Monthly Archives: October 2007

Books, Family, Leukemia, Robert's Snow

Blogging for a Cure: Robert’s Snow and David Macaulay

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"There are things I think people have a need to know . . . I want them
to look around more — to pay attention to the world around them, to
take an extra moment to look at things, to think about things."

—David Macauley

Ten and a half years ago, when our 21-month-old daughter was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, Scott and I were told to be thankful it was ALL and not some other kind of cancer. We were thankful, strange as it was to feel glad about anything related to a cancer diagnosis. We knew that the prognosis was better for kids with ALL than with other types of cancer.

But we were a full week into treatment before we found out how very good the prognosis actually was. Jane had started the week with two complete blood exchanges, purging her body of all the cancerous white blood cells that had escaped her bone marrow and were coursing through her tiny veins. She had made it through the first terrible week of chemotherapy—the fevers, the vomiting, the countless needle sticks. One week down, years to go. The head of the hem/onc department came in to meet us, and he asked us, rather professorially, what our goal was with Jane’s treatment.

"Remission?" I asked. He smiled in obvious amusement.

"Yes, of course," he said, shrugging. "We will get her into remission, and very soon. But that is just the beginning. Our goal is to keep her in remission. Our goal is a cure."

Scott and I stared at him. I started to cry. A week earlier, during the nightmarish hour between leaving our pediatrician’s office and arriving, per his urgent instructions, at the children’s hospital emergency room, we had swung by our apartment to restock the diaper bag. On the way out the door, I had grabbed an old (but not that old) medical reference book we happened to have on the shelf. In the car I read aloud to Scott in horror. If the pediatrician was right, if the baby had leukemia, the best-case scenario, according to this tome, was a five-to-seven-year survival rate.

Until that moment when the Chief Oncologist said the word "cure," Scott and I had believed our best hope at the end of putting Jane through the torture of chemotherapy was that she would live to see her ninth birthday.

"I didn’t know," I croaked. "I didn’t know there was a cure for cancer."

"For this kind, there is," said the doctor.

We all know that ALL is but one of the many, many kinds of cancer. The treatment—the cure—doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for a lot of people, especially children. Ten years later, Jane is still in remission and spilling joy everywhere she goes. If you find joy on this blog, she is a large part of the reason why. I threw that old medical reference book in the trash long ago, because the hard work of doctors and researchers, and the courage of patients who came before my Jane, had rendered its somber pronouncements inaccurate.

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, researchers are working on more, and better, cures. This research is paid for by the Jimmy Fund, named after a 12-year-old cancer patient who made a radio appeal in 1948 that brought in some $200,000 in funding for research that first year. Jimmy, like Jane, survived his cancer. It’s possible that Jane survived because of breakthroughs in chemotherapy protocols developed by the doctors at Dana-Farber—I don’t have any idea who all the people were whose work saved my daughter’s life. I only know that I am thankful to the very marrow of my bones. And hers.

Children’s book illustrator Grace Lin wrote a picture book called Robert’s Snow during her husband’s fight against bone cancer. Robert Mercer was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma just months after he and Grace were married. Grace tells the story on the Robert’s Snow site:

Nine months later, Robert was declared cancer-free. "Robert’s Snow"
was accepted for publication. We felt that our good luck had finally
arrived. But, in March 2004, Robert’s cancer returned. We were
devastated. Our doctor told us that Robert’s best chance for long-term
survival was a breakthrough in cancer research.

So we decided to help the doctors the best we could. Because
"Robert’s Snow" had meant so much to us the first time, we decided to
use it as an inspiration for a fundraiser. We recruited children’s book
artists to paint wooden snowflakes and auctioned them off — the
proceeds going to cancer research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The response was tremendous. "Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure" snowballed greater than we ever dreamed.

I am grieved to say that Robert Mercer passed away this summer. But Robert’s Snow lives on. To date, the Robert’s Snow snowflake auctions have raised over $200,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This year’s auctions will begin in November, and you can bid on a stunning array of snowflakes illustrated by some of the most talented artists in children’s books.

Starting last week, bloggers all over the kidlitosphere joined in an effort to spread awareness of the upcoming Robert’s Snow auctions. Encouraged by Jules and Eisha of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, who dreamed up the "Blogging for a Cure" event, dozens of bloggers are featuring snowflakes by some of the participating illustrators. There are many, many more snowflakes being auctioned in addition to the ones you will see in these posts. I encourage you to go explore the auction site and feast your eyes on all these beautiful pieces of art.

Here is one of them. What an honor it is to be able to feature David Macaulay’s snowflake here at Bonny Glen. I mean, David Macaulay! Caldecott winner! Author of The Way Things Work! The man who taught Jane what a laser is, and how parking meters work, and what is the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion!

David Macaulay painted a snowflake for the Robert’s Snow auction. Here it is, front and back, reproduced here with permission:

039_snowflake

Don’t you love that sweet, pensive face?

Ten years ago, when Jane was diagnosed, David Macauley’s books already had pride of place on our living room shelf. I first saw The Way Things Work in the children’s bookstore I worked at during grad school. I bought a copy with my employee discount. I hoped to have children one day, lots of them, and I knew they’d want to know how stuff worked.

Now here it is 2007 and I’ve got those children, a lot of them!, and they are indeed full of ‘satiable curtiosities. David Macauley’s books have helped show them the world. Sit down with one of his black-and-white "Building Books" masterpieces, and you’re likely to spend the whole rest of the day immersed in the details of another corner of the world. Here are some of the books he wrote and illustrated, a homeschooler’s dream library:

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction
Cathedral
Pyramid
Mosque
Ship
Underground
Mill

Cathedral    Mill   Pyramid

He also wrote the Caldecott winner Black and White, a stunner of a picture book, as well as the charming Angelo.

There will be three rounds of snowflake auctions, beginning November 19th. If you’d like to see David Macauley’s snowflake hanging on your Christmas tree or in your winter window, it will be sold in the second auction, which starts on November 26th. (Trivia time: one of the other snowflakes in that auction was made by the illustrator of one of my books. Do you know who?)

Many thanks to Mr. Macaulay and all the illustrators who donated these gorgeous works of art for the Robert’s Snow auction, to Grace Lin for founding the event (view her own snowflake here), and to Jules and Eisha for organizing the Blogging for a Cure effort. And many, many thanks to the folks of the Dana-Farber Institute for continuing to work toward cures for other people like Jane.

Here are the rest of this week’s Blogging for a Cure snowflake features (thank you, Tricia and Jen, for the list!):

Monday, October 22

Tuesday, October 23

Wednesday, October 24

Thursday, October 25

Friday, October 26

Saturday, October 27

Sunday, October 28

Related links:

Blogging for a Cure page at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

David Macauley page at Houghton Mifflin.

Robert’s Snow main page.

Main auction page.

David Macauley’s snowflake auction page.

Art, Family, Fun Educational Stuff

Of Fowls and Fun

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Yesterday my three oldest kids went to a workshop at the San Diego Museum of Art. A docent gave a short talk about elements of art—line, shape, color, etc—and then they split into small groups and went to look at four paintings up close. Afterward, they did an art project focusing on copying details from the paintings they’d viewed. I missed most of the workshop, because I was outside with the little ones. The girls had a splendid time, and Beanie was especially impressed by the dead chicken.

"Huh?" I asked her, ever so articulately, upon receiving this report.

"A dead chicken! In a painting! I saw it, and I drew it!"

I do remember seeing a painting with a dead fowl in it when we first visited the museum. I think it was a duck, not a chicken: Merganser by William Michael Harnett. (I don’t know if that link will work—the URL says "index." I don’t think the SDMA site has direct URLs to the paintings. But if you’re really interested in seeing the deceased bird, you can click around to get there. Beanie thinks it is worth the effort. Me, I prefer a nice landscape with haystacks.)

During the workshop, a couple of the other mothers and I walked down to the Science Center with our little ones. There’s a kiddie room upstairs where a mama can park herself on a bench and watch her younguns play with all the interesting toys. Wonderboy loved the air chute made for putting balls in: whoosh! Up goes the ball and pops out the top of the tube. Rilla enjoyed filling the toy shopping cart with plastic fruits and vegetables. It was so easy and pleasant to sit there chatting with my friends while our toddlers and preschoolers bustled around. I remember when I thought tending two little ones in a children’s museum was a tiring day’s work. Now it’s a mini-vacation.

One thing I’m really enjoying about our proximity to Balboa Park is that we can drop by for short, frequent visits without feeling like we have to do and see everything all at once. We’ve barely begun to explore all the park has to offer. After I picked up the girls, we were strolling back to our car and we passed the little Timkin Museum, a small, free-to-the-public art gallery next to the big SDMA. Erica had mentioned that it’s an incredible collection. Jane and I noticed a huge sign advertising a special French Neoclassical exhibit, which is exactly the movement we’ve just been reading about in Young People’s Story of Fine Art, so that was a pretty exciting discovery. We’ll have to squeeze in a visit sometime soon.

Jane is also keen to see the Journey to the Copper Age exhibit at the Museum of Man—she wondered aloud whether her daddy could take a day off and take her. And I’d like to get to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Natural History Museum while it’s still there…but tops on the girls’ wish list is to go climb a certain enormous, low-branching tree they spotted on the way into the park. And when I was watching how happy my wee ones were yesterday in the kiddie playroom, I made a little mental note to remember that as important and wonderful as all this cultural stuff is, it’s even more important to allow ample time for Climbing Very Big Trees and Dipping Fingers into Fountains. Sometimes the dead chicken really is the best part of the art museum. Even when it’s a duck.

Family

The Art of the Warm Welcome

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I loved this post by my friend Laura at A Cup of Tea with Me. She is living in London (after several years in Cyprus) and shares some observations about greeting-the-new-neighbors customs around the world.

Over the summer, FOR SALE signs pop up
in front of two houses directly across from yours. New families move
into both houses within a few days of one another. Do you:

A) Peer at them from behind your net curtains, trying to figure out who they are but making no direct contact;

B) Wave politely when you both happen to be outside at the same time;

C) Knock on their doors, introduce yourself, give them a plate of muffins and welcome them to the neighborhood?

The neighborhood we left behind a year ago was a plate-of-muffins kind of place, and it was marvelous, and very hard to leave behind. Here in San Diego, we’ve had almost no contact with the neighbors on our street, but when the kids and I rolled into town one year ago today, my online friend Erica (now a beloved real-life pal!) surprised us with a welcome of pumpkins and mums adorning our front steps for my first sight of the rental house, and two huge bagsful of Trader Joe’s goodies to fill our empty pantry! Talk about love at first sight.

And on day two of our California life, one of Erica’s friends (now also my cherished friend too!) arrived bearing not one but two meals—one she’d cooked herself, and a Honey-Baked Ham feast from the wonderful family who had given Scott their spare room for several weeks over the summer. I’m still blown away by their hospitality, a year later.

Family

This Day Last Year

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Was the day we reunited with Scott after three months apart. A very happy day. We picked him up at the Phoenix airport and drove another couple of hours west, stopping for the night in Yuma so that we could make the last piece of the journey to our new home in the daylight. We got the very last room in town, after being turned away from about six motels. Two queen beds for the seven of us, but we didn’t care. We ate at a Cracker Barrel that night, and a woman at the next table couldn’t stop giggling at us because of the way Wonderboy was staring nonstop at Scott with a huge grin plastered on his (Wonderboy’s) face.

So today I’m thinking about how happy we are to be all together again, and I’m thinking about the children whose daddies are in Iraq and Afghanistan. If our separation was agony, it must pale in comparison to what those families are going through.

Sewing and Handwork

Sewing for Children: Reviews to Come

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I’ve been putting together a series of reviews of instructional sewing materials aimed at kids. Before I start posting them, I thought I’d ask for suggestions of other books or resources to include.

Here are the ones I’ll be reviewing (so far):

Simple Sewing (a Klutz book)

Mary Frances Sewing Book

Stitches and Pins: A Beginning Sewing Book for Girls

Sewing with St. Anne

Sewing Machine Fun (3 volumes)

Any others I should take a look at?

Sew Sewmachfun


Klutzsewing_4
    Maryfrances_2 Stitchesandpins_4

ASL, Sign Language, Speech Delay, Wonderboy

Signing with Babies, My Favorite Topic

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After watching Rilla, Monica asked:

I was wondering what the research says about how hearing kids learning
sign affects (if it does at all) their verbal speech acquisition. I
assume it is like my 4yo learning romanian and english. his english is
miles ahead of romanian, but learning romanian hasnt affected his
english at all. just wondering if you had read anything about this.

That’s a very good question! As a matter of fact, teaching babies to sign does seem to have an affect on their verbal language development—a good one. I’ve read about at least two separate studies whose results demonstrated that children who used sign language as babies tend to score higher on IQ tests than non-signers. There was a study at the University of Alaska and another one at Davis, I believe. One of them tracked kids through age 8 and found that the baby-signers wound up reading at earlier ages and showed higher cognitive and verbal skills.

But honestly, even if that weren’t the case I’d be on board with baby sign just for the way it smooths the toddler years. You get to bypass that stage where the little one knows exactly what she wants to tell you but doesn’t have the words for it yet, leading to the intense frustration that often winds up in a meltdown.

We’ve used baby sign with all our babies, even before Wonderboy came along. When Jane was about a year old, Scott’s boss’s wife very thoughtfully sent me an article on the subject, and I thought it was a brilliant concept. I taught Jane a few signs but we didn’t really take off with it until Rose came along. By then, Jane was three and had spent a lot of time in the hospital where she saw an ASL interpreter working with another patient. She was very interested and I was a young would-be homeschooling mommy eager to start strewing. 😉 I ordered this set of videos from the Timberdoodle catalog and we dove in.

The videos didn’t appeal to Jane—they are intended as tutorials for the parents of deaf babies and toddlers (and yes, how goosebumpy is that, considering what was in store for us a few babies later? God’s providence, anyone?) and the format is rather dry. But the vocabulary was perfect for daily use with my little ones. By the time Rose was 18 months, she was using about two dozen signs on a regular basis. I remember my relatives being impressed by her "please" and "thank you" at a family funeral. It is awfully nice to have "please" be a habit even before verbal speech begins.

When Beanie was a year old, Jane was six, and she and her friend Summer were both interested in learning ASL, so we watched the Sign With Me videos again. The little girls hung in there with the videos despite their dry format, and since they both had one-year-old sisters they really enjoyed being able to sign words like "yucky" and "silly." We started checking children’s sign DVDs out of the library, and Summer’s family came across Signing Time. That was the beginning of a beeyootiful friendship…

But we had no idea, then, how important the Signing Time series—or, indeed, ASL itself—would become to us. When Wonderboy was born I launched right into baby sign, same as always, having no clue that he had hearing loss. He was six months old before we started to seriously worry about his hearing, and it was another three months (after a set of tubes proved fluid buildup wasn’t the problem) before we got a firm diagnosis.

I’ve already written about what happened next: how our family threw ourselves into the study of ASL for Wonderboy’s sake—and our own intense enjoyment. ASL is a beautiful, beautiful language. I wish I were more fluent—we are still plugging away on our own, but one of these days we’d like to study with a fluent signer. Jane hopes to become certified as an interpreter one day.

One piece of advice I have about teaching babies to sign is that it’s better to use real ASL (American Sign Language—if you’re American, that is) rather than one of the made-up "baby sign" programs. It seems to me that as long as you’re teaching signs, why not give the child a head start on a real second language? That’s one of the reasons I come out so strong for Signing Time (and no, I don’t get a commission from those folks)—it uses ASL.

We recently received the three latest installments of Signing Time, and once again I’m blown away by how fun and engaging they are, how practically useful the vocabulary is, and how effective the instruction is. Both Wonderboy and Rilla are doing a lot of counting these days, because there is a new "Counting Time" section of the show. The "ABC Time" segment has also been a big hit. The new editions are:

Move and Groove
Happy Birthday to You
Nice to Meet You

I really like the manners signs taught in that last one. I admit I still think the songs in Volumes 4, 5, and 6 are the best of the whole series, but once again the music is catchy and fun, and I honestly can’t say enough good things about these DVDs. Rachel Coleman and crew have hit upon a perfect format. In fact, I also think Signing Time gives reading skills a boost, since the English word for each sign is displayed next to the person demonstrating it.

Once Wonderboy’s hearing loss was diagnosed, we knew ASL would be an important second language for him—both as a bridge to verbal speech and as a backup for times when he isn’t wearing his hearing aids (or in case his hearing degenerates further as he gets older). There are different theories about signing with hard-of-hearing kids, and the "Total Communication" approach is what made most sense to us. His expressive and receptive language skills have consistently tested as at-or-above-age-level despite his "speech delay"—that delay is only with pronunciation. I am so grateful that we were already primed to jump into the use of ASL with him because of the "baby sign" trend. Some trends are sound and sensible. This is one!

Robert's Snow

A Beautiful Blizzard Is on Its Way

Postcard_image_2
If you read children’s literature blogs, you’ve heard all about Robert’s Snow and the big blog event surrounding it. But in case you’ve missed the news, here’s the lowdown, courtesy of the indefatigable Eisha and Jules at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Robert’s Snow
is Grace [Lin]’s book, published in 2004, about a mouse not allowed in the
snow. The story was inspired by Robert’s battle with Ewing’s sarcoma.
After the book was published, Grace gathered artists from all over the
children’s book illustrating community to create special snowflakes to
be auctioned off, with the proceeds benefiting sarcoma research at
Dana-Farber. These snowflake auctions became known as the event
“Robert’s Snow.”

This year, more than 200 well-known children’s book illustrators
from around the world have been given a five-inch wooden snowflake to
decorate at will. Like actual snowflakes, each design is unique. The
2007 online auctions for bidding on these hand-painted snowflakes will
take place in three separate auctions, open to everyone, from November
19 to 23, November 26-30, and December 3-7. You can read here for more information.
But starting today — and lasting for over one month until the day before the auctions — over 65 bloggers will be highlighting some of the snowflakes and the illustrators who created them….

I am delighted to say I’m one of the bloggers who’ll be featuring snowflakes. I am even more delighted to say that the illustrators whose work I’ll be featuring are two of my favorite illustrators ever: David Macauley, author of—oh, you don’t need me to tell you this, but I will anyway, because it’s so exciting—The Way Things Work, City, Cathedral, Castle, Pyramid, and so many other amazing books; and the enchanting Timothy Bush, whose picture book James in the House of Aunt Prudence makes my family’s best-of-the-best list.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My turn doesn’t begin until next week. For now, treat yourself to the first round of snowflake interviews at the following blogs:

Grace Lin, featured by Becky Bilby at In the Pages . . .

Randy Cecil, featured by Liz Dubois at ChatRabbit

Michelle Chang, featured by The Longstockings

Kevin Hawkes, featured by Cynthia Lord at cynthialord’s Journal;

Barbara Lehman, featured by David Elzey at the excelsior file


And keep checking in at SevenImp all week for a new round of snowflake features each day. Or visit Jen Robinson’s Book Page for a sidebar listing of the entire week’s Robert’s Snow schedule. This is going to be a very exciting event!

Sign Language

Rilla Signs

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Whoops, it’s all pixelly. No time to fix it now—back later!

UPDATED: Well, I tried and tried. I don’t know what’s wrong with the upload. Tried saving the movie file in various formats, but it comes out pixellated every time. Ah, well. She’s cute even in tiny dots.
Don’t ask me why I picked that particular moment to capture her litany of signs on film—a moment when one hand was clutching the treasured Pink Plastic Phone. She was there, the camera was there, and I’ve been meaning to record her baby signs for weeks. She is exploding with new ones every day, courtesy of her big brother and Signing Time. When Wonderboy and Rilla start signing to each other, I swear my heart turns to jelly. It’s sweeter than I could ever have imagined, back when she was in utero, kicking him through my belly as he signed himself to sleep.