Monthly Archives: June 2012

Books, Writing

Say Hello to The Stephanies

Leave a comment

It’s only the second day of Lexi’s summer vacation and she already needs a project to keep her from being bored. OK, I need her to have a project to keep her from being bored.

A while back we wrote the outline of a book together. I asked Lexi who she wanted the characters to be, what she wanted to happen and kind of made up the rest. She drew one picture and it got filed away for another day.

Today was that day.

The Stephanies
We pulled out The Stephanies and started work on our book. I’m the writer and Lexi is the illustrator (apparently on Saturday we’re going to switch roles for her Star Wars book). I had to explain how illustrating works, how you have sketch things and draw them and redraw them and draw them again to get it just right. I explained how she had to practice drawing each Stephanie so they looked the same in each scene. I also explained how this wouldn’t be a quick project that we’d finish up today—it’d take a while. (All of which would probably make me a horrible art teacher)

So I spent the afternoon writing and Lexi spent the afternoon drawing. I have most of the story, though the ending needs some work and it needs lots of polishing (my last children’s book was Mike, The Cat, written when I was a child). Lexi has a lot of good drawings, though I think we need to pick some new colors or figure out what’s wrong with the scanner (the girls should be wearing dresses that are highlighter pink and yellow).

So that’s your preview of The Stephanies. It’s going to be awesome. I’m hoping we can release it later this summer, probably as an ebook and maybe as a full-color, printed book (I’ve been wanting to experiment with that for a while).

What About Milo?
And why isn’t Milo involved in this little project? Mainly because I insisted the kids clean their rooms on the first day of summer vacation and then keep them clean. Lexi finished after an hour or so on the first day. Milo kept procrastinating, not doing it and somehow completely avoiding it. For two days. He finally finished the half hour job tonight, so maybe I’ll have to find a role for him tomorrow.

Maybe he can be our publicist.

Children, Education, Family

Lexi’s Last Day of Kindergarten

Leave a comment

168th Day of School - Last DayIt seems like only yesterday Lexi was heading off to her first day of kindergarten. She was over-the-top excited and Milo burst into tears.

Today was her last day of kindergarten. She’s older, wiser and taller.

The last day celebration included a cookout with Pete the naturalist at the Dodge Nature Center, featuring mini hot dogs (Milo ate half the pack) and pizza. Then we headed back to school to hear about some of her favorite things from throughout the year and every student received an award for following one of the school’s five overall rules.

Lexi was recognized for “safety,” because she always brought the right gear. I think that means I should get an award for sending my kid to school prepared (which usually meant stopping her on the way out the door and insist she wear something more appropriate). She also got the award for making sure everyone else was being safe too, which I’m pretty sure means she’s just bossy. She practices all day long on Milo, so it’s good to see it’s paying off.

It’s been a fun year watching Lexi grow. I think the social aspect of kindergarten—learning how to interact with other kids, following the rules, being prepared—has probably been the most important, though it’s also been cool to see her learning the academics. She’s learning how to read, slowly and with more and more confidence. Having a kindergarten teacher for a mom, some people expect reading to be a serious and early milestone in our house. But it’s actually counter-productive to teach kids to read too early (Abby could give you all sorts of reasons why—I’ll leave that blog post to her). It’s important to let them go at their own pace. And it’s been fun to see that with Lexi, to see her start to read signs in stores and read stuff over our shoulder. She’s still gaining confidence with reading books, but she’s getting there.

I’m also trying not to be too proud that one of her favorite things in school was writing.

Finally, the end of the school year means the end of a little project of mine, the Days of School. It started with me taking pictures on the first day of school (I have an addiction to feed). Then as we waited for the bus on the second and third days of school Lexi kept asking me to take pictures. So we started taking a picture every day. I think we only missed one or two days when Lexi actually went to school, and of course we missed all the days she was absent (and since she had mono in the fall, there were a lot of those). But in the end we have 151 pictures of Lexi going to kindergarten.

As we went outside to take her picture today I told her  we were taking her last picture. She told me, “Nope, you’re taking pictures in first grade too!” So we’ll see how long this thing continues.

Check out the Days of School: