In October of 2007, I had the true pleasure of attending a Q&A with Maurice Sendak at Scholastic.  I had written about that experience then, and am reposting/updating today in honor of his incredible life, career, and contribution to the world of literature. Note that the various links to Sendak throughout this post will take you to websites and articles about him throughout the web-o-sphere.

On Tuesday afternoon, Maurice Sendak visited Scholastic as part of its Design Forum series. The auditorium was full of eager art and design and word people (aka editors and writer), including me.

“Are you ready to jump right in?” asked David Saylor, VP and Creative Director of Scholastic Trade Books.

Maurice Sendak (with whom I am proud to share a birthday!) leaned forward in his arm chair. “Jump,” he said in a a matter-of-fact yet mischievous tone. “I want to jump!”

That was the beginning of a thrilling, funny, inspiring Q&A with the much-loved children’s book illustrator and writer, author of Where the Wild Things Are and many, many more picture books, including his most recent, the fabulous pop-up book Mommy (of whose cover he joked, “Clearly the mummy is me, the falling apart old man who is hugging the world, you. Now that we know who’s who, we can get started!)”

Sendak, who lived till the age of 83 and made his home in Connecticut, was casual and unassuming, wearing a sweatshirt, cotton pants, and Nike sneakers. He has an impeccable sense of timing in his storytelling and a meandering narrative style that I absolutely fell in love with. No matter where his answers took him, he always came back to the point–and what points he made!

During the 90 minute talk, Sendak talked about his early career in children’s book publishing. He started out at Harper Collins doing “sweet books” that were not truly his passion. He was fortunate enough to have an editor Ursula Nordstrom who fed him various book projects though while supporting and mentoring him to start doing the books he wanted to do.

When he began working on Where the Wild Things Are, the book that is synonymous with his name, he never thought of it as his masterpiece. “I just thought that it was my next book,” he said during his talk. “Plus, it was my way of getting back at all my old Jewish relatives–especially Uncle Joe–who used to visit us on Sundays in Brooklyn. One day they would look a lot like this! It was my way of getting even at them for their pinching and poking and their irrational physical treatment of kids.”

I told you he was funny! But, he’s also so unafraid to talk about the irrational and real fears that accost us as children (and let’s be honest about it, as adults too.) Actually, he told us about how the Lindbergh Kidnapping left him feeling real afraid. He thought that since he was a kid, he would also get kidnapped. During this time, he asked his father to sleep at the foot of his bed with a stick, just in case someone came to get him at night. One day, his Uncle Joe said to his father, “But why would anyone want to kidnap this kid?” Sendak paused as he told this story, then looked at the audience and said, “The ugliest character in Where the Wild Things Are - that’s my Uncle Joe! I hated him from that moment until the day that he died.”

Through all his answers, Sendak repeatedly came back to the theme of childhood. To him, this is a state of mind that should never be lost. I don’t think he tries to imagine what a child thinks or feels when he writes his books. He has held those feelings inside of himself.

“To my books I brought some of the bitterness of childhood, some of the awfulness of childhood, some of the stupidity of parents–and that’s how I made my career!,” he said.

And, that’s what makes his work so authentic, isn’t it? My friend Cari called him the “Kurt Vonnegut of children’s literature” – a title I love because yes, he is skeptical, cynical, and ironic and still, hopeful and … a dreamer.

After Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak’s success gave him more or less a green light to go in directions heretofore uncharted in the world of children’s book publishing. That doesn’t mean his work wasn’t without controversy. His books In the Night Kitchen and Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present were both challenged as being “too sexual.”

Sendak has never been one to be pushed into a corner by conservative reviewers, educators, or librarians. “That the naked rabbit leading the little girl down a forest path was deemed too sexual was infuriating. It was infuriating that the children’s publishing world reviewers would read such unwholesomeness into such an innocent book. I wasn’t going to write books for people who buy books – grandmas and librarians. Kiddos don’t buy books. But, those are the kids I write for– kids who are moved, touched, angry, really angry sometimes.”

“Children’s books often have had this thing that they’re only for kids, which underrates them,” he said. And, that’s the thing about him that really blew me away. He completely throws out the notion that children’s books should be about perfect little worlds. The world is not that, and depicting it in this way would be lying, something one gets the impression that Maurice Sendak is incapable of doing. If it’s the truth, he has to say it. That was so refreshing, in this world of tiptoeing conversations that we all live in.

Sendak also talked about the major influences on his art: number one, Randolph Caldecott and number two, Beatrix Potter.

About Caldecott, he said, “He gave you the rhyme and he slid a story under the verse. That was brilliant.”

About Beatrix Potter, he said, “There is a cruelty to her, which is marvelous. She and her brother spent hours boiling and then dissecting animals (including cats) to see what their bones looked like so that she could draw them. There’s nothing sentimental about her work, which is what’s wonderful about her. Yet her books show how deeply touched she was by the fate of her characters.”

Yeah, so, obviously I could go on and on, trying to recount the anecdotes Sendak told about letters from his readers; about what makes him afraid (“everything”); about a recent interaction with a publisher who wanted to reprint an excerpt from WTWTA but who gave him a day to review the proofs (shame shame); about the state of publishing (it’s not what it used to be,” he says). But, I don’t think I have the time to do that, and so I will end with a few quotes that stayed with me (Mr. Sendak is a very quotable man):

On required reading in high school:

My English teacher asked us to read Hamlet and I told her that I wouldn’t do it. I detested school. She said, Why don’t you do what you like? Why don’t you draw pictures?” And, of course, I had to read it!

On his relationship with books:

When I was a child, I loved to read, but I also licked my books. A book should be edible. You want to lie with it. It’s a precious, precious thing. Do you smell paper when you’re reading? Sometimes I have to crush my book on my face. There, I’ve aid enough about the foreplay of reading. Really, sex looms everywhere in paper, in glue, occasionally in people!

I tried to record the talk, but my microphone was not powerful enough. So, the next best thing I can do is suggest you listen to some audio interviews with Mr. Sendak. That’ll give you a true sense of how exhilarating it was to be in the Scholastic auditorium listening to him talk that day.

• NPR interview on his favorite things with Jennifer Ludden.
• NPR interview with Steven Inskeep (Why Maurice Sendak Puts Kids in Danger)
• Bill Moyers PBS interview (video, part of PBS NOW with Bill Moyers, Art and Culture)
• Video Lecture at MIT where Sendak provides a retrospective on his early career as an artist (Descent into Limbo)

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading picture books lately and when I’m not doing that, I am either reading the New Yorker, academic journals, or slowly catching up on trade fiction must-reads that I’ve missed out on over the past couple of years. This is what happens when you have a toddler in the house and run an editorial business!

But, when I got my hands on Keshni Keshyap’s Tina’s Mouth, I made sure to put everything down so that I could read a graphic novel whose publication I’ve been awaiting since 2008 (when I first got wind of its development). Cleverly and sweetly illustrated by the Japan-born Mari Araki, the book was well worth the wait and is a welcome addition to the library of fusion stories — contemporary novels by Asian Americans aren’t traditional tales set in Asia nor stories about coming to America for the first time.

The jacket flap aptly compares Tina’s Mouth to two of my favorite graphic novels, both of which deftly and humorously weave together themes of coming-of-age and identity with portraits of family and cultural life.

In the tradition of Persepolis and American Born Chinese, a wry and endearing high school heroine comes of age. Tina M., sophomore, is a wry observer of the cliques and mores of Yarborough Acad­emy, and of the foibles of her Southern California intellectual Indian family. She’s on a first-name basis with Jean-Paul Sartre, the result of an English honors class assign­ment to keep an “existential diary.”

Like American Born Chinese, the protagonist of Tina’s Mouth encounters awkward social situations in her school environment that are all-too-familiar to children of immigrant parents (i.e. reader like myself). As Keshni Keshyap explains,

Tina is from a very specific world – a tight-knit ethnic community and family and also a very particular sort of school environment.  So yes, the book is inspired by the environment I grew up in.  Tina is an outsider in both these worlds, just like I always felt I was.  This ‘outsiderness’ may explain why I’ve been drawn to questions that are internal in nature.  I think the same goes for Mari – and you can see that in her paintings.  How do you live an authentic life?  How do you figure out who you are in a complicated, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society?  I was a pretty shy and anxious teenager and I spent a lot of time alone – eating lunch alone, etc., not unlike Tina.  I think that’s why existentialism appealed to me.  It encourages you to find an anchor within yourself.

And, like Persepolis (the two books boast the same editor, Anjali Singh!), Tina’s Mouth offers idiosyncratic and an almost film-life portrait of South Asian family and cultural life –ones that I, as a reader of South Asian background, particularly appreciated because they felt like an organic part of the novel, not a political statement or specific exploration of Tina’s cultural heritage. The author, a film-maker herself, “wasn’t interested in writing an Indian ‘longing for the homeland’ sort of story, the kind that we see in a lot of Indian diasporic writing. She “just wanted to write Tina’s story, really, and be very true to who [she] felt [Tina] was and that shines through beautifully in the book. As Keshyap (who herself is a filmmaker) explains,

“I didn’t think [Tina] was directly interested in her cultural heritage.  Not at fifteen at least.  She was more interested in boys and friends. She was interested in her identity only by default.   To that point, I think we’re in a transition period in America where demographics and power are shifting.  The America I grew up in was less familiar with weird names and different races. So, there was an early nineties identity-claiming that people of color in America who are now in their thirties and forties went through.  Tina’s a different generation. They think about race slightly differently.  I talked to teenagers while I was writing this book, particularly non-white girls who went to expensive schools.  It was interesting…they are a little different, and yet kind of the same.

Below the fold are some sample pages from the book as well as a brief Q&A with Keshni Keshyap, which focuses specifically on the desi (South Asian) perspective that the author brought to the writing process.

Literary Safari: Your book was clearly influenced by Persepolis which tells a story about coming of age at a specific political moment but is interlaced with themes of culture. When you read that book, did you think, “there has to be a desi version of this?”

Keshni Keshyap: No. I never thought that there had to be a ‘desi’ version of the Persepolis story. I’m sure there must be, but that is not what I set out to write. I was inspired by Perseoplis as a form. I hadn’t been exposed to literary comic books and, having directed a handful of short film, I found them intriguing as a way of visual storytelling. I wanted to use the form to tell a story and I wanted to write about the world I knew – being an Indian-American teenager growing up in L.A. From the beginning, Tina’s Mouth was never meant to have overt political elements.

LS: Growing up, what was your experience of desi literature and how has that experience influenced your own writing?

KK: My mom always read a lot of ‘desi’ literature such as Rushdie, Roy, Manto, Tagore, Naipaul so I was exposed to it growing up. I always loved reading and I’ve always written. So maybe on a subconscious level there was a message…Certainly, while I was of college age, India went through a sort of literary boom where the West suddenly took note and gave generous book contracts, awards etc., the sort of boom that maybe Africa is going through now. That increased my exposure too. That said, I also watched a lot of MTV growing up. I think what I do now is influenced by such a pastiche of things!

LS: Who was your audience when writing this book? Your 15 year old self? Today’s 15 year old South Asian/second gen immigrant girls who might be encountering similar angst? Or something much broader?

KK: It’s a personal story, so in a way – yes, I was writing for my fifteen year old self but also my 30-something year old self. I always wanted it to work on a few levels.

LS: The book is about a young girl finding herself, but also her own sexuality, a theme that has not been explored much in YA literature about South Asians. As I was reading, I was reminded of Rakesh Satyal’s BLUE BOY. How do you think male and female coming of age is different and the same in our community and as expressed in literature?

KK: ‘Coming-of-age’ really depends on what circumstances you grow up under. Yes, boys and girls grow up with different pressures and needs. So do gay people and straight people. A lot has been made of ‘coming-of-age’ as a genre, but my feeling, really, is that ‘coming-of-age’ stories are simply about people who experience personal growth. That can happen sexually, spiritually, emotionally and physically. And it can happen at any age.

LS: I read that Amar Chitra Katha comics, the ubiquitous mythological comic books of India, were a constant element of your reading childhood. Can you talk about the influence of that, perhaps, on this, your first book?

KK: Well, I read ACK’s like gangbusters when I was a kid. I think it certainly affected my ideas of beauty growing up in a pre-9-11/pre-Obama America. I certainly think that ACK’s are extremely effective, immersive storytelling. They really work. So, maybe they played a part in my interest in film and comics and creating thoroughly immersive worlds. What happens, I think, when you grow up in a multicultural society like I did where there are a lot of different influences, you don’t know exactly how and what has affected you in what way (was it MTV, ACK’s, John Hughes or Rabrindranath Tagore??) Perhaps a combination of everything….

For a more detailed Q&A with Keshni Keshyap and Mari Araki, click here and for a preview of the book, click here.

It’s sometimes a challenge to explain to people what I do for a living as an editor and writer in this day and age. At the Literary Safari offices where we specialize in interactive editorial services, a lot of our daily labor certainly falls under the banner of content development and creation. We help clients articulate and frame a broad product concept in specific narrative terms. We conceptualize product ideas with twin audiences of young people and the educational community. We sculpt innovative and interactive approaches to learning that are aligned with existing curriculum goals (aka standards). Alongside all of this, there’s a gamut of editing and writing that gets done – from creative writing and character development to lesson plans. And, of course, no project is complete without the right level of project management. These were all the different kinds of roles we recently played in the development of HD Lab, a new online game based on the popular PBS series History Detectives.

And, yet, in articulating all of this, I always feel like I’m not fully describing what seems to be becoming a bigger role for myself and my colleagues; more and more, we are being tasked to identify and draw upon multiple methodologies, disciplines, mediums (or media), and resources as inspiration and guides, then yoke them together to craft a new type of user experience. The world is changing and so is our role–and I feel like I’m on a constant search of the right words to describe what we do and can offer.

So, when I came across the video, “What is Curation?”  in a recent Brainpickings newsletter, it lent me some of the language that I’ve been in search of. Produced by the Brooklyn-based m ss ng p eces, it vividly explains the shifts we are seeing in the world of content creation.

curation (n.): a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why

The shift in thinking in the video echoes  what the 18th century philosopher David Hume described in A Treatise on Human Nature as the essence of invention — the act of recombination, of compounding an idea or transposing it from one field to another [hat tip, Michiko Kukutani]:

Nor will this liberty of the fancy [imagination] appear strange, when we consider, that all our ideas are copy’d from our impressions, and that there are not any two impressions which are perfectly inseparable. Not to mention, that this is an evident consequence of the division of ideas into simple and complex. Where-ever the imagination perceives a difference among ideas, it can easily produce a separation [and a recombination].

More and more, in order to be effective content creators and developers, we must also play the role of curators.

HD Lab

In a recent post at the blog of Channel 13’s upcoming Celebration of Teaching and Learning, Using Video Gaming Technology to Teach US History , Christopher Czajka, Senior Director of the LAB @ Thirteen, highlighted the positive benefits of digital history games such as Mission U.S. to harness student learning:

These benefits include greater gains in subject knowledge and critical thinking skills, positive teacher reactions, and more classroom emphasis on analytical work rather than textbook activities.

Indeed, since 2005, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has awarded $20 million in grants to forge partnerships between public television producers , the educational community, curriculum developers, and the high tech industry to create integrated interactive multimedia platforms that measurably improve the learning of American history and civics by middle and high school students. One product of this American History and Civics Initiative, is History Detectives Laboratory (HD Lab), an online learning game for middle school students based on the popular series History Detectives, which launched last month and will be unveiled in a featured speaker panel, Teaching Students to Become History Detectives, that I will be a part of at Channel 13′s Celebration of Teaching and Learning this Friday.

The producers of History Detectives had long heard from teachers that the PBS TV show ‘made history fun’ by combining education and entertainment. With this in mind, producers Lion TV and its key partners Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, the gaming company Playmatics, and Literary Safari’s narrative design and editorial team challenged ourselves to create a direct learning experience for students that harnessed young people’s passion for gaming to help teach them how to be ‘history detectives’.

HD Lab features two game-based investigations—The Case of the Hooked Hawaiian Knife and The Case of the Curious Clock—where students assume the role of ‘detective,’ to investigate mysteries surrounding historical artifacts. The games serve as teaching models for the Open Investigation, a virtual detective notebook that offers middle schoolers the tools to engage in their own history research projects, hereby allowing them to become empowered to understand their own communities as historically-manufactured and subject to investigation and understanding.

So, what kind of experience does an online history game like HD Lab offer? The chance to visit rich virtual landscapes of the past and to encounter unique objects that shed light on key historical moments—in this case, the new industrial age, a period between 1870 and 1916 when more than 25 million immigrants entered the United States and its colonial territories. While interviewing experts and hunting through archives for missing clues, players score points, interface with rich primary sources, and acquire valuable historical thinking skills. Along the way, they can’t help but build their content-area knowledge about their nation’s history. And, that, as history and social studies teachers know, is a win-win solution for an educational system where tests show that students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject.

It’s a New Year and new beginnings are on the horizon. When you have so many choices to make, it can be overwhelming. I came across this quote from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles in this week’s Brain Pickings newsletter and it really spoke to me.

Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”

This feels like a sound page of gospel for whatever resistance comes my way this year.

Are kids too young to learn about money? Sesame Street doesn’t think so, as elaborated in this article from today’s New York Times by Ron Leiber which highlights PNC Bank and Sesame Workshop’s new collaboration For Me, For You, For Later: First Steps to Saving, Spending, and Sharing.

In the wake of the financial crisis, however, and the realization that individuals share at least some blame for the bubbles, a number of people and organizations have taken up the cause of helping the next generation of grown-ups form better habits at an earlier age. … This week, Sesame entered the fray, too, with a series of videos and other material aimed at teaching its audience about spending, saving and sharing. …

I had the opportunity to develop and write the Educators Guide for this financial literacy kit and am excited to see all of this in its final form–and the attention it is receiving in the media. As a parent, I’m also looking forward to implementing the ideas and lessons put forth here.

I’ll leave you with a video interview with Elmo from the above-referenced Times piece.

Although super quiet here online, it’s been a busy shop in real life,  with lots of good stuff cooking in my editorial kitchen. I’m working on an exciting, groundbreaking video game for middle schoolers, based on a popular PBS show. And, I’ve been reading lots of good books over the past few weeks, as part of my judging responsibilities for the 2010 Cybil Awards which are given each year by bloggers for the year’s best children’s and young adult titles.

Front and center on my bookshelf have been the Middle Grade Nonfiction Finalists, including The Dark Game: True Spy Stories by Paul Janeczko, The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe by Loree Griffin Burns, Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World’s Strangest Parrot by Sy Montgomery, The Secret of the Yellow Death: A True Story of Medical Sleuthing by Suzanne Jurmain, Spilling Ink: A Young Writer’s Handbook by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter, Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania by Haya Leah Molnar, and An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank by Elaine Marie Alphin.

The holidays are just around the corner, and with that, the oh-my-goodness of airplane travel. Now that I’m a mom, that craziness seems compounded with the thought of taking infants and toddlers along. With this in mind, I’m happy to share a few Sanity Travel Tips, as part of a meme sponsored by my fellow blogger buddy Momsicle.

Not too long after my now-14 month old daughter was born, my hubster and I started talking about THE TRIP. By this, we meant the 18+ hour journey that we were going to take to India so that little A. could meet her grandparents and both her great grandmothers. The very thought of THE TRIP freaked me out and talking to our pediatrician – herself of Indian origin – didn’t help matters much. “You should just wait till she’s a year old. You really don’t want her to end up in the hospital.” Such was the nature of her advice, all based on her personal experience.

The thing is that even though I asked for her advice, I knew that this was a trip we had to take. I figured it would be a bit easier if we went while I was still nursing (less of a chance of dysentery, diarrhea, and any water or food related issues). The only catch was that I wouldn’t get to eat my beloved street food. I chalked that up to another maternal sacrifice and set about doing lots and lots of Google searches about airplane travel to India with a newborn, an infant, a toddler. And I talked to folks who had done it successfully—there’s nothing like hearing a story of survival to give you the courage you need to venture out on a journey like this.

The trip, when we finally took it soon after A. turned four months, was not bad at all; in fact, lots of fun! And, the airplane travel was not the most difficult challenge we faced; it was losing one wheel of her stroller while we were in India!

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that in the past 11 months, we have clocked about 65 hours of travel with little A., including a non-stop flight India trip and a summer holiday to Norway.

7,087 miles NY-Mumbai

Read on for my top ten travel tips for international travel. And, for more in this vein, choose your own adventure. Check out:

• Kim at Let Me Start By Saying who believes that with the right packing list, a little compromise and some red wine, you can successfully travel with 2 kids.
• Cyndi at My Convertible Life who will try anything to get her toddler to sleep when they’re away from home.
• Sue at Motherhood and Me who won’t let a little poop in-flight get in the way of traveling all over the country to see her family!
• Momsicle who having embraced the red-eye and mood-altering substances shares lessons from toddler airplane survival.

Top Ten Tips for International Travel

Tip # 1: Take a test trip. We flew to St. Maarten via Jet Blue (a three hour flight) about a month before our India trip. Though I originally thought this was a trial experience for Baby A., what it ended up being was a trial experiment for myself and hubster. How would we, as a couple, handle the stress? The packing? The airport security lines? The diaper changes? You get the point. If a three-hour flight IS in fact your dreaded journey, I highly recommend simulating the experience with a weekend road trip to visit a family member or friend. At least you’ll have a sense of what it means to pack, sleep elsewhere, do lots of diaper changes in uncomfortable situations, and eat on the go. To simulate feeding your 8 month old lunch on your lap in the middle of turbulence, you could probably just try it out during a few bumpy cab rides in NYC.

Tip # 2: Really hang out with your baby. If your baby is younger than five or six months) use a sling on the flight – sleeping on Mama and Papa’s lap grows old pretty fast and the bassinette is just not very comfortable. Baby A. slept in the sling most of the way to India (with breaks for her normal awake-times) and on the way to Norway (when she was a bit older), the Baby Bjorn was a godsend.

Baby in Bassinet. Warning: This will not last for long.

Much better.

Tip # 3: Keep airplane chachkies to a minimum. It doesn’t matter how old your baby is. Less is truly more. On our most recent trip, we carried a backpack diaper bag that held the bare essentials—diapers, wipes, bottles, and a couple of little board books (the ones that are the size of your palm are the best). Also essential was a blankie. And, a bonus was one of those little plastic photo albums that I filled with pictures of family members (I tucked extra pictures behind each one so that we would be able to switch things around on the flight home; a handy, space-saving trick!) Beyond that, everything you need to keep your baby interested will probably be around you—like the people sitting behind you (who hopefully have kids too), the airline staff (who hopefully will swing by every hour or so to twitch their moustaches, make funny clicking noises from deep down in their throat, or coo at your little one), and the in-flight Duty Free catalog and magazine (an excellent resource for teaching little hands how to turn pages and point to interesting objects; maybe if you’re lucky, there will be a few ducks, birds, and dogs here).

"Hello everybody!" Baby A's favorite position on the airplane, at the airport, in restaurants ...

Tip # 4: Don’t worry too much about take offs and landings. Baby A. never liked the pacifier and doesn’t suck her thumb, so I was real worried about what we would do at these times. My hubster convinced me that all we needed to do was distract her and play with her and all would be OK. When you’re taking off at a time when your baby just isn’t interested in a bottle or nursing, you have no choice but to take your husband’s advice. And in this case, it absolutely worked. Baby A. was so happy to be sitting on her mama and papa’s laps and checking out everyone around her that she didn’t even notice the change in cabin pressure. (OK, maybe we were just lucky but my takeaway was this: When all else fails, don’t discount the value of distraction. Come prepared to make lots of funny sounds like long aaaa’s and tongue clicking. Be inventive and ready to entertain. You never know what will work. And, most of all, take a chill pill. If you’re chill, chances are high baby will chill out too. The reverse is also very true.)

Tip # 5: Airplane changing tables are a nightmare. Put on a super-absorbent diaper on your little one and unless there are bigger matters that require a new diaper, keep diaper changes to a minimum. My rule of thumb: every four hours, unless it was night-time in my home destination, in which case, I let things be for the duration of the night (which for us was about 8-9 hours). It sounds icky but trust me—your baby will thank you. Of course, if you have a bassinet, it’s main purpose will be to serve as a convenient changing table!)

Tip # 6: You just don’t need as many clothes as you think you do. When we went on our first trip to St. Maarten, I took so much stuff that she could have changed three times a day and I would have still had clothes left over! I forgot about laundry and I forgot that things like sweaters and jackets, just like with us adults, can be mixed and matched and recycled. So, unless you have a colicky baby who is always spitting up his or her milk on your hands, chances are some days you don’t even have to change your baby more than twice (including PJs). Plus, baby clothes in other places are so cute – why not leave lots of room to buy some? Oh, and take along those Purex 3-in-1 Laundry  sheets. They smell great, take up no space, and make laundry a breeze.

Learning the rules of packing.

Tip # 7: Take fewer diapers than you think you need. You can always buy more, even in India, where the same brands are available. I read all this talk about how diapers in India were not as leak-proof. Bullocks. They work just fine and your baby is probably less likely to get a diaper rash, given recent oopsies on the part of companies such as Pampers. Oh, and take out all the diapers from the packaging and line them at the bottom of the suitcase, then layer them between clothes. This yields a flat suitcase, instead of one that you have to sit on top of to zip up.

Tip # 8: Contrary to popular opinion, don’t drag along half of your toy chest. Pack everything you want to take about a week before the trip, then go through the toys and books every few days thereafter and weed out as much as you can. When traveling, children are fascinated by EVERYTHING that they see, so that book which they normally love to read 20 times or that rattle they can’t live without? It loses value pretty quickly and ends up being just another thing to carry. The best toy we took on our 4 month trip and our 8 month trip was the Whoozit (it still goes everywhere with us). It’s compact, multi-functional, and rattly and snuggly at the same time.

Loving Whoozit all the way over in India.

Tip # 9: Get with the time. I followed our pediatrician’s advice on how to deal with jetlag to the T and it worked great. When you get to your destination, immediately switch your baby over to local time. If she’s exhausted and needs to nap at an odd time, let her sleep, but not for too long (max 40 minutes). When we got to India, all A. wanted to do was sleep in the afternoon. So did I. We entertained her, sang, talked, laughed and by the time night came, she was so tired that she slept through (for the most part) and she was cool with India time within 3 days. Coming back home was a bit more challenging, but I invited a friend over the night we got back and she entertained Baby A. since we had no energy left. The only tough thing about this is that you’re really tired and want to sleep, but it’s so worth it to just deal for a day or two. It really does make the rest of your trip so much better.

Tip # 10: It’s a bit pricey but invest in a good travel bed. I cannot say enough good things about our Baby Bjorn travel crib. Baby A. knows and loves it and even if she’s in a loft space in a log cabin in the Norwegian Fjords and we put her in it, she’ll go to sleep as long as her blanket and Whoozit are there with her. It’s easy to fold, lightweight, and has given hubster and me twelve-hour nights of sleep in new destinations. Now,that’s what I call priceless.

Cabin Fever is not always a bad thing, especially if it means baby, mama, and papa all get 12 hours of sleep.

PS: Take along a small 4 oz. lavender essential oil. I always dab a drop or two on A’s feet and nostrils (not too much or else it’s over-stimulating) on the flight and the relaxing scent calms hubster and me down and seems to do something good for the nervous and somewhat disgruntled (oh why, oh why me? why am I seated next to a baby?) passengers around us. They whiff in appreciation. If you’re like me and don’t close the cap too tightly, it will also make the icky smell of airplane food go away.

PPS: Courage and a sense of humor. Don’t leave home without them.

Back in the days when I edited Writing for Teens (may it RIP) magazine, we featured a regular column called “Grammar Slammer” which was written by my fabulous editor Debbie Nevins.

grammar slammer

This one’s for you, Deb.

I just discovered a clever column in Slate’s blog Browbeat that I will regularly be following. Copy-Editing the Culture features grammar clunkers in the cultural limelight.

I was especially amused by The Rise and Fall of Woody Allen, as Experienced Through Punctuation
of his movie titles:

After the apprentice effort What’s New Pussycat? (missing, like the song it references, a direct-address comma), Allen redeemed himself and reached some measure of creative maturity with What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, a charming and, more to the point, brilliantly punctuated feature. From there, he was borne forward on a wave of good comma-ic energy. The year 1972 brought another direct-address victory in Play It Again, Sam, shortly followed by the creatively but rigorously punctuated Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex*/ *But Were Afraid To Ask. From there, the triumphs of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, all beautifully and necessarily unpunctuated, seemed inevitable.

I love this stuff. Makes me feel a bit better when I walk down the street and want to copy-edit food cart signs.

I was just reading “The Next Incarnation,” a recent profile of the Dalai Lama in The New Yorker, and this conversation between author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and His Holiness gave me pause.

One day in the late seventies, [the Dalai Lama] asked for a meeting with Elie Wiesel. According to Wiesel, the Dalai Lama said, “I’m familiar with your work, what you wrote about the Jewish people losing a homeland two thousand years ago and how you’re still here. Mine has just lost its homeland, and I know it’s going to be a very long road into exile. How did you survive?”

Wiesel replied, “When we left Jerusalem, we didn’t take all our jewels with us. All we took was a little book. It was the book that kept us alive. Second, because of our exile, we developed a sense of solidarity. When Jews left one place for the next, there were always Jews to welcome and take care of them. And, third, good memory. Survival takes a good memory.”

Reminds me of my grandparents and great-grandparents who were exiled from Sindh during partition and also just took three things with them — their religious texts and prayers (mostly from the Guru Granth Sahib), their diasporic connections, and their memories of the good things that were.

Words, community, and remembrance. Come to think of it, they are simple things we can all carry with us.