Brain clearing

I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and this morning the delightful Elizabeth Spann Craig posted on it: The Importance of Doing Nothing. I was so glad to hear her nothing-positive blog, because I am a firm believer in unscheduled time for everyone (and especially kids!). I think time with nothing to do is what inspires creativity and builds a person's character. When you're sitting around mulling over nothing in particular, you sort out a lot of your values and dreams and best ideas!

When I was a kid, we lived too far from anything for lessons or camps or sports. I spent most of my time reading or wandering aimlessly. Sometimes I played in the creek, but mostly I rode my bike in circles and daydreamed. Most of those daydreams turned into stories, about a third of which I started writing down in my early attempts at novels. I never made it more than a thirty pages into a project, but that might have been due to handwriting that even at age ten was pretty abysmal (and that was when my handwriting was at its zenith!). When you work without an outline and your notes are on random scraps of school work, it really helps if you can read them.

In that tradition, my daughter has very few scheduled activities. She's taken a few classes from Parks and Rec, but she's not terribly interested in team sports or music. She wants to be a writer more than anything in the world. Needless to say, yesterday she spent about an hour rolling around on an exercise ball in our living room, doing nothing. I hope its teaching her something important.

Browsing!

Today I went to my new home library, which is a convenient one mile from our  new house. It's adorable--there's a cute park with a duck pond attached to the library--but best of all, the entire basement is a children's library. The books there are separated out into genres and ages in a way that I think it is really accessible. My daughter hasn't really learned how to browse for books yet, and I think this library gives that perfect quiet coziness that you need to really dig through the shelves.

How's the adult section? I don't know. I got sucked into the mid-grade fantasy section and didn't come up until my daughter was ready to check out! I love all genres of books, but mid-grade fantasy is what made me fall in love with reading, and I still love it best of all. I'm finally going to start reading Garth Nix's Keys to Kingdom series--I've never seen book one on the shelf before, and I've been forgetting to put it on hold.

Three cheers for the new library!

Sick kid

One week later, the midget is still a little under the weather. She's had a bit of an earache and her nose just doesn't stop running. She says her ear doesn't hurt today, but that may be because I had John give her a classic ear ache treatment: a hot onion in a sock, pressed to the ear.

We're just enjoying the beautiful weather and trying to nurse our little loveling back to health. It's been a quiet week!