Making it Up As I Go

I finished a couple of books lately- one that I feel like I’ve been reading for 6 months, and another that took about 1/2 hr.

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim by Tom Corwin and Craig Frazier is a lovely little gem of a book. It’s short, but packed full of beautiful images and thought provoking ideas. It tells the story of Mr Fooster, who spends his days wandering the world and pondering such questions as “Why is yawning contagious? How long do frogs’ tongues get? Why do grown-ups lose their sense of wonder?”. And as he travels he comes to some realizations. It’s kind of a Zen story, and I really liked it.

Playful Parenting by Lawrence W. Cohen is the book I’ve been reading for the last 6 months. It’s seriously taken me forever to finish it, but it was extremely good. Cohen is a psychologist who specializes in play therapy, and he explains why play is important for kids’ development, what function it serves, and how parents can help their kids (or other people’s kids) by playing with them in different ways. He gives some really concrete examples, of both how kids play (ie. role reversal- they get a shot, and then when they get home want to play doctor with THEM being the one giving the shot to you- working through the issues of power and powerlessness) and how to help kids work through things through play (like when we played “Car Wash” with Z to help her with her car wash phobia). I’ve gotten a lot of insight from the book, and some really good practical skills to use with Z, and have seen a difference using them. I definitely recommend this book really highly.

This makes 11 books finished this year, which is 9 behind where I need to be to hit my 50 books by the end of the year. But I got a bunch of great looking books from the library, so hopefully I can just steam right through them and catch up.

What are you reading?