first birthday board books

When each of my babies turned one, I made them a personalized board book. I have been taking pictures with my cell phone almost every day I'm with them for the past eight months with this project in mind. Out of the hundreds of shitty cell phone pictures I've taken, there were about 15-20 decent quality ones of each kid.

I used mycustomstory.com to upload photos and design each book. I filled each with very simple sentences like "Ezra plays outside" and "Athena likes to learn " to match each picture.

The babies think their birthday board books are good teething toys and occasionally fun for throwing. The parents are somewhat more sentimental. There were misty mom eyes for sure.

Hugs,
-MP

in which grad school is the best

Mondays are solidly my favorite day of the week. I have just Ezra for the first half of the day, and then sometime after a nap, a walk, and several rounds of snacks, I plunk him in the Ergo and go fetch Sasha from school. We always meander home fairly slowly, swapping weekend stories, pointing out the things we see, and of course discussing Harry Potter.

I get Sasha set up with a snack, lay Ezra down for a nap, and return to Sasha to get her going on her math or reading homework, and then it's time for me to clamber onto my bike and head off to campus, leaving the kids in their dad's care for the remainder of the afternoon.

The reason Mondays are my favorite is because I get to go to class.

This is a stark departure from my undergraduate college experience, which for me was much more about community building and identity formation than academics. In undergrad, two thirds of the classes I was taking were not in my specialization, and many of my classmates would show up to class not having done the reading homework and then bullshit their way through the day's discussions. (I was absolutely not an exception.) In grad school, everything I take is immediately relevant, and I can trust that not only have all of my classmates done all of the reading, but they've also likely done extra reading and research simply because they are as excited about what we're learning as I am.

This semester the class I'm taking is a diversity & social justice course. I consider myself fairly well versed in social justice issues, but I didn't know there are so many resources for early childhood teachers for building anti-bias themes into their curriculum! I read both of our textbooks in just a few days each, and launched into an independent project where I'm reviewing children's books that feature diversity and anti-bias themes. It's a really fun project, and one I've been meaning to start since I began collecting names of social justice themed children's books two or three years ago. My professor just gave me the kickstart I needed. If any of my readers are interested in seeing the blog I've started to document my reviews, email me at hugsorhigh5s at gmail and I'll send you the link. It's connected to my real name, so I won't post the url here.

More and more I'm feeling ready to take on more coursework and scale back on nannying. I really miss the classroom environment, and I'm so incredibly excited about curriculum development, so I'm hopeful that I might be able to move on from private childcare to preschool teaching as early as this fall, and increase my classload as soon as summer term. I'm waiting to have those conversation with Sasha's family, because it will mean my slow and inevitable goodbye.

Hugs,
-MP

Harry Potter Playlist

Sasha is still really into Harry Potter. When she's not begging me to read the first three books aloud again, she's plying me with questions about Harry's universe. Luckily for Sasha, I am something of a Harry Potter geek. I was quite the trivia wizard in my day, and I've still got the cosplay costumes to prove my nerd cred.

I recently told Sasha about the great cultural phenomenon called Wizard Rock, which is essentially a genre of music with lyrics pertaining to the Harry Potter universe. The musical groups that fall into this genre often write and perform songs from the perspectives of JK Rowling's characters (like the band Draco and the Malfoys, who dress, act, and talk like Draco Malfoy) or from invented characters who don't exist canonically (like The Parselmouths, a girl duo who perform as two random Hogwarts students in Slytherin House).

Sasha was immediately intrigued by my description of wizard rock, so I promised to make her a CD of wizard rock songs. I had two major constraints when selecting songs: they needed to be about books 1-3 (and avoid major spoilers from books 4-7, mainly because it would be confusing and irrelevant to Sasha), and they needed to be appropriate for a 6-year-old. Pretty much as long as they didn't have sex, drugs/alcohol, or "bad words," they passed my "appropriate" test.

Click "read more" to see the playlist!

Harry Potter Holidays

Sasha had Friday and Monday off from school, so I wanted to make sure I had plenty of activities prepared to keep her busy for two whole days. Since we've been reading the Harry Potter books together, and she loves the hell out of 'em, I thought she would enjoy a load of Harry Potter themed activities.

My criteria for activities was:

1. It must be fun.
2. It must support learning.
   (Literacy, science, art, physical activity, music, social skills, problem solving, etc.)
3. It must be relevant and doable for a single six-year-old who has only read the first two Harry Potter books.

I searched the internet for "Harry Potter activities for kids," but almost everything that came up was kind of pathetic. I tend to shy away from things that restrict kids' creativity, so pretty much any website that started with the words "free printables" was off the table. Coloring a pre-printed owl or doing a crossword puzzle? No thanks. One "top ten" list of Harry Potter games for kids I found was almost entirely composed of screen-oriented activities like marathoning the movies, downloading an iWand iPhone app, and playing trivia online. As much as I love the occasional movie marathon, that's not really a great option for Sasha, since a.) we have enough power struggles over movies as it is and b.) she already vetoed watching the movies because she thinks they will be too scary for her, and she's probably right.

What's a nanny to do?

Make her own activities, of course! Here's my lineup of fun, educational Harry Potter activities, after the cut.

reading recipes

Sasha has been really struggling with learning to read. She still mixes up some of her letters, the most mysterious to me being f and i. She knows about five sight words, one of which is her own name. She drags her feet doing her 15 minutes of reading homework each night.

I remember how frustrating and tedious it was to learn how to read when I was her age. She has the same set of Bob books I had; I hated those books because the stories were so boring, and Sasha seems to feel the same. (In my case, my slow reading was at least partially to blame on my eyesight; my reading improved by several grade levels within two months of getting glasses.)

But Sasha likes stories. She likes being read to. We just finished the first Harry Potter book, and I've promised to find a copy of the second one to start reading to her. I may have her sound out a few words per page of The Chamber of Secrets so that she's involved in reading a more interesting story than "Dot has a hat."

I've been trying to come up with creative ways to integrate letter recognition and rudimentary reading skills into other activities so that it doesn't feel like reading, doesn't feel like a 15 minute timer, doesn't feel like homework.

So today, I wrote out a chocolate chip cookie recipe, packaged up and labeled all of the ingredients and most of the equipment we would need, and biked it all over to Sasha's house. After school, after some regular ol' dollhouse and dress up playtime, and after doing 10 minutes of her assigned reading, we whipped up a batch of cookies. She liked measuring and dumping and cracking eggs, and she loved mixing the dough with her hands!

She wasn't thrilled when I asked her to sound out the words on the recipe paper, but she was a champ at just straight up matching recipe words to container labels, and then recognizing the ingredient in the containers ("that's brown sugar!"). Good enough for a first go.

I wonder, if I wrote and illustrated a book for her that's all about things Sasha can do, like "Sasha can cook! Sasha can kick! Sasha can sing! Sasha can read!" if that would be a more exciting story for her to read than "Mat sat." I'll let the idea bake for a bit.

Hugs,
-MP

the art of coming out without tripping over things

Now that I've been employed long enough to receive my first checks from my two regular families, I've been contemplating if, how, and when to tell these families about my family. Specifically, that I'm a big ol' queermo and that I share a bedroom and a cat with a person I usually refer to as my partner. I fly pretty silent on most people's queerdar since I have the double whammy of fairly feminine mannerisms and a fairly feminine physical presentation. (I even currently have long-ish hair that is neither a buzz cut nor a pixie cut, my two rotating constants over the past six or seven years.) So it's not like these families would look at me and just know, or even suspect that I'm, you know, "of the gay." (Unless they saw my Yeti legs, which I always cover during interviews with new people anyway because preschool teaching effectively ruined my body hair self-confidence in childcare settings.)

With Jaden's mom, I knew her from her blogging presence on the internet, so I had absolutely no doubts about coming out. Within minutes of meeting her I had casually dropped the "my partner" bit, and not only was she instantly receptive ("your partner is welcome to hang out too, Jaden loves people!") but her kid was obviously acquainted with the term partner because he immediately asked in his adorable three-year-old lisp, "Does yo' pawtnah wike kids?" like an old pro. I gave him a mental high five.

My first day with Sasha and Ezra, I picked up a baby board book off the couch and upon my second or third reading to Ezra, I had it well enough memorized to start looking at the pictures that accompanied the text. It's a book called Everywhere Babies and even though it rhymes, it's the least obnoxious rhyming board book I have yet come across. I was surprised and delighted to see that even though the gist of the story was "babies are everywhere and they all sleep, play, and poop" it actually featured a very diverse cast of characters. Not only did it have what were pretty obviously same-sex couples, but it also showed grandparent-aged caretakers and caretakers who looked different from the babies (presumably fostering or adoptive families).

This was my sign.

This family is probably gay-okay and won't fire me upon revealing my true rainbow sparkle colors.

The next time I showed up at Sasha and Ezra's house, as their mom gave me my morning orientation, I saw my window and I plunged for it. It wasn't even really a window, but was shaped enough like one that I was pretty sure I could make it into a window. It went like this:

The Mom: "Sorry about all the noise, the workers should be done pulling off the roof after today. Ezra really needs a nap but he won't sleep through the noise so you'll have to put him in the stroller."
Me: "Yeah, I wouldn't be able to sleep through that noise either."
The Mom: "It's hard to sleep through sudden loud noises, like when they hammer or drop something big."
Me: "For sure. Last night somebody was going through our glass recycling out front and the noise of the bottles banging around woke us up. My partner got really worried that whoever it was would come in and steal her bike. But the type of person who bothers sorting through the recycling for bottles to deposit for a nickle each is probably not the same type of person who will then break into your basement and steal your bike."
The Mom: "Yeah, those people usually consider it their little job, and go from house to house on recycling day. Your bikes are probably safe in the basement."

Did you see that? She didn't even blink at the casual "my partner, she" bomb.

Of course, my partner sometimes goes by "they" pronouns, but one step of coming out at a time.

I would like to high five the people who illustrated Everywhere Babies, as it is now one of the very few board books that I don't despise on sight, but that I actively like. Good job on the passive diversity education front, Everywhere Babies.

Hugs,
-MP