Author Archive
Friday, May 24th, 2013
Check out Part Two of this week’s posts about reading to babies and little kids. Today, the authors of Reading With Babies, Toddlers and Twos share their secrets to hitting the books for wee little babes.
5 Tips to Start a Healthy Reading Habit
1. Read now, and read some more later. Don’t try to pack in a big reading session with a baby or toddler. Pick up a picture book and read at odd moments throughout the day.
2. Digital devices can wait. Research shows that we read differently with babies when we read books from our phones and tablets. We focus more on the gadget (don’t touch! Swipe this way!) than on the words and images. We’re not saying no screen time, but apps and ebooks don’t replace a book in the hand.
3. Be messy. Don’t file the books spines out on the shelf. Go for baskets and loose piles so that there’s always a book at hand, and a mobile baby can easily shuffle through for a favorite, and keep books in every room in the house.
4. Again! Again! Why? Why must we read “Hello Baby” three times nightly for weeks on end? Small people love predictability, and they love to exercise even a little control. If you can take it, read it. If you can’t, hide it without shame, or just make sure that book goes to Grandma’s house.
5. Be a reader yourself. Parents who want to raise a baby who loves to read often love reading themselves, so pick up a book in front of your baby, toddler or two as often as you can. You may have to re-read that chapter later (or choose books that are easy to dip in and out of) but years of watching parents read adds up. If you do your reading on a tablet or ereader, show your little one you’re reading and not playing Angry Birds.
About the Authors:
KJ Dell’Antonia is the lead writer and editor of the New York Times Motherlode parenting blog. Also as a children’s book reviewer and a mother of four children, she knows which books work best and why. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two young children.
Susan Straub founded the READ TO ME program more than 20 years ago, a national workshop encouraging young families to read to their babies that is still thriving. Ms. Straub’s work with READ TO ME has been celebrated on NY1 television and in Oprah’s O magazine. She lives in New York City.
Rachel Payne is the coordinator of early childhood services at the Brooklyn Public Library. She knows why some books are carried around, colored on, taken to meals, and slept with, while others are pushed away after a single page.
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
Love reading? (You must if you’re checking out my blog!) Love your baby? Combine these two joys quickly and easily tonight. In today’s Part One of two stories, I asked the authors of Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos three questions about how to get started with your little one.
KK: At what age is it important to start reading?
It’s never too soon to start and never too late to begin. You can show a tiny baby illustrations and contrasting images and read a cheerful rhyme, or prop books by the changing table, or tie them to the stroller. Share a book every chance you get.
KK: By they time they’re toddlers, how many minutes should we be reading to them?
Don’t stress about “how many minutes” you’re reading daily. If the books are around, and you’re seizing opportunities, you’re sharing good book time. There’s no magic number. What’s important is making reading something you both enjoy.
KK: How does starting a healthy reading habit when they’re young help them as they hit elementary and middle schools?
A child who starts reading early is a child who has never known life without books. This child develops a trust in the stories and information and adventures within a book. Expecting pleasure from reading makes so much of school easier. A fluent vocabulary—the kind that comes from sharing a wide variety of books—comes naturally to a reader. Continue reading with your child once she can read to herself. Bring out chapter books and old favorites and keep going as long as she’s listening. You’ll both be glad you did.
About the authors:
KJ Dell’Antonia is the lead writer and editor of the New York Times Motherlode parenting blog. Also as a children’s book reviewer and a mother of four children, she knows which books work best and why. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two young children.
Susan Straub founded the READ TO ME program more than 20 years ago, a national workshop encouraging young families to read to their babies that is still thriving. Ms. Straub’s work with READ TO ME has been celebrated on NY1 television and in Oprah’s O magazine. She lives in New York City.
Rachel Payne is the coordinator of early childhood services at the Brooklyn Public Library. She knows why some books are carried around, colored on, taken to meals, and slept with, while others are pushed away after a single
Categories: Children's Books, Mom Must Read, Mommy Bloggers, Must Read, Parenting Advice, Picture Books, Popular Books, Q&A With Authors | Tags: KJ Dell’Antonia, Reading, Reading with Babies, Susan Straub, Toddlers and Twos
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
This week is the I Read YA campaign by Scholastic–promoting all things young adult. And just yesterday, one of my favorite authors, Susane Colasanti, released a new YA love story called All I Need.
Here’s what Susane had to say about her new book, true love (which she finally found!) and her home state of New Jersey.
“You know that feeling you had in high school on the first day of summer vacation? When summer was shiny and new and filled with possibility and your romantic fantasies seemed like they would all come true? When meeting the boy of your dreams at the beach or roller rink or that Italian ice stand felt like an entirely realistic scenario? And you would fall so crazy in love that your long-distance relationship would totally work out?
Yeah. Never happened to me, either.
But that didn’t stop me from believing I’d eventually meet the love of my life. Every summer would begin with an overwhelming sense of longing. Like anything was possible. Forget that I’m from Middle of Nowhere, NJ, where the chances of running into a boy who hadn’t known me since second grade were approximately zero. I kept the hope of meeting the boy of my dreams alive in my heart. And I never let it go.
Two major life events happened for me this year:
1. I turned 40.
2. I met my soul mate. He is the love of my life. He is the boy I was dreaming about all those years ago. And guess what? He lived ten miles away from me in Middle of Nowhere, NJ. We went to different high schools. We didn’t meet back then. But he was there all along. What if we had met as teens?
Writing All I Need was my way of bringing that fantasy to life. Skye and Seth are soul mates. Their instant connection and chemistry are undeniable. When they meet at the last beach party of the summer, they both know they’ve found something real. But their plans to exchange contact information are disrupted. Skye goes home to her junior year of high school and Seth starts college with no way of connecting. They can’t stop thinking about each other. And they won’t stop believing that they’ll find their way back to each other one day.
Choosing to set All I Need in New Jersey was inspired by my own background. Skye is from Newfoundland, a town nestled in the middle of the woods much like my hometown of Peapack-Gladstone. Her family has a beach house in Sea Bright. Although my own Jersey shore experiences largely took place in Asbury Park, Toms River and Wildwood, the name Sea Bright evokes such a sweet, happy tone that I decided to incorporate it. Sea Bright is one of the towns that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. The landscape of the New Jersey coast has changed, but memories of summers down the shore will forever live on in my heart. And now those memories can live on in All I Need.
Readers often ask me if soul mates are real. They ask if boys like the boys I write about actually exist. I’m here to tell you that soul mates are real and boys like these do exist. I know what it’s like to meet a soul mate. What it’s like to feel that instant connection. To feel like you’ve already known someone your whole life even though you just met. I want readers to be inspired by All I Need. My hope is that by the time readers finish the last sentence, they will believe in the possibility of true love. The kind of love Skye and Seth have is not easy to find. But it’s possible. ”
That’s the thing about life. Anything is possible.”
Categories: Children's Books, Guest Blogs, Mom Must Read, Must Read, Popular Books | Tags: All I Need, I Read YA, IreadYA, Jersey Shore, Scholastic, summer romance, Susane Colasanti, teen books
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
Bury the Hot is the true story of a boy who hid from Hitler, but could never escape the memories. His friend, writer Deb Levy, completed his book for him. Below, she describes what it was like writing about a child in such a desperate situation while trying to raise three young sons of her own.
“One evening last summer, I strolled with my children toward an outdoor concert in our local park. The path was forested, and I found myself doing what I’d been doing for years already: imagining myself in a different set of woods, clutching my sons’ hands, running, fearful of letting go and losing them in the pitch black. I summoned the cold, the hunger, and Nazis.
While writing a book about the Holocaust, I spent hours on the phone with Sal (pronounced Sol; formerly Szulim), a close family friend who’d hired me to write his memoir. For months, I probed his memory, shook dust off painful recollections, and wakened the dead. In doing so, I found myself constantly comparing and contrasting the sheer normalcy of my life—buying chicken, running a bath—with the details of a time that was anything but.
My children became the perfect frame of reference as I delved into the world of another little boy. I’d stare at my youngest, age 3 at the time, and think, “That’s how old Szulim was when German warplanes first darkened the sky above his house.” I tried to picture my then 6-year-old stumbling over cobblestones—like Szulim at 6, fleeing a Gestapo roundup. I trembled at the thought of kissing my own 10-year-old goodbye before sending him on an orphan train across Europe.
I wrote my sons’ sensory quirks and self-soothing habits into Szulim’s story. When I sought to capture the dismantling of Szulim’s world through the eyes of a child, I stared into the faces of my own. On the playground, at the dentist, everywhere I turned, a little Yiddish boy became the doppelganger to my three. Even worse, I found myself getting angry—quickly, and all too often—at the boys seated around my own kitchen table. Their incessant requests, their refusal to eat a home-cooked meal, their inability to sit still for two minutes—it was driving me mad. Dzietzy i ribi glosi nie mayem! “Children and fish do not have a voice,” I wanted to yell, an old Polish trope about childrearing. But wait a minute. We’re not living in a mid-century shtetl. Besides, what kind of mother doesn’t want to hear her son’s voice?
As it turns out, a scared one. Every day, I sat at the computer and immersed myself in a world where bullies did more than exclude a child from a coveted seat in the cafeteria, where threats weren’t online, but on the street where Szulim, hungry, wearing his yellow star, rolled his hoop in the ghetto’s dirt. If my children can’t sit still during dinner, how will they survive when they have to cower in an attic without moving, while Nazi soldiers patrol the sidewalks below? For 18 days, Szulim and his little brother sat trembling in silence, waiting. There were no iPhones. No snacks. Nothing but fear that each moment might be their last. Could my sons survive this? I knew the answer and it terrified me.
(more…)
Wednesday, May 15th, 2013
Jennifer Gilmore‘s The Mothers has become a praised and hot new novel. It’s about one couple’s struggle with infertility and then the rigors of adoption. Jennifer wrote her book after going through a similar hardships herself. Luckily, her personal story has a happy ending. Here’s more directly from Jennifer about her life and her book:
“Since we met in our late twenties, my husband and I have wanted to make a family. I’d been sick, though, and was told by my doctors I’d never be able to have children.Despite this ominous declaration, I went on to become pregnant, which ended in a miscarriage. After several rounds of unsuccessful IVF procedures, we decided to pursue domestic adoption.
We were utterly unprepared for the adoption process, despite extensive research. And the deeper we got into the world of paperwork and agencies and lawyers and the choices we had to make, the more issues of race and class, and also what motherhood means, ignited the novelist in me. I wanted to investigate not only the difficult and shocking process, but also the deep and complex wanting to be a parent and the stress not being able to make that happen puts on a relationship. I hope my new novel, The Mothers, does this.
After a long and winding and often terrifying adoption path, my husband and I have been fortunate enough to have a newborn at home with us, for good. We are adjusting—with pleasure—to the daily rhythms and changes of a growing infant. There were times we thought this would never happen, and so becoming a family of three feels delicious, something to savor.
And yet, like my friends and family who came to motherhood easily, I have some of the similar concerns. There are the financial pressures—our savings and then some went into trying to have a child—and there are the pressures of space that come when living in a New York City apartment, with or without a child. While often there is little predicting when a child enters any of our lives, adoption can be quick and unexpected, as ours was. And so we are living the same frenetic life we were before his arrival .
As a writer, I work at home. Right now, the baby is asleep in his swinging chair, but he could—and will—wake up at any moment, wanting to be held, fed, changed. I do all these things with pleasure, but as a writer works for herself, there is no maternity leave. Now, I meet my deadlines in quick spurts. And I would be disingenuous if I did not admit to being worried about the future. Beginning a novel takes huge swaths of empty time and silence and solitude. And as a novelist, I have to believe I will be working on a new book very soon.
I am not the first writer to become a mother. Women managing work and parenting has been tackled and discussed and hashed over privately and in the media for decades. For writers though, especially women, it is especially difficult to carve out time for work when there is a child right here, whom I have yearned for, waiting for me to pick him up, bring him to me, hold on to him forever.”
