Asian American Writing Blog

One fun thing I had the opportunity to do this year is write a couple blog posts for http://asianamericanwriting.com/  I discovered that it is quite a bit more difficult than just coming on to my own blog and writing whatever I feel like writing!  A lot more pressure, but also quite a bit of fun.  Here is the post I wrote, which focused on a couple of my favorite things - grandparents and children's books!  Enjoy!

Alice's Pick of the Week: The Garden of Happiness

In The Garden of Happiness by Erika Tamar, a neighborhood comes together to build a community garden.  Young Marisol wants to be a part of the project but is told there are no plots left.  So, she plants a seed in the sidewalk crack and waits to see what happens.  I love books about planting and growing - and keep hoping the more I read them with my children, the more we will be inspired to plant our own garden (next Spring, I promise!).  This book has the added bonus of telling the story of community and people coming together to make their neighborhood a safer more beautiful place.

Fall is Here: Trees, Leaves & Pumpkins!

Fall is here!  The temperatures dropped this week and we even had a little rain this morning.  And now that October has officially arrived, I decided it was time to start in on the fall/Halloween crafting.  The end-of-year holidays are always good for some art inspiration.  Ben has been studying trees in his kindergarten science unit, so he also inspired us to read a bit more about trees.  One beautifully illustrated fun book we discovered is: Strange Trees: And the Stories Behind Them.  Other fun stories we've been reading that feature trees and leaves and fall flavor include:

- Wangari's Trees of Peace by Jeanette Winter
- Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert
- The Hugging Tree: A Story about Resilience by Jill Neimark
- The Season's of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons
- Apples and Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell
- Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

We followed up our reading with a very simple art project.  Yesterday, Clara and her dad took a walk in the park and collected leaves.  We then glued the leaves to paper and painted them.  The kids observed that the leaves Clara found were mostly brown and very dry.  Ben ran outside to find a red leaf from our yard - and as we looked outside this morning, we noticed that there were yellow leaves on the trees that were falling and not so dried out.  We thought maybe if we went on a nature walk in a couple weeks we would find some very different leaves to work with.  

I started out the project by putting out various colors of construction paper, the bag of found leaves, and glue.  The kids picked the color paper they wanted and got to work.  Because we got started on our project pretty late in the day, we let the glue dry overnight and headed up to bed for more tree reading.

In the morning, the kids each chose the paint colors they wanted for their palate and started painting.  I also picked up a few little pumpkins this morning at the store, so they spent a little time also decorating those.

The kids had a fun time with the actual leaves, but in the end, I think they had the most fun mixing and swirling the paints.  After talking about their leaf creations, we focused on how to make different colors and designs.  We had a fun time kicking off the fall season!

        

Peeny Butter Fudge - Toni Morrison & Slade Morrison

As a child, I spent my summers with my grandparents.  Every morning, my grandmother prepared dinner for that evening (usually anticipating a few guests) and baked up a storm.  She woke up early, so by the time I got out of bed the house often smelled of fresh banana bread or chocolate cake.  While she frequently scolded me for jumping around too much and causing her sponge cakes to fall, mostly I remember sitting at the  table while she did her thing.  On many of those mornings while she cooked, she told me about her life - growing up with a dozen siblings, riding motorcycles through the cane fields when she was supposed to be at school, working as a domestic at the age of 12, meeting my grandfather, raising her family.  My grandmother had a ton of energy and was always rushing around from one thing to another, but even as a kid, I knew those moments I had her all to myself in the kitchen were really special.

My grandmother passed away over 10 years ago, but there aren't many days that I don't miss her.  I love to bake - mostly because it reminds me of being with her.  My mom is also an excellent cook/baker, and one of my favorite things to do now is to look for recipes with her, trade stories about what we're making, and on far too rare occasions bake with her - often times while laughing about my grandmother's cryptic recipes and wishing we could eat her manju or lilikoi chiffon pie just one more time.

These days, because I remember growing up with my grandparents so fondly, I love seeing my children with their grandparents - building those same kinds of memories and feeling the same kind of unconditional love.  I'm always on the look out for books about relationships between grandparents and their grandchildren - there are certainly many out there.  And at the library this past week, I stumbled upon a great one for our family called Peeny Butter Fudge - written by Toni Morrison and her late son, Slade Morrison.  It is the story of a grandmother who turns a mundane afternoon into a magical one, and bakes a favorite family recipe with her grandchildren - all told in Morrison's beautiful poetic style.  This book is a quick read - but for me the story was more in the pictures and the ideas - and in talking to my kids while we were reading it about all the things they love to do with their grandmas - and of course all the things I used to do with mine.

The book ends with the recipe for Peeny Butter Fudge - which of course, I had to try out.  I initially thought it would be a good evening project to do with my girls.  But, they were off drawing cards for their grandmas.  In the end, I just felt like making it by myself and spending some quiet time with my grandma once again.

Orphan Train - Christina Baker Kline

I have been on a non-fiction kick lately (and not updating the blog, clearly), but I took a break from that endeavor to read this book - which I've been hearing about since last year and was handed to me by my mother-in-law.  Orphan Train explores the unlikely friendship between a disgruntled teen foster youth, and an elderly wealthy woman.  As the book explores the parallels between the lives of the two women, it switches back and forth from the present to the life of the elderly woman who traveled on the orphan trains from New York across the midwest to find "suitable" homes for orphaned and abandoned immigrant children.  This was a quick read -  I read it in one sitting on a plane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. - and I ended it in tears (not at all embarrassing on a very public plane ride!).  This reminded me of the fiction I love to read - stories about women, coming of age stories, and stories of unlikely friendships and connections.

Clara's Pick of the Week: The Books of Kyla May

My almost three-and-a-half year old girls are making the transition from picture books to chapter-like books - we still read lots of picture books, of course, but they like the idea of have older kid books to also read from and cart around.  Recently, a friend passed along a recommendation for an author named Kyla May.  She has several different book series, including one about magical twins.  We read the first book in that series: Lost Tooth Rescue about twins Lottie and Mia who start at a new school and use their twin powers to help a friend who has lost her tooth.  I wouldn't say the story was particularly compelling, but along with the illustrations it was quite fun - my girls did like the twin aspect, as well as the magic.  And, there was also glitter and a purple unicorn involved, so those were all positives.  We will check out the second book in the series, School Bully, Beware! soon.


But, the real recommendation hit were the books in Kyla May's series: The Lotus Lane Girls Club.  The series includes four books about a group of friends named Coco, Kiki, Mika, and Lulu.  Each girl has her own book which acts as a journal about her life and adventures.  Clara has taken a particular liking to Coco who loves animals and baking - and carried a cool purse and has a cat.  The format of the books is fun to read - with cute illustrations and lots of facts about the characters. We are looking forward to reading all of the books in the series, but for now Clara just wants to carry this one around with her everywhere and read a few pages together whenever we can!

Clara's Pick of the Week: Monsters Eat Whiny Children

I randomly came across this book at the library and the title just spoke to me.  My three-year-olds have been in a whiny phase lately, and I thought this book might send them a good message.  The books is about two little children - a brother and sister - who are themselves in a terrible phase.  Their father warns them that Monsters Eat Whiny Children, and sure enough, one day, when the whining gets to be too much, a monster sneaks in and snatches them right up.  He takes them to his Monster Lair where he brainstorms various dishes he might cook the children in - from Whiny Child Salad to Whiny Child Burger to Whiny Child Vindaloo.  My girls had fun laughing along with each step, as well as being just a bit worried that their whining might land them in a boiling cooking pot.  I can't say that the book has cured them entirely of the behavior, but it's been a good one to bring up to break the tension.  There are a few lines in the book that I am not a fan of - the wife monster is a bit of a stereotypical nagging bullying wife, who claims she can't eat Whiny Child Cake because "her bottom is too big."  I don't generally endorse female characters commenting negatively on their bodies- so I tend to skip the line (though someone else who read this to them did not, and of course it's the one line they remember and keep pointing out that I've skipped over).  I think there is also some name-calling language that I also leave out, but overall this is a silly book - that gets kids talking about proper behavior and consequences, as well as some really good food.