Resolving to Love our Children
I recently celebrated my fifteenth wedding anniversary. I’ve been thinking about love a lot lately. How do we know we are loved? What things do the people in our lives do for us that tell us most deeply that we are loved? After I first got married, I encountered the... read more
Knowing Where We’re From
There’s something powerfully rooting, deeply reassuring about knowing the place where you live. Noticing the smells after rain. Following animal prints in the snow covered sidewalks. Observing the predictable cycle of birth and death and rebirth in the cycle of the changing seasons. Saying hello to the same people walking the same routes day after day. Watching for the same cat at the same driveway every afternoon. Catching the same snails, lizards, and beetles.
We crave this kind of connection to physical places, but cultivating this knowing depends on slowness, intentionality, and repetition. We have to walk the same paths day after day. We have to leave our headphones behind and notice smells, sights, animals, and neighbors. We have to dig into the dirt and plant flowers. We have to walk instead of drive. We have to name the emotions that these physical places bring to mind in us.
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Climbing UP The Slide? A Right To Recess? Powerful Princess? Yes, Please!
A few years ago, I was teaching a class to a group of early childhood educators, and one of the participants had just visited a local bookstore. On her desk sat a copy of It’s OK NOT To Share by Heather Shumaker. I was so intrigued by the title that I went out... read more
Sneak Peak
Okay, so remember last August when I told you I wrote a book? Way back then, it still didn’t have a title. But we’ve made progress!
Discovering the Culture of Childhood will be released in June 2016. The cover has been finalized, and I can give you a sneak peek today! Isn’t it lovely? The design team a Redleaf Press did a fabulous job; I couldn’t be more pleased!
Also, I am excited to share that my book features stories contributed by early childhood educators from across the United States and Canada of their work with young children, including Kisha Reid, Marc Battle, Kelly Matthews, Tom “Teacher Tom” Hobson, Melissa Cady, and Denita Dinger. Their voices add a spectacular richness and complexity to my narrative, and I am so grateful that they were willing to share their stories in this book.
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I Will Sit With You When You Are Sad.
We are winding our way through Yellowstone, and my oldest daughter, is hard at work with a pencil and paper. She is flustered, and cries angrily.
I want to fix. I want to untether her creativity from the pursuit of perfection. I want to free her love of drawing. I want to ground her sense of self, that she might feel proud of her effort, even when she falls short of her own expectations…
“I canNOT do it! I am TRYING to draw a BEAR! It does not LOOK like a BEAR!! I drew an elk that I am very proud of, but I cannot DRAW A BEAR!”
She is frustrated. Annoyed. She works the lines but they are unwieldy, her fine motor skills failing to interpret between her mind and the paper.
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Prioritizing What’s Important
A few months ago, my email app on my phone was glitching. I could not get the notifications to disappear.
I tried everything. Looking for threads where an unread message might be lurking, clearing out my messages through a separate email service, but try as I might, that notification remained.
Notifications pester me into action.
In those tiny red numbers, I see opportunity. An email response I was waiting for, a chance to multitask, an opportunity to connect with a friend. My heart almost skips a beat when those numbers appear, and in those milliseconds of anticipation, I think:
Maybe something has happened. Something wonderful. Something tragic. Some adventure or reward or warning. Something.
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