Weekend Reading

From Humans of New York.

Our fabulous plans to go to the Chinese New Year Parade in DC were snowed into oblivion today…so we’re inside, watching it come down, and doing our taxes. Woo. Actually, JC is doing the taxes. I’m internetting.

Here are some interesting links for you. Happy Year of the Goat!

  • This is not a test. Emma Watson is playing Belle in the new live-action Beauty and the BeastGeeky girls everywhere lose their minds.
  • Speaking of feminism, decent maternity leave and equal pay for equal work are Big Goals that will take Will and Movement. But surely we could get ourselves some pocket equality?
  • New favorite comic for theater geeks.
  • I’ve been asking for years why our farmers aren’t doing more methane capture. My dairy farmer neighbor has a wealth of… ahem… “natural gas” in his back 40. Finally, Slate poses that question. Maybe it will get some attention.
  • Something to show the next person who tells you that race is not a problem in this country anymore. Also, guess what race gets suspended the most…in preschool?
  • Speaking of preschool, a couple of people have asked me what we’ve been doing to help Silas get ready to read. The real answer is that we’ve been reading to him daily, constantly, since he was about 10 months old. We tried before that, but … there’s a long phase in there where they just are not listening and don’t care. Here are some of the preliteracy and literacy developments over those years (for him and Petra). More recently, we’ve periodically checked the BOB Books out from the library. I’m impressed with the pedagogy here, and I do think that they’ve helped him start to make those connections. This morning, after reading only a few words over the past several days (and a word here and there since he was two…just enough to get me excited…), he read me four whole books. They were BOB Books, so if you’ve read them, you understand that this is not the same difficulty level as Hop on Pop. He was still justifiably proud of himself, and I was thrilled. I just bought Collections 2 and 3 at Costco, but they didn’t have Collection 1 (so if you find that, and you’re someone I know IRL, please grab it and I’ll pay you back!). He hasn’t seen the ones I bought yet, just the early ones from the library. I also started making him watch his half hour of TV with the captions on. I don’t know if it really helped, but maybe?
  • My church, in collaboration with two other congregations, does a daily devotional email newsletter during Lent. It’s all written by members of the congregations, and, so far, it’s really good. It’s not too late to subscribe.
  • I’ve Upped some good Worthy lately, including: grown-up Wednesday Addams, an endangered resource that we actually could bring back kiiiind of instantaneously, and a community pulling together to respond to a crisis. Remember, finding Upworthy stuff is the hardest part of my job, so if you see something, send it my way. And sharing is caring!
  • PS I got a cat video on Upworthy.

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