Author: Sheila Quirke

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Finding Everything I Need in My Sock Drawer: A Story About Seeing the Moments That Sustain Us

It happened this morning.  I was at the sink doing dishes, my older son was being too attentive to one screen or another and my younger son was whining at me, asking for help making puppets.  He wanted to make puppets.  Now.  He needed help, of course, but couldn’t he see me busy at the sink doing last night’s dinner pans?  Nope.  Puppets.  Now.  Right now.

I encouraged him to ask his brother.  He did.  That didn’t go too well, as that screen wasn’t going to watch itself.  The little one was back in the kitchen after a squawk with his brother, still needing that help to make those puppets.  A craft project.  Pffft.  Not my forte, even on my best days.  Okay, kiddo, today’s your lucky day.  Puppets it is!

Improvisation is a mother’s best friend, so I sacrificed a pair of my white anklets I wear when I exercise to use as sock puppets.  HA HA HA!  Yeah, that one was an easy sacrifice.  Exercise, even on my best days, is also not my forte.  I fished out a selection of Sharpies and slipped those socks over my son’s eager hands, showing him how to move his fingers up and down to mimic talking.  He took to it immediately.

We made a little girl with pink curls and a green bow.  She had bright blue eyes and red, red lips that matched her polka dotted blouse.  Her puppet companion was a snake with a long, hissing tongue.  He was hungry.  My boy was delighted.  D-lighted.  Knowing exactly what he needed, he requested help setting up his pop up tent, an Amazon impulse buy a couple of years ago that has been worth its weight in gold.  “I want to make a puppet show for my brother!”

I left my boys, happily engaged now, to return to the kitchen sink.  There were giggles and guffaws wafting back from the front room.  What in the Sam Hill was I doing scrubbing pans when I could be watching the wonder of a four year old putting on his very first puppet show for an audience of one?  Priorities realigned, I walked back to my boys, but not before grabbing my phone to snap a shot.  I sensed this was one of those moments that demanded documentation.

A boy, a tent, his puppets, and a brother.
A boy, a tent, his puppets, and a brother.

I was right.  And so, so glad both that I saw it and that I captured it.  The snake was hungry and threatening to eat the green-bowed girl in one big bite.  Oh no!  “SQUEEEEE!,” she shouted, not wanting to perish in the thin grave of a mean old snake.  The girl fought back and defeated that snake.  “You won’t eat me today, snake!  I am strong!”  Crisis averted, safety restored, sock puppets FTW on a rainy Saturday morning.

The beauty of this moment between these two boys, almost five years between them, happy and laughing, performing and sharing.  Brothering.  Swoon.  This bit of perfection will sustain me for days.  The moment wasn’t about me, but Lordy, it was for me.  And dang if I didn’t need it.

Life is so, so hard these days.  Between hunting trophy elephants and adult men dating teen girls and allies behaving badly, I am too often at the end of my rope.  It is these moments that will sustain me.  I need them.  Badly.  Right now.  Just like my little one needed that puppet.  It’s time to pay more attention to the moments — not only looking for them, but nurturing them, encouraging them, recognizing them.

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Beyond the Cover: What to Look for in a Children’s Picture Book

This is a guest post by one of my former high school English teachers who is now retired and a published author.  She was wonderful then and is wonderful now.  I hope you enjoy her words and wisdom as much as I do!

By Saralyn Richard

Before I wrote and published Naughty Nana, I selected a children’s book based mostly on the cover. If it was appealing, I was good, and I ended up with some real duds. Now, like a connoisseur of gourmet foods and fine wines, I’ve developed a more sophisticated palate, so I thought I’d share some of my new-found criteria for what makes a fabulous picture book.

1. How well is the book constructed? Whether the book has a hard or soft cover, it needs to be durable enough to withstand many page-turnings by hands, both big and little. Is the binding secure enough to keep the pages intact? What kind of paper does the book have? If the book is flimsy, it’s just not going to hold up.

2. Is the book colorful? Many picture books have only one or two colors, while others have four. In my experience, children enjoy books with multi-colored illustrations that come from combinations of red, yellow, blue, and black. If the paper is coated, it will take the inks and produce vibrant and shiny pages, the kind children are attracted to.

3. Does the book have at least one relatable character? Most picture books have a target audience of children aged 1-3, 3-6, or 3-8. The main character should be someone who is similar in age to the person who is reading or being read to. It’s also helpful if there is some age, gender, race, or religion diversity among the characters, so the book has a wider appeal and teaches children about people who
are different from themselves.

4. Is there a compassionate message? Most children’s books are entertaining and/or educational, but not all of them present readers with a positive message, something that points the way toward ethical behavior, kindness, friendship, or love. Children’s minds, after reading a bedtime story, should be filled with uplifting thoughts and the importance of doing the right thing. I’m convinced that is key to making the world a better place.

5. Does the book lend itself to conversation between the child and the adult reading it to her? Are there questions that flow naturally from the story? Can the child draw conclusions, make inferences and predictions, generate explanations, compare and contrast, and evaluate the story? The best picture books are open to interpretation, providing room for healthy discussion.

As you shop for quality books for the youngsters on your holiday list, keep these five criteria in mind: Construction, Color, Character, Compassion, and Conversation. Hit all five, and you’ll know you’ve got a winner!

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Saralyn Richard is a former educator and author of Naughty Nana, a children’s picture book, ranked #30 on the Goodreads list for Best Picture Book. For reviews and book orders, GO HERE.

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14 of America’s Worst 25 Mass Shootings Have Happened Since I Became a Mother in 2005

You lose sight of these kind of things in the day-to-day, but this morning I opened up Google to research the worst mass shootings in America’s history.  You know, as one does on a Monday morning.  Two of them have happened in the past six weeks.  How’s that for sobering?

I found this list that catalogued the deadliest mass shootings in America’s modern history.  Full disclosure, I have no idea what qualifies as “modern history” or when it began.  Per the list, sometime after World War II.  Also, this list is generated by CNN, so perhaps a few of you might believe it to be fake news.  Alas, it is not.  Mass killings are now becoming commonplace. We barely have time to wrap up sending our thoughts and prayers from one carnage before another one has occurred.

Art installation done by Michael Murphy at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Art installation, “Gun Country,” done by Michael Murphy at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014.

I sat down at the computer to write about a different aspect of this new culture of mass shootings (I will save that angle for another day, and, sadly, my guess is that I will not be waiting that long) when I went to Google.  Once there, I was sickened to realize that 56% of America’s worst mass shootings have happened in the twelve years since I have been a mom.

That means that my kids have only known an America where mass shootings are commonplace.  There have been seven in my young son’s life (he is 4) and twelve in my older son’s life (he is 8).  Even my daughter’s abbreviated life of just four years logged four mass shootings.

Just six weeks ago I was careful to keep the radio turned off so the boys would not hear the news out of Las Vegas before they started their day.  This morning, I kept the news on, the voices calmly relaying the details of our new normal — traffic, weather, body count.

In my own childhood, my mother never once had to turn the radio down for a report of mass carnage caused by guns in America.  The first mass shooting in my life happened in 1982 when I was 12 years old.  I had a childhood free of mass shootings.  Today’s children, mine included, cannot say the same.

I remember hearing stories from my parents about the man at the top of the tower at the University of Texas.  He killed 18 people and wounded dozens more on a summer day in 1966.  My Mom would never fail to remark that the shooter was diagnosed with a brain tumor during his autopsy, which somehow helped a traumatized nation make sense of the shooting spree.

Seeing the information, this landscape of our “Top 25” shootings, mapped out in my tidy handwriting on a notebook beside my computer, puts America’s problem with gun violence in stark focus.  Media outlets are now categorizing things like “worst church shooting,” “worst workplace shooting,” “worst school shooting.”  It is utter madness, lunacy, one of our great national sins.

To see and acknowledge the difference between the America I grew up in and the one my boys have inherited kind of, sort of makes me want to throw up.  Part of that is because I have little to no hope that things will change.  We are simply making room for these shootings in our lives rather than doing anything to stop them.

Just last week, which marked the one month anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting, I thought to myself that it felt like the violence had happened months and months earlier, not just a few weeks prior.  I wondered why there had been no follow-up coverage of what the motivation was behind the worst rampage on American soil.  I shuddered to realize that folks had just stopped caring.

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There was an article I saw over the weekend, even before news of this latest shooting broke yesterday morning, that talked about efforts underway to educate Americans about “situational defense.”  There is a growing movement that is trying to convince us that if this is the America we live in, we should learn how to get used to it as best we can — remain vigilant in all places, know where the exits are at all times, learn to stop blood flow if someone next to you gets shot, get our children comfortable with live shooter drills.

Actually, as every other developed nation in the world demonstrates, there are ways to curtail senseless episodes of mass shootings.  Enacting common sense gun laws would require a collective American wail of, “Enough.”  We are not there.  Instead, we bicker about politics and 2A rights and libtards and snowflakes and doomsday scenarios of government tyranny.

My children deserve better.  Your children deserve better.  All children deserve better than the adults who surround them, including me and you, who have become so inured to the senseless violence that nothing changes.  I hold myself accountable.  And you.  And those elected officials bought and paid for by the NRA that represent us in DC.

Stand up.  Vote.  Demand better for your children than a country where mass shootings are as commonplace and mundane as folding laundry or grocery shopping.