wild*life

My house is a wasteland of children’s art projects.  Well, not children.  Child.  One child.  A little lefty named Jacob who is well on his way to 10,000 hours of drawing expertise.  Little piles of his work can be found in drawers and on tables; in folders and portfolios.  I try to take pictures of his best work for posterity, but it’s almost impossible to keep up.  Plus, some of them are just too funny to toss.  Sometimes I ponder how much mommy guilt Picasso’s mother felt, years later, after sneaking mountains of pictures into the paper recycling bin?

Earlier this year we went through a bit of a power struggle with this artiste.  And whenever he would get mad, he would go to his room and draw pictures of us and then draw big circles around them and lines through them— banning us from his psyche.  It’s probably a productive way of dealing with anger and frustration, though it is not good for parents to giggle when said drawings of themselves are silently stuffed under doors to communicate said frustration… unless you want more hate mail.

The other night during story time, Jake kicked his legs and accidentally jammed my finger and it really hurt.  Instead of an apology, I got a picture of myself with tears springing off my face and a big, red throbbing finger that was crossed-out with the word “no.”  Underneath was a smiling picture of me with a happy face and a happy finger and the word “lles”— which sounds like yes when you sound it out in Spanish.  How can I not save these in little piles all around my house?

And speaking of drawing, my last review was of a real dud of a moose book, but just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, somehow the Book Elf skyrockets you to book bliss.  And that’s exactly where we are with a book called The Boys’ Doodle Book by Andrew Pinder.

In a nutshell: The Boys’ Doodle Book is a heavy duty art book of creative and thought-provoking pictures to complete.  The Book Elf likes to change it up now and then.  It has sparse, simple text questions that a five-and-a-half-year-old can sound out.  Mostly it’s filled with partial pictures and a prompt.  Examples include things like: A boy looking over the side of his mattress and the caption: What’s under the bed?  A strong looking man in his skivvies and his dog and the prompt: Design their superhero costumes.  A page with three fierce lions running as a pack and the question: What are the lions hunting?  Followed by a page with the lions looking back in fear and the question: What is hunting the lions?  It’s full of pages with vikings and castles, pirates and aliens, pyramids, tunnels, caves and stampedes.  It skews “boy,” but without being too stereotypical.  One of the first pages Jake turned to had a frightened looking T-Rex and asked, “What scared him?”  Jake’s answer:  A skunk.  Actually, a pack of skunks.

Why didn’t I think of that?

This book has kept him creatively occupied for hours in a calm, educational way, exhibiting model “we’re in public” behavior.  Target audience is definitely the 5-7 demographic.  The paper quality is great and the pictures are colorful and engaging with lots of white space.  Nothing about this book impels one to color inside the lines.  One reviewer on Amazon took hers to a copy shop and had them chop the binding off and make it spiral-bound so it lies completely flat.  This might be worth it, though after a few days of use it seems to lay flat enough.

This past Saturday, we were invited to a last minute birthday party for Jake’s first best friend, Helen.  In need of a quick present, I scoured the local specialty shop and Targét for The Girls’ Doodle Book or any of the books by this author, but came up short.  I did find something close and we paired it with our favorite washable marker Pip-squeak carousel.  Jackpot.  I could hardly believe my eyes when after two-hours of trampolening, cheese pizza and frosting as thick as snow, six little girls made a circle on the floor and started coloring with the markers while Helen colored in her new doodle book.  We also marveled that five out of the six were lefties… leaving us to wonder how Helen racked-up such a statistically significant number of left-handed friends.  Several hours later, as we said our goodbyes, Helen was balancing the marker carousel on top of her book to take it upstairs and continue working.  I’ve now found my go-to birthday present for 2015.  Expect to see this reappear on next year’s No It All Gift Guide.

Families can talk about: Why do you like dragons and vikings so much?  Are there enough pages where you can draw dragons?  When the boy is looking over the side of his bed and says, “Oh crumbs!” is he referring to pie?  Is that why you drew a monster eating a giant piece of pie?  Is this like a regular coloring book or better?  There’s a list of thirty seven other Doodle books by this publisher… how many hours of mommy quiet time does that equate to?  Technically the pages rip out, but you don’t need to know that do you?

The Boys’ Doodle Book by Andrew Pinder

The Book Elf has found that no matter how many hours of research he does, how many “Best of” book lists he pours over, how many Amazon reviews he reads, truly outstanding books that make you want to read them again and again are rare indeed.

Some words of caution: Many of those organizations that like to foil stamp metallic awards like Olympic medals on the front of books do not have the same definition of “good” as your average bedtime reader.  They have a major bias for beautifully illustrated books without words.  Which I can appreciate as the art forms they are, but I do not want to spontaneously narrate works of art after a long day of work, feeding people, bathing people, dressing people and brushing said people’s teeth.  Yes, the The Lion & the Mouse is gorgeous and no, I don’t want to think.  Sometimes I just want to mindlessly read.

And those people on Amazon almost always like everything.  Just about every book I look at has an average rating of 4.5 stars.  Even super bad books like Peanuts: You Can Be Anything! which is one of the worst books I’ve read… ever.  Proving that the American public’s taste in children’s literature can rarely be trusted.

And that is a long winded way of saying, sometimes the Book Elf picks a real lemon.

In a nutshell: This Is a Moose by Richard T. Morris  is a story about a moose on the set of a documentary film.  There are a number of “takes” with the black clackey thing, as the director tries to shoot his movie.  But alas, the moose doesn’t want to be your average wild moose and instead wants to be an astronaut.  For some reason his grandma comes along and she wants to be a lacrosse goalie.  Some other things happen, there’s a doctor giraffe, and then the animals build a giant catapult and launch the moose into space in a lawn chair.  At this point, we find out the director is a duck and he has a conniption Don’t-Let-the-Pigeon-Drive-the-Bus-style.  He wants the animals to act like animals instead of like astronauts and goalies and doctors and movie production crew workers.  He has some sort of epiphany, which took me two concerted re-readings to really get, and the entire crew launches itself into space in a canoe to film the moose on the moon as an astronaut.

Overall I had high hopes for this book and they fell to earth like a moose-shaped asteroid.  Fortunately, the illustrations are well done.  Unfortunately, there is a little drawing of a moose visibly heeding nature’s call, which then becomes the only page the two little potty-obsessed three and five-year-old kiddos at my house care about.  The story requires a lot of explanation.  The subtle message of this book is to dream big, or as Peanuts might say, “You Can Be Anything!”  I wish I could get the Book Elf to take it back to the North Pole but unfortunately, the boys dig it.  They even talked Nonna into buying it on her Kindle.

Families can talk about: What is a movie set?  Is it called a clapperboard or a black clackey thing?  What is it for?  What is a microphone on a boom?  What is a lacrosse goalie?  What is a lawn-chair sling shot?  Can you put a fish bowl on your head and fly to the moon in a canoe?  What else am I going to have to try and explain before we can get through this book?  Should the title be: This Is a Moose, or This Is a Dud?

This Is a Moose by Richard T. Morris

The Book Elf was assessing the calendar countdown to Christmas and appraising his stock of well-researched kid lit and has identified a two night shortfall.  He has decided to write a non-committal note regarding some unexpected fire drill from his boss and bring in The Pajama Elf as back-up.

The good news is, it looks like The Pajama Elf is available.  The bad news is, it looks like she has her own book…

Two weeks ago I buckled down and did my obligatory clothes management clean-up of the boys closet.  It generally involves going through every drawer and putting things into piles such as: Basement for Nate, Devon, Salvation Army, Girls Clothes Nate Wore Home From School, and Rags.  Given the weather has finally changed, I decided it was time to whittle it down to a more manageable number of items, moving the drawers from super stuck to marginally stuck.

It also occurred to me, several weeks ago, that it possibly has not rained, to this degree, in Nate’s lifetime.  Except maybe that one torrential nap time downpour.  Now there’s a sobering drought-tolerant thought.

And if you can believe, I packed-up Nate’s six “Black and Blue One Superman Shirts.”  Last year at this time we were eyeball deep into this particular Superman shirt obsession.  He wouldn’t wear his snow coat in Yosemite because it was covering-up his Superman shirt.  I’m pretty sure that in August when we went to Portland, I only packed navy blue short-sleeved Superman shirts.  And his one Azores bull shirt.

Somehow between August and now, he has dropped the Black and Blue One Superman Shirt obsessive compulsion like a hot potato.  Wouldn’t be caught dead in one.  For a few weeks he only wanted his bull shirt.  Lately his favorite is his Transformer shirt which might possibly be a 2T.  Overall, he’s shown a new level of variety and flexibility in the range of his wardrobe.  There are far fewer episodic crying fits as he digs through the dirty clothes hamper and implores me to wash and dry his favorite shirt in less than three minutes.

Primarily he’ll only wear shirts with someone or something that flies, but I even got him into a character-free striped shirt with an orange pocket on Sunday.  “I like orange.  Orange is my favorite color.”

And being stuck in Nate’s wardrobe rut is my effortless segway into our next book: Stuck by Oliver Jeffers.

Now Mr. Jeffers is also the author and illustrator of one of Nate’s favorite books, How To Catch A Star.  Every time we read that book, Nate has to ask, “Why he sitting like a cwab?”  With a similar narrative style and artistic proclivity for footless boys, Stuck looked like just the thing for our almost four-year-old.

In a nutshell: Floyd’s kite gets stuck in a tree.  He throws his shoe up to try and dislodge it, only to exacerbate his problem.  He begins throwing household items into the tree and then households and then more and more crazy and absurd things until finally he has a tree full of firemen and whales.  In the end, his kite falls out and he nonchalantly goes to bed with a nagging feeling that he’s forgetting something.

Overall it gets great giggles.  The illustrations are engaging and it can be the jumping off point for all sorts of conversations.

Families can talk about: What would you do if your kite got stuck in a tree?  How many ways can you brainstorm to get a kite out of a tree?  When should he have stopped to rethink his approach?  At what point do you think it’s unrealistic that Floyd could throw those things?  What does unrealistic mean?  What kind of steroids do you think Floyd might be taking?  Is it a good idea to throw a whale?  How will he breathe?  How safe is it to throw a saw?  What’s a unibrow?  And the question we’ve all been dying to ask: How does Floyd wear shoes when he doesn’t have feet?

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

Keeping with this theme of mistake-making and perfectionism, the Book Elf brought us a little tome titled Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg.  A quick Google search has also turned-up a song and a lesson plan and all sorts of other teaching accoutrement.

So now that Jacob is learning to write, and in Spanish no less, we have many opportunities to battle frustration and fix mistakes and raise our adversity quotient by continuing onward and upward because Hugglemonsters never give up!  I’ll save you the trouble and do the Mom eye-roll for you…

In a nutshell: This little little board book is slightly more sophisticated than your average board book… which we have generally grown out of except for Sandra Boynton’s Happy Birthday Pookie which just gets funnier and funnier every time you read it.

The Oops book helps you visualize how any mess-up can be turned into something new.  Paper tears and stains and holes and folds can be turned into frogs and penguins and all sorts of neat things if you just use your creative noggin.  The execution of this book in cardboard helps to better deliver this message with tactile flaps and folds and holes and a telescoping view-finder page that takes five minutes to turn.

Yesterday Nate came to me, fit to be tied, because Jake had drawn a sun in the corner of his picture that he had colored at Geoff’s birthday brunch.  It was “wuined!”

And I said, “Hey Nate.  I bet you can turn that sun into something cool.  Go find the Beautiful Oops book for inspiration.”  And get this: he actually ran to find the book and started looking through it for ideas and stopped crying and left me to clean-up the kitchen alone.  Beautiful miracle.

Families can talk about: What can you do if your brother accidentally steps on your drawing?  Which writing instrument do we choose if we want the ability to erase?  How many other letters can you turn an ‘i’ into?  Who makes mistakes?  Do grown-ups make mistakes?  What could we say if we see a friend getting frustrated?  What are other words for mistake?  Accident?  Should you apologize for accidents?  Was drawing on your brother’s paper a mistake or an accident or both?  Theoretically, what does a sincere apology sound like?  Theoretically…

Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg

When Jakey was three he went through an “ashamed phase.”  If you even gently or innocently questioned his abilities, strength, size, or corrected his behavior, he would melt into a puddle of tears and cave baby grunts and would run away and hide his face.

Once I balked when he offered to pull up this iron horse hitching post that was set in concrete in the middle of our lawn.  Fearing that my children would split their heads open on the forehead-high iron dagger protruding from the side, I spent hours twisting and turning the pole, trying to haul it out of the fudgy soil.  He was so little and so confident.  He offered to pull it out for me and my smile of disbelief sent Jakey into meltdown mode.  I felt horrible.

Nate has been going through a similar phase, though not quite as extreme.  He’s slightly more accepting of his current stature and station in life.

So when the Book Elf suggested a story about perfectionism, I readily embraced his recommendation of The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett and Gary Rubenstein.

In a nutshell: Beatrice Bottomwell is an elementary school-aged girl who is famous for never making mistakes.  She is able to make PB&J with the exact same amount of PB versus J.  She is so perfect that people don’t know her name… she’s just known as “the Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes.”  She even has paparazzi that wait for her in the morning outside her house.

Her little brother Carl makes all kinds of mistakes like drawing with green beans and eating cereal with his feet (which I would argue is less of a mistake and more a lack of good judgment).  Carl is clearly happy, but also unlikely to be showing-up in Us Weekly.

Beatrice almost ruins her mistake-free record during cooking class when she slips and drops four eggs.  But, she miraculously catches them all, landing on her back with all the eggs safely caught— including one in her mouth.  After this close call, Beatrice is spooked.  Now she’s walking on egg shells (figuratively of course).  She avoids ice-skating and other risky activities so as to maintain her reputation of perfection.

Well one day it’s time for her to perform her world-famous juggling act in the school talent show.  Spoiler alert: She grabs the pepper shaker instead of the salt shaker and when she combines this mistake with her hamster, Humbert, and a water balloon… Everything goes terribly wrong.

In front of the world, Humbert breathes in the pepper, sneezes, claws the water balloon and explodes it on top of Beatrice, ruining her perfect hair.

And what does Beatrice do after this horribly embarrassing public screw-up?  Does she run and hide her face and grunt unintelligible sounds in a puddle of anguished tears?

Staying true to her nature, her reaction is perfect: she laughs.  She laughs and laughs and the audience laughs and hallelujah, the pressure to be perfect evaporates.  She learns to ice skate and take risks and has fun instead of being such a goody-goody.  At the end of the day, she’s no longer famous, but she doesn’t care.  Now she can be Beatrice the girl instead of Beatrice the robot.

Families can talk about: Why does Beatrice not want to make mistakes?  What does making mistakes teach you?  What is the worst thing that could happen if you mess-up?  What is the worst thing that could happen if you worry too much about messing-up?  What mistakes have you made?  What do you do when you make a mistake?  Would you rather your name was “the Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes” or Beatrice Bottomwell?

I’d go with option 1 myself.

The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett and Gary Rubenstein

We’ve recently had a couple of exciting developments here in the world of child development.  First, back on November fourth, Jakey started sounding out words so he could write them down.  He wrote “luna” and “mi casa” without me telling him the letters and it was the best.

And then this past Thursday, Nate finally saw pictures in his mind.  At the dinner table he closed his eyes and exclaimed, “Mama, I can see it in my head!  A wolf!”  Up until now, Nate would squint his eyes shut and press his fist to his forehead and then open his eyes and say, “I no see it.”

“Imagine it in your brain.  Can you see a cow?”

Squinting.  “Uhh…”  He had nothing.

So it couldn’t be better timing than for the Book Elf to deliver one of the acclaimed books of 2014 titled The Book With No Pictures by B. J. Novak.

In a nutshell: This book is just words, as the title warns.  It has shown-up on a number of “Best Books of 2014” lists as innovative.  It’s basically a narrative that gets the reader to say a bunch of silly things against their will thus inciting giggles from its pipsqueak audience.  It makes kids feel powerful by “tricking” grown-ups into saying things they wouln’t normally say like “I am a monkey robot.”  It has one use of the word “butt” which will likely become the only line your kids will continue repeating after the book is over.

According to my highly refined book rating system:

Humor— check
Length— check
Plot— strike 1
Art— strike 2
Substitutions Minimized— strike 3

I like that it’s humorous, but otherwise it’s not one I expect to be digging through the book crate for.  There is no storyline.  It feels more like a long greeting card.  But, Nate calls it “the funny book.”

Families can talk about: Can a book without pictures be good?  Who do you know that reads books without pictures?  Can you close your eyes and imagine pictures in your mind?  Why do you think this book is funny?  Should we go back to books with pictures?  Do you remember anything about this book besides the sentence “My only friend in the whole wide world is a hippo named BOO BOO BUTT?”  Anything?