Learning Without Screens

The puddle was approximately the size of a welcome mat and located directly at the end of our front path, where the concrete dips slightly and the rainwater likes to collect. Mara found it before I had fully registered that we were outside. One second she was beside me, hand in mine, and then she … Read more

The book is called Where Is Baby’s Belly Button? and by eleven o’clock this morning I had read it aloud eight times. It is a lift-the-flap board book, twenty-two pages, and several of the flaps have been lifted so many thousands of times that they no longer lie flat — they curl up at the … Read more

The sound started at 9:14 in the morning, which I know because I had just looked at the clock above the stove and thought, with some desperation, that there were still four and a half hours until her nap. Then she found the cupboard. It’s the low one to the left of the sink, the … Read more

The log was not large. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. By any adult measure, it was a modest piece of firewood — a round of birch maybe eight inches long, split once, the pale wood still holding a little of the cold from the porch where we stack them. But Wren spotted … Read more