On Fairy Wings

The girls of the Kids' Reading Clubhouse recently read Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. It's a beautifully illustrated and enchantingly written book with lots of adventure and some fairy dust mixed in.

If you're familiar the the Tinkerbell movies and all of that, you'll remember that each fairy has to find her talent. The girls had to do the same thing. In my midst, I had a Music Fairy, an Art Fairy, and my favorite, a Friend Fairy. "Is being a good friend a talent?" she asked.

After that we made our own fairies out of old-fashioned clothespins with plastic cup wings, yarn for hair, and fabric scraps for clothes.

Each one was completely unique, just like each of the fairies who showed up for book club that day.

For My Mom

My mom is a reader.

She always has a book by her chair.

She's always sharing her book recommendations with me either over the phone or via text.
(Sometimes via text, she also recommends that I write another blog entry soon, ahem.)

When we get together, we show each other the books we're reading and talk about what we'll be reading next.

We always discuss what our book clubs are up to.

Sometimes we drift off into a conversation about a book, and if you were to overhear, you'd swear we were talking about something real.

It's been like this for as long as I could remember.

I am many things because of my mom, and a reader (and a blogger) are two of them.

Here's to that!
I love you, Mom.

Puzzles

While Brian and the kids are downstairs working on a giant floor puzzle, I am upstairs working on a bit of a puzzle of my own. 

Here I am surrounded by some of the pieces.

I've got two marked up manuscripts.
I've got emails.
I've got binders.
I've got meeting notes.
I've got phone conversation notes.
I've got multiple documents with "thoughts for revision."
I've got hundreds of ideas swirling around in my head...
and I've got to put them all together.

Revision.

A bit of a puzzle? 

Yes, indeed. 

Too bad you can't see the girl behind the camera, pulling her hair out, trying to put it all together. 

Bright Young Things in a Dark Speakeasy

What could be more perfect than meeting in a modern day "speakeasy" (the front is a pie shop) to discuss The Great Gatsby?

Only going to said speakeasy dressed as bright young things and drinking pisco punch with a marvelous group of literary ladies.

Our book club really is the bee's knees.

                                                                         See! We really discussed the book too. 

And when the night came to an end, we left that place in style...

...each one of us a Zelda or a Daisy Buchanan until the stroke of midnight, when we returned to our homes and turned back into unassuming, bookish moms. 

Cheers, Darlings.

Kids' Reading Clubhouse--Ruby Lu

This month the Kids' Reading Clubhouse read Ruby Lu: Empress of Everything by Lenore Look.

It's a smart, fun, and well-written book for girls. In this story, there are lots of laughs, problems to solve, and new things to learn. (The author also has a series for boys that is all of the above, plus some.)

We talked about words like immigration on Friday, and discussed what it would be like if your cousin from another country came to live with you. We talked about what it would be like to be deaf and also how friends can solve some of their own problems by apologizing to each other.

Then we got busy with our activities of the day. Each girl got to try her hand at origami. We made Fortune Cookies.

Remember these?

Then we got some practice eating edamame and pot stickers (by far the most popular snack so far) with chop sticks. 

Finally, the girls got to memorize how to say something in sign language using a pictorial sign language chart and demonstrate it for the group. By the end, they all knew how to say "I love you" and "Thank you" in sign language. Always handy to know!

Dragons Love Tacos

This book found its way into our library bag a few weeks ago. 

I was skeptical. 

I sort of started to like it when I noticed all of the tacos on the endsheets. That's pretty funny. 

Then we read the first line:

"Hey kid, did you know that dragons love tacos?"

Then we learned that they love tacos and parties, but not spicy taco toppings. Definitely not spicy salsa. What they love most of all are taco parties, which are parties with lots of tacos. 

"Hey dragon, are you excited for the big taco party?"

By the end, we were in love and already flipping back to the beginning to read it again. Suddenly, the tacos on the endsheets were even funnier than they were the first time we noticed them.

After reading it 1,000 times, we couldn't even pull it out of the bag without cracking up. It's just funny. Deadpan funny. Majorly fun to read out loud. And so silly that you have to laugh every single time. It's one of those books that kids memorize after a few reads and then walk around the house reciting. 

I could never have guessed that this silly book would become one of our favorites. But it's true. We love Dragons Love Tacos. 

Kids' Reading Clubhouse--The Quilt Walk

This month, we read The Quilt Walk by Sandra Dallas.

Isn't this a gorgeous cover

It was a bit slower than the other books we've read--kind of like the long walk Emmy Blue and her family took from Illinois to Colorado. It wasn't magical like Pippi Longstocking or thrilling like The Spiderwick Chronicles. But still, it was good. We laughed a bit, gasped some, and we learned a lot.

When the girls and I met, we focused on the stories quilts tell.

Each girl made a log cabin quilt square.

And we put them all together to make a paper quilt. 

Then we looked at a quilt that a friend made for our family.

And each girl wrote about what she thought the bear was doing. We made up our own stories.

We ate dried apple pie for snack and named the two things (and only two) that we would bring along if we had to walk from Illinois to Colorado back in 1863. Tough choice. My favorite answer was from a little girl who said, "I'd bring my blanket and a huge stack of books." I told her she could only bring one book if she brought her blanket. "Well, hmm," she said. "That's impossible."