crooked house

Illustrator Virginia Lee

This illustration is a perfect description of my relationship to winter. I am thinking of buying a print. I found Virginia Lee's website after happening upon a book she illustrated -- Persephone -- on Amazon.

Shadow Paintings

Gorgeous shadow paintings by Rashad Alakbarov.

Beckett's Fail Better

Although this is the finished print, if I were still teaching the first grade, I think I'd make up similar work sheets for my class to complete. They'd make a fun display. (See also Beckett for Babies, one of my own failure, of which there are many.)

Little Cabin Clings to Side of Building

This little cabin hanging off the side of a building in SF is an art installation. I wish it were actually, you know, a little cabin with someone curled up beside a tiny woodstove inside it. Via The Hairpin.

Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies

Nathalie Foy recommended  1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up so we recently borrowed it from the library. Of course a lot of the books in it are familiar classic titles but it has suggested a few treasures that are completely new to us. Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies is one of them. It cracks me up. It's like Heather Has Two Mommies but with a sense of humour.

Heather Has Two Mommies was, I believe, the first children's picture book to openly address gay and lesbian-parented families. Even though Two Mommies author Leslea Newman grew up in a Jewish community, she never saw  Jewish families on television or in picture books and so felt that her family was somehow "wrong." Her book, which sparked a controversy when it first came out, was an effort to make a difference for this emerging minority of children.

Seven Little Daddies is a sort of  blanket version of Two Mommies, covering all minorities precisely because its fantastical premise doesn't apply to any particular real-life one -- unless of course there is an actual polyandrous subculture involving little people in Sweden, where the author Pija Lindenbaum is from.

In the book, Else-Marie is alarmed by the fact that her seven little daddies are going to pick her up from school instead of her mother. She is worried that other people will think her family is strange -- but of course everything turns out just fine in the end.

This is my favourite illustration, which is accompanied by the text: "I sigh and lean my head against my mother's shoulder. Isn't it lucky that my daddies are so little that we can all fit in my mom's lap?"

Impossible Pie and Cheeseburger Cupcakes

I made Impossible Pie -- have you ever heard of it? -- on the weekend and wrote about it for The Awl. I also made cheeseburger cupcakes, which excited Vivi no end. We had to have a mock birthday party for her with them.

Miss Suzy Teaches Us to Love Squirrels

We got the best present in the mail today from our dear friend ee. It seems she read about our recent squirrel fiasco and so decided to send us one of her favourite books when she was a little girl -- Miss Suzy. Written by Miriam Young and illustrated by Arnold Lobel, it tells the story of a little grey  squirrel who gets chased out of her treetop home by a band of marauding red squirrels. So Miss Suzy gets into the attic of a dilapidated old house and takes up residence in a charming dollhouse she finds there. She discovers five toy soldiers in a box, who move into the dollhouse with her in a kind of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves situation. She looks after them through the long winter and then, in return, they chase the gang of red squirrels out of her beloved treetop home in the spring. Thank you, ee! Miss Suzy is teaching us to love squirrels, the sweet little grey ones, anyway. (Ours was red.) 

Someone will read the story to you on youtube.

It's Never a Mistake to Be Friends Valentines

I found these little Valentine erasers at our local Superstore -- they were six for a buck, or something like that.  The little heart-shaped notebook pictured was also from a package of six for a buck. They came from our local dollar store. I used my label-maker to print out the text, only because I'd run out of ink for the printer. But the fact that it printed in the form of adhesive tape was actually a bonus.

Of course, after I'd made them Luke decided he preferred to use his store-bought Spiderman ones. Oh well. I had fun anyway. It may not be a mistake to be friends but it is certainly a mistake to assume your child will be enthusiastic about your ideas. Maybe I'll send them to the next twenty people who "friend" me on facebook.

Our Lego Hearts Bracelets

I got the pieces I needed in time to make these Lego heart bracelets for the kids for Valentine's Day -- I thought bracelets might be a little safer than necklaces for them at this point. The lovely woman at the local bead shop made the rather complicated slip knots for me, which means they are adjustable.

Although there's one for David and I as well as for each of the kids, David is getting this edition of Shakespeare's Love Sonnets, too, which is probably more of a present for me than for him, judging from its prettiness:

Reading Children: Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lippincote's

Odd image found here.

I was reading the hilarious At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor (this one not that one*) when I was struck by this great passage about the little boy in the book, who seems to be about seven years old and a very precocious reader. It has inspired a new feature here -- excerpts from books about children who love to read or hate to read or are in the act of reading. Passages that have something, anything, to do with children reading. In this case, the child really loves to read:

Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his head with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of the words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine.The pages had personality. He was of the kind that cannot keep a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet, dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. 'Don't!' he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.

If this passage is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver's life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor's pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereal and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Bronte.

*Completely off topic: did you know that the other Elizabeth Taylor, the actress not the writer,  had double rows of eyelashes?