Where My Wellies Take Me...

Charlotte was home sick today, so in-between making soup and baking muffins, I read her parts of this book.  I can't stress enough how fantastic this book is!

Where My Wellies Take Me...

Clare and Michael Morpurgo

designed and illustrated by Olivia Lomenech Gill 2012

It is indeed Wellington weather.  This is the kind of book I would love to make someday- filled with poems, part scrapbook, drawings of nature and the adventures of a child.  Clare and Michael Morpurgo say this in the introduction:  "For Clare and for me, some of the happiest years of our lives were spent growing up in the countryside.  We had walked on the wild side, gone where our wellies had taken us, and loved it."

A girl named Pippa, is staying with her Aunt Peggy.  Written in a journal format, she puts on her boots (wellies) and goes out for a walk.  I never have any idea of where I'm going, I just go.  Proper, long walks.  I don't care if it's raining, don't care if it's cold.

What a thrill for a child- to just wander around the countryside.  Unfortunately where we live, hedged in by busy roads and houses, my kids don't get that kind of freedom.  Perhaps in a small way, playing out back, running from neighbor house to neighbor house rounding up kids to play with, digging holes, collecting moss, and traipsing through the 'woods' behind our house has given them a sense of that kind of adventure.  I remember Madeleine and her friend Alexa playing for hours outside, mapping the pond and creek beyond our neighbor's driveway.  They gave the pond and the bridge poetic names and incorporated them into their fantasy play.  (Madeleine and her friends played "fairies" well into middle school!)

Lately reading this book with Charlotte as the weather stubbornly turns to Spring, makes me want to pull on boots and go wherever they take me!  As John Masefield says in one of the poems:

O, to feel the beat of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth,

Is a tune for the blood to jig to, a joy past power of words.

There's a wonderful fold out map!

I particularly like Walk This World With Music- a folksong by Chris Wood

It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where.

-John Masefield

Hello, Hello

 

 Hello!  Hello!

Matthew Cordell 2012

I have a love/hate relationship with technology.  For 2 years I didn't have a cell phone (when I tell people that they usually gasp.)  I actually loved not having one even though it drove everyone else around me nuts.   They could never call or text me when they wanted.  There's a wonderful sense of freedom in not being connected ALL the time.  Life goes on.  If I'm running late, there's no way to call, people will be fine.  Someone needs something at the store while I'm there but can't reach me, it's not the end of the world.  My kids had to learn that sometimes you just sit outside the school waiting for your mom to come hoping she remembered to pick you up (this was how I lived my life as a kid!).

I realized what a state we are in when I noticed at the Dentist office that I was the only one in the waiting room with an actual BOOK to read (everyone else was texting on their cell phones).

Don't get me wrong- I love my computer and the internet but after awhile it starts to make me crazy.  I want something tangible and "real" like a piece of  paper and a pen.  I get tired of looking at screens.

A couple years ago my husband gave me an iphone 5.  I had told him that I sort of thought I wanted one (mostly because of the cool camera apps everyone seems to be using).  I'm thankful for it and certainly use it (and waste time on it).   When I first got it my brother was excited to use "facetime" with me and my mom exclaimed "Now I can text you all the time!"  And I jokingly told a friend that our friendship will get better now that I have a cell phone to keep in touch.   Yeah, I guess this is the modern age.

That's why I love this book.  A little girl's parents and brother are so busy with their electronics that they don't have time for her.  So she ends up being lured outside by a leaf and saying "hello" to nature and her imagination.

A House of Leaves

A House of Leaves

Kiyoshi Soya

illustrations by Akiko Hayashi 1986

What's more perfect than finding a little hideaway during a spring shower?   The Japanese illustrator Akiko Hayashi draws an adorable little girl named Sarah who is playing in the garden when drops of rain begin to fall.  When you're small, you can find little nooks and hideaways, and that's just what Sarah does.  "A roof of leaves makes a good roof," she whispered.  

But when you sit still and quiet in nature, you're not alone for long, as Sarah finds out. 

I like how the pictures are vignettes on the page, almost like you are peering through a hole in the leaves to see her.

The World is Young

I came across this book at the thrift store and was quite taken with it.  It's a photographic journey through childhood.  Intimate snapshots show the lives of children- playing, learning, growing, busy in their own secret worlds that are closed off to adults.  The project ran several years through the 50's and featured the photographer's own children and other friends.  Individually the photographs themselves are not that striking, but put together, sometimes with quotes from the kids, they portray such a vulnerable, passionate, innocent time of life.  Something we've all experienced, but have forgotten as we've grown up.

The World is Young

Wayne Miller 1958

Footprints and Shadows

They come and go.  But where do they go?

Footprints and Shadows

Anne Wescott Dodd

illustrated by Henri Sorensen 1992

This book, with a soft palate of painted pictures, lyrically describes where footprints and shadows go.  In a gentle way, the refrain "Footprints come and footprints go" and "Shadows come and shadows go" tells of the passage of time, the seasons, and the sun as it moves through the day.  I love books that combine nature and scientific concepts with art and poetry and philosophical thought.  It's a quiet sort of book that we read at bedtime or nap time.  

We've had our first Spring visitors!

The golden crocus reaches up
To catch a sunbeam in her cup.
 -Walter Crane

The Bed Book

The Bed Book

Sylvia Plath

pictures by Arnold McCully 1976

Who knew Sylvia Plath had written a rhyming children's poem?  A great bedtime read (as you can tell from the title!), it's filled with all sorts of silly, wonderful beds.  A tank bed (for a "cobbledy town"), a hammock, a North-Pole bed made of fur, a submarine bed, or a "Jet-Propelled Bed for visiting Mars with mosquito nets for the shooting stars."  Imaginative and fun, it made us want to invent our own magical sort of bed.  After all, who wants to sleep in "just a white little tucked-in-tight little nighty-night little turn-out-the-light little bed!"?