Adopting

Dear Annie,

The images of storms you posted as Hurricane Sandy was battering us all were quite evocative.  The New York experience has been so awful.  I'm glad you came through unscathed, although disrupted.

As promised, I've been digging for books about biracial adoptions, and about adopting kids older than babies.  I haven't found a lot, but here are some offerings.

Starting with the ever-chipper Todd Parr: 

We Belong Together: A Book About Adoption and Families. It opens:

We belong together because ...
you needed a home
and I had one to share.
Now we are a family.

The illustrations for that page appear to be a single-mom family living with grandma and grandpa.  Parr offers a wide variety of kinds of families -- single parents, gay parents, straight parents, and even a two-page spread about dog adoption ("We all needed someone to play catch with"). *  His people come in a wide variety of skin colors, most of them not found in nature (see illustrations to right and left).

A cheerful, loving not very explanatory introduction to adoption for little ones.

Then there's Beginnings: How Families Come to Be by Virginia Kroll (out of print: link is Alibris).  It starts with dark-haired probably Hispanic parents telling their genetic-offspring son about his birth.  Each chapter is the story of a different child, told as a child-parent conversation.  There's a Korean adoption, an uncle adopting his nephew after his single-mom sister dies, two private adoptions (single white mom adopting white kid, black couple adopting black baby).  Then there's Nicole, a maybe-Hispanic girl in a wheelchair -- five or six years old -- being adopted by a mostly-blond white family:

"You had three sons.  Now me."

Nicole

"I kept thinking how beautifully black braids went with blond buzz cuts as I looked at all my children.  Pretty soon your brown eyes hooked into your brothers' blue, and you all began bickering over whose ice cream cone was biggest and whose singing voice was best, as brothers and sisters do."

Nina BonitaKane-Miller, part of the Usborne publishing house, has a Brazilian book, by Ana Maria Machado which is a fable-ish storybook about race and mixed families.  A white rabbit meets a black girl at the beach (feels so Brazilian already!) and asks how he can have fur as beautifully dark as her skin.  She spins yarns at him -- painted herself with ink, drank too much coffee, etc. -- which he methodically tries, to no avail.  Then he gets the concept of born-that-way, finds himself a dark spouse, and has children of many hues.  It's a while since I've read this one, but it does have a whimsically celebratory feel to it.

And finally, for your friends who are adopting a 1 1/2 year-old Ethiopian girl: I can find no African adoption books. Just Add One Chinese Sisterby Patricia McMahon and Conor Clarke McCarthy is the story of a family going to China and bringing home a daughter who appears to be two or a little younger.  The mother is telling the story to Claire, the daughter, when she's a little older, but on every page there's a sidebar with commentary the brother wrote as events unfolded.  Son and parents are embarking on this new event together.  Before they head to China, there's a baby shower.  Conor comments: "I think this new sister now has more clothing than I do.  And more toys than I had."  It's bemused, not resentful.  Conor ends up being the first family member to inspire laughter in his shy sister.  And when they're met at the airport by well-wishing friends, Conor is the one she holds on to.

Happy day-after your birthday, by the way.

Love,

Deborah

* I found a book that included a dog!  Do I get the bonus points?

Blogging from a hurricane

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The wind is howling outside my windows, and the lights have been flickering, but so far our power has remained on.  Fingers crossed.  I hope you're doing well down in DC, too.

I kept thinking tonight of amazing storm images from children's books we've written about here:

Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder:



Patricia Polacco's Thunder Cake:

Rachel Isadora's The Fisherman and His Wife:

Yup, that's pretty much how we're feeling, here in New York.  Stay safe.

Love, Annie

Hurricane Nina

Dear Annie,

I love  thinking of you and Eleanor sneaking in extra chapter reading time to enjoy Starry River of the Sky.  That book makes me happy.

We've just spent the day battening hatches around here in preparation for Hurricane Sandy.  A storm of a different nature is the subject of today's book: the angry pre-schooler. 
Nina in That Makes Me Mad! by Hilary Knight and Steven Kroll is another Toon reader which makes a great read-aloud for a certain age (hello, Isabel).   Yes, Hilary Knight is a familiar name: he's the 85 year-old illustrator of the Eloise books.  Nina was  originally written in 1976 -- this version of the book is dedicated to Kroll, who died last year.  It's been re-formatted to fit the Toon graphic novel format

girl-girl-boy

Nina is the middle child in a girl-girl-boy family. 


   And she has a list of grievances, each with its own two-page spread:

(1976 explains Mom's fashion sense -- she's in skirts and sensible heels throughout.)

Other things that make her mad include:

When you promise and then you forget...
When I try and it doesn't work...
When I try and no one else does...
When you stop me before I can finish...

Nina is younger than Maya (who makes a mess), more full of pure frustration, less artfully funny.  But Nina's feelings are a good point to start the Anger Discussion -- an addition to our list of books about tantrums.  One can imagine Nina in a few years calming down and becoming Eloise -- why have we never written about her?

There's a nice little trailer for this book, with a tag line I'm fond of:

"Available at retailers that don't make Nina mad."

Hope that includes me.

Love,

Deborah

Starry River

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Last month, you sent us Grace Lin's Starry River of the Sky, and ended your post wanting to know what we'd think of it.  The verdict is in: Eleanor LOVED it, perhaps more than any other chapter book we've read in a few months.  We read it very quickly, sneaking in a chapter as part of our morning reading along with a picture book for Isabel, and another chapter or two at night.  (There were enough references to animals, and drawings by Lin at the beginnings of chapters, to keep Isabel somewhat engaged.)

What worked so well about this book?  Part of it is the structure Lin uses in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon as well: stories within stories.  The stories in Starry River offered Eleanor multiple opportunities to piece together elements of plot by herself in ways she clearly found satisfying.

At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Rendi, is presented as a mystery.  We know he's on the run, but don't know where he's going or what he's running from.  He's hostile and uncommunicative, but appealing -- it's clear he's upset by something real.  The mysterious guest at the inn, Madame Chang, tells stories based on Chinese mythology, including the story of WangYi and his wife, who becomes the Moon Lady.  She gets Rendi to agree to tell stories in return, and when he does, it becomes immediately clear that he's telling the true story of his own father.

Or I should say: it becomes immediately clear to an adult reader.  To a five-year-old, it becomes interesting, then exciting, then thrilling to spot the connections and figure out the truth.  The stories invite a gentle spirit of detective work, and wind together in a satisfying puzzle-like way.  When we finished, Eleanor asked immediately if we could read it again soon.  Thank you!

Love, Annie

We have a contender! I hope.

Dear Annie,

I'll definitely talk about adoption books soon.  I have to sort through my shelves in the store.

I applaud you wanting to avoid the stereotypes of birth order.  As a third child (girl [your mom]-boy-girl [me] family) I'm sensitive to the concept of overlooking the youngest. So take lots of pictures of him!

Last week, when I opened a shipment from Houghton Mifflin, I discovered I'd ordered quite a lot of copies of one particular picture book.  Hmm, I thought, what was I thinking those many months ago when I was ordering new books?  Then I re-read it, and thought, oh dear, I didn't order enough.

Sleep Like a Tiger by Mary Logue is magic. The illustrations by Pamela Zagarenski are both other-worldly and cozy, formal and wacky.  The book starts with a girl wearing a crown on a scooter.  She does not want to go to sleep, "even though the sun had gone away."  A small tiger is walking out of the picture with a large orange ball on its back.  The girl insists she isn't sleepy.

Parents appear, also wearing crowns, but clearly understanding of her situation:

The parents persuade her to brush teeth and get into bed.

   "Does everything in the world go to sleep?" she asked.
   "Yes," her parents told her.
   "Our dog is sleeping right now, curled up in a ball on the couch, where he's not supposed to be."

Bats, cats, whales, bears, snails  -- parents reassure her all have to sleep (the snails "curl up like a cinnamon roll inside their shell").  The girl adds the tiger to the list.  We see a tiger in a Rousseau-like jungle, with a crown floating above its head.  The parents kiss her goodnight.

   "I'm still not sleepy," she told them.
   "We know," they agreed.
   "You can stay awake all night long."
   They left her door open a crack.

There she is, warm and cozy in her "cocoon of sheets":

She imitates each of the animals her parents talked about, circling like a whale, wriggling like a cat, and of course, like the tiger, she falls asleep.  The last picture in the book is the cover illustration.

It's beautiful and lyrical, with enough bits of humor and oddity to make it special.

As you know, I'm terrible at predicting winners of the big children's book awards.  But I think, I hope, I want this one to be a contender for the Caldecott medal for illustration.    It's so beautiful and odd, yet also wonderfully kid-friendly.  It makes me happy to read it.

Goodnight!

Love,

Deborah

Problematizing the middle child

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Thank you for the three-child-family recommendations!  I've thought about Peter Pan recently at bedtime, singing "Tender Shepherd" from the stage version: "One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery, fast asleep."  Something to aspire to.

In preparation for Barleybee's arrival, my awesome brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Grace, bought Isabel a book focused on the middle child for her birthday last month.  It's appropriate in two ways.  First, though we didn't know it at the time, Jan Fearnley's Martha in the Middle mirrors the family structure we're going to have, with two older girls and a younger boy.  Second, because of Eleanor's initial difficulty pronouncing "Uncle Michael," the girls call him Uncle Mice, and this is a book with all-mouse characters.  It was a sweet, thoughtful gift.

Unfortunately, it's also one of those books that problematize a thing which is not yet a problem, and which we hope won't become one (see Julius, the Baby of the World and my problem with it, Bedtime for Frances, etc.).  The premise of Martha in the Middle is that Martha doesn't like being in the middle of everything.  Her older sister Clara gets praised for being "big and sensible."  Her younger brother Ben gets praised for being "cutesy-wootsey."  Martha feels unnoticed, uncared for, unwanted.  She decides to run away, and on her journey meets a frog who expounds on all the ways that the middle is best:

They looked at the tall sunflowers.  Martha nibbled on some of the sunflower seeds.
"See, the seeds are in the middle," said the frog.  "That's the best bit."

Martha begins to join in on the celebration of the middle, and ends up returning home, feeling quite good about herself ("I think the middle is special") and going off to play again with her siblings.

We read the book with Isabel and Eleanor once, when it arrived, and that night I hid it.  Isabel was so intent on the story, and is so interested in acting out the roles of different characters, that I fear repeated readings will give her a chip on her shoulder before Barleybee is even born.  We'll keep the book in reserve, in case that's how she feels somewhere down the line, but it's not a book for now.

Wait just a second, Annie, you may be saying.  The book you're hiding away sounds like it has almost exactly the same plot as Noisy Nora, the book you've been touting.  It's also girl-girl-boy.  Nora and Martha are both responding to feeling neglected by their parents in favor of their younger and older siblings.  Both girls choose to run away as a result.  For goodness sake, all the characters in both books are mice.

What's the difference?  Part of it, I think, is style: Rosemary Wells's rhymes are sharp and funny, the refrain is fabulous, there's a rhythm to the book that is utterly infectious.

Here's how Wells starts out:

Jack had dinner early,
Father played with Kate,
Jack needed burping,
So Nora had to wait.

First she banged the window,
Then she slammed the door,
Then she dropped her sister's marbles on the kitchen floor.

"Quiet!" said her father.
"Hush!" said her mum.
"Nora!" said her sister,
"Why are you so dumb?"

And Wells is economical: where Fearnley's text says more about Martha's feelings directly, Wells's brief lines accompanied by illustrations of Nora's increasing frustration capture the sense of wordless freak-out I am so familiar with in my own children:

Sometimes, less is more.

I want to leave you with another Expanding Family question: can you recommend some good kids' books about adoption?  There are two new lovely adopted children in our friends' lives this year, in different situations, and I'm wondering what's out there for their families.

Situation #1 (which I mentioned briefly here): a white couple who have recently adopted an African-American baby at birth.  She's their only child.  Bonus points if the book also includes dogs, as their family does.

Situation #2: Eleanor has a good friend, just turning 5, whose family is adopting a 1 1/2 year-old Ethiopian girl.  Some of the same racial depiction questions here: white parents and older sister, black adopted child.  But other questions, too: are there books out there that discuss becoming the older sibling to a little sister or brother who's not a baby?

Love, Annie

Families of five

Dear Annie,

I'm not so good on the Noisy Nora girl-girl-boy family structure, but here are a few classic three-child families (with thanks to the brainstorming abilities of my co-workers):

  Wendy came first, then John, then Michael. 

  Peter Pan!  (Full text here.)  Mrs Darling remembers the children's last evening at home:

She had found her two older children playing at being herself and father on the occasion of Wendy's birth, and John was saying:
  "I am happy to inform you, Mrs. Darling, that you are now a mother," in just such a tone as Mr. Darling himself may have used on the real occasion.
  Wendy had danced with joy, just as the real Mrs. Darling must have done.
  Then John was born, with the extra pomp that he conceived due to the birth of a male, and Michael came from his bath to ask to be born also, but John said brutally that they did not want any more.
  Michael had nearly cried. "Nobody wants me," he said, and of course the lady in the evening-dress could not stand that.
  "I do," she said, "I so want a third child."
  "Boy or girl?" asked Michael, not too hopefully.
  "Boy." 

 Staying with the classics,  Babar and Celeste have an instant three-child family when their first-born turns out to be triplets in
Babar and His Children. The girl is named Flora; the boys are Pom and Alexander.

Another Alexander, this one of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, is afflicted with two big brothers.
At breakfast Anthony found a Corvette sting Ray car kit in his breakfast cereal box and Nick found a Junior Undercover Agent code ring in his breakfast cereal box but in my breakfast cereal box all I found was breakfast cereal.

Three boys there, and on the other side of the country, three girls at the Quimbys'.  The summer after Ramona's third grade year, the ultimate little sister becomes a big sister. 

Ramona's World starts:

Ramona Quimby was nine years old.  She had brown hair, brown eyes, and no cavities.  She had a mother, a father, a big sister named Beatrice who was called Beezus by the family, and -- this was the exciting part -- a baby sister named Roberta after her father, Robert Quimby.
     "Look at her tiny fingernails," Ramona marveled as she looked at the sleeping Roberta, "and her little eyebrows.  She is already a whole person, only little."

Of course the baby becomes a bit more problematic as she grows, learns to spit mashed peas, screams a fair amount, and sucks up adult attention.

And another big favorite: Dogger, with a wonderful girl-boy-boy family.  It's a story of siblings caring about each other.  So I'll leave you with this lovely illustration, and I'll think of your future in Brooklyn whenever I look at it:

Love,

Deborah