Heaven Will Be an Eternal Game of Bananagrams

 

There's this unschooling tactic called "strewing" that I started to follow when the kids were little. Basically, if there's a material you'd like a kid to explore, you don't hand it to the kid, or direct the kid to it--instead, you just leave it temptingly out on a shelf or a table for them to discover for themselves. And it's supposed to be okay if it takes days, weeks, even months for them to pick up that material, because when they do, it will be self-directed and self-motivated, and following their interests is how kids best learn.

Until I really discovered the true dimensions of our local university's library (Hint: filtering for Three-Dimensional, Mixed-Media gets you all the puzzles and toys and manipulatives!), this was mostly just a way for me to waste my homeschool budget on stuff the kids didn't touch. I mean, sure, they became obsessed with the Geomags and the Kapla blocks, eventually they spent entire weeks with the Perler beads and the Sculpey clay, listened to so many books on cassette tapes that I worried they would never do anything else, but the 3D pen? Nope. Nope to the Zometools for free play. Nope to the crystal growing set and the build-your-own maze set and the Snap Circuits and the Turing Tumble and the balloon animals kit and probably over a thousand dollars more of awesome kid crap over the years that I would have given a year off my life to have played with when I was their ages, ahem.

Anyway, became much cheaper to strew when what I strewed came from my local university's library, and since then, over the years, we've had logic puzzles and board games and STEM toys and math manipulatives and scientific instruments all enticingly placed on our family room bookshelves ready to be explored and easy to return.

Thanks to the library's infinite renewals, I can't even tell you how long we've had Bananagrams. I think we got it around the time we also got the giant poster of the Greek mythology family tree and the giant map of the Moon, and those have both gone back to the library, but Senet and the leaf identification kit are also still here, so maybe it hasn't been too ridiculously long. Although I'm pretty sure several sets of tessellation puzzles have come and gone in that time, as have the Proofs of Pythagoras kit and the French vocabulary flash cards, sooo...

Now that the kids are grown or nearly grown, though, it turns out that the person I'm maybe actually strewing for is myself. I was wandering around the family room the other day, aimlessly tidying while the teenager and I listened to The Haunting of Hill House (it's not translating as well as I'd hoped to audiobook; we're going to finish it, but we don't love it, whereas I LOVED this book when I read it a couple of Halloweens ago), when I noticed, for the first time in ages, the Bananagrams game sitting on the shelves where we keep our library materials, and thought, "Huh. I should play that and see if it's fun."

So I rallied the teenager, and we did play it:

And it IS fun!

You know how Scrabble is generally really fun, but it's also boring waiting for other people to take their turns, and it's terrible when you have a terrific plan for an awesome word to play but before you can do it another person takes your spot?

Bananagrams solves ALL of that. There is never any downtime. You make your own crossword grid that's all for you, so nobody can ever mess it up, and when you see a better play you can rearrange your own crossword however you like:

Teenager peeled an "I" and decided to turn "DOPE" and "DAMN" into "DOPAMINE." 

So, everyone draws the same number of letter tiles (every time I've played it's been with 2 or 3 players, and we always draw 21 tiles), and you each work on your own individual crossword grid.

Matt, our college student home for Fall Break, and I are playing at the kitchen table on a Saturday night, listening to the drive-in's broadcast of the Taylor Swift concert like a good old-timey family.

When you've all of your own letters in your own crossword, you say "Peel," and everyone takes a new tile from the pile and continues playing.

Sometimes you get a new tile and it's like an S or something, so you can just pop it onto the end of a noun. But sometimes you get a Q and you realize that your only U is already busy, so you have to disassemble half your grid to get it back and then figure out how to rebuild while continuing to take a new tile every time someone else says "Peel."

The game continues that way, with occasional breaks to look weird words up as a family or neg someone else's word choice or lore dump about Scrabble games of old, etc., until there are fewer tiles left in the pile than there are players. At that point, we declare that the next person to use up all their letters wins, and then we get in everyone else's business to "help" them finish their own crosswords, but you could also go by Scrabble points.

I think you could also play Bananagrams as a solitaire game, going by how much fun the teenager and I had one time simply turning all our tiles face-up and using them all to make one giant grid. We started off just trying to build the most emotionally unhealthy words we could, as a "joke," so maybe it's also a little bit therapeutic, as well!

Or you could just build words representing the biggest thing on your mind these days...

I'm now officially on thrift store/garage sale lookout for a set of my very own, although I'm also toying with the idea of DIYing a set. They're literally just letter tiles in a zippered bag, and the only requirements are that the letter tiles have enough chonk to be able to pick them up easily, and that they have two sides for facing them up or down.

I think it would be fun to take a set of blank wooden tiles and handpaint each one, maybe with little background decorations like an illuminated manuscript. Think how pretty your crossword grid would be!

I Read The Heat Will Kill You First, and We're Definitely All Going to Die of Hyperthermia

It was an eclectic week!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My way into The Heat Will Kill You First was the author's discussion of the 2021 deaths of a family, including their dog, during a hike in the Sierra National Forest. I am high-key obsessed with the topic of People Dying on Public Lands, and when the news hit, I followed it for a couple of weeks, reading theories ranging from algae poisoning to the mafia, before the next crazy news story hit and I forgot about it.

Turns out, that family died of hyperthermia, and Goodell’s vivid description of how it happened was the perfect segue into the longer, more detailed topic of We Are All Going To Die From This Heat.

You guys, we are all going to die from this heat!

I often apologize to my kids about the state of the planet that I’ll be leaving them, as often as I irritatedly lecture them that it's the giant corporations killing the sea turtles, not plastic straws... but we still don't use plastic straws. Also, plastic recycling in general is a myth. 

The blogger's child, age five, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium

I think about the state of the planet that I'll be leaving them even more than that, how those fun, special activities that I've taken them on, all those trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, will one day have become once-upon-a-time adventures, never again to be repeated, since much of Monterey Bay has already died off due to warming temperatures.

Even corn, the roach plant of the Heartlands, will be negatively affected. I’ve been obsessed with how hateful corn is ever since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (EVERYTHING is made from it! It has very little nutritional value! Cows aren’t even built to digest it, and that’s why they have to give them so many antibiotics!), so maybe it’s not the worst thing that rising temperatures will eventually kill it off... except that, you know, by the time corn is killed off, most of the good stuff will have been LONG extinct.

It’s especially horrifying that, even in these ever-worsening conditions, America’s agriculture economy is still based primarily on individual manual field labor. It’s not quite as underpaid as it was when landowners literally enslaved people and forced them to do the work, but it’s still much closer to slave wages than it is to pay commensurate with skill, value, and experience. And just like when people were enslaved to do it, manual field labor is still causing heat-related deaths, just so we can have our strawberries and cabbages and almonds whenever we want them.

One of Goodell’s most interesting claims is that one reason why ever-worsening heat, particularly deadly heat waves, isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s invisible. The world has agreed on a Richter Scale, an EF rating, hurricane categories, etc., but the world hasn’t agreed on a scale upon which one can identify the danger level of a heat wave, nor is there a good universal graphic to illustrate one on a weather map. Part of that is that one’s experience of heat is somewhat subjective, so it’s less obvious when a heat wave strikes a place that isn’t prepared for it compared to the “normal” hot temperatures of a place where people know how to live with it--or at least have air-conditioning to avoid most of it.

Goodell also makes the point that part of the subjectivity of heat is its classism. Unlike tornadoes and, to a lesser extent, hurricanes, which strike where they will (it’s still a LOT better to be rich when there’s a hurricane coming, though!), heat affects the economically disenfranchised more than those with wealth and power. If a tornado hits, you’ve got to do something, but if a heat wave hits and you’re rich, you can just turn up the air-conditioning, or take a bonus vacation north.

 
In conclusion, maybe I should buy property in northern Canada so my descendants can perhaps eke out a few more generations on our greenhouse planet. Or plant some more trees on my back forty. Or maybe just take my kids to see a glacier so they’ll have a crazy-sounding, half-believed story to tell the orphans they help chaperone in the Survival Camp.

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I Read The Class and Now I'm Depressed about the State of Public School Education in America

Texted this to my own exceptionally bright, perfectionist kid. Nobody has ever called me subtle!

The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America by Heather Won Tesoriero
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, and this book makes me sad.

The Class is written with such compassion and gentleness when it comes to the stories that it tells about the central protagonists, the real children involved in one specific science class in the wealthy, high-class community of Greenwich Connecticut. Tesoriero clearly spent quality time with these kids, and was likable and trustworthy enough to be invited to their promposals and told all the fun little details about their daily lives that, in turn, give her writing life. Her tone when telling their stories is comfortable, a bit gossipy (but in a nice way), but always, always kind and respectful. It would be so easy to typecast a kid as a “character” in her book, so easy to lampoon a kid’s silliness or naivete for laughs, but this never happens. Instead, Tesoriero uses small details that she’s witnessed about the kids’ interactions to illustrate their personalities in a way that feels completely natural and true, and I love how thoughtful and careful she is.

Here's an interview with Tesoriero in which she gives an excellent overview of her book. It's a little long, but you get all the main points and some of the more interesting little details that brought the book to life for me:

The novelty of Tesoriero’s topic is what makes me sad. Tesoriero writes about a unicorn of a science class: an exceptional, privileged teacher of exceptional, privileged children who attend an exceptional, privileged school in an exceptional, privileged town located in an exceptional, privileged part of the country. I haven't looked up how their school district is funded, but if it's property taxes as is usual, they should have plenty of money. Even so, one of the premises of the science class is that the teacher, Bramante, has the skills and the connections to stock the classroom with professional-quality, niche lab equipment that would be otherwise out of the reach of even the most well-funded school, so again, other than in this unicorn situation with this unicorn teacher, wealth is a barrier to recreating this exceptional classroom and these exceptional results.

I'm interested in education philosophies as they connect with education access, and in my amateur research, whether you want the crunchiest, earthiest education or the STEM-iest, most academically rigorous education for your kids, the kicker is ALWAYS money. Here's a short video talking about Montessori and Waldorf and the issue of money to show that these exceptional experiences, wherever they lie on the spectrum, are ALWAYS expensive (and in my short time in the Montessori system, I can tell you that all the other parents but me were R.I.C.H.):

In The Class, the children’s level of achievement is exceptional mostly because of their privilege, and while Tesoriero does acknowledge this privilege, as do most of the children, she completely leaves alone issues of equity, or how on earth this kind of program could ever possibly be reproduced in other schools, or what it says about the overall environment of public education in America. That’s likely because this particular scenario is clearly inequitable, can’t be reproduced in most other schools, and has only dismal things to say about the ways that public school education is, overall, failing the majority of America’s children. All of that is deliberately not the scope of this book, but the book’s very existence begs those questions.

It was interesting, then, to see the small inequities that DO plague the lives of these exceptional, privileged children. Kids who should have won specific science fairs don’t win them. Kids who do win are cyberbullied. One kid, who is clearly THE most exceptional kid, is denied admission to Harvard, but another kid, depicted as entitled and wasteful of some of his many opportunities (but still exceptional! Because privilege!), but also described as wealthy, with parents who are both Harvard alumni and active donors to Harvard, is offered early acceptance. But even though I might want to mock the pettiness of any slight in the shadow of such overall overwhelming opportunity, it’s impossible to, because Tesoriero treats these setbacks with respect; these are children, their setbacks are real to them (if so out-of-scale as to be wildly unreal to me, ahem), and these are the life lessons they’re learning.

But seriously, though--don’t worry about the kid who didn’t get into Harvard; he got into TONS of other schools, and ended up turning down a $267,000 scholarship to Duke, one that would have included room and board and study-abroad, to attend Stanford. As a parent who’s currently got a range of side hustles going on to try to cash-flow as much of my own kid’s college tuition as possible so she can graduate as debt-free as possible, it’s a big challenge for me not to put my petty hat on for that scenario. 

I’ll be a little more petty about the kid who worked out a deal with the high school to basically allow him to test out of all of his classes for his final two years while he lived across the country in an apartment his parents rented for him and worked on his multi-million dollar invention. The super fancy international science fair thing he got invited to disrespected him, I guess(?), so he just didn’t go, and then they asked his mom for $600 to reimburse them for what they’d spent on his no-showness. THEN the bougie high school that had been essentially not making him go there for the last two years threatened to withhold his diploma because he didn’t take the wellness class he said he’d take, and OMG, would Yale withdraw their acceptance if he didn’t have his high school diploma? Nvm, they sent his diploma to him anyway. 

Just… you know, in my house, the most recent money/attendance blow-up with my own teenager involved her getting called into her part-time job on a night that she had ballet class, and I was pissed because I had to ask the ballet program if she could make up the class on another night rather than simply skip it, and they were weird about it but nevertheless, I persisted, because I paid fifteen dollars for that stinking class and fifteen dollars is FIFTEEN DOLLARS!

Okay, I’m taking my petty hat off again.

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I Read Pitch Perfect and Compared it to the Movie

Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as ‘sexy stewardess.’”

So begins the non-fiction book that’s the basis of one of my favorite film trilogies, Pitch Perfect!

I do like this type of non-fiction, and I’ve read several similar titles (Pledged - Secret Life Of Sororities and The Class are two recent books that come to mind), but for me, quite a lot of the charm of the book Pitch Perfect is picking out all the little references that show up in the film Pitch Perfect. I already knew (Thank you, Dr. Google!) that all the competitions were real competitions, but it was super cute to see that Divisi, the female a cappella group from the University of Oregon, IS the Barden Bellas! The movie picked up so many Divisi details, from their “sexy stewardess” outfits with “unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves” to the attrition in numbers that led to their desperation early one fall semester to pick up new recruits, ANY recruits… and then in walks a plucky new girl. When I found their album, Undivided, on Spotify and played it? 

It was like the Barden Bellas were singing to me! In later parts of the book, there’s a very node-like tonsillectomy! There’s a weirdly mean rival group! Even Divisi's much-touted performance of “Yeah,” when I found it on YouTube, had some similar choreography to the Bellas’ show-stopping number at the end of Pitch Perfect.

Here's the famous Divisi number, "Yeah," at the 2005 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella:

For a fun comparison, here's the Bellas' Pitch Perfect performance:

The chapters on the male a cappella groups didn’t excite me nearly as much, although I still found them interesting to read. Yes, the album Code Red by the Tufts Beelzebubs is impressive--

--and it was interesting to read about the controversy, but… then there’s another whole discussion of their next album, Shedding, and how IT was made, and a list of all the awards that IT won, and we’ve just really gotten into the weeds of collegiate a cappella album creation here.

The chapters on the Hullabahoos were more compelling, probably because Rapkin depicted them as being a LOT more fun… or a lot more of a hot mess. Whichever. Like, a Hullabahoo member literally peed on the Beelzebubs’ car?!? A Hullabahoo knocked into the CEO of the major company they’d been flown out to perform for. The Hullabahoos were invited to sing the national anthem at a Lakers game--and then piddled around their hotel for so long that when they finally left they got caught in a traffic jam and THEY MISSED IT. Just, OMG you guys.

I had a lot of fun ready referencing the groups and performances throughout the book, and I’d totally have paid for an accompanying CD/DVD, even though many of the performances that I found were so impossibly corny that I couldn’t actually watch them. Is there a word for someone singing and performing so earnestly that you high-key want to die while you watch them? But the ready-reference was important research, because some groups were so awesome that I didn’t want to die watching them! “Yeah” is fun and adorable, and the Hullabahoos’ “Royals” is well-sung and surprisingly understated, considering the singers are all wearing voluminous robes in cartoonish prints.

  

While I enjoyed what I read, I really wished we could have dug deeper into the inner workings of some of these musicians, something that I totally get possibly wasn’t an option, because, you know, they’re real humans and we don’t necessarily get to own their thoughts. But some of these singers clearly had a LOT going on that impacted and was impacted by their a cappella passion, and I’d love to hear more about how an obsessive passion like that affected them. Lisa Forkish turned down her dream school for YEARS to sing with Divisi, but then later… she finally went to that dream school! What helped her decide to move on? Ben Appel was the music director of the Beelzebubs, and then all of a sudden, he had to leave the entire school to get help with his mental health. Surely, his all-consuming a cappella commitments did NOT help with his struggles… or did they? I’m very interested in the world of extreme hobbies, and I would LOVE to know.

The only real problem with Pitch Perfect, and the reason why it’s a three-star book instead of a five-star one for me, is Rapkin’s use of offensive language regarding gender expression and sex preference. There's a whole "funny" story that hinges on a homophobic slur that Rapkin himself writes--he's not even quoting anyone!--and Rapkin really needs to say that he’s sorry. Just because of that, I was stoked to see that in chapter eight, he makes fun of a poster that a Divisi member makes by hand, in which “a cappella” is spelled incorrectly--and then in chapter twelve, who is it who writes the word “a capella” in his very own book? Why, none other than Rapkin himself! Check your spelling AND your homophobic language, Mister!

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Day 8 in England: In Which We Draw the Dread Sigil Odegra, and Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach

Do you know Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman joint?

If you haven't, spoiler alert! Also, you should really be consuming media more quickly, because the book is, like, 33 years old by now. Read the book, then watch the series, then read a bunch of Aziraphale/Crowley fanfic, then buy yourself some cute little fanart on etsy to celebrate your obsession. You're welcome!

Anyway, there's a running joke/semi-major plot point involving the M25 that circles London, mainly how it's terrifying and terrible because it was secretly designed by the demon Crowley to form an ancient sigil that reads, "Hail the Great Beast, devourer of worlds." Everyone who drives it empowers and becomes part of its low-grade evil emanations.

So guess what was the very first road we drove on after picking up our very first right-hand drive car and veering our way out of the Gatwick Airport parking garage, poor Matt with his hands at 10 and 2, knuckles white, me screaming, "Left side! Left side! Oh Sweet Jesus LEFT SIDE!" as a helpful reminder of England's left-hand traffic, and both teenagers actively having panic attacks in the back seat?

I think we have never been so collectively terrified in our lives.

Also, I cannot BELIEVE that they let us just... rent this car and drive away? Like, they slapped a sign by the exit that reminded us to drive on the left hand side of the highway, and then boom! There we were, zipping along in bumper-to-bumper traffic!

I will go to my grave insisting that roundabouts are not better than traffic lights and why do they have so many lanes in them and how do you know which lane to be in, anyway? We never did figure that one out...

We had yet to experience how very narrow English roads could actually be, so after we'd careened our way to Canterbury and I was attempting to navigate us to a parking lot, I kept being all, "Turn here--OMG wait don't turn there that must be a sidewalk or something! Do the next--no, wait, that's surely another sidewalk. WHY IS GOOGLE TRYING TO GET US TO DRIVE OUR CAR INTO THESE TINY LITTLE CREVICES!?!"

I'm very glad we didn't reverse our touring plans and go to Lyme Regis first. Now THOSE were some narrow roads! 

Eventually we found a parking garage, left the car and kissed the concrete under our feet, thanked Thomas Becket for helping us arrive alive, and wandered through Canterbury to find the newly restored Christ Church Gate:

Zooming in on my photos at home so I can see all the little details is the next best thing to having binoculars!

We'd arrived a lot later than I'd planned, thanks to having no idea how to drive in England, so I dithered at first about actually going into Canterbury Cathedral, knowing I wouldn't have time to see everything. We wandered around a bit, checked out a couple of secondhand bookshops and vintage clothing stores, and then a shopkeeper gave us the tip that you could get a good view of Canterbury Cathedral through the second-floor window in the visitor's center:

The shopkeeper knew what she was doing, because as soon as I saw Canterbury Cathedral in real life, I said, "Yep, I've got to go there."

And thus my pilgrimage to Canterbury, begun four days earlier at Southwark Cathedral, is complete!

Even under construction scaffolding, Canterbury Cathedral is the most impressive building I've ever seen:

I kept craning my head to look at the super high ceilings:

Guess I wasn't the only person who walked into Canterbury Cathedral and stopped looking where I was going!

I was so busy goggling at the architecture that I barely got a single photo of the assassination site of Thomas Becket:

And I definitely almost fell down a giant flight of stairs in my desire to stand exactly centered beneath the Bell Harry Tower:

See the lovely fan vaulting! I don't know how tall this ceiling is, but the entire tower is over 250 feet tall.

It was honestly ridiculous how beautiful Canterbury Cathedral is. I was almost offended--like, how dare you just stand there and be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life?!?

And then, as if that wasn't more than enough, there was an exhibition in the crypt that had manuscript Bibles, pilgrim badges, more cool stuff owned by the Black Prince, and some excellent Gothic statuary:

And then as if THAT wasn't more than enough, we also found a library!

Here's some of us, wandering around in baffled amazement:

We really didn't have time to explore the rest of the Canterbury Cathedral site (until next time, then!), but some of us needed fuel and fortification before we got back into our Rental Car of Terror, so we popped into our first (but very much not last!) pub of the trip, The Old Buttermarket:

We even let the 17-year-old order her very first hard cider with our late lunch, thinking that a bit of a sedative before the upcoming drive wouldn't hurt, and might even keep her from having to breathe into a paper bag the entire time:

Another bit of a wander, definitely us procrastinating to avoid the upcoming ordeal because we really did need to get back on the road...

I LOVE how you can look down little streets and see the cathedral!

When I come back again one day, I'm DEFINITELY doing the Canterbury Tales live-action experience omg.

Then we bravely set forth like stalwart pilgrims and let Thomas Becket preserve us as we veered over to Dover Beach:

There was an open water swimming club practicing nearby, as well as the busy ferry port, but, as always, some of us were mainly interested in our Special Interests:

Contributing to the heft of her suitcase!

After a long walk along the beach, we all piled into one hotel room to eat Caribbean takeout and watch, in baffled fascination, this amazing 1969 British TV show about a ghost detective. At the time I thought that maybe I only thought it was so bizarre because I was soooo tired, but no. It really was that bizarre.

And apparently the TV only got more bizarre after I fell asleep, because Matt swears that he stayed up later and found a dating show in which the contestants were completely naked...

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Tiny Julie Would Have Read the Snot out of The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

Especially if you compare that to how much fun Grown-Up Julie has reading them!

I am pretty sure that The Baby-Sitters Club (and my grandma) gave me my terrible penchant for snarky gossip. Even as the 10- to 12-year-old that I was when I first read the novels, if I'd had another kid to talk about books with I would have happily snarked away about how bossy Kristy is, how disloyal Stacey can be, and what a pushover Mary Ann often is. Also, I didn't like Mallory, and I wasn't sad when she left the series.

But I LOVED The Baby-Sitters Club, and well after I'd graduated from its target age range, you could still find me on long evenings in the public library, trusted as a high school page to be the sole staffer in the basement children's department just because the library stayed open well after any reasonable child's bedtime, reading through a couple more Baby-Sitters Club novels in between straightening the picture books and using the staff pinback button maker for my own nefarious purposes.

I've written before about that magical year for reading that was 2016, when the kids discovered so many great books, like Percy Jackson, Warrior Cats, and the new graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitters Club, then drawn by Raina Telgemeier, still one of my favorite graphic novelists. I checked out every Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel as soon as it came to the library for quite a while, and read them as avidly as my younger kid did, but then she got VERY into listening to long chapter books on Playaway, became happily accustomed to searching the library catalog and requesting them for herself, and as I was kicked out of the kid book selection job, I forgot all about The Baby-Sitters Club.

Fast-forward to this summer, when some search term or other on the library catalog brought one of the newer graphic novels into my first ten search results, and I was all, "OMG! There are more Baby-Sitters Club books!", and I requested every single one.

So that's what I did during a recent stormy weekend. You don't need electricity to read The Baby-Sitters Club!

And remember how when I was a little kid I didn't have anyone to talk about books with? Well, motherhood fixed that problem for me, because my college student sat on the other end of the couch and burned through all these graphic novels with me, only looking up so we could cozily snark on all the kids... and, with my new adult perspective, their parents!

With my 46-year-old eyes, I'm kind of now coming to see that the flaws in each flawed character, combined with their extreme competence in their various academic, extracurricular, and career pursuits, IS the fascinating draw to this series, at least for me. Mary Ann lets her father walk all over her in an infuriating way, and can completely take over the childcare of both a baby and toddler simultaneously.  Stacey can be selfish and vain, but with a diabetes diagnosis and two major moves in about a year, wow is that kid resilient. Kristy is the world's biggest bossypants, and damn, she can organize the SHIT out of a backyard day camp!

Like, gee, do I personally happen to know anyone who considers themselves both deeply flawed in a lot of ways and also extremely competent in a lot of different ways?

Ahem.

I am also extremely impressed at how the series allows big changes. I read Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye on the couch, said, "Holy Shit, College Kid! You're not going to believe what they do to Stacey!," and flipped the book to her. She read it and said, "OMG WUT?!? What the hell?!?!" 

Spoiler alert: Stacey moves away! She's one of the central characters, but her dad's job gets transferred back to New York City and she just... moves away! And then in the next graphic novel, the kids are all, "We miss Stacey so much sigh," but, you know, Jessie's a ballet star and learns sign language and there's a whole thing with a ballet school clique and life goes on.

Like, how sad and what a bummer and it really sucks because Stacey's awesome but, at the same time, such is life, especially when you're a kid. People move away, and life goes on. It's probably great for kids to see that modeled and normalized. 

It's much the same with all the really flawed parenting, because I do think that a lot of these kids' parents suck quite a lot of the time. But... you're a kid, so what are you going to do? Even when your dad is being really unreasonable, he's the parent you've got to deal with, so if you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation, then you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation. If your mom is getting married and moving you abruptly out of the only home you've ever known you're probably extremely distraught but you're still going, so you might as well lean in and help out and rack up some good credit (Kristy's mom does NOT appreciate that kid nearly enough! One of my kids would STILL be rolling on the floor in utter hysterics if I'd tried to pull that on her!). 

In conclusion: am I about to go get on the pre-release list for the newest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, set to be released in October? 

Yes. Yes, I am. Although I'll probably wait to read it until my college kid is on a school break and can sit on the other end of the couch to read it right after me so we can gossip about it!