Two times TODAY where reading has undone me

Number one

We are reading Anne of Green Gables for school right now. I didn't precisely go into the school year with a plan. We read a non-fiction book about the Great Famine in Ireland, and then read Nory Ryan's Song, a historical fiction account, mostly because that's a topic Zoë's been curious about. 

And then we read Kwame Alexander's Door of No Return because it's nominated for the Georgia Children's Book Award this year and...that's kind of my job. It is set somewhat contemporaneously to Nory Ryan's Song (within 20 years). 

And then I had picked out Anne of Green Gables for a nighttime read with my big kids, but they selected a different book (Good Different, another book on the GCBA list). But I just feel like there's no bad time to read Anne of Green Gables, really. Plus it's set within 20 years of Door of No Return, so it's somewhat contemporaneous...right? 

At any rate the kids have been working on their spooky stories and using rich description to invite their readers into their story. What better mentor text than Anne of Green Gables for that?

Zoë started her story with a rather bland sentence: It. Was. October.

She started reading Anne of Green Gables and her revision and suddenly "the October sun" is "shimmering" through the leaves, "casting suspicious shadows" on the path.

Delightful. Thanks, L. M. Montgomery!

Anyway, we read chapter seven today, 'Anne Says Her Prayers.' 

Anne doesn't quite understand what prayer is for, though she had to memorize the catechism while in the orphan asylum. So she asks Marilla:

“Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer. Well, I’m ready. What am I to say?”

Such a beautiful soul, Anne is. But Marilla is aghast at her "heathenism." 

Marilla felt more embarrassed than ever. She had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

I interrupt here to say that my children didn't know this classic prayer, so I recited it for them: "now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." 

My children were aghast at that prayer. To think of children praying for the Lord to take their souls while they sleep! Benjamin acknowledged that children used to die more frequently "back then," so such a prayer kind of makes sense. But it really falls outside of what might considered a typical bedtime prayer in our current culture. (Of course, we don't tend to do recited prayers at all, but still).

Continuing on with good ol' Maud narrating about dependable Marilla:

But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor—which is simply another name for a sense of fitness of things; and it suddenly occurred to her that that simple little prayer, sacred to white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing about God’s love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.

Oof. Anne "had never had [God's love] translated to her through the medium of human love." We talked about that for a long time (and sang As I Have Loved You, much to Phoebe's delight). Here we're starting to see Marilla's goodness, too, the fact that she wants to show Anne what it is to be loved (even if she seems a little too strict, a little too proper to be very likable at this point in the book).

“You’re old enough to pray for yourself, Anne,” she said finally. “Just thank God for your blessings and ask Him humbly for the things you want.”

“Well, I’ll do my best,” promised Anne, burying her face in Marilla’s lap. “Gracious heavenly Father—that’s the way the ministers say it in church, so I suppose it’s all right in private prayer, isn’t it?” she interjected, lifting her head for a moment. “Gracious heavenly Father, I thank Thee for the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters and Bonny and the Snow Queen. I’m really extremely grateful for them. And that’s all the blessings I can think of just now to thank Thee for. As for the things I want, they’re so numerous that it would take a great deal of time to name them all so I will only mention the two most important. Please let me stay at Green Gables; and please let me be good-looking when I grow up. I remain,

“Yours respectfully,

Anne Shirley.

“There, did I do all right?” she asked eagerly, getting up. “I could have made it much more flowery if I’d had a little more time to think it over.”

Oh, the beauty of that sincere prayer, the beauty Anne sees in the world, the beauty of Marilla accepting this "share of trouble." I'm looking forward to finishing this read with the kids. 

Number two

I was helping Phoebe get ready for bed and noticed the melatonin was down, so I offered her one.

Listen.

Some of y'all might have kids who sleep. Miriam just babysat for a sweet mom down the road whose older child had a well-child check during her baby's nap time. She asked if Miriam could just sit in the house while the baby napped (and Miriam is perfectly capable of that). So the mom put the baby down for her nap, packed up the preschooler, went to the doctor, and came back home...and true to her word, that baby just slept right through everything. 

Miriam earned $10 without even seeing the child she was tending.

That, uh, is not how things really work in my house. 

My kids don't sleep. They want to be up and doing. Always. 

Giving them some melatonin really does help them realize they need to power down. It's especially important for two specific people in our household: Zoë and Phoebe. They are by far the worst sleepers of my bunch. I'm not saying the others were great sleepers (except for Miriam—chef's kiss!—who was fantastic) but Zoë and Phoebe have been particularly challenging. 

So I handed her a melatonin and she was like, "Mmmm...don't mind if I do!"

She didn't really say that, though I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility. What actually she said was:

"Oooh! Fanks! *chew, chew, chew* Why I need... *chew, chew, chew*swallow* Why I need two today?"

"What do you mean 'two'?" I asked. "I only gave you one."

"Alexei already gaved me one," she shrugged.

So Phoebe got two melatonin pills before bed (and Alexander got a lecture about dosing out medicine without the say-so from an adult).

She was getting mighty heavy-headed during scripture study. For some reason (we had three chapters left in Third Nephi) Andrew wanted to read three chapters tonight, so it was a bit a marathon. And so many wild things were happening. Nothing too extreme...just...eight-silly-people-in-a-room things.

Months ago Andrew accidentally said, "inikitty" instead of "iniquity," for example, so now whenever the word "iniquity" comes up in the scriptures (which, ummm, is quite frequently) the kids all start chattering about "inikitty," not unlike the "I have purse" meme:

And then tonight Benjamin was reading the word "blessings" and his tongue got all tangled up on the "bl" so he ended up saying something like, "bl-bl-bl-blessings," which was funny.

And then Zoë—who is our current pneumonic child (once again ill, though we haven't taken her in to see the doctor yet...)—decided she needed to get a drink or go to the bathroom or something. So she hopped off the couch and then tripped and fell in the middle of the room in a very surprising way.

And then Phoebe was just, like, playing with my hair and pulling on my glasses and talking right in my face about wanting to say the prayer right now, please can we just say the prayer, when's it gonna be prayer time...

She was very ready for us to say the prayer. So we did...and then she still wanted a story, even though she was very tired. 

She chose My Big Dumb Invisible Dragon (Angie Lucas and Birgitta Sif) and I was not prepared for this book, so I will tell you right away that this is a book about grief. 

And I will tell you that it was beautiful. 

It follows a child from learning about his mother's death—in a very delicate way, so delicate that many of my children did not pick up on that, but that's okay...because they knew that something had happened...even if they weren't quite sure what had happened—through the ups and downs of the grieving process. 

He feels empty. He feels alone. He feels afraid, angry, depressed, ignored, sad, guilty. 

Eventually the dragon starts exploring, flying away for a few hours, a few days. But always coming back. And it's such a heavy dragon.

Sometimes the dragon feels like a comfort. The child can lean in and feel those big feels.

The dragon starts going away for longer periods of time and the child thinks it might finally be gone...but then the dragon makes a surprise appearance for the child's birthday. 

How real is that to how grief works?! Ugh—always sneaking back when you least expect it. But the good news is that now that the boy has been with the dragon for so long, the dragon doesn't seem so big. 

At the very end the boy and his friend are playing at the park, but his eyes are looking at a sad girl, sitting alone with an invisible dragon on her head. And he remarks how silly it is for him to have asked if we've "ever seen an invisible dragon" because they're invisible so you can't see them.

We turn the page and he's holding hands with this little girl, both of them smiling, running through the trees while their "invisible" dragons soar above them and the text says, "You have to look at the person underneath." 

And...guys...that was it for me. 

Like, I managed to hold things together for the rest of the story, but that last page??!! I could not even!

Perhaps it's because this story speaks to my own spiritual understanding of life and death and grief (the author—Angie Lucas—is from Utah and another one of her books won an Association for Mormon Letters Award, so I'm assuming we share a faith tradition) but this book was such a wonderful exploration of grief. 

It was lighthearted enough that my children didn't feel particularly distressed by it (even if I couldn't keep myself together on that last spread), but deep enough to really open up a discussion of the grieving process (and how those big, dumb dragons don't ever seem to go away entirely). 

So, thank you, Angie Lucas!

I'm so surprised this wasn't on this excellent list of books about death for children. If you're looking for resources, that list is a good place to start, but there are so many other wonderful books that aren't on the list. For example, My Big Dumb Invisible Dragon, but see also Maybe Tomorrow? by Charlotte Agell (and Ana Ramírez). That's another one that stands out in my mind as being an exceptionally good book about grief. 

The next time we're hit with family tragedy, I will be so much better prepared than I was the last time! I hope. I mean...those dragons always land in such unpredictable ways. But...I can at least try to be prepared, right?

Too bad this book was published in 2019—it's too old to review for JoLLE or recommend for GCBA. I know I should probably just pick up the "new" titles at the library for that purpose but what happens is that the children scatter and bring me books from all over, so we end up checking out a little bit of everything (which is also an excellent way to read). It's not that a book from 2019 is old, by any means...just that it's too old to qualify for those two review/award systems that I'm linked to.