The Disconsolate Mr. Jeremy Fisher
Good Reads

I Didn’t Think I’d Need a Dictionary to Read My Son Bedtime Stories

At my baby shower a couple of years ago, I received a full set of the Beatrix Potter books.  A lovely gift.  But as the ratio of words to pictures skews heavily toward words, it’s only just now that the Little Monkey has shown an interest and a willingness to sit through them.  He discovered them on his bookshelf and now they’ve been all he wants at bedtime.  And as he typically does, he tends to latch onto books that interest him and he wants me to read them over, and over, and over again.

So, this is how I have found myself immersed in Beatrix Potter.  And, can I just say, holy cow!  I thought I stumbled over my words when I read some of his dinosaur books.  Nothing like trying to pronounce Euoplocephalus.  It just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

But with Beatrix Potter it’s like I’m teaching myself to read again.  Is it that Potter wrote these in the early 1900s with the formal language of that era?  In The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Potter writes “Jemima complained of the superfluous hen.”  In today’s modern fiction this would surely have read, “Jemima cursed the useless bitch.”  Well, maybe not in a children’s book.

In The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Potter describes how “…Mr. Jeremy sat disconsolately on the edge of his boat…”  Disconsolately?  Really?  Not only could I not pronounce that, I had to look it up.  Although to be fair to Miss Potter, you do get her general meaning from the other parts of the story and her drawings.

And in a classic example of how our understanding of the meaning behind words and phrases changes over time, she writes (again in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher) that it “was all slippy-sloppy in the … back passage.”  I don’t think I need to elaborate on where my mind leapt.  Especially given my recent experiences.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think these books are great.  They have imaginative stories and drawings that have clearly captured the attention of my two-year old.  I just didn’t expect that at this stage I’d be reading stories to him that gave me a vocabulary lesson as well.  And that is, of course, a good thing.  It has me looking forward to all the other things I’ll get to re-learn along with him when we do things like his math homework.

 

December 15, 2011
Inspiration

Christmas Cookie Baking Music

I don’t make enough playlists.  Collections of songs that have some theme, create a mood, or that I just enjoy listening to.  In my college days I remember sitting at the CD listening station in the local music shop for hours before walking out with a couple I’d decide to buy.  And, I had stacks of mix tapes.

Now, in the digital age, I’ve got a large collection of songs in my iTunes and I like to keep adding to it.  But, honestly, I’ve gotten a bit slack.  I don’t get all the enjoyment I should out of the music I already have or the new songs I discover because I haven’t taken the time to organize them into playlists that I enjoy listening to.  How did I have time to make mix tapes but can’t manage to drag and drop a few songs into a list?

So I figure there’s no better time than Christmas to put a playlist together.  There are plenty of great classic Christmas songs out there from the likes of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. But sometimes, well, they’re just a bit slow for my taste.  This doesn’t mean they’re not great songs, it just means I wouldn’t put them on repeat to listen to over and over again.  And they certainly wouldn’t have me dancing around the kitchen.

So here’s my list, Christmas songs that just might make you dance around the kitchen while you’re busy baking cookies.  What are your favorite Christmas songs?

All I Want For Christmas Is You – Mariah Carey
Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Leon Redbone and Zooey Deschanel
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town – Bruce Springsteen
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – U2
Christmas Lights – Coldplay
Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid
Wonderful Christmastime – Paul McCartney
Feliz Navidad – José Feliciano
Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses
Frosty the Snow Man – Ella Fitzgerald
Last Christmas – Wham!
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Barenaked Ladies with Sarah McLachlan
Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon & Yoko Ono
The Twelve Days Of Christmas – The Spinners
My Favorite Things – Tony Bennett
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday – Wizzard
Winter Wonderland – Aretha Franklin
Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant – Annie Lennox
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year – Andy Williams
Jingle Bells – Michael Bublé featuring The Puppini Sisters
Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree – Brenda Lee
Deck The Halls – Nat King Cole
Joy To The World – Whitney Houston with The Georgia Mass Choir
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! – Dean Martin
Sleigh Ride – Johnny Mathis
Is This Christmas? – The Wombats
Step Into Christmas – Elton John
Fairytale Of New York – The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
Merry Christmas Everybody – Slade

December 9, 2011
Three Wise Men
Everyday Adventures

A Little Christmas Cheer for the Day

Seriously, how cute are kid’s Christmas nativity plays?  Toddlers wandering around aimlessly, shouting out random things (“Hey, I’m four!”), displaying looks of confusion and sometimes joy, singing out of tune, wearing fake beards.  It’s brilliant.

Today was my first as a parent and I loved it.  Little Monkey was a Santa which in the end meant he was just dressed all in red.  Keeping in form with his refusal to be a dinosaur at Halloween, he had no interest in the Santa coat or hat choosing instead to discard the hat somewhere on stage.  And even though I don’t think he sang a word, I’m just proud that he was confident enough to get up on stage in front of a room full of strangers without me holding his hand.

And in a moment of parenting bliss, what did he say when Santa Claus handed him his present?  “Thank you.”  Ahhh. I’ve done one thing right.

So here’s a bit of Christmas cheer for the day.

December 8, 2011
Advent Calendar Last Day
Motherhood

Advent Calendar Fail: Teaching Your Child About Instant Gratification

December 1st rolled around this year and all of a sudden it hit me like a freight train:  I have a child who is now old enough to start appreciating the magic of Christmas and I am woefully unprepared.  We don’t have any decorations or presents yet.  We haven’t made cards.  And finally, we have no Advent calendar.  And while the other stuff will happen eventually as we work our way into the festive season over the next couple of weeks, if the Advent calendar didn’t start it on Dec 1st, well, we might as well abandon the thing.  Note, it’s not like we have some long-standing Advent calendar family tradition I was in danger of breaking.  I just thought it would be a nice thing for us to do every day in the build up to Christmas.

This is why, at the last-minute, on the afternoon of December 1st, I decided to make an Advent calendar.  Yes, make an Advent calendar.  Sure I could run to the shop and pick up one of those calendars with the little chocolate pieces in each day, but the Little Monkey doesn’t like chocolate (how is he related to me??).  I couldn’t see him being excited about that each morning.  But something that has a bunch of small little toys?  That he’d love (well, what kid wouldn’t?).  Then, as I’m surfing the Internet, I come across all of these crafty ideas for Advent calendars.  And I think to myself, OK I can do that.

My plan involved some paper cups, glitter glue, construction paper, and ribbon.  Most of this we, remarkably, already had at home.  For each day, I put a small toy inside a cup.  Then, I made tops for each with the construction paper and glitter glue and then tied them onto the cups with ribbon.

Advent Calendar Cups

And then I hung them all on a small little table top tree we had. It was brilliant.

Advent Calendar Tree

That is until we got the Little Monkey to open the one for December 1st.  Well, once he found out he had twenty-five cups full of little toys and he could reach them, that was it.  It’s one of those decision points that you have as a parent.  Do you stick to the principle of this thing and try to reason with your screaming two-year old about why he can’t have these little trinkets or do you just give in and let him have them.  What did we do?  Well, we decided to just let him dig in and open then all in one go.  Advent calendar done.  Just like that.

Although he is learning about the magic of Christmas, he’s still too young to really understand what it’s fundamentally all about.  And trying to force that on him at the age of two just seemed a bit much.  We’ve got plenty of time to teach him about the meaning of Christmas.  And plenty of Christmas seasons for me to be more prepared.  This year, teaching him about the magic of instant gratification seemed like a better idea.

December 6, 2011