It’s been a while since I updated about the chapter books we’ve been reading. Books we’ve read with Anna since my last update include Mary Poppins, A Bear Called Paddington, Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Read-Aloud Treasury, The Lighthouse Mystery, Mountain Top Mystery, Schoolhouse Mystery, Caboose Mystery, and Houseboat Mystery. The last five are Boxcar Children books, and David has been reading those with Anna. That has become their special thing. I read the others, usually right before nap time. I used to put Sarah down for a nap earlier than Anna and then read with Anna, but lately Sarah has joined us and has done pretty well.

I’ve been a fan of Pooh for a long time, but I just discovered Paddington. He’s wonderful! We’ve only read one book, but there are lots of them and we plan to read more. The Raggedy Ann and Andy stories were sweet, a little sappy at times, but still pretty good. Anna liked them, and she and Sarah got a special surprise when I gave them my Raggedy Ann dolls (I had two) from my childhood. Mary Poppins is very interesting—pretty different from the Disney movie. There are actually several books in the series; I’ve read the first four myself, but only the first one with Anna so far. While I find the movie’s portrayal of Mary Poppins’ personality more likeable, the books include many magical moments that I’m glad I didn’t miss—P.L. Travers had an amazing imagination!

I seem to have a new habit of collecting book lists. As I muddle my way through children’s literature, thankfully there are many who have gone before me who like to publish online their lists of favorite books for children. There is a lot of overlap, of course, but with each one I seem to find more books I want to check out. We won’t run out or reading material for a while! Or ever, really. There are more good books out there than we could read in a lifetime—and most of them FREE electronically or through the library. It’s astonishing.

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We are loving “chapter book” time with Anna, and she’s loving it too. She follows along as we read and tells us if we miss a word. Nothing gets past this kid. Books we have read in February/early March include The Blue Bay Mystery, The Woodshed Mystery, Little Sioux Girl, Betsy-Tacy, and Betsy-Tacy and Tib.

I had never heard of the Betsy-Tacy books, but I think I would have loved them growing up. I loved the Little House books, the Anne books, and other old-timey stuff like that. The Betsy-Tacy books are written in that vein. This New York Times book review is worth a read if you’re interested in them. Apparently, they have a small but very devoted group of fans! I thank our children’s storyteller at our local library for clueing me in to these.

More great books are in the queue… I look forward to sharing next month!

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We’re entering new territory with Anna—we’re starting to read some chapter books aloud to her right before naptime, and sometimes in the evenings. I thought we might get through a couple a month, but we finished FIVE in January. Since David or I need to read them first, we’re going to have a hard time staying ahead! It’s a bit of a challenge to find books written on that level that also have content appropriate for a not-quite-5-year-old. Many of the classic children’s favorites are, in my opinion, better suited for kids at least a couple of years older. Anna is loving it, though, and she’s SO ready.

In January, David read her The Boxcar Children and Surprise Island, and I read Helen Keller, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and The Courage of Sarah Noble. Up next? David started The Blue Bay Mystery with her today, and I will start Little Sioux Girl, a book I loved as a child and borrowed many times from the library. And I have a large stack and an even larger list of books to peruse for future read-aloud time. I’ll try to keep the blog updated with what we read!

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… because that’s where the book bags were sitting after our trip to the library. That’s where the girls just plopped down and started looking at them. My, how these girls love books! And I’m so glad! We have a lot of good times reading together.

Anna is reading picture books and easy readers very well on her own. We read plenty of them to her as well, of couse. I’m about to start reading aloud some chapter books to her. Sarah still loves board books, but more and more she is reaching for “real” books to look at and be read to her. She’s pretty good about sitting through the whole thing, although sometimes it’s hard to get through it because she is so excitedly pointing out things on every page! But that’s wonderful as well.

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I’m on a children’s literature kick. After reading the book Honey for a Child’s Heart, which I highly recommend to anyone with children, I am newly inspired to fill our home and our lives with good children’s books. I tend to go overboard with my inspirations, and I have an overwhelming desire to read every good book out there right now, forgetting that we have a lifetime ahead of us to enjoy them, and also forgetting that I need to cook dinner and do the laundry.

Lately I’ve been wanting to introduce more poetry to the girls, so I checked out Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. (I intend to buy one, but I first wanted to peruse the library’s collection to see which version I liked best).

For a baby gift, Anna was given the CD A Child’s Garden of Songs, which is a selection of Stevenson’s poems put to music. I had planned to read Anna some of the poems from the book this morning. Well, as soon as I explained to her what the book was, she went and got her CD, read the titles off the back, searched for the same poems in the table of contents, found them by flipping through the book to the correct page number, and proceeded to read them aloud to her favorite baby doll, Charity, whom she had retrieved from her room just for this purpose. All by herself. She’s four, for crying out loud! I just stood there watching. Literature, rhyme and meter, art, reading, research skills, counting and number recognition, nurturing role-play—all happening at once. If that’s not education, I don’t know what is.

And I wondered what we’d do all summer while she was out of school.

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I recently read Getting Things Done by David Allen, after first seeing it on MoneySavingMom’s site. The title had me. After all, who doesn’t want to get things done? This book is definitely geared toward the business world, and I knew that going into it, but I wanted to see if I could glean a few useful tips from it anyway. Honestly, I got a little bogged down in all the corporate lingo he threw around, and I thought parts of his “system” were a little too complex for my needs. But there were several good points. Without giving a run-down of his entire system, I’ll just share a few things I came away with.

I need to be better about collecting all my “stuff.” Stuff is everything, and I mean everything, in your life that on some level you think isn’t like it should be or requires something of you. At any given time, these things pop into your head, cause stress, and prevent you from focusing on what you need to. I think I have a dentist appointment coming up soon; when is it again? I need to remember to ask David to hang the new curtains. Oh yeah, that toy needs batteries. What’s for dinner tonight? I’d really like to play the piano more. The washer stopped, time to switch the load over. We really should have people over for dinner more often. Did I remember to charge my cell phone? It would be great if I could learn Spanish. You get the idea. The important and the unimportant, the exciting and the mundane, the “must-dos” and the “would-be-nice-if-I-coulds” all float equally in and out of your head. I’m not ready to totally overhaul my system and start from scratch with the “collection system” he outlines in the book, but I do want to re-think my planner to make sure I have a place to capture everything. When something comes up, I need to know it’s covered so I don’t keep worrying about it.

Another helpful tip is the “two-minute rule.” If something requires action, and that action would take two minutes or less, just do it now. Now I can see how this could be taken too far; I could easily whittle away my entire day doing little things that take two minutes or less. But I see his point. If you receive an e-mail that only requires a quick reply, just go ahead and send the thing and get it out of your mind (and your inbox).

For “projects,” which he defines as anything that requires more than one action step, it is important to visualize the outcome and specifically identify what a “done” project would look like. Only then should you start brainstorming ideas, and then organize those ideas in a way that will get you to your goal. Often, people start throwing around ideas before they’ve really put into concrete terms what they are trying to do.

It is crucial to identify a tangible, very specific next action step on everything you need to do. He gives the example of a guy who needs a tune-up on his car. But what he actually needs to do is get the car to the garage. But first he needs to call the garage and make an appointment. But he doesn’t have the info; he wanted to use a garage his friend recommended. So he needs to call his friend. “Get tune-up” isn’t a next action; “call Fred for number to garage” is. Often all it takes is 10 seconds of thinking to identify a specific next action to get one of your to-do items “unstuck.”

Overall it is a pretty good book. I ended up skimming some of it quickly because it seemed repetitive at times. But it gave me some things to think about and implement, and I’d call it a worthwhile read.

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And it’s only halfway through January! I’m already about a third of the way to the number of books I read last YEAR…

… but I’ve resolved to do better this year. You know, resolved as in “New Year’s Resolution,” as in “I never read, but I should, so by golly I’m going to read 50 books this year.” Ok, maybe not. But I’m aiming for two a month, and if I read at least one a month I’ll be pretty pleased.

(Side note: For those of you who thought this post was about Anna’s reading, so as not to disappoint you, let me just say she’s doing great. We’ve just started going through Starfall‘s little “books” for beginning readers and she loves it. She can tell you all about Zac the Rat, Peg the Hen, and Gus the Duck.)

Back to my book…  it was a short book (but it still counts, I tell you!) about how to stop procrastinating and get things done. Things like reading all those books I want to read. It’s called Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy. To explain the title, I’ll just offer a quote from the introduction:

Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.

This book is definitely geared toward those who have careers outside of the home, but much of it was applicable to little ol’ stay-at-home-mom me. At this season in my life, I’m pretty quick to blame external factors beyond my control as my primary hindrances to getting things done. However, I admit I have some internal holdups as well, and this book helped me identify them. I’ll just highlight a few things I learned:

• I need to be better about setting goals. If I’m going to spend my time on something, it needs to be getting me to where I want to be. Tracy says, “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.” How true!

• Advance planning is very important. Just taking a few minutes to plan out your day can save you up to two hours of time! You should have master, monthly, weekly, and daily lists to work from. Aha! I knew it! Making lists if one of my favorite things to do. Now, about getting things crossed off of it…

• Focus on high-value activities—those that will bring the greatest positive results to your family, career, life in general. The 80/20 rule applies to our activities too—20% of our activities account for 80% of our results. Yet we tend to busy ourselves with the 80% that don’t get us anywhere. Always busy, but never accomplishing anything… yeah, that sounds familiar.

• We have to choose to procrastinate on some things, because we simply can’t do everything. I’ve actually been thinking about this since before I even started the book and I’ve observed something about myself. When I have a chunk of time, I think one of my biggest holdups to using it wisely is that in choosing to do something, I’m choosing to NOT do fifteen other things I want to do. So I do nothing, or I hop from thing to thing trying to do it all, thereby accomplishing diddly squat. Pretty stupid, huh?

• Technology is meant to improve the quality of our lives by enhancing our communications with people and making us more effective and efficient. If you’re a slave to technology, it is no longer serving that purpose. Don’t become addicted.

• You can reach a mental state of high performance and productivity. Tracy writes, “You feel elated and clear. Everything you do seems effortless and accurate. You feel happy and energized. You experience a tremendous sense of calm and increased personal effectiveness.” Ok, I have felt this on occasion. But most of the time I feel sluggish, sloppy, unmotivated, and foggy-headed. I’ve long thought that people who get a lot done must think faster than I do, that my brain just isn’t wired to operate that efficiently. But you can work to achieve this state of clarity by developing a sense of urgency in getting your tasks done, by training yourself to act rather than procrastinate. And once this starts, you develop the momentum to keep it up.

There were several things about this book that really were more applicable to those pursuing a career, but I gathered a several gems from it that made it worth the read. And I learned that I can get more done. And by getting things done, I DON’T just mean housework and such. I’m also talking about personal goals, things I want to do with my family, relationships I want to nurture outside the home—things that matter. I don’t want anyone to think I’m trying to brush people aside so I can do tasks. But sometimes those things that matter take some advance planning to make them actually happen.

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… when Anna brings me a book and wants me to read it to her. I mean, how can you refuse a child who wants to read a book? I love it! I tell you, I’m not getting a thing done around here because every five minutes she’s toddling up to me with that little “uuh, uuh, uuh” and holding up a book, and I just drop everything and plop down right there on the floor with her in a heap of smiles and cuddles.

We’ve always read to her, but she’s really gotten more into her books the past several weeks. She wants to pick out her book herself, she watches and listens more attentively, she wants to read the same ones over and over, and she’ll sit through 4 or 5 now rather than just 1 or 2. She’s amazing!

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I’ve been reading Madeline
To my daughter all the time.
I think it has affected me,
For now I write in rhyme, you see.

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This is the book that changed my life. Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic. But as a sleep-deprived new mom, it sure felt like it at the time.

The book to which I am referring is The 90-Minute Baby Sleep Program by Dr. Polly Moore. I linked to this book in an earlier post, in which I expressed my amazement at the results of my trial run of the program after simply hearing about it and before even reading the book. It went so well I decided to buy the book to find out more. (more…)

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