This was considered an appropriate policy, especially since students as young as fourth grade wanted to check out these books.  This gave the parents input into their children’s reading selections.

This raises some interesting questions:

Do you think a school should limit a student’s reading material unless he/she has parental approval?

Do you like the fact that a school will check with a parent first?

Do you think the school or librarian should simply let children of any age read whatever books are in the library?

As a mother and grandmother, I like the idea that I’d be consulted and give input into my child’s reading matter.  What do you think?

(Image: Pop Culture Graphics at Amazon)

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Should School Libraries Monitor Kids’Books?

Image:sxc.hu

Then he opened his fingers and dropped into my hand three dandelion heads.  I knew from his grin, he thought he was giving me a treasure.  This reminded me of the dandelion bouquets my brother picked for my mom.

Brother was the kindergartner’s age or younger.  He’d roam around the large front yard of our farmhouse during dandelion season in spring.  Then he’d bring Mother a bouquet…a mass of golden dandelion heads.  No stems, just the heads.

Mother poured water into a cereal bowl and placed the heads there.  Once I asked her, “Why do you keep them?”  (I was only five years older, but thought I had the wisdom of more years.)

“Because they’re a special gift he picked for me,” Mother replied. 

I remembered this over the years, when my daughter brought me dandelion heads, as did my two grandchildren…and now the kindergartner.

What special floral gifts do your children bring to you?  Treasure them and tuck them away in your memories.

Post from: Blisstree

Dandelion Treasures from a Child

Jane and I have only known each other six weeks. We speak through typewritten words, sent electronically through cyber space. We talk about mothers and children and the lowcountry of South Carolina. She is my friend.

I think the root of friendship begins with a complimentary soil, a companion to the sun and the rain and the varied elements. We have a commonality – our mothers’ ashes are spread in the same waters in South Carolina. Her mother died after a full life, learning about nutrition and making copper-etched bowls and standing by as her husband and friends passed away before her. My mother’s story is different. She died young, just before she was able to enjoy life on that tiny island. Jane recognizes this irony. She and her husband call that same place home. They could have been my parents’ friends. But instead, she is mine.

And so, for this Mother’s Day, I am wishing my friend Jane – a mother and grandmother – well. I’m hoping the weather is calm on the island of Dataw, and she is able to step out on the dock there by The Bluffs, and listen to the pop-pop-popping of the clam shells and the buzzing of the cicadas. Maybe she’ll see a tree frog clinging to the edge of an old live oak draped in Spanish moss and startle a foraging heron. And if she does, maybe she’ll think about her mom and offer a silent prayer that maybe our mothers are up in heaven together, thankful that we found comfort in each other’s words.

Photo, Flickr, debaird

Post from: Blisstree

To My Friend Jane on Mother’s Day

Image: sxc.hu

Post from: Blisstree

Happy Mother’s Day at Blisstree

Susan Faye, the artist, offers the custom original watercolor paintings of your mom (or other female) and five cats of your choice. You can get more details at Etsy. It’s too late to get one of these in time for Mother’s Day, but it would make a great birthday gift as well.

Have you incorporated cats into your Mother’s Day gifts before?

(Images via Etsy/Susan Faye)

Post from: Blisstree

Custom Mom and Cats Portraits

There are reminders of her everywhere, pushing out from mounds of pansies in my garden or in passages of a thick Pat Conroy novel. At times I can feel her with an intensity that startles me. Browsing hosta in a garden shop or scraping wallpaper from the bathroom walls, I am doing what she did. I am becoming her.

Nine months after her death, on what would have been her 58th birthday, I held her ashes in the palm of my hand, giving her up to the wind of the sea islands. The dust flew into the sky and down into the quiet waters of the marsh. There was no ceremony, no preacher hugging the family Bible, no sermon echoing in the open breeze. Just my family, what was left of us, bruised and worn raw.

We had scattered her ashes off the edge of my parents’ property on Dataw Island, South Carolina. They had purchased the land the year my mother got sick, with plans to retire early and spend their days tending to the native plants, fishing off the pier, maybe teaching at the local community college. Here, my mother would heal from the surgeries and treatments. Here, she would be healthy.

But the cancer came back. Or maybe it never left her body, lying dormant until we fooled ourselves into thinking that life would be normal again. Cancer does that. It hides in the back of the mind, breathes a chill against your shoulder so you never completely forget.

On a quiet spring morning just before daybreak, the same month ground was to have been broken for their home on Dataw, my mother passed away. The birds still called into the sunrise, the car engine still turned over, people on the street still walked and breathed and made small talk, all unaware that everything had changed. My mother was dead.

I was the only one of my family who remembered that Easter night a year before she died, when we sat at the dinner table and dreamed of their move. The house plans were almost final, there were appliance books and paint decks spread across the table. My mother said once they moved to Dataw, they would never move again. And when she died, she wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered into the water at high tide, just below the twisted oak in their backyard that leaned over the marsh’s edge.

I have often been asked if I miss having a gravesite to visit, a plot of grass on which to drop to my knees and connect with what remains of her six feet below. At the very least, don’t I feel obligated to visit the property where her ashes were scattered, a place that now holds the house of a stranger, someone who never will know the secrets of that sprawling live oak out back?

I stand now, my feet bathed in the gently swaying waters of the Gulf Coast, hundreds of miles and many years from where my mother’s ashes flew. She is with me. She is the water, riding currents across this mighty earth. She is the air I breathe, the wind that tangles my hair. I have felt her during my child’s birth, in the still nights rocking my son to sleep, with my grandmother who since spiraled into the darkness of dementia. I speak to her in the quiet of my car and in the vast space between earth and stars.

There is no comfort in losing a mother, just the raw burn when memories rub against the mind. I choose to visit her here, in the static of my senses – for this is as close to heaven that I know.

(photo, Flickr, debaird)

JWJourney

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For My Mother On Her Birthday

My Friend Mr. Z is pure joy.

Going to the grocery store with Big Zack is like talking a walk down the red carpet with a Super Star. Seriously. No one can resist this sweet soul.

He gives yummy hugs and kisses. He smiles at all. He shares with everyone. 

You expect women to gawk and goo at a baby, but men? Men will walk across a restaurant to come say hey there big boy!  

As we walk by, strangers exclaim to each other, I love his mohawk! I expected old ladies would scold me, but it seems to have made him ever more Gerber in their hearts, reminding them of the Brill Cream swirl of their own generation of babies.

I call him my peaceful human because he is. He’s content, he plays well with others and easily entertains himself. 

When he is sleepy he retrieves his paci and blankey and sweetly asks to be put in his crib.

His adoration for his big sister, Ainsley, knows no bounds. If she is allowed to visit a friend after school he will stand by the door and cry for missing her and being left behind.

The other day he thought another kid was attacking Ainsley and he hurled his little toddler self screaming onto his back, hitting and kicking. The message was unmistakable: Leave my sister alone!  

Mr. Zack does a mean naked boogie dance that inspires belly laughs. 

The mischievous twinkle in his eye makes him difficult to punish. While I hover menacingly over him in time out I have to stifle the urge to scoop him up and cover him with kisses and giggles.

He thinks it’s funny to lick people.

The pleasure he gets from soda pop made me change my stance about whether he can have it. He can.

He appears to be a natural fruititarian, loving all fruit equally and without limits. I’ve seen the kid down an entire cantaloupe for breakfast and then bring me an orange or apple to cut.

Z’s almost self-suffecient, if he’s hungry he’ll bring me a can of peaches, a juice box, ask me to open a container of yogurt or heat a hotdog.

He knows enough words and sign language to convey his feelings, wants and desires and hardly throws temper tantrums, not never for that would be odd, but hardly. When he throws one it is short and sweet and passes quickly.  

Happy Birthday Zack, something tells me your twos will be more terrific than terrible.

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Mother of Two