Why Children Are Not Nesting Dolls

I made matryoshka dolls for our Christmas babies

from fabric scraps. 

Pip loved them so much she asked Santa for a "katroomshka" doll too. 

Here's the first lady. She's self-contained and proud of it, until...

Surprise!

Out pops another lady!

More!

my happy niece with her doll!

A word to the wise:

dolls are much easier to photograph than children.

Dolls sit still

keep sweet smiles on their faces,

don't suddenly get hold of all the cutlery

and play "Little Drummer Boy" on the baby.

Yep.  

Happy holidays!

May your new year be filled with joy 

and peace. lots of it!

Word Party

We had a party this week to celebrate words and reading.

Sugar Snack helped me get ready while the girls were at school.

Pumpkin Gingersnap Cookies cut into "sight words" = Yum!

He can't read yet, but he knows tasty cookies.

I drew pictures of things we'd have at a party,

labeled them along with some random descriptive words,

cut them out

and put them on the table in a big bowl.

We took turns choosing from the bowl and sounding out words.

Once read, we decided where our words belonged:

food and party fare ("cup", "cookie," "bread")

decorated our plates,

descriptive words like "red" and "shiny"

fancied up our paper crowns

and a few unwanted words like "grouchy" and "tired"

ended up on noses and chairs.

After a delightful afternoon filled

with games, tea and word cookies,

the verdict was in:

"This was the best day ever! Can we have a word party every day?"

Word Therapy for Time-Crunched Writers

If writing life is a garden, mine is in winter.

I love this glorious season;

but with twins in kindergarten, a babe in arms

and a toddler in everything else

- including water and bags of pancake mix simultaneously -

available writing hours are slim to none.

Why fight it?

I'm a writer; I don't want to be a frustrated writer,

so I'm turning my daily adventures into word therapy.

It's a lot like writing, only without the pen or computer.

Some might call it "thinking,"

only it's more purposeful than that.

How do you feed your hungry inner writer and artist?

Lunch!

Read.

Read to kids, read to your partner, read to yourself. Reading is research.

Compare books, outline favorite plots, take notes on what works and doesn't work.

Play word games.

Play with rhyme, rhythm, pacing, pig latin, word patterns, alliterations, Cockney rhyming slang.

Observe. Question. Listen.

Be Sherlock Holmes, focusing on minute details in speech, expression, landscape, emotion.

Play- at kid level.

Celebrate word and art in the commonplace.

This one is so fun for me that I'll visit it in later posts.

Box City

Box Castle

Here's to getting our brain-dirt nice and loamy so that when we plunk down our story seeds, they'll shoot up into brilliant oaks of word!

Lullaby

Sleep

sings to me in the night

croons of why

old as stones

the lullaby

lilts
of lost dreams

of treasured things

of unhindered oblivion

with

moon and milk my company

this small fist, tiny sigh

sweet breath

brings

less sleep, yes,

but waking bliss

Nesting

I've discovered a similarity between

Bowerbirds,

those fascinatingly compulsive artists of the bird world

and

pregnant women.

Or, at least,

obsessively-creative-and-due-in-a-week

pregnant women.

Here are pictures of my nest:

Art includes a few of my watercolors

and an original from my brother Jesse Joshua Watson on the far wall.

I found the crib second-hand and "aged" it

with crayons to blend in the scratches.

Ribbon scrap mobiles for "Sugar Snack"

and his newly arriving sister

Baby booties fashioned from old clothes

Bulletin boards for "Sugar Snack" and his new roommate

The nest is feathered,

my blog fingers are at low tide

as I wait

to meet

baby Pray...

First Drafts

Sugar Snack finally made it through an art session

without eating crayons.

His sheer delight at his first masterpiece

reminds me

of how joyful it is to create.

Take a first draft, for example:

it's buoyed with hope,

unencumbered by revision slogging,

a fresh treasure chest of untapped potential.

I often find myself smiling

while scribbling at new sketches

or a new project.

We are made for this,

to leave a sparkling trail of creation behind us,

jewels of ourselves,

beauty for the world.

What accomplishments give you joy?

a beautiful meal, new sketches,

a clever light bulb moment,

seeds planted

... ?

Great Books!

After enjoying a delicious read in Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor,

I feasted on her second novel, Dreamdark: Silksinger.

Brilliant!

No wonder she's getting kudos all over the place for her work.

Lips Touch, Laini's latest book was a National Book award finalist.

It's a collections of three richly woven stories which

all hinge on a kiss.

Laini Taylor's books are clever jewels

set off with gorgeous illustrations

by her husband Jim Di Bartolo.

I promised to share notes from Laini's talk on plotting

at the SCBWI Western Washington conference this spring.

Better yet - she's posted it on her blog

(in three parts: 1, 2 and 3).

What are you reading lately?