Wanted: Not-So-Easy Readers

Did Henry James Write Anything along the Lines of Junie B Jones?

A few years ago when the Captain Underpants series was becoming popular, I recall that some parents were complaining about the increasingly sarcastic, scatological content of children's books. In a bookstore I bumped into “junior chick lit”: Barbie-pink paperbacks in nearly monosyllabic prose that belies their cynically fashionable, prurient content.

I recall an article in which a librarian defended this trend toward simplistic books with a worldly, jaded attitude. She pointed out that many adolescents don't read at advanced levels, so we need I-Can-Read books that are also PG-13.

Our family has an opposite problem. Jessica started reading alone at five and hasn't looked back. She works out syntax and pronunciation effortlessly and reads a newspaper without stammering—even if she doesn't comprehend the story.

When Nathaniel was six, choosing books at the library was like a math exercise. He carefully counted pages and estimated the words-to-picture ratios of books with numbers on their spines. Jessica, however, just peruses thick paperbacks from the spinning racks.

So we need to locate Captain Underpants' nemesis: writing with fifth-grade syntax that appeals to a wide-eyed first-grader.

Restroom Tourism

When Nathaniel was first learning to use a toilet, he quickly came to understand that stores and restaurants, churches and schools, all had restrooms. Exploring them evolved into a hobby for him, and suddenly we couldn't go anywhere without visiting the bathroom.

The parent of a potty-training child who says “I have to go” is in a precarious position. I often suspected he was just curious or bored, but I was never sure. I could ask, “Do you really?” But could I actually refuse?

Sometimes I wished I had. The first time I went into a bathroom with Nathaniel, he promptly withdrew the deodorant cake from a urinal and inquired, “Keep this?”

On later occasions he would finish drying his hands by running them along the walls. That sort of thing makes me squeamish, no matter how many studies insist that my computer keyboard has more germs than a dirty toilet seat. Other men would eye me strangely as I stood at the urinal and called out blindly, “ . . . and don't touch anything! Are you touching anything? Don't touch anything!”

Vengeance came when Nathaniel pretended to have to go to the bathroom in order to get away from a restaurant table.

I watched as he dropped his pants, clambered onto the over-sized toilet, and perched, legs splayed, feet in the air, clinging to the rim with his hands.

He began chatting, commenting on the wall tiles and the hook on the stall door.

After a few minutes, I suspected a false alarm. He craned his neck to critique a picture on the wall behind him.

The toilet flushed automatically.

It didn't flush like our toilet at home, with a gentle swirl and gurgle. It flushed like a rocket ignites, with a great industrial whoosh. I can still see the terror on his face as he balanced precipitously over the roar.

That ended his restroom habit . . . for a few weeks anyway.

Years later now, I thought these issues were behind us. Recently we found ourselves in a public bathroom again. Either a leaky fixture or some bad mopping had left occasional puddles on the floor, so we stepped in cautiously. Nathaniel went into the stall while I washed my hands. He did his business promptly while delivering a brief soliloquy on his afternoon plans. As I dried my hands, he materialized at my shoulder, clearly proud of himself.

“I rolled out,” he announced.

“You . . . ?”

“I didn't go out the door. I sneaked under.”

Seeing the wet marks on his belly and shoulder, I gritted my teeth and took a breath.

“The door is still locked,” I pointed out. “Nobody else will be able to go in.”

“Okay.”

And before I could stop him, he lunged toward the stall, crumpled lithely onto one shoulder, twirled on the grimy floor, and sprang to his feet on the other side.

Art Appreciation and the Mechanics of Halos

The Hood Museum is one of the blessings of living near Dartmouth College.

It's a gem of an art collection: small enough to peruse everything in an hour, quiet enough to linger, and rich in quality and variety from ancient Assyrian bas reliefs to a Picasso.

And it's free to the public.

We had the kids there on Sunday, and they made us proud. Both are comfortable categorizing portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes. They even know something about how to start looking at a picture. When prompted, they speak comfortably about how it makes them feel, its colors, and whether it's realistic or abstract.

In the art museum, homeschooling shines. When I recall the somniferous sessions with the well-meaning “picture lady” at my own affluent grammar school, I'm gratified to see how easily my children converse with art.

Upstairs, the Hood is featuring a temporary exhibit by El Anatsui, an African artist. Much of his work is a comment on consumption and waste in the modern world. As we ascended the staircase, we stepped into a miniature mountain range built entirely of tin can tops.

“Mom,” Nathaniel eagerly suggested, “we should stop recycling so I can build this at home.”

A few minutes later we were looking at a giant wall made of rusty scrap metal and punctured with thousands of holes so it shimmered with light.

Nathaniel, ever concerned with the engineering of things, asked, “Was the wall already put together when they brought it here from Africa, or did they have to put it together here?”

“I don't know,” said Camille. “Why don't you ask the guard?”

Nathaniel confidently approached the man and inquired . . . “Do you have any free souvenirs?”

The guard promised him a bookmark about the exhibit, but—on discovering they had run out of bookmarks—heaped brochures and informational literature on him instead.

At an exhibit about consumerism and waste, Nathaniel swore off recycling and acquired an armload of printed brochures.

Our children's first visit to an art museum was unplanned. Shortly before moving out of Chicago, on the spur of a free day, we decided to introduce the kids to the Art Institute.

After fighting our way through hundreds of people lined up for a traveling Toulouse-Lautrec show, we made it inside. In the first gallery, a handful of well-dressed urbanites whispered quietly while some college students sat sketching from the floor.

As the door closed behind us and plunged the gallery into silence, Nathaniel looked about the large white room, unfurnished except for a central bench and the oils on the walls. Shouting as if we were still in the crowd, he exclaimed: “What the heck is this place!?”

Camille and I blushed, and most people politely pretended not to notice. The guard let out a peal of giggles.

The children were most comfortable with the Christian art. They knew the Bible stories so many of the paintings became a game of “name that Bible character.”

Camille and I tried to guide the children to particular pictures, but we were too late to steer them away from a grisly depiction of the beheading of John the Baptist.

As I recall the painting, St. John's corpse still kneels on the floor, spouting a fantastic arc of blood from his severed neck, while his head, eyes gazing upward, rests on a platter.

Our children pored over the painting in silence. Realizing that it was probably the most violent image they had ever seen, I scrambled for something comforting to say.

Finally Jessica spoke.

“So . . . when the head comes off . . . does the halo always go with it?”

The Very Short Carnival of Kid Comedy

I have the honor of hosting the Carnival of Kid Comedy this week, but I'm afraid that I've had only one submission.

(And still I'm a day late in posting it!)

Perhaps we're all enjoying our kids instead of writing about them this Christmas.

Allow me to link to one of my favorite bloggers, David of Bruggie Tales. I don't know how he finds the time to spend with his many children and to write regularly about them, too, but he does, and in a clean, wry voice. On Christmas Eve he wrote about his five-year-old's plans for marriage.

We're having a wonderful Christmas (I hang on to all twelve days of it), and hope you are, too.

Carnival of Kid Comedy Is Coming

This blog will be hosting the Carnival of Kid Comedy on Tuesday, December 26. If you've posted any amusing stories about your children this holiday season, please send the following information to Carnival.KidComedy@gmail.com by midnight on Monday (Christmas!) night.

Your name:
Name of your blog:
URL of your blog:
Name of post:
URL of post:

More information about the carnival is here.

Thanks!

Christmas Pageant Politics

Jessica may play Mary in our church's Christmas pageant this year.

We're new in the very small church, and the father who is producing the pageant already had a girl in mind for Mary. The pageant will be modest, and last week we sat in the pews with other kids and parents as he assigned the parts. Eventually he said, “And that leaves Megan to play the part of Mary.”

“I want to be Mary,” called Jessica.

“We should probably have Megan be Mary,” he said. “You can be an angel. Angels get to wear the wings.”

“I want to be Mary,” said Jessica with a winning smile.

He sized up Jessica, a head shorter and visibly younger than Megan. “Well, Megan can read,” he replied.

“I can read,” piped Jessica.

“Megan's already taken some acting lessons,” he said, playing his trump. “Megan should really be Mary.”

Our trained instinct as parents is to teach our children respect and politeness: let others go first, share what you have, defer to adults.

But at some point, a deeper instinct kicks in, and we start to look out for our own. Perhaps the assumption about Jessica's lack of reading struck a nerve.

“Jessica's had acting lessons, too,” Camille said firmly.

And this is strictly true. Jessica had participated in a “Mini Movie Stars” program at a community center back in Chicago. There, some fearless young woman had attempted to herd Jessica and a dozen other four-year-olds into their roles in The Emperor's New Clothes.

As The First Thief, Jessica had chortled with sinister zeal:

Heh, heh, heh! Can't you see the cloth? Isn't it beautiful?

The villains always get the good lines.

So yes, strictly speaking, she has had acting lessons.

He backed down. “All right. Let's draw names for Mary from a hat,” he said. “Does anybody else want to be Mary?”

Now that it was a question of chance, two other girls entered the fray.

Of the four Marys in the hat, one of those last two was drawn. Victory made her shy, however, and she indicated some second thoughts. It was decided that she needed an understudy, and Jessica's name was drawn.

The shy Mary didn't make the first rehearsal, and Jessica played the walk to Bethlehem with a painful wince and a hand on her belly. (Where could she have picked that up?) We'll have to wait for Christmas Eve to find out whether she is ultimately chosen among women.

Poor Megan, alas, gets to wear the angel wings.

Robert Frost for Four-Year-Olds

When Nathaniel had just turned four, I introduced him to poetry. A great listener, he had already sat rapt through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I started with a handful of Shel Silverstein's lyrics for kids, then one day pulled Robert Frost from the shelf.

First I read Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, maybe Frost's most accessible poem. Its bouncy, rhyming, iambic tetrameter might occur in Dr. Seuss. It is short. It paints a clear picture.

Of course it touches on dark things, and its storyline is unexciting: A man is going home with his horse when he stops and thinks. Then he continues going home.

The next night, Nathaniel surprised me by requesting more Frost. He may have been just delaying his bedtime, but he could as easily have pointed me toward the Silverstein book that still lay open. I read At Woodward's Gardens and tried to explain why a boy would taunt a caged monkey with a magnifying glass. He wanted more.

On a whim I read one of my favorites: Wild Grapes.

I should confess that I don't understand Wild Grapes. It describes a girl's moment of terror when she finds herself hanging from a high branch of a tree, unable to cling forever but afraid to let go. Her brother bends the tree and helps her down. She draws conclusions from the incident.

Wild Grapes doesn't rhyme and is longer and is quite abstract: a harder poem altogether.

But it hints at wonders: fear and revelation, the afterlife and forgiveness.

How do you read it to a boy of four? I decided just to plow through, reading aloud to myself, letting it wash over him. I hoped for a non-musical version of The Mozart Effect.

To my amazement, he scrutinized it carefully. “What's an ornament of grapes?” he interrupted. “What does that mean: 'stated in lengths of him'?” “What are banjo strings?”

He was grappling with it, but what could he possibly understand of this poem? A rush of images, perhaps. An occasional abstract noun. The rhythm of the words. His father's voice. The serenity of bedtime.

Now that he's eight, I'm afraid Nathaniel would have less patience with Wild Grapes.

Is a child who still reads picture books more content to view a disjointed stream of images? Is a toddler, still learning to speak, more attuned to, more satisfied by, the mere rhythm of words? Is a boy more open to mystery when the routine things of his everyday world—breakfast and furniture, fingers and shadows—still offer untold surprises?

He asked for another poem, but it was bedtime. “One more,” I said and turned to Frost's shortest lyric.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle, and knows.

He looked at me expectantly, so I added “The End.”

His eyes went up skeptically. “But that was no poem at all!”

Already a critic.

(This blog got a nice mention in a recent Carnival of Kid Comedy.)

I Think They Call It a "Camisole"

We continue to struggle with the gender issues.

It's getting cold, and Camille recently bought me white, sleeveless undershirts for the winter. I never used to wear them, but I'm getting to like them.

Jessica first saw me in one the other morning before work and watched, bemused, while I hastily put on a sweater.

Finally I made to leave, but she stood in front of me.

“Dad. You're not.”

“Not what?” I said, maneuvering around her to grab my travel mug full of hot chocolate. I needed to go.

“It's a joke,” she insisted. “You're joking.”

Impatiently, I said, “What's a joke, honey? I love you. Be good today.” I reached for the door.

Her amusement was turning to wonder. “You're really wearing Mom's shirt to work?”

I missed it at first—she still emits the occasional non sequitur, after all, and parents learn to filter what they hear.

“Mom!” she called the alarm. “Dad's wearing your shirt! He's dressed like a girl. Look under his sweater!”

Ah, now I understood.

I kissed the top of her head and walked out, leaving Camille to sort out the details.

Completing First Grade

Our first homeschool evaluation last May was a bit anti-climactic, actually, but I want to share the experience in case any other beginning New Hampshire homeschoolers are wondering about what they're getting into.

We located our evaluator when Homeschool Scholars in Concord hosted an information session. Camille took comfort in meeting the evaluator before signing her on. I believe the only criteria for evaluators is that they need to be certified teachers.

The evaluator scheduled a half-hour meeting at our house. It actually ran an hour.

The session didn't involve any testing of Nathaniel, just a portfolio review. Camille had assembled all of Nathaniel's “school work” from the year, including:

• Filled-out workbook pages


• List of books we had read to him


• List of books he had read on his own


• List of field trips with descriptions of what he had learned


• Notes he had made on science experiments


• Pictures he had drawn and sculptures he had made

The evaluator arrived with her six-year old daughter, who played outside with our kids during the meeting. Apart from shaking the evaluator's hand when she arrived, Nathaniel did not interact with her.

Camille walked her through the portfolio.

Then the evaluator explained that the formal results of the evaluation would be short and legalistic: “Nathaniel has shown age-appropriate learning advances” or something to that effect.

(The actual statement that arrived weeks later was only slightly more detailed. A few errors in grammar and spelling made us wince, but it was otherwise unremarkable.)

After the formal review was done, however, the evaluator became more personal, discussing different options in math curricula, offering advice on how to improve our planning in second grade, and complimenting Camille on a job well done.

She was especially impressed with the 24 field trips that Nathaniel took in six months. (To us, it didn't feel like many!)

Incidentally, thanks to Kim at Life in a Shoe for hosting this week's Carnival of Kid Comedy.

Dolls for Boys

Nathaniel wholly embraces gender stereotypes. He won't drink out of a pink plastic cup or use the yellow token when he plays Sorry. He loves Concentration, but not the Disney Princess edition. He still plays with trucks, but never dress-up or “house.”

Fortunately he hasn't yet learned all the intricacies of machismo. He still holds my hand in public, and he still sings in the car. . . . well, pirate songs and Christmas songs anyway. Specifically Christmas songs that don't contain any girlish words like “love.”

You can imagine my surprise last night when I heard Jessica propose that they play dolls.

“Yeah,” said Nathaniel eagerly. “Let's play dolls.”

They sat down in front of the doll house, and Jessica began narrating with authority. “I'll be the Mommy and the Daddy and the Sister, and you be the Baby. It's time for lunch. What should we make for lunch today? Let's look in the refrigerator and see . . .”

Meanwhile, Nathaniel had picked up the baby doll and stuck it head first into the doll house's toilet. He quietly waited for Jessica to notice.

“ . . . we have chocolate cake and ice cream and pasta and – Hey, Baby! You're not supposed to play in the toilet!” In pretended indignation, she plucked the baby out of the toilet and hurled him violently back into his crib.

Then she fell on her back laughing, reliving her brother's wit: “Silly Baby! You don't play in the toilet!”

By the time she sat up, she had to pluck the baby from the refrigerator. Then he was on the bookshelf . . . driving the car . . . hanging upside down from a window. Each time Jessica fell over in belly laughs until Nathaniel would start to giggle too.

I suppose that's how real men play dolls.