In the past few weeks, Amelia’s early reading and writing skills have started to click, and her kindergarten science sessions have focused on making and recording observations about the world. Her growing skills combined with the curriculum she’s learning have coalesced into a new hobby: she’s become an avid journaler.
Notable events from yesterday: the dog threw up and we spotted both the UPS and the FedEx trucks in our neighborhood.
I’ve also journaled in some way, shape, or form for most of my life, and it’s both jarring and comforting to compare her notes on daily life to mine. While I’m writing panicky missives about….well, everything, she is still thinking about the skunks that stole a graham cracker from our campsite in August and asserting her power in extremely minor and charming ways.
The cognitive dissonance of raising little kids while multiple simultaneous crises unfold outside our doors has been exhausting, disorienting, and also a source of great relief these past seven months. It is hard to maintain an atmosphere of normalcy for their sake when I feel strongly compelled to sit in a closet with a blanket over my head. And it also really helps to be called away from the chaos and horror of recent news because the leaves and acorns and migrating birds on the Autumn Scavenger Hunt homework assignment aren’t gonna find themselves.
I hope you’re all okay. I hope you are finding some moments of respite here and there too.
If you like reading Extra Credit, would you consider sharing it somewhere, or with someone? Parenting can be hard and isolating even in non-pandemic times, and lately…..well, you know. It helps to connect!
Ask A Teacher
I didn’t answer a letter in the column this week, but it is entitled “I’ve Been Watching My Kid’s Teacher on Zoom, and I’m Horrified!”, and you know you want to read that. (The teacher in the column is a disaster, but I’ve been thinking a lot about all those early-grade teachers out there experiencing the double pressure of trying to effectively instruct their target audience while knowing that, most likely, there is also an audience of adult observers just out of sight, listening to them work.)
Recommendations
Jeanna Kadlec has written two pieces in a series called Deconstructing Disney, and “The Princess Problem of Frozen II” was a complex and super interesting read:
But what particularly stood out was how uniquely committed Frozen II was to continuing Disney’s overarching project they have taken on with every princess film since their co-production with Pixar, Brave: the relocation of anxiety around women’s agency from romantic relationships to the stability of the nation-state. How much does women’s independence, agency, or bodily autonomy support or threaten the state? This is the project that every Disney Princess movie of the past 10 years has engaged in.
I liked that piece so much that I searched for some of the author’s other work, and found the also complex and super interesting “On the Overlooked Eroticism of Mary Oliver,” which led me to this new-to-me and exTREMEly sexy Mary Oliver poem.
I just started reading Emily Jenkins’ Toys Go Out to Amelia. The first chapter takes place almost entirely inside a backpack, and StingRay’s increasingly panicked spirals about where the three titular toys might be going made her belly-laugh:
“I hope we’re not going to the zoo,” moans StingRay. “They’ll put us in cages with no one to talk to. Each one in a separate cage, and we’ll have to woosh back and forth all day, and do tricks on giant swings, with people throwing quarters at our faces!”
“We might be going to the dump!” cries StingRay. “We’ll be tossed in a pile of old green beans, and sour milk cartons, because the Little Girl doesn’t love us anymore, and it will be icy cold all the time, and full of garbage-eating sharks, and it will smell like throw-up!”
I wrote once before that Netflix stealth-dropped an Octonauts movie on their platform, and while perusing our suggested offerings today, Amelia discovered that they’ve done it again! My prior review of Octonauts & the Caves of Sac Actun applies to Octonauts & the Great Barrier Reef as well: I have no idea what it is about (except that it’s a musical with extremely frequent singing) and have no comment on its quality. I can tell you that its 47-minute length was perfect for getting dinner on the table, and I recommend it on that basis. Amelia reviewed it as “good!”
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