Books, Playtime, and More Books

I’m feeling quite proud of myself to be blogging again already only ten days after my last post. Although by the time I finish writing this, several more days may have passed. The baby’s asleep and my son is watching Netflix. Yeah, it’s one of those kind of days. That makes it sound like this is an unusual turn of events, but who am I kidding? Every day is one of those kind of days. My son won’t go to sleep until around 10:00 p.m. (he’s in his room by around 7:30 p.m., but he doesn’t fall asleep until much, much later) and the baby is awake every few hours all night long. Mama needs a minute and Netflix is there.

Before we devolved into the Netflix Zone, we spent some quality time together reading. His favorite book this week is A Couch for Llama by Leah Gilbert. We read it a lot today, which I was really excited about because he has only been wanting to read Harry Potter lately and I’ve been missing picture books. I also managed to get a craft project underway with him—a snake made from toilet paper tubes. He only painted one of the tubes before saying that he was too tired to do the rest. By tired I think he meant bored. So I carved him a stamp out of a sweet potato and he used that to make diamond prints on the rest of the tubes. Maybe we’ll even finish the snake tomorrow.

Last week (at least I think it was last week, but the days and weeks and months have been blurring together lately, so who knows for sure), we did a cool art project with shaving cream and food coloring. It came out really nice, but I’m not sure I want to do the project again because the shaving cream smells soooo strong. I tried to find unscented shaving cream, but apparently that’s not really a thing. The pictures reeked so much afterwards that I sprinkled them with baking soda for a few days in a row to try to get the scent off of them (it helped but you can still smell it).

My son loves to build and I was wondering if I should look for some sort of a new building set for him when I suddenly remembered a rainy day activity that I used to have available in my classroom. So I bought a 100 pack of plastic cups (which in my head I still call “keg cups” despite having not had a beer from a keg in a plastic cup in well over a decade). The idea is to build something out of the cups and then knock them down. We’ve had a blast building castles and other structures, and then devising unique ways to destroy them. We’ve tried blowing, throwing paper airplanes, launching foam rockets, and rolling a ball, among other things. My favorite was one-on-one garage soccer with cup castles for goals.

On the writing front, I finally finished the back matter for two picture books that I’ve been working on and now my agent is getting ready to submit to editors. I’m really excited but also feeling more nervous than usual because everything in the publishing world has been grinding to a halt. Both stories are uplifting so hopefully that will inspire someone to want to acquire them in these challenging times.

I was idly Googling the name of one of my books a couple of weeks ago and discovered to my surprise that it was showing up on Goodreads, Amazon and other places that books are available for sale. I went from giddy to horrified in the time it took me to click onto one of the sites because I realized that my name was wrong (Serena Allen rather than Serena Gingold Allen) as well as the publication date. But my editor got it sorted out quickly, so I’m back to feeling giddy whenever I think about it. It’s like real, solid proof that my books are coming out next year. Since my books are now listed I was able to set up my Goodreads author account which helped me to feel even more legitimate.

Oh, and if you were wondering, I did finish writing this post in one day! I feel so accomplished.

What I’m reading: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie. I recently bought a bunch of Christie’s books because they were on sale for Kindle. I read through most of her works when I was a kid/teenager and it seemed like it would be fun to reread them now. I’m only a few chapters in and hoping to not be disappointed, because I’ve found that there are many things I liked as a kid that I do not like as much as an adult.

Quite the Hiatus

Alright, so admittedly, I don’t have the best track record when it comes to writing this blog, but this has been the longest break I’ve ever taken.

Here’s the quick catch-up for the past three years: I’ve got two kiddos now (my son is no longer a baby, he's four and a half, and I have a daughter who is seven months old), I’m still writing children’s books and my debut books are coming out next Fall (check out my website for more details https://serenagingoldallen.com/), I still read a ton (aloud to my kiddos and to myself on my Kindle in the middle of the night), and I will climb rocks again someday (it’s been over a year—first because I was pregnant and then now because, you guessed it…COVID-19).

Despite having less time to myself than I’ve ever had before, I decided I should start blogging again. Crazy, you say. There’s probably some crusted spit-up on the floor that needs cleaning or a load of laundry to fold, you continue. You probably shouldn’t overextend yourself anymore. Yes, yes, you’re correct. But I need something that’s just for me. All of my other writing is critiqued, edited, revised, sometimes changed beyond all belief. But this blog is mine. I can do whatever I want with it. And the worst that can happen is that no one will read it. So here’s what I’m going to do: refocus it, at least for the time being, on my life at home as a mom and a writer.

I spend a lot of time with both of my kiddos, but currently more with my son since my daughter is in the three-naps-a-day stage (on the good days). My son LOVES books of all kinds. I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series aloud to him and we’re now on the sixth one. We started the first one shortly after we locked down and he just can’t get enough of them. At first I was a little worried that he wasn’t following along, but whenever I asked him questions about what we’d read he definitely understood. After we finish each book, we watch the movie version of it together. On numerous occasions, he’s asked why something is different from the book or has been left out. It’s been really fun having these conversations with him because my husband is not a Harry Potter fan. My son still loves picture books and he has a renewed interest in board books, thanks to his sister (he also has a renewed interest in baby toys—is that normal?).

My sister-in-law and I are each planning one project a week to do with our “big” boys (my older nephew is three and a half and my younger one is five days older than my daughter). Having projects to look forward to each week is helping a little with the stay-at-home fatigue. The first project we did was to make playdough. Back when my son used to go to preschool (you know, way back in March when life was still normal), I was the mom who made the playdough each week. I had the boys help measure out the ingredients and stir them together. I did the cooking and kneading and then they got to choose the colors they wanted. Then they kneaded the dye into the dough (I put small balls of dough into plastic sandwich bags and they squished to their heart’s content—we did have to help them at the end to get the dye fully mixed into the dough). And then the boys played blissfully for at least five minutes without fighting.

  

I got really excited today because my daughter scooted over to her shelf of board books and started pulling them off and throwing them on the floor. I was like, “YES! Another reader in the house!” My son’s love affair with books started in the same way when he was her age. Every morning, I would set him down in the living room and he would immediately scoot to his shelf of books. He would then pull all of them off and chew on them. Hopefully my daughter doesn’t get in to the habit of consuming large enough portions of her books to get sick.

All right, I gotta stop procrastinating. Time to stop blogging and get a little work done. Until next time (which hopefully isn’t in another three years).

What I’m reading: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Written in the first person, it’s about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife and their life together. I bought this on a whim. Well, really because it was on sale for Kindle and had a lot of stars. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but so far it’s quite good—well written and captivating. It’s reminiscent of Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan and Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, which are also based on the lives of the partners of famous men.