Motherhood and TL PD thanks to Mary

Mary @ her 12th birthday party.

Today is my daughter's 12th birthday. On this day in 2000 at 4:03 p.m., after 16 hours of labor, I became a mother - and the real work began. I debated about devoting today's blog post to Mary but then I remembered that, long ago, I wrote a magazine article about how parenthood impacted my abilities as a teacher-librarian. I searched online and found the article here. It's an old piece from 2005; my son was only 2 when I originally wrote it. I thought it'd be interesting to reflect on what I wrote back then and compare it to my reality today, with a 12 year old daughter and 9 year old son.

My daughter still loves reading more than my son. The great thing is that even though she's an extremely capable reader, I still read to her every night. The books are different. We just finished reading The Hunger Games and started Catching Fire on Saturday. I love being able to talk with her about the novels. We started reading just one chapter a night but she loves the Suzanne Collins series so much, I now read two chapters aloud. After chapter 4, she declared, "The more I hear about Panem, the more I despise their form of government." My son likes reading more than he lets on, but he prefers graphic novels to prose fiction. For his most recent Sunday night reading material, Mary and I jointly read the 4th volume of the Colleen A.F. Venable Guinea P.I. series, Fish You Were Here.

I still test out books and activities on my children before trying them at school. My latest experiment has been playing Minecraft with them. You'll be able to read more about the results here on this blog in the near future and on my other blog, Family Gaming XP. If my kids like it, chances are good that it will succeed with my students. 

I have changed and matured (thank goodness) since I wrote that article. I think I'm less "snobby" about "fluff reading" than I was back then. Now, I buy Dora the Explorer and Lego Ninjago paperback picture books for my school library because I know that my young students enjoy them, and reading for pleasure, as you heard on this blog a few weeks ago, is a crucial thing for school libraries to develop.

My children still continue to make me a better teacher and teacher-librarian. For that and so many other things, I'm grateful. Happy birthday to the best daughter in the world.