I’m always on the look out for books that The Eleven-Year-Old and I can read (and talk about) together. Here are four of our favorites from Family Book Club this past year. https://caterpickles.com/2018/12/13/4-books-for-family-book-club
Years ago, when I started this blog, neither my daughter nor her friends read on their own. They were never online, which gave me considerable freedom when it came to posting funny stuff my daughter said. But now that my daughter is 11, the potential fallout from telling funny stories from her day is much greater. What’s a curious mommy blogger to do?
If I could change one thing about parenting, it would be to have it commonly accepted that parents & kids should keep reading books together well into middle school. My fifth grader and I both read Beth Vrabel’s Pack of Dorks this past weekend and it opened up so many excellent conversations about friendship, bullying, and having the courage to be your own person.
This week, instead of telling you about what my daughter’s reading, I want to tell you about a great book I’m reading. Friendship challenges in K-6 are just as complicated and emotionally fraught as ever. In Little Girls Can Be Mean, Michelle Anthony and Reyna Lindert describe a simple, four-step process that parents can use to teach their children to navigate these tricky social situations on their own.
Last week, as I was sitting down for a bit of pre-dinner reading, I had what I thought was a bout of dizziness. Then one of my books toppled over, and I figured out I was experiencing my first earthquake. That, combined with the wildfires raging in Northern California and the news out of Puerto Rico, has me thinking about disaster preparedness.
Dateline: March 28, 2012 The Five-Year-Old, under her breathe: “[mild expletive, mild expletive], our phone is broken. [mild expletive, mild expletive].” I knew the day when The…
After reading The Night Before Christmas, The (then) Five-Year-Old and I had a conversation about the perils of smoking, and whether Santa smoked. The (then) Five-Year-Old has obviously been busy processing this information because a few days later she asked me, “Why doesn’t Santa have heart disease?”
I still get a little thrill whenever I see my daughter walk into the house with a Judy Blume book. Back in the before times, when I was just a young kid in Texas, there was a bit of a dust-up about Judy Blume’s book, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, which resulted in my school librarian banning all Judy Blume books. It was my earliest experience of censorship (and its limitations), but it wouldn’t be my last.
This week, The Nine-Year-Old reads Terry Pratchett’s The Carpet People and convinces Mommyo to read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett with her.
She’ll ask you to take a picture of her by the growth chart, and you will be shocked to discover that your baby is now almost…
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