Growth!

M's newest favorite song is My God is so Big, and so Strong and so Mighty/There's nothing my God cannot do. And lest you think it's the happy, tinkly Sunday School song, you should know that while the message is the same, the delivery is a hard-charging hip hop beat.
Last year at VBS, not only did he not do the motions to any of the songs, he often was distractingly sullen at music time. Sometimes even run-offish.
This year he has the CD and is singing along and looking so forward to "going to your church every day!"
That's serious progress.
The theology, as with all of us, has a ways to go.

M: [sings] My God is so Big, and so Strong, and so Mighty/There's nothing my God cannot do...
Nothing? There's nothing God can't do?
(side note: I've been working on getting "can't" out of M's vocab and replacing it with "I can do all things thru Christ who strengthens me!" Also a work in progress.)
me: God can do whatever God wants!
[subtly inserting some application] And we are so blessed that sometimes God uses people to make things happen. To teach us, or help us grow...
M: God makes things grow.
me: Yup! God makes the grass grow, right?
M: Uh huh.
me: Does grass have to work to grow? It just grows, right? That's God's plan, too.
M: Yeah...
me: And God makes kids grow!
M: God uses cake to make kids grow.
me: Cake?
M: Birthday cake.

websites for kids

Source: a year of many firsts: summer review websites for kids

Maybe not new to me, but if it's new to you...

TIL the importance of TIL.

Even if I've known something "for ages", that doesn't mean everyone knows it.
And I'm such an enthusiastic explainer (overexplainer) when I'm working with kids, shouldn't I be just as excited to share fun facts with adults?

Today ends my disparaging attitude of "how could you have missed that one?"


Source: xkcd: Ten Thousand


Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of your discovery process.

And hey, green screens? They're even cooler than you think they might be, especially in that lime-with-navy-swirls shirt you're wearing.

Caldecott 2013

source: Medallic Art

GeekMom's post on 2013 Caldecott Books.  I am dismayed that I have not read a single one of these, but I am, as ever, delighted to have a new list of to-reads.  Particularly intrigued by the one about yarn bombing.

source: Amazon.com

2013 Caldecott winner: This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen
Caldecott honors: Creepy Carrots, illus by Peter Brown; Extra Yarn, illus by Jon Klassen; Green, by Laura Vaccaro Seeger; One Cool Friend, illus by David Small; Sleep Like a Tiger, illus by Pamela Zagarenski

Other Lisa Yee

Novelist Other Lisa Yee, my not-quite alter ego¹, made it to a Top 10 list!: Top 10 Chinese American Children's Books, age 2-14. Yaaaaaay! Go Millicent Min!

¹ Does that make me Clark Kent? Not at all. It's someone entirely different who writes novels. But she and I have the same name, so I claim them as "my" books.

I highly recommend Other Lisa Yee's books, and I loan my copies out frequently. Her Millicent, Emily, Stanford, and Marley, her Ivy, and her Bobby are fabulous characters. Their families are great too.² It is great to have strong, nonstereotypical Asians in kid lit!

² Maybe is my favorite of Other Lisa Yee's characters so far, but she's not in the least Asian. Although her mom once taught people to be "ethnical".

Other Lisa Yee is also a prolific blogger, and just as friendly in person as she comes across on paper. She also travels with Peepy, who loves getting photographed in exotic locales and with famous people. I should have gotten my photo taken with Peepy when she was in town; it would make Kevin Bacon games so much easier for me. But I did get my photo taken with "me".

This particular list puts Other Lisa Yee in great company. I've read about half these titles and very much enjoyed them. I commend to you specifically In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord³, and Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin⁴.

³ Bette Bao Lord also wrote Spring Moon, an adult novel which spans five generations of Chinese history. One of my favorite books.
⁴ I also call Grace Lin "Other Ah-Ma", because my nieces' and nephew's grandmother shares her name.

TIL Johnny Cash is a stamp!

source: MTV Hive

You can't buy them yet.  If you could, better believe I would've after a laborious trip to the USPS today.  But they'll be released on June 5.  (I seem to show up at the Post Office the week before the coolest stamps are released.  I was in the week before the Cherry Blossom Centennial stamps were released, too.)

How Johnny Cash Became a Forever Stamp tells about the photoshoot for the Cash's Best Of album, back in 1963.

It was a good year for Cash, one of his best in a very long time. Things were heating up with June Carter, the love of his life who later helped get him sober, and his career as a singer-songwriter was finally taking off...

[The photographer] wasn’t thrilled with the black and white photos he took that day, and Columbia ultimately chose a color shot for the album, which seemed just as well. But fifty years later the photo has surfaced again, this time as part of the U.S. postal service’s Music Icons series.

And evidently Ray Charles is next in line. 

source: USPS blog Stamp of Approval

kid quotes - VBS

This summer, our church is doing Big Fish's Gotta Move VBS, focusing on the Fruit of the Spirit. (Join us! Mornings, June 17-20.)

We turned the CD on in the car today, and the kidlets started listening to it while I ran back into the house for something. I returned to the car to M's cries of:

Aunt Lisa! Come quick!
The song said that God is so big, so strong, and so NAUGHTY?!?!?

Evidently "mighty" isn't a word that crossed his mind.