Author: keepinthesunlightblog@gmail.com

Belinda the Ballerina

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Belinda the Ballerina (2001) by Amy Young .

With a daughter who loves ballet and a bagizillion books on the topic at the library, it’s hard to sort through and find the good ones.  Fortunately, we stumbled across the Belinda books pretty early on.

Belinda is a hard-working dancer with a passion for ballet.  Her feet, however, are quite sizable, especially for a dancer.  She doesn’t mind, but the esteemed judges at an audition try to tell her otherwise.  Discouraged, Belinda calls it quits for awhile, but her passion won’t let her stay still for long.

We love all the Belinda books (there are four in the series).  She is kind, graceful, and best of all, has a true love of dancing.

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The Watermelon Seed

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The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli

What kid hasn’t imagined the awful things that might happen inside his tummy if he swallowed a watermelon seed?  In this book, a watermelon-loving crocodile does just that.  After swallowing a seed, this crocodile plays out all the scenarios that must be going on inside.

There’s no heartfelt message or sentimental tears at the end of this book; it’s purely for fun—short, colorful, and silly .  My one-and-a-half-year old can’t get enough of this book right now, and our six-year old loves hearing it over and over as well.  I’m excited to read more by Greg Pizzoli!

Creating Your Own Fonts

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I discovered this site a couple years ago, and I love it!  I’m sure there are others like it out there, and perhaps I’m behind on the times to realize something like this exists, but, nevertheless, I had to share.  On Calligraphr (no “e”), you can create your own font for free!  The free account lets you do the basic upper and lower case letters, numbers, and basic punctuation (although, I find it doesn’t always pick up my quotation marks and apostrophes).  It will also let you add one whole set of variants so that your font has a more natural look.  The paid account will let you store/work with many fonts at once, contains more characters, more variant possibilities, and other features.  (Once your font is saved and stored on your computer from the free account, it stays there; you just can’t store more than one font at a time on their site with the free one.)

I have yet to create anything super fancy or artistic on here, but I’ve done my own basic font, and I LOVE, love using it for our daughter.  She enjoys writing stories, so this is a great way to type up her longer work, but have it “written” in her handwriting.  Since her handwriting is still changing so much, it’s fun to update it as she grows.  This would also be a fun way to personalize letters or cards to people, if your kid isn’t up to the stage of writing lengthy text.

It took me a little bit of a learning curve to figure out where to place my letters within their guidelines, but if you look through “Tutorial 1,” it’s quite clear how to do it.

Anyway, just thought I’d share for anyone else who didn’t know this was out there.  It’s a fun way to personalize letters, cards, poetry, and stories, without much effort.

Frindle

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Frindle (1996) by Andrew Clements

Nick Allen isn’t a bad kid, but he certainly uses his clever ideas and wit to his advantage.  So, when he asks his 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Granger, about her favorite book, the dictionary, he’s really only trying to stall that day’s lessons.  But what she says in her answer leads to one of his biggest ideas yet.  In an experiment with how words are made, Nick creates his own new word for ‘pen’–‘frindle.’  What starts as a 5th grader testing his teacher, becomes something bigger than any of them could have guessed.

This is a super quick read, and I’ve read it far too many times to count.  It’s fun, sweet, and a great commentary on how change is created in our world.  And, if you’re anything like me, Frindle will leave you with some happy tears at the end.  If you haven’t read this yet, please do yourself a favor and do so.

Happy Thoughts

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In 1990, there was a book published called, 14,000 Things to Be Happy About.  I don’t remember exactly when my family purchased it, but I remember LOVING this book.  We had the daily calendar too.  I remember delighting in filling blank journals with my own lists of happy things:
–rainy, Sunday mornings
–my stuffed animal, Bunny
–freshly baked chocolate chip cookies
…things like that.

What I’ve come to realize about myself is that if I start worrying or thinking negatively, my mind can take off in that direction at an alarming speed.  Scary fast.  BUT, the good news is that my mind can just as easily and quickly take off in the opposite direction of happy thoughts, if I just give it the tiniest bit of guidance.  When I was a young teen, and even a young adult, I was pretty good at finding that space to encourage myself to look for the good and reframe things.  But, in these sleep-deprived, muddled days, I’m struggling with that quite a bit.

It wasn’t recently when reading this lovely post on my friend’s Patreon page that I even remembered my “happy” journals.  She created a “jar of joy” full of beautiful, decorated strips of paper that shared her “moments of goodness.”    I really love this idea.  It seems like a fun, simple way to remember some of the things in life that bring joy.  It got me thinking of different ways to create a collection of happy thoughts:

–happiness or gratitude journals
–a weekly chalkboard space for the family to jot down happy thoughts (Snap a pic at the end of the week, if you’d like.)
–a joy jar for yourself or for friends to contribute to, as well
–maybe a gift of a joy jar to a gift recipient (So, maybe have each guest at a party or reception write down a happy thought or memory associated with the guest(s) of honor.)
–a nightly dinner ritual to say something we’re happy about or grateful for in that moment

Anyway, I think the more we can appreciate about this wonderful Life, the more we will treat ourselves, others, and our world with kindness and respect.  And, in that way, this small act of finding things to be happy about can start changing the world for the better.

(When I looked up the book, 14,000 Things to Be Happy About, I came across this awesome website!  It’s colorful and fun, and when you click each section, including the calendar at the top, you’ll be able to view a list of happy thoughts for that topic.  You can also use the refresh button to the right of the list to get more happy ideas.  It looks like the author, Barbara Ann Kipfer, has many books of collections to help you find the good in your days!)

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