Bird and Little Bird

Alphabet Glue: Volume Fifteen is Here!

Good Monday, all! It was a busy weekend, and I have high hopes for toddler napping and couch knitting in the next little while here, but I did want to poke my head in to let you all know that Volume Fifteen of Alphabet Glue is officially available.

This newest installment is full of all kinds of good stuff related to the height of autumn and the coming of cooler weather and shorter days. You will find fun projects and printables on such themes as natural history, weather science, and bringing the outdoors in as the seasons shift.

 

Hop on over to the shiny new Volume Fifteen page on the Alphabet Glue site to find out more about this issue, to get a sneak peek at some of the projects, and to download a copy of your own!

Already know that you're all in? You can also download the new issue using the button below:

Alphabet Glue, Volume Fifteen, $4: 

Mindful Nuturing E-Book Bundle.

 

Good Monday morning, internet friends! I'm elbow deep in projects for the new issue of Alphabet Glue over here, while also attempting to manage things like remembering to send the order envelope for school pictures, finding the pilot for the toy airplane, and making sure that everyone is starting their week with clean socks. Well, maybe not everyone. I like you, but you are on your own.

I did want to mention this pretty great new e-book bundle sale that I am participating in this week, however. It is organized by Mindful Nurturing and is entirely play-oriented. The bundle contains 10 quality e-resources for kids ages 1 to 12, plus 3 bonus resources.

There's a little something for everyone: coloring pages, a yoga story book, mandala drawing initiation, treasure baskets and sensory bins, modeling play, and much more. And, of course there are issues of Alphabet Glue included. You'll find both Volumes Nine and Fourteen in the bundle- the two most recent early autumn themed issues.

 

 

 You can read more about the resources here, and then get your bundle today for only $14.95, (over 80% off a retail value of $79). It's available only until October 3!

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The Friday Run Down.

As it turns out, not so very much got done this week. Between Dan working truly insane hours at the hospital and both kids being sick, it just seemed wise to let a few things go and circle the proverbial wagons in an effort to stay sane instead. And, here is Friday. Hello. I guess that means we made it.

I did want to share a couple of things before heading into the weekend, though. The first is that I have a new post up on the Sparkle Stories blog. On one of the days that she was home from school this week, Mariam and I spent some time adapting the baking soda clay recipe from the 2013 Summer Science Special so that it could be used to make paintable charms. You can find the instructions here.

Also, to celebrate the fact that all things are going swimmingly over at the new blog, Dawn and I are hosting a fun giveaway. To get the details (and to enter) visit today's post.

Alright, then. Off to try to problem solve the fact that the dog ate one of the toddler's only serviceable shoes this morning while I was upstairs and not being adequately vigilant.

Friday, indeed.

 

Boston's Finest.

A couple of weekends back, we went with visiting family to wander around the Boston Public Garden. I had been there once before, when we were here for Dan's interview last winter. But that trip was primarily accidental, the result of having not followed a map to the science museum closely enough, and we didn't stay long. It was a windy day in January, and outside wasn't really the place to be.

This time around, we decided to really go all out and have the entire Make Way for Ducklings experience. Swan boat rides and all that. It was pretty fantastic, actually. The toddler doesn't know the book well yet, but the big kid does. She has been an avowed McCloskey fan from the beginning and was absolutely stunned by her good luck that day. Swan boats, friendly ducks; all of it. She kept saying "I can't believe we are finally and actually doing this!"

This friend, however, was not impressed.

For more great duck photos and a printable activity sheet for duck identification, check out this post from the Mud Puddles blog last week.

Library Monday: Salmon Stream.

As Dawn and I have been working away on the Mud Puddles to Meteors page, we've begun to realize that we have shared a lot of great stuff here and there on other blogs and pages over the years. Many of these are no longer active, and are likely to disappear into the ether of the interwebs sometime soon. With this in mind, I've decided to move a few of my reviews of favorite books that I've written other places onto this page. The following review is one that I wrote a few years back for a book that we just recently rediscovered and have been reading again lately. I was happy to be reminded of it, and I hope that you will be too!

My mother lives in North Western Washington State on the Puget Sound.  Although we are originally from Washington (I was born and partially raised in Spokane), this is the first time that my mom has lived on the coastal side of the state.  When she first moved there, she sent us a few "local" treasures to help Mariam understand a bit about where she was living.  Among them was Salmon Stream, a beautifully illustrated book about the life cycle of the salmon, a fish widely associated with the Pacific Northwest. 

My daughter has a great fondness for non-fiction books that give way more information that you might guess anyone would ever want.  This book provides that, but the real informational bit comes as a sort of appendix at the end of the book, after a lyrical text that gives a flowing and easy to read overview of the life cycle of the salmon.  A perfect combination for the mama that likes to read a well-written picture book and the daughter that likes to read the encyclopedia.  

An additional benefit of this book is that it makes such a nice addition to the fall book basket.  If memory serves, Pacific Salmon swim upstream in the fall, making this season a perfect time to learn about the life cycle of these fish and maybe even to plan a little field trip if you happen to live in the right area.  As much as I love all the books about the changing of the leaves and animals nesting in preparation for winter, it's fun to provide a little balance by reading about what happens as the season changes in the non-woodland parts of our world, no?

Library Monday: The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict.

I almost decided to skip out on writing about this particular book here, mostly because I feel like I have properly expressed our affection for The Mysterious Benedict Society books all summer long here, and maybe you all want to hear about something new and different. But then The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart turned out to be such a fantastic story that I talked myself out of being innovative and interesting. I'm just going to be honest instead. We like what we like around here and apparently what we really like is all things Benedict Society.

The decision to even pick up The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict was not an obvious one, despite our enjoyment of The Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy. I somehow had a difficult time imagining that a book about Mr. Benedict himself would be as compelling and rich and just plain exciting as the books about his rag tag team of genius orphans and their unusual heroes' quests. But the book, which chronicles Mr. Benedict's own formative childhood experience living in an orphanage with a mysterious past, turned out to be so much better than I could have imagined. And that is something that I love in a good book: when the plot makes twists and takes turns that are totally outside the realm of what I might have expected. There is a certain joy in a book that contains a myriad of surprises, but this is especially true when those individual surprises add up to a story that is wholly satisfying.

For her part, the avid kid reader 'round these parts absolutely loved this book. She was also skeptical to begin with, in part because I think it seemed slightly odd to her to read about the childhood of a character who is so much like a parent to the kids who are the true stars of the other books. But it didn't take long for her to be totally invested in the story, and to be completely taken in by the cleverness, loyalty, and kindness of Nicholas Benedict the boy. Throughout Nicholas' adventure in solving the mystery of the orphanage, and in improving the lives of those who he lives there with, there are glimpses of the Mr. Benedict that he will become. If anything, reading about Mr. Benedict as a boy makes the Mr. Benedict of the trilogy come alive even more. By the time we finished this book, the fact that it was the final Benedict book out at the moment was very much on her mind.

"I wonder," she said, "if I could write to the author and tell him that he should make more of these books..."

Fine by me, kid.

One Down.

The first week of school has come and gone on its way. And, by all accounts, it was a good one. My girl seems to be finding her place in her new school, and came home each afternoon with news about cool and interesting things that had happened that day. There are gluten-free lunch options for lunch. There is woodworking. She learned that Texas gets to fly its flag at a different height from other states because of the fact that it was once its own nation. Goodness, there is a lot to learn in life.

For his part, the toddler misses his sister even more than I expected that he might. Here and there throughout the day he asks where she is, and when I tell him it is time to go get her in the afternoon, he makes a beeline for the stroller. This is a child who normally insists on walking independently everywhere he goes, refusing to even hold a hand. Hopping into the stroller for sister retrieval? An act of overwhelming love and affection to be certain.

And, We're Back.

 

 

 

Well, I suppose we didn't actually go much of anywhere. I mean, not so much that it then seems necessary to use a such dramatic title for this post. There were day trips, yes. And there were more forays out onto local beaches for purposes of making sand castles and searching for particularly nice little sea shells. But mostly we have been here, having our summer behind the scenes.

But come tomorrow morning, summer officially comes to a close. In the vacation sense of the word anyway. The big kid begins her new school year. She's got a reasonably new pair of pink kicks with matching laces and, thanks to a weekend shopping trip with grandma, some new socks to match. We are ready. Ready, I might add, to begin the fourth grade year. Yep. Fourth grade. I would wax philosophical about that one a bit if I were even the least bit capable of coming up with words to explain how I feel about my tiny little girl waking up one morning as a fourth grader. But, no such words are available just right now.

And while his big sister is off all day doing what fourth graders do, baby Z. and I will settle into a new routine of our own. It has been months since we had days without Mariam around the house, and I expect that at first he will miss her a not inconsiderable amount. But he will probably nap a bit better as well, and that will mean that I can resume my regularly scheduled posting here. Which is to say, my posting that follows no schedule or organized theme whatsoever, but is at least somewhat more frequent than these summer months of slack have led you to expect.

In other words, I'll be seeing you again soon. And then I'll be seeing you a little more often too.

 

In the meantime, I totally forgot to mention here that I have been running an Alphabet Glue back to school sale for the last week or two. Um, sorry? But since this is the first you have likely heard of it, I'll extend it a bit. Enter "school" at checkout between now and September 9th for 20% off all issues.

Yarn Along (Twitchy Needles).

It seems that there is a way to be able to predict the arrival of autumn that has nothing to do with calendar pages or even the beginning of the new school year. Indeed, I can tell that fall is imminent when I start getting twitchy about all the things that I must knit right now. This feeling usually comes out of nowhere, and generally arrives at the tail end of a summer spent being totally unmotivated to sit with an almost finished adult sized wool sweater spread across my lap in 85 degree heat.

 

I had a Quince & Co. gift certificate hanging out in my inbox from my birthday last year, and last week finally felt the need to put it to use. I had been saving it to buy yarn for a sweater for Z., but didn't want to end up knitting an 18 month size garmet only for him to outgrow it overnight. But he is pretty much enormous now, and can easily rock a 2T, so I decided it was time to go for it, and ordered enough yarn to knit a size 4. The yarn arrived the end of last week, and is hanging out in an old sap bucket, looking pretty and perfect and trying very hard to tempt me away from finishing my Tea Leaves. Which, after having to rip out the sleeve I almost had finished night before last, wouldn't take much. Just saying. The siren song of brand new yarn is a force to be reckoned with.

 

Of course Mr. Shark Pajamas here has also discovered the soft and squishy bundles of yarn, and they have now had to be placed on a shelf just out of his reach. I can only watch him attempt to feed them to the dog so many times, people.

Yarning Along with Ginny today.

Summer Reading Round-Up

I meant to write this post yesterday, which is to say that I meant to write it last week sometime, but somehow that never happened. There is gas main construction going on in our neighborhood, resulting in things like having no water for seven hours at a time, so we have been doing less at home and hitting the road for various adventures instead. The tour of Massachusetts beaches continues, in other words. But we have all been reading a lot, so I thought I might share a bit of what we have been reading, and maybe see what you all have been up to as well.

For her part, Mariam finished up reading the Mysterious Benedict Society books this summer, as well as reading a couple of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I think that she just finished Little Town on the Prairie. Annie 2.0 arrived for a visit this weekend, and brought along Wildwood, which M. has been wanting to read. They started reading it together a couple of nights ago, but I might try to catch up so that I can read it with Mariam when Annie heads back to Oregon. Mariam has probably read almost a book a day all summer long, including everything from The One and Only Ivan to a pile of Nancy Drew mysteries and about half of the Series of Unfortunate Events books. She loved The One and Only Ivan and was really excited when she heard that the book had won the Newbury Medal for this year.

 

For my part, I have gone deep down the natural history hole, as I am wont to do. A few weeks ago, I read the new David Quammen book, which I found totally riveting. I am like a certifiable squealing David Quammen fangirl, a fact which is so incredibly nerdy I can't even believe I just admitted to it on the Interwebs. But there it is. I have read everything the man has written and engage in Internet stalking to find out when new books will come out. I can't believe I was so slow to read his latest; I blame it on the residency match/move situation. And laziness.

Tim Gallagher also has a new book out, about his trek to Mexico to search for the likely extinct imperial woodpecker. I'm about half way into that one right now, reading it along with Dawn, who was the one that told me about it. I'm a big fan of Gallagher's earlier woodpecker chronicle, but somehow missed the fact that there was a new book.

Last week, I read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, which I also really enjoyed. It is part natural history, part memoir, part call to being present and grateful in daily life. It is very well written and strangely engaging, considering that a lot of it is about snails. I would definitely recommend it to my friends and neighbors. I've also been browsing The Seaside Naturalist, which is a truly fantastic reference for any of you beachgoing folks living on or visiting the eastern seaboard. I picked it up at the local Audubon center and have looked at it almost daily since then.

And for Z.'s part? More with the pigeon and the bus. Yes. Still.

I don't believe I've got anything on deck, so if you have a great read to recommend, do leave it in the comments for us all to see! I love to know what everyone is reading.