,

then you’ve got to read Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book. child examines what happens when her hero ends up in a fairytale storybook that he has doodled on, torn a bit, and basically manhandled. a modern-day alice falls through the looking glass, and boy, the consequences are hilarious!

c’mon: if you were supposed to be a fairytale mainstay and someone doodled a mustache on you, you’d be pissed, too.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book

clarice bean series by lauren child

Posted on November 21, 2007 by wrekehavoc

tween girls book week concludes with a major fave, the clarice bean books by lauren childs. some of these are chapter books, some are picture books, but all are amazingly cheeky fun.

there’s something so hilariously fragile and funny about clarice and her family. her father is too busy at work; her mother is, well, a bit self-involved; her surly teenage brother is in cave-boy mode; her sister is surgically-attached to the phone; her little brother, minal cricket, is a handful; her grandfather has more than a few senior moments; and her uncle ted, the fireman, is simply a hunky hoot. anyone who has to balance family and hysteria can relate to the over-the-top things that happen in the books. child is perfectly attuned to a girl of a certain age who has to deal with calamity in her daily life. i suspect this is what my house is like on certain days.

incidentally, if you’ve been weaned on charlie and lola (and want to run screaming whenever it shows up on the disney channel), please please PLEASE don’t let that stop you from checking out clarice (i’ve put some faves below, but there are more.) she’s simply THAT FUNNY.

if your kid has finished every junie b. jones book there is, it’s time to graduate to clarice bean. you may find that you like the book, though, even more than your daughter does. i can’t wait to take them out and read them again… (if BC will let me.)

utterly me, clarice bean

clarice bean spells trouble

clarice bean, guess who’s babysitting?

thanksgiving whine

Posted on November 20, 2007 by wrekehavoc

i like writing about books and music as much as the next gal, but gee whiz! some people are wondering about me, the chick behind the curtain! why, i haven’t whined (publicly) in a least a week – what gives!? thus, here’s some whine and cheese for good measure.

when we last left our heroine, she was sick. guess what? i’m sick again. yes, the magic of my condition is such that i pick up every. single. bug. there. is. so a big-n-hearty ~~fuck you!~~ thank you to anyone who lets their kid hit school or daycare with serious stuff (and no, i don’t mean things like runny noses. if we all kept out of circulation when we had colds, no one would ever see daylight.) people like me are thrilled beyond belief that your child and mine will touch and i will be the happy recipient of your child’s generosity.

hey, while you’re at it — can you manage to not vaccinate your children, too? i really can’t wait to see how my immune system hacks it when your measles, mumps, or rubella-laden kid shares her joy with me. (and all because you read some bullshit on the internet about MMR shots causing autism. which they don’t, by the way.) see, i’ve been vaccinated, but as we’ve found from all the testing done on me, i’m not only bionic, i also don’t have very good resistance to things, even when i’m vaccinated. it’s all about my immune system. smallpox? nearly killed me when i was 6 months old, but hell — bring. it. on. just because you’re a selfish fuckwit who refuses to vaccinate.

if you can’t tell, miss crankypants is just a little bitter today. but i’ll lighten things up with things for which i am thankful.

1) the comb that i accidentally flushed down the toilet last week? you know, the one i never actually wrote about because i was too busy talking about books? well, i’m not exactly thankful for THAT, but i am thankful for the plumber who came out and told me that the very worst thing that would happen would be that i’d need to replace the toilet. see, BS painted pictures of lawns being pulled up. pipes being dredged. college funds following said comb. it was an ugly, ugly time. when i told the plumber about BS’s nightmarish scenario, he laughed and told me that i should tell BS that the tree people would be there next week to start pulling up the trees. obviously, he doesn’t realize that BS’s sense of humor had followed the comb down.

2) i’m thankful my house did not blow up kablooey last week after i had to clean the dryer out with Goo Gone, something i had to do once before. once again, a certain someone left cinnamon gum in her clothing. i knew it wasn’t Miss Scarlet with a lead pipe in the library. using my incredible, supergenius-mom powers of deduction, i know a few things: 1) BS doesn’t chew gum; 2) i hate cinnamon gum; and 3) jools has no earthly way of getting his hands on any gum. BC strikes again. i couldn’t get all the gum out with simple elbow grease, so i called in the tangy orange flammable joy that is the Goo Gone. it works, but i was afraid to use my dryer for days. i rationalized that i was doing the earth a favor by hanging my laundry up to dry. which, hopefully, balanced out the toxic, orange fumes i unleashed upon the earth.

but you know, after wearing stiff jeans one day too long, i got a bit antsy. i did what any other red-blooded, passive-aggressive person would do: i waited until BS had laundry to do. i informed him, of course, of the dryer’s status. (if he gets all blown up, then i end up a single mom. there’s no way on Dog’s Green Earth that he’s getting off that easy.) he told me he would gladly try things out once i took some dishwashing liquid and scrubbed the dryer’s inside. which i did. and the rest, as they say, is history.

which fortunately, i can add, is not our status.

3) good things come in threes. and i’m here to report that jools has decided to act like a camel, which would be really useful if i could ride him up I-95, gasoline being as expensive as it is these days. unfortunately, he has decided to be the less-than-nice part of being a camel: he has decided to spit at people when they piss him off. i’m not entirely sure where this comes from: no one in our family spits. in fact, he has heard me several times railing against the no-class bubbas who spit and who probably had the wrong end smacked at birth. but mr. man has decided to spit at his classmates, a major bozo no-no from every angle. so, to bring things full circle, i am thankful that my boy has had all of his shots!

yes, you and your child may end up sharing this lovely snotty, coughing thing that we all have around here. but you can rest assured that my son’s spit will not result in your contracting polio.

which is probably a lot more than i can say about my risk around you and yours.

junie b jones by barbara park

Posted on November 20, 2007 by wrekehavoc

pity poor junie b. jones.

the scrappy heroine of many, many books about her hapless adventures in kindergarten and first grade, she has been reviled by plenty of elementary school teachers, who ban her from classrooms because she commits a sin so heinous, she might cripple your child:

she speaks like an honest-to-G-d kid.

some teachers and parents fear that if your kid reads junie b., her english and her grammar will be ruined for years to come. (i know mine has.)

honestly, though, as a writer, i adore junie b.’s voice. park has captured the diction and attitude of a girl-of-a-certain-age to perfection. and as a parent, i adore the fact that her stories are soooo funny, soooo engaging, that BC actually wanted to read. we’ve listened to a bunch of these on tape during car trips, and i’m here to tell you that even BS got wrapped up in the plots. i never, ever understand why people are so frightened by a book. yes, books are very, very powerful instruments. banishing them does no one any good.

in spite of 1st grade teachers discouraging their students from reading from this series, don’t worry about barbara park. i’m sure she’s crying all the way to the bank.

i’m still waiting for junie b to end up as a float in the macy’s t-day parade.

Junie B. Jones’s First Boxed Set Ever! (Books 1-4)

Junie B. Jones’s Second Boxed Set Ever! (Junie B. Jones)

Junie B. Jones’s Third Boxed Set Ever! (Books 9-12)

Junie B. Jones’ Fourth Boxed Set Ever! (Junie B. Jones)

the best/worst christmas pageant ever

Posted on November 19, 2007 by wrekehavoc

i know, i know. what’s a nice jewish girl like me reading a book like this to her kids?

barbara robinson penned this classic way back in 1972. since then, she has written two more in the series about the six awful Herdman children and how they disrupt life among not just the kids but the entire small-town Ohio community. the Herdmans steal. the Herdmans threaten. the Herdmans are terrible to their insane cat. the Herdmans, left to their own devices by an absentee mother (who chooses to work two shifts at her job, and most of the parents cannot blame her), manage to set fire to things, shut down events, and even paint poor little Howard’s head.

it sounds tragic. but it’s a hoot!

robinson has a dry wit that permeates every bit of this book. you have the bored children, who could care less about the pageant. you have the narrator’s beleagured mother, who gets roped into heading up the pageant this year after the Queen Bee Mother Who Runs Everything (and you moms out there know exactly the type i’m talking about) gets hospitalized. and, of course, you have the Herdmans — six over-the-top children who have never stepped foot inside a church and who, through the oddest of circumstances, end up playing all the lead roles.

if you are looking for a book that de-commercializes christmas in a humorous, lighthearted, but incredibly meaningful way, this is it. this is the literary accompaniment to linus van pelt’s speech in A Charlie Brown Christmas. i’m not even christian, but i can appreciate that. and this is all delivered in a non-preachy, frankly hysterical way that appeals to adults and kids alike.

(BC is still running around the house, proclaiming: HEY! Unto YOU a child is BORN! read the book, and you’ll find out why.)

hey ms. robinson — there are a lot more school holidays. PLEASE write more about the Herdmans!!!!!

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The Best School Year Ever

The Best Halloween Ever

kit, an american girl by valerie tripp

Posted on November 17, 2007 by wrekehavoc

there are certain things that are predictable when a young lady turns a corner into the tween world. one, that she’ll probably start to love horses. two, that she’ll start asking for sleepovers. and three, that she’ll fall in love with the American Girl doll franchise (or some reasonable facsimile thereof.) i haven’t yet bought BC any AG stuff (i don’t feel like putting a second mortgage on the house to do so); and we have not yet made any treks to the big store in the Big Apple; but we do enjoy reading the American Girl books. and probably our favorite series thus far (we’re still not nearly anywhere near done) involved Kit, a girl from the Great Depression.

kit is a plucky girl picked out of one of those andy hardy musicals, only, there’s no musical involved here. she wants to be a newsgirl, and she starts out the series as a very proud, somewhat spoiled little chick. but don’t you fret — the Great Depression beats her ass down but good. (naw, i’m joking. sort of.) the chick never loses hope, even when the bank threatens to take her house back. i love the way that the american girl series’ get you talking about american history — sort of like sneaking veggies into your kids’ food and they don’t even know it.

last year, BC did a book report on the series. some of you faithful readers may remember my panic when i realized that girlfriend wanted to dress up like kit. but it all worked out, and i only wish i could get BC to dress in that 1930s garb again — she looked adorable. then again, i’m a sucker for the early ’30s — i still remember the time i made up a drinking game with friends to a marx brothers movie. any time they said something of that period, you had to drink. things like: “say!”

yep. loved the ’30s. pity that asshole hitler had to go and destroy it all. too bad he wasn’t sucked away in a dustbowl.

Kit an American Girl (6 Book Set)

the ABC meme

Posted on November 16, 2007 by wrekehavoc

i’ve been tagged by cynematic to make a glossary of me. ::a you’re adorable, b, you’re so beautiful, c you’re a cutie full of charm::

ok. i’ll knock it off.

rules: list a word that describes you for every letter of the alphabet. offer as much or as little explanation as you wish. please keep the words positive (for example, don’t use “fat�? for F or “lame�? for L), and feel free to get creative. tag as many or as few people as you wish. Link back to your tagger and forward to your taggees.

note that i don’t always keep it positive. but i always keep it real. ::cue MTV-type music here::

a – asshole. yeah. i said it. i’m an asshole sometimes. like i get all angsty and sarcastic and bunched up.

b – bread and brownie baker. those are the two dishes i do well, generally. ask me to cook something, though, and take your life into your own hands.

c – cake baker — i do cookies and cakes well, too.

d – depressed. i generally see the world as a place filled with half-empty glasses. and not the rose-colored kind, either. i fight it; i really do. but i wasn’t voted “class pessimist” back in high school because of my sunny disposition. which, i do have at times, you should know. (hmm. maybe m ought to be for manic depressive?)

e – emotionally perceptive. i may not be einstein when it comes to things like chemistry, but i am einstein when it comes to being perceptive about human chemistry. the only one who continues to puzzle me in that department, of course, is BS. after 20 years, he still surprises me. sometimes in good ways, even.

f – family. from the day i was born, it has been drummed into my head that this is the most important thing in life. nevermind how mad you might get at your brother — he’s still your brother and you have to love him. period. that’s life growing up in my family. summing it up would be my favorite quote from my father: home is the place where they have to take you in.

g – Google Queen. i’ve found out how to fix toilets, how to find old friends, and how to make always perfect sweet-n-sour meatballs thanks to my friend Google.

h – hopeful. i may be depressed, but i always have hope. hope for peace. hope for love. hope for chocolate.

i – insanely happy. i have moments when i probably go over the line and into the blue. i bubble over, and i cannot contain it. really. and it happens at the damndest times. like when i walked out of the hospital after a hematologist’s visit where i was joined by jools. and i was so glad to be leaving there, and the sun was shining just so, and i was holding him so that he didn’t get caught in the revolving door. and he pressed his nose up to mine and smiled. and i was simply full.

j – joker. everything must be funny. even my tragedies.

k – kisser. i come from a family of huggers and kissers. i think i freaked my future father in law out when i first met him. i walked up to him and gave him a big hug and kiss. that’s just how we do it. the nice thing, of course, is that over the years, my husband followed suit and even hugs and kisses his dad, too 🙂

l – love. i fall in love every. single. day. with. so. much. beauty. in. my. life.

m – mama. i worked really, really hard to get called by this name. when BC or jools call me by my first name, i stop her or him, not because it’s a respect thing. i stop the kid because it is my very honor to be called mama, and there are only two people in the world who can call me that. and they damn well better call me that, or a variation of it, until the day i die.

n – nuisance. ask BS what he thinks i am when he’s trying to be good and mad and be in a total snit. and i make a lizard face. or crack a wildly inappropriate joke. yep. with a capital N.

o – outrageous. i have a bit of a mouth on me, and that mouth has gotten me into trouble from time to time. i’ll refrain from some of my, ehhem, finer moments.

p – psychedelic. i dig psychedelic music and psychedelic art. i can’t really speak to the issue of psychedelics themselves, though.

q- quite quarrelsome. okay, okay, i stole that from maurice sendak.

r – restless. i am always interested in things that are new. i can’t sit still.

s – shockingly spoiled. also stolen from maurice sendak. also true.

t – tenacious. i don’t give up.

u – unusually musically oriented. i associate people and situations with songs. i play by ear. music is my daily catharsis.

v – vocal. not shy. shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.

w – writer. i am a writer. i have always been a writer, even when i was sidetracked into three other careers. i will always be a writer.

x – x-tra smart. so smart, i can’t think of an x word. but i’m on it.

y-yawning. i am always tired. i have been tired since 1998. i’ll sleep when i’m dead.

z – zipper-challenged. i can’t fix zippers. i break zippers. somehow, i missed that day at mommy school where they taught you how to fix them when they’re off track. velcro is my friend.

tagging these alpha females in alpha order:

tied to my apron strings

and one cool alpha dude:

philfree

matilda by roald dahl

Posted on November 16, 2007 by wrekehavoc

we first met matilda when one of BC’s best friends gave out books in birthday goody bags instead of plastic crap. (yay, mira!!) we were further encouraged when BC’s second grade english teacher, a roald dahl fanatic and all-around amazing teacher, read the BFG and the twits to the class with great animation and admiration for the works. at this time, we’ve read the book several times. we’ve even seen the movie twice, though admittedly, the book is much, much better.

read this book.

the story, about a genius girl who faces some of the worst adults ever (including her parents and her principal), is a wonderful fantasy about how adults are not infallible — and how love can prevail. you have to laugh at the names in the book (Bogtrotter?); and you will be surprised when matilda’s parents scold her for doing something so terribly naughty as reading books instead of watching crap TV.

if words like telekinetic scare the bejeebers out of you, fear not: this is not any sort of carrie meets the horsey set. but you will laugh. i promise. and you will cheer on matilda and miss honey with abandon as the story goes on.

i think the very britishness of it is what is lost in the movie, now that i think of it. and that’s simply wrong. it’s not that danny devito or rhea perlman do a bad job; they don’t. but this is a british story within a british school and caste system. without that, it misses a bit. after all, this is the story that got BC singing: we don’t need no education. we don’t need no thought control. [note to self: don’t let her go into school singing that.]

so read the book — don’t see the movie first — or else i’ll bend a spoon, or move a desk with my mind. or something like that. cos if matilda can do it…

Matilda