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Babyville

Dispatches from Babyville: A Lit Legacy

April 17, 2019 By Nicole Kear Leave a Comment Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: Babyville, childhood, dispatches from babyvilel, Nicole Kear, parenting

Art by Heather Heckel

I was a voracious reader as a child, a read-while-walking-down-the-sidewalk kind of bookworm. As an adult, I’ve moved apartments countless times and every time, during the brutal downsizing that precedes packing, I place one childhood book after another on the “Keep” pile, schlepping the yellow-paged books from one shoebox apartment to another. I love these books. They’re my Proustian madeline.

Naturally, I want to share these jewels of literature with my children, now aged 6, 11 and 14 years old. When they were very young, this was easy enough. Toddlers are happy to sit through any readaloud, be it an evergreen Sendak or a psychedelic Stephen Cosgrove. But when it comes to chapter books–the classics–I’ve been less successful in preserving my literary legacy. In fact, my children have flat-out rejected my legacy. Loudly, Repeatedly.

With my firstborn, Primo, I tried Heidi.

“You’re going to love it!” I assured my then nine-year-old. “She drinks milk from goats and she lives on a high mountaintop and her grandpa’s really grumpy.”

“Sounds boring,” he noted–to my mind, prematurely.

A few pages in, he confirmed his initial assesment.

“It is boring,” he pronounced.

So, I upped the ante. I acquired an audiobook version, in which a Swiss woman read the story in the most lilting, hypnotic accent imaginable. Her voice was more relaxing than a bottomless glass of Chardonnay. Turns out one man’s “relaxing” is another man’s “boring-est thing I ever heard.”

We listened while on a road trip, making it through three or four chapters before we arrived at our destination. Once out of the car, the children staged a mutiny and refused to get back in until I agreed to never play Heidi again. So, that was that.

Several years later, I tried Little Women, this time with Seconda, who was about eight. I hooked her by telling her that something really, really terrible happens in the middle of the book. Seconda really digs it when terrible things happen in books, so she agreed to try it. And she did. But we’d hardly made it past chapter two when she put the kabosh on the readaloud.

“But we didn’t get up to the terrible thing yet!” I reminded her.

She raised her eyebrows suspiciously. “I bet it’s not even that bad.”

“Oh, it’s bad. Trust me. Reaaaally awful. Tragic.”

“Does the dad die?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“The mom?”

“No.”

“Just tell me! I’m never going to read this book and I want to know.”

“If you want to find out what terrible, awful, sad and tragic thing happens,” I said, “you have to let me read it to you.”

“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Forget it then.”

About two years later, when we were in the middle of an argument, she yelled: “And I know what happens at the end of Little Women! Beth dies!”

I gasped. “How did you find that out?”

“The internet, Mom!” she replied. “It’s called the internet!”

And then there was one.

My youngest, Terza, is six years old and, I am aware, my final shot. I knew I had to choose the classic carefully, so I left Little Women on the shelf, opting instead for A Little Princess.

A Little Princess has it all. There’s servitude, and rodent friends and orphanhood. There’s the word “princess” right there, in the title, irresistible to kids of the Cinderella-Ate-My Daughter age bracket.

Plus, I knew Terza liked my literary tastes. My husband and I had read the entire Ramona series to her–twice–using a few of my childhood volumes.

I hooked Terza with a tight elevator pitch. I kept her focused by doing all the voices. I even edited out some of the more boring adjectives.  

She was smitten for one night of bedtime reading and then another. We conducted light literary analysis on the way to school. We bonded over favorite quotes.

It’s not the legacy I planned but then again, in parenting, it never is.

“It’s working,” I thought with no small amount of self congratulation.

And then, on the third night, just after Ermegarde St. John was introduced, Terza cut me off mid-sentence and said, “I don’t want to read this. Let’s read Ramona again.”

“But–but what about Ermegarde St. John? We have to find out what happens to her. She has the best name ever! ERMEGARDE ST. JOHN!”

Terza shot me a “Mom, you’re really losing it” look. It’s troubling when your six-year-old appropriately uses that look on you.

“Can we please read just a little more?” I pleaded. “I really want to read it!”

“You can read it, Mommy. Later. After I go to bed.”

“But you didn’t even find out what terrible thing happens!” I blurted, floundering..

“I don’t care. I want to read Ramona.”

“Okay fine,” I said quickly. “I’ll tell you. Her father dies. She loses all her money! She has to become a servant in her own school!”

She shrugged. “So what?”

To which I could issue no reply. There is no coming back from “so what?”

I pulled Beezus and Ramona off the shelf and started reading, for the upteenth time, Cleary’s sturdy, steady prose. I began to feel, I think, what my daughter does while reading it –  bemused, delighted and more than anything, safe. Klickitat Street is no Sesame Street; you can’t have all sunny days in Portland after all. But when it does rain in Cleary’s world, there’s always an umbrella to stand under, metaphorically speaking, anyway. I understood then, that that’s what my little one is looking for when she reads. Or what she’s looking for right now, at least. Fair enough.

A week or so later, Terza was browsing Netflix when she cried out, “Look Mom! It’s that really boring book you kept trying to read to me. Can we watch the movie?”

“Are you kidding?” I wanted to say. ”Before finishing the book?”

Instead I said, “Sure” and made popcorn. We followed the trials and tribulations of Sara Crews and Ermegarde St. John and her rodent friends. Terza was riveted. She watched the movie again the next day.

It’s not the legacy I planned but then again, in parenting, it never is. I’ll take it.

The following morning, on our walk to school, she turned to me and said, as if conceding a point: “You were right, Mom. That is a really good story.”


Nicole C. Kear is the co-author of the new middle grade series, The Startup Squad, out this May, as well as author of the chapter book series, The Fix-It Friends, and the memoir Now I See You. You can find out more info at nicolekear.com.

Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: Babyville, childhood, dispatches from babyvilel, Nicole Kear, parenting

Running Free

August 16, 2016 By Nicole Kear Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: Babyville, bookworm, childhood, dispatches, fitness, Nicole Kear, tag

When I saw a ball coming towards me as a kid, my first thought was: “run.” Not towards the ball but away from it. If the ball was big enough, I might use it to sit on while reading a book. That was about the extent of my experience with balls. I was the archetypal bookworm, knocking over huge displays of breakfast cereal at the grocery store when I walked right into them while reading. One can certainly be both a bookworm and a sports star, just not if one is me.

Though I didn’t know him at the time, my husband was precisely the same way. He was neither asthmatic nor French, but I do imagine him as a little Proust, scribbling feverishly in a notebook, crying for his mother and lingering over cookies. It’s no surprise then, that our children, aged 11, 9 and 4, are ball-averse story junkies.

In general, I love that my kids share one of my great passions. It allows for easy bonding and there’s always someone to talk to about the latest This American Life podcast. Our shared, sedentary interest is also very convenient on those days when I am thoroughly, ruthlessly exhausted – which is to say, pretty much every day.

When they were young (and still with my preschooler) hypnosis via story-telling was the only way I could distract my kids into doing things they didn’t want to do, such as eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, walking places, and, occasionally breathing.

The one drawback, though, is that the fine arts of reading, writing, talking and listening do not afford children a ton of physical exercise. And as everyone knows, daily physical exertion is necessary for a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps more importantly, daily physical exertion is necessary for sleep.

This is an important fact when you consider that in addition to being ball-averse, my kids are also sleep-averse. The level of exertion necessary to wear my kids out is extraordinarily high, which is somewhat ironic. It is as though jet fuel courses in their veins instead of blood. Physical romps which cause other children to fall alssep on the subway ride home have no affect whatsoever on my children’s level of alertness. I have no explanation for this. I do, however, have a remedy, namely: Run them ragged.

When you’re trying to think up ways to thoroughly drain the charge out from your kids’ batteries, the first thing you think of is: balls. So, recently, I bought the biggest ball I could find and I dragged my children to a nearby basketball court.

“Play with this ball!” I instructed, like I was a mom from Mars impersonating a human. “Throw it in the basket! It is fun!”

And they did, for two and a half minutes. But they soon tired of the endeavor. Sometimes the ball went in, and sometimes it didn’t and either way it seemed to feel about the same.

So I tried a new game.

“Chase it! Get it!” I instructed, throwing the ball away from my kids. In the dog community, I believe this game is referred to as “Fetch” and it’s a huge hit. It’s less popular well with human children. 

I did not, however, give up. I took the dog game one step further, unleashing our family’s ace in the hole –imagination.

“Let’s pretend the ball is a dog who’s running away from us!” I told my four-year-old, bouncing the ball away from her. “Fido, you naughty little doggie! Come back here!” And, lo and behold, she ran after it, chortling with glee. But ten minutes later, the novelty had worn off.

“Run, run, run!” I exhorted the kids.

“Why?” they asked.

“You’re kids!” I reminded them. “You don’t need a reason to run! It’s supposed to be what you do. A wolf howls. A bird flies. Children run.”

And that’s when my 11-year-old said: “Let’s play tag.”

As a child, I was not a huge fan of tag. I was too busy inventing soap operas for my Barbies to enact, and gossiping with my imaginary friends.

I wasn’t a big fan of tag as a child but I am a big fan now. It involves constant, ceaseless running, which dovetails nicely with my maternal agenda. It is a game that both an 11-year-old and a 4-year-old can enjoy. And it requires no equipment, making it totally free.

But the real reason I love tag is that it’s one of those games you can only truly enjoy in childhood. You reach a certain age, and the appeal just evaporates. I like a good chase scene . . . but only if I’m watching it in a blockbuster while sitting down and shoving popcorn in my mouth. The kids, though, want to be the stars of the chase scene. It’s exciting. It’s invigorating. It’s high stakes.

I sat on a bench at the park and watched the kids play tag. It was a stunning early summer morning – the sun warming but not yet oppressive. There was a delicious breeze that rustled the leaves and almost made me feel as if I lived in the countryside. My kids each bent down on one knee and stuck their feet together.

“Bubble gum bubble gum in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?” my son began – but my littlest one interrupted him. She is wont to pipe up whenever the opportunity presents itself and frequently even when it doesn’t.

“Let me do it! Let ME say the words!” she insisted. And then: ”Daffy Daffy duck eating apple pie. He sat on a rock and he cried because it hurt his butt! You’re it!”

This last bit was directed to my nine-year-old, who accepted the mantle of “It.”

And they were off.

I sit on the bench and watch them run, their matching golden manes glinting in the sun. Their feet – big and little – pounding the pavement hard. Their arms pumping.

“I’m gonna get you!” my daughter, “It,” shrieks, panting
and laughing.

“Ahhhhhh!” shriek the others, looking over the shoulders, a thrilled grin stretching taut the muscles of their mouths.

They laugh as they run. And I laugh too, from a vicarious exhilaration. They’re alive and ignited and just so free.

And also because they’ll sleep come nighttime.

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). Her chapter book series for children, The Fix-It Friends, will be published by Macmillan Kids’ Imprint in spring 2017.

Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: Babyville, bookworm, childhood, dispatches, fitness, Nicole Kear, tag

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