Just back from a sweet morning school visit.

Lotsa kids sittting criss-cross applesauce on the gym floor, a futzy little portable microphone, 
and me with my book.
Or rather, my book via PowerPoint. 
Which is my read-aloud method when there are too many kids to easily and cozily share the real thing.

So, for the little ones (preK-2nd grade), I like to walk into the book by singing a song together (one that features pockets) and then joyfully and methodically going through the pockets of my ‘writer’s vest’ (aka, fishing vest) and then, drumrolll please, reading the book — A Sock is a Pocket for Your Toes.

The kids generally love the warm-up — especially the vest, which is filled with all sorts of intriguing and funny treasures, including a sock. (This one inevitably cracks ’em up. They are always just certain that it is dirty. Go figure.)

Anyway, today there was a wiggly little guy with an orange shirt sitting front and center. 
At some point during the singing or vest adventure, his hand went up and it wasn’t goin’ down until we spoke, guaranteed.
And when I called on him he said, “Can we get reading? I’ve been verrrrrry patient here.”

So we did. I was as ready as he was…

So for those of you who’ve asked or wondered, nope, I am NOT going to the hotly anticipated Democratic Debate here in Austin tomorrow night.

Drat!

Neither my husband nor I won a ticket in the lottery, no matter how many email accounts or false names we employed.

Drat squared!

Who knew that Texas of all places would be a big player in the Democratic race this year???
Gotta say, it’s a little titillating. We’ve been rather, um, red down here for awhile.

So, we didn’t make the cut to hob-nob with the big-wigs, but we’re kinda all about politics around here these days.
And believe me, the kids are part of the fray. 
To wit:

Small one:
“How long until we pick one of these people? Hasn’t this been a kind of long time to have no president?”
(Turns out she thought that George Bush was already, ahem, out…)

Tall one:
“Do the candidates get to vote? I’m sure they all vote for themselves. Do they have to vote last?”

Small one:
“And do they get to vote in every state? That wouldn’t be fair. They shouldn’t get to fly all over the place just because they might be president.”

Tall one:
“I don’t get why all this voting isn’t happening on the same day. It seems like people are just going to take other people’s ideas.”

Small one:
“Will there still have to be peace rallies when we get our new president?”

Tall one:
“I’m sure this year people will really think about things before they vote. Right, Mama?”

Right. Let’s hope, my sweet. Let’s hope…

A psalm is a little song of praise.
Which is a lovely thought — an endeavour hardly anyone could argue with.
Kind of like reciting gratitudes. 

So I’m working on writing one, at the invitation of a grad school poet friend of mine, but I’m positively slopping through irony over here. 

For one, my religious background goes something like this: interfaith Sunday school when it doesn’t interfer with ski team. (I do have fond and visceral memories of my granddad singing the Doxology before Thanksgiving dinner, and I have one intensely spiritual daughter, but still…)

For another thing, I’m currently traveling on a low road and finding it harder than usual to recognize all that there is in the world to praise. It seems as if many of the people I love are suffering and the music I click on and the things that I read make me heartsick and the sunshine is barely strong enough to cut through the chill.

And third, I’m not tone deaf but not exactly musical either. 

So.
Here I sit.
Working on a little song of praise.

Maybe it’s those kinds of ironies that bring us to the blank page most fiercely.

One can hope…

 I’ve always been a sucker for a guy with a guitar.
Good thing I married one.

And guess what he got me for Valentine’s Day?
This soundtrack, currently set to peat and repeat on my iPod.

Have you seen the movie?

You haven’t?

You guys! They didn’t invent Nexflix for nothin’…

I’ve been thinking lately that one of my purposes, in writing for children, is to honor their perspectives — 
wild, varied, inscrutable, sweet.

To empower through recognition.
To notice, to listen, to see.

That’s what I remember wanting as a kid.

Recently I was plowing through piles of my own poems and I found this one, written when my first baby was wee. 
I think this is when this whole idea must’ve started to coalesce for me. 

Don’t you love tracing your own paths backwards sometimes, to find out how you got where you are today?

Perspective

It is nearly impossible  — impossible —

to recognize the difference

between dog and bear

in the transmuting dark

and the long croony whistle of a train

sounds so much like moo

as to be four-legged and lonesome

A sock looks like a hat

but doesn’t fit and isn’t

a pear looks like an apple

apple sounds like happy

and is

Blowing on breakfast

cools it off, blowing

in the bath makes bubbles

and the wind blows

arms into fingered wings

Every man is Daddy

— the Wicked Witch

is Mama and so is the moon

in this afternoon’s sky

milky as the breast

at bedtime when who

will stay to keep things straight

who will name the sounds

that come in the night?

— Liz Garton Scanlon, 1999

This morning, The 2007 Cybils awards were announced and hot dang, you judges did a fine job!
I haven’t read every winner, but I can assure you that I will. 
I can see the rush at the circulation desk now.

As for those I’ve read, a quick little hoo-rah to a few:

Linda Urban’s A Crooked Kind of Perfect took the honors for best middle-grade novel, which, to my mind, is kinda perfect.
Congratulations, Linda!

Back in January, I predicted the winner of the picture book category — The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County — so woot! to Janice Harrington and Shelley Jackson and woot! to me!!!

And finally, the winner of the poetry award: This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness.
Sigh, swoon, sigh. 
I love this book. 
And (I know, I’m gonna hurt my wrist patting myself on the back this morning) I just so happen to be the reader who nominated it! 
Joyce Sidman, you wrote a book of lovely, honest and meaningful poems and I’m awfully glad they’re being celebrated.

OK, now go on you guys. 
Go check out The Cybils for yourself…

My writing class for the 12-week short semester starts tomorrow night.

Which, in case you live under a rock or never enter a Target store, is Valentine’s Day.

I’m going to be so popular, dontcha think?

Students love missing dreamy interpersonal holidays to sit in drafty old college classrooms for three-and-a-half hours. (That’s right — did I mention that part? Three-and-a-half hours. Again with the popularity…). 

And y’know, since it’s the first night, let’s spend a goodly portion of the evening talking about administrative nuts and bolts — syllabi and attendance policies, stuff like that.

Oh, they are going to be rolling in the aisles.

Do you think I should bring cookies or conversation hearts?

Today, my wee one turns seven. My baby.
And I hate to be all maudlin and cliched, but wha?!?!?

I am shattered not because I want to rewind, to back her away from who she has become.
I am shattered just that we have her, she is partly ours and has been now for seven years.
Seven years.
It’s a blessing almost too big to bear…
 

I am smart to be raising daughters around women who devote more of their time to hiking than hairspray, art than eyeliner, politics than pills. 

I am lucky to have an abundance of fresh and healthy and delicious food in my fridge and on my table.

I am blessed to have two girls who are tall and strong and, so far, relish the bodies they’ve been given.

But. 

But, I am still mindful of the fact that I hardly know a woman (and that includes the hiking-artist-activist type) who wouldn’t say she’s had body image issues in her life. I hardly know a woman who can’t reflect on stages of awful awkwardness and self-loathing. I hardly know a woman who hasn’t envied another her hips or abs or thighs. 

Objectively, there is so much to love and revere, isn’t there? 
The way we can climb mountains and move futons and pull weeds and have babies?
The way we can heal our own colds and strengthen our own weaknesses and survive stress and loss and trauma?
The way we can age well with just a little good sleep, good food and brisk movement?

But subjectively, we are a people with harsh and critical eyes. 
We are riddled with flaws and if you give us the opportunity, we’ll tell you about them.
We find it hard, most of us, to love our bodies without condition… to relish them the way my daughters still do theirs.

Which saddens me. 
Honestly, I’d like for my girls to sit around with your girls in their college dorms someday and talk about something else.
Y’know — their majors, their favorite candidates, their plans to travel to Argentina or Alaska in the spring.
Instead of what size jeans they hope to fit into by Christmas or whether the girl down the hall has bulimia.
Right?

I have a lot of thoughts on what may help turn the mirror on its side, but I’m no expert.
There are smart folk who have devoted their entire professional careers to researching how women perceive their physical selves and how those perceptions can change; how women are influenced by the images we are shown in the media; how women feel about other women.

It’d be a good idea if we all read up on this stuff and left Cosmo and Glamour to others.

It’d be a good idea if we just started loving up our own selves as examples.

And it’d be a good idea if we checked out this book.
(Click on the book itself to preview the gorgeousness that is inside. And then, if I may be so bold, order it…)

Our within-a-whisper-of seven year old celebrated her birthday last night.

Scavenger hunt… sparklers… ice-cream sundaes. A big time.

One of her little buds gave her The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

It is now 5 o’clock PM here in Austin, Texas, and she is reading on the couch.

She is still in her jammies from this morning.
I kid you not…