Some resources of games to play at home (attention and concentration training)

* 9 indoor activities for hyperactive kids <Link>

* Top brain games <Link>

Reading While Nursing 8 (Early October)

 Jyothsna. If Wishes Were Aeroplanes. Notion Press, 2019.

If Wishes Were Aeroplanes reimagines Jane Austin'e Persuasion in a contemporary Indian setting. It features a feminist heroine, a university lecturer of English literature in a women's college in Delhi, India, and narrates the journey in which she was torn away from, and returns to, her first love over a span of fifteen years. 

My Lunchbox Diary XXV

My Lunchbox Diary XXIV

Reading While Nursing 7

 The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I read Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking because I was looking for something to read to give to a friend who just lost her husband. 

He passed away in an accident, and I do not know what to do to console my friend seeing her losing weight and facing everyone in the farewell event. 

The book consists only of Didion's monologue, which records how she thinks and suffers after having lost her husband to a sudden heart arrest. It was until the end that we knew that she also lost her daughter eighteen months afterwards. What she reveals in the book is heart-breaking. 

Some readers complained that she is narcissistic because there is no one else in the narrative but herself, her thoughts, her anxiety, and her calmness. I would think, however, that of course she has to be narcissistic. The dead have left, the living are alone to figure out what has happened. Of course, one has to focus on him-/her-self, and no surrogate can be found to grieve, moan, and suffer.  

My Lunchbox Diary XXIII

Lunchboxes continued in the summer vacation.

My Lunchbox Diary XXII

 A new lunch box today for T. A pie of coconut milk curry plus veggies.

Reading While Nursing 6

El Deafo, by Cece BellA friend mentioned this graphic novel to me, when I told her that my daughter has microtia in one of the ears. The heroine in El Deafo loses her hearing at the age of four after having been infected with meningitis. The ups and downs in her social life from kindergarten to elementary school in the book show what a world with little sound is like, and what anyone with hearing need is special and different at the same time just like all other people. I like the point she makes that when people with normal hearing ability try to "help" those with hearing need and to be over-cautious of the difference between them, they usually fail to see how they are all the same and how people with need "wish" to be treated. This is an important reminder to me, who tend to be very imposing in many cases in good or bad ways. 
My friend also bought my daughter another picture book, Rebekah's Superpower. The author wrote this book for her daughter, who has microtia in one ear. There is less plot in it, and the purpose is to help people with normal ears understand those with needs. 

 Superpower is the connecting concept between the two books. Disability might, on the one hand, disables one from meeting the norm, but on the other, it enables another power, which is usually unimaginable and therefore powerful. 

Reading While Nursing 6 Poetry

The New Yorker April 6, 2020

Jose Antonio Rodriguez. "Shelter". 48-49.
     "In that illusion of shelter, though perhaps
       They were closer to poetry's pursuit, that edge of oblivion
       Where words begin becoming insufficient [...]"

Reading While Nursing 5 Journals

The New Yorker (Jan 20, 2020)

Menand. Louis. "How Affirmative Action Has Evolved". 62-68.

The New Yorker (Mar 23, 2020)

Dyer, Geoff. “Existential Inconvenience: Life in the Shadow of Coronavirus”. 17-18. 

Gawande, Atul. “The Blight: How Our Economy Has Created an Epidemic of Despair”. 59-63. (Health Insurance; suicide rate of white working class; USA problem)

The New Yorker (Mar 30, 2020)

Leprechaun, Jill. “Don’t Come Any Closer: What’s at Stake in Our Fables of Contagion?”. 22-25. (Literature of pandemics)

Gopnik, Adam. “Abundance of Caution: Entering a Time of Containment, New York is at its best and its worst.” 38-55. (Pandemic, social class)

Denby, David. “Chain Me UP: Harry Houdini and the art of escape”. 67-70.

“Houdini evoked actual cruelties - slavery and imprisonment, people cast into filthy cells and tormented for years. [...] He burrowed into the unconscious of the human race, evoking types of public sadism that had been suppressed, only to reemerge in later eras: his stunts looked backward to the ducking stools of the witch trials and forward to such practices as waterboarding and ‘enhanced interrogation’ under the George W. Bush Administration.”

The New Yorker (April 6, 2020)

Press, Eyal. "A Deadly Principle: Cervical Cancer and Alabama's Medicaid Policy."  24-31. (Medicare in the USA, white working class, populism)

Kolbert, Elizabeth. "How Pandemics Shape Human History." 58-61. (political history of pandemics)

Lepore, Jill. "Loneliness Studied." 62-64. (the emphasis on individualism and loneliness; living alone as a product of capitalism)

Heti, Sheila. "The Letters of Tove Jansson." 65-69. (Moomin's author Jansson Tove, solitude and companionship, idea of home)

The New Yorker (April 20, 2020)

Blitzer, Jonathan. "Juan Sanabria: New York Remembers a COVID-19 Victim". 16-19.

The New Yorker (May 18, 2020)

Tolentino, Jia. "Can I Help You?: The Meaning of Mutual Aid During A Pandemic". 24-29.

The New Yorker (August 24, 2020)

Mead, Rebecca. "Nature and Nurture: A Therapist and Her Husband, a Garden Designer, Urge Us to Seek Solace in Plants." 20-24.

The New Yorker (September 7, 2020)

Kincaid, Jamaica. "A Heap of Disturbance: in Naming What We Grow, We Perform the Act of Possessing". 24-26.

"The garden is a heap of disturbance, and it may be that my particular history, the history I share with millions of people, begins with our ancestors' violent removal from an Eden. The regions of Africa from which they came would have been Eden-like, and the horror that met them in that 'New World' could certainly be seen as the Fall. Your home, the place you are from, is always Eden, the place where even imperfections were perfect, and everything that happened after that beginning interrupted your Paradise." (25)

Reading while Nursing 2

Christie, Agatha. Cat among the Pigeons. (1959) (7/Apr/2020) 

 

Reading while Nursing 3

Hall, Sarah. Mrs Fox. (2013) (26/Jan/2020)

Online resource for kids at home

PE with Joe here

Music Lesson with Lindsey here

here

Lunch doodles with Mo Willems here

CBeebies:Andy’s Wilde Workout 

Animation 

The Land Before Time

Dinosaur Train

Reading while Nursing 1

Hellman, Lillian. The Children’s Hour. (1934) (finished reading on 31/Mar/2020)

      Film adaptions and other information here

here