5 Things I Loved About Last Week #celebratelu 7/12/14

Ruth Ayres hosts a weekly celebration on her blog. I appreciate this invitation to find positives at the end of the week.

It was a fairly brutal parenting week, but I expected that after the good week last week. For every step forward in attachment, there are several very messy steps backwards. Still, there were plenty of good things about the week:

1. Good books. My saintly mother took pity on my Top Ten Books on My Summer TBR List and bought the books I hadn’t yet purchased (because unlike my friend Carrie, who creates lists to AVOID purchasing books, I apparently create them in order to purchase, because not ten seconds after I’d published that blog post, I had ordered four books on the list. So much for any kind of self-restraint when it comes to book buying.) I haven’t found a lot of time to read this week, but I have been reading wonderful books.

2. Daily blogging. Every week, I set the intention to publish a blog post every day, but most every week, I fall short. This week, I did it! And my post yesterday, Raising a Less Reluctant Reader: 13 Suggestions for Parents, is already my number-two viewed post of all time! That post took FOREVER to write. I actually tracked the amount of time I spent on it. 7.5 hours. It went through three entirely different drafts before I found the right style, structure, and content, and I even edited it AFTER I published it (deleting a small rant about the reading interventions my son has received at school. I still feel ranty about that, but decided a post of suggestions for parents wasn’t the place for it).

3. #cyberPD. I enjoyed connecting with more teachers this week as #cyberPD kicked off with a discussion of the first two chapters of Donalyn Miller’s brilliant book, Reading in the Wild. I’ve discovered some new blogs that I’m excited to read and found some new teachers to learn from on Twitter. My contribution focused on the ways that I tried to restructure my college-level Children’s Lit course.  I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion next week.

4. Unexpected writing time. I wasn’t entirely sad when a friend had to cancel our coffee date because it gave me two hours of unexpected writing time at my favorite coffee shop. It was quiet and cool, and the coffee was superb.

5. 80s movies. We’ve been watching 80s movies with our older son, and it’s delightful. Some are as good as I remembered (Big), some are better than I remembered (A League of One’s Own), some are just plain terrible (Crocodile Dundee), and some are terrible but still kind of awesome (Gremlins). Next up, we’re planning to tackle the movies we haven’t seen on EW’s 55 Movies Every Kid Should See list.