This book is about practical, every day things fathers can do to bond with their babies. Inspiring, helpful prose is paired with stunning photography by Christopher Briscoe (one reviewer calls the photos "artsy porn for new moms"). Many new dads have never held a baby before having their own child. It's no wonder men sometimes worry about how to interact a new baby, especially when that baby is a tiny bundle weighing under ten pounds! Still, men need to take the initiative & create their own ways of bonding with their children, right from the start. That's where this book helps new dads (moms enjoy it too), inspiring them to approach parenting head on. Topics include:
- newborn bonding
- carrying
- skin-to-skin contact
- going places
- napping
- playing
- exercising
- reading to baby
- diapering
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Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained
Many newborns emerge into the world with cone-shaped heads, half-closed eyes, & wrinkled skin. Some even have acne. As they grow, they start to make funny noises, they find specs of dust in the air so fascinating they will cross their eyes to follow them, they enjoy sucking on their own toes, they cough, splutter, spit up, & drool! This unique book explains key baby behaviors parents & other caregivers encounter in babies between 0 & 1 year old. The behaviors range from the truly bizarre ("Why do babies play with their own poop?") to the truly lovable ("Why do babies love to be cuddled?"). This witty & interesting book not only informs but also inspires the reader to play peek-a-boo, cuddle, bounce, & enjoy everything unique about babies. Why Babies Do That captures some of a baby's finest, albeit fleeting, moments.
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The first & only collection of first-person stories of its kind, Toddler is a heartwarming, sometimes shocking, book of real-life stories about parenting toddlers, complete with all the dirty diapers, shouting, cuddling, & wonder that comes with the life-long task of caring for children.
Toddler includes stories from well-known writers like Hope Edelman, Paul Kivel, Joyce Maynard, Louise Erdrich, Meredith Small, & Brett Paesel, as well as stories from emerging talents. In it is the first prose piece by New Yorker poet and co-founder of Poetry in Motion, Elise Paschen, & original pieces by internationally known young adult writers Gordon Korman & Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Unlike most parenting books, it also gives voice to fathers, both stay-at-home dads & working men.
These stories describe the joy a father feels when his daughter looks at him and exclaims "dada!" (& the disappointment that follows when she addresses her sippy cup by the same name), & the frustration a mother--who is also a doctor--feels when the potty-training advice she routinely gives to worried parents fails miserably with her own triplets.
Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger & The Mother Dance calls Toddler a "delightful, searingly honest, hilarious, sad & moving book that captures the whole rollercoaster of emotions that come with the territory of rearing a toddler."
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Though a virtually forgotten part of American history, there were hundreds of enslaved white Americans on the North African coast in the 18th & 19th centuries, seized by Barbary pirates. Encouraged by the British, who were embittered by their rout during the Revolutionary War, Barbary pirates capitalized on America’s growing shipping industry to prey on American vessels. They looted the ships, stripped the crewmen of their clothing, & remanded them into slavery.Susanna Rowson, known as America's first best-selling novelist & as a pioneer for women's education in America, started her career in America as an actress & playwright. Her novel of seduction, Charlotte Temple (first published in 1791, it went through dozens of subsequent editions), was immensely popular in early America. Believing the story of the seduced & abandoned Charlotte to be true, hundreds of young women visited what was purported to be her grave site every year. But Rowson's connection to the theater is much less well known. She is reported to have written 3 other plays that are no longer extant. To help support her family, Rowson made her appearance in dozens of early American plays on the stage of Philadelphia’s New Theatre & elsewhere. Like movies today, American plays drew hundreds of viewers. George Washington, among other notables, was often seen at the theater. Rowson acted in plays & wrote at least 4 plays of her own. Little is known of her other plays beyond their titles.Although Rowson's Charlotte Temple is taught in many surveys of early American literature, & appears in full in some anthologies, Slaves in Algiers has been largely forgotten. Yet the play is of seminal importance to our understanding of American literature. America's wars with Barbary, & the enslavement of white American seamen, inspired dozens of novels, plays, poems, short stories & narratives.
Now available in an easy-to-read, glossed, illustrated, & affordable classroom edition, Slaves in Algiers has become invaluable to students of American literature & readers interested in American history.Buy the book from Amazon.com.
The Maternal is Political:
Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood & Social Change
Edited by Shari MacDonald Strong (Seal Press, 2008)
Jennifer's story, "Life Under Construction," is about defying social conventions to be both be a stay-at-home parent and have an income generating "job."
From Publishers Weekly
In a raw and emotional literary anthology, 30 women express their frustrations about motherhood, their disappointment with unsupportive work environments and their deep desire for social change. In her debut effort as an anthology editor, Strong brings together voices of veteran and first-time writers in a cacophony of cries that mothering isn't just personal, it's political. The stories include Annie Downey, a struggling mother on welfare ; Jennifer Margulis and her husband who, unable to reconcile full-time work and parenting, quit office work and begin a home business; and Helaine Olen's horror stories of mean moms in playgroups who look down on stay-at-home mothers. Anne Lamott writes of the difficulty of espousing a pro-choice position before a largely Catholic audience. This book has a liberal bent, and happy, content mothers don't get much airtime. Young women considering motherhood may be taken aback by the rage and unchecked anger in some of the essays and the lack of solutions presented. But if shock spurs action, this anthology has done its job. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life
Edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant (Rutgers University Press, 2008)
Jennifer's story, "Recovering Academic," is about spending a year teaching 19th century American Literature in Niger, West Africa, on a Fulbright Fellowship, after having decided not to have a career in academia.
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How To Fit A Car Seat on a Camel and Other Misadventures of Traveling with Kids
Edited by Sarah Franklin (Seal Press, 2008)
Jennifer's story, "Captain Safety Out the Window," is about traveling by pirogue & camelback with three small children in Niger, West Africa.
Sixty Candles: Reflections on the Writing Life
(ASJA press, 2008)
Jennifer's essay, "'The' ... Give Me A Dollar!" is about realizing for the first time that writers could get paid $1/word.
It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters
Edited by Andrea J. Buchanan (Seal Press, 2006)
Jennifer's story, "Spilled Wine," is about how hard it was to have a second child, born just 19 months after the first.
It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons
Edited by Andrea J. Buchanan (Seal Press, 2005)
Jennifer's story, "My Three Sons," is a poignant revelation about the remorse experienced from having an abortion.
Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love
Edited by Jennifer Margulis (Seal Press, 2003)
Jennifer's story, "Why Does Your Son Have a Phallus on his Head?" is about her famous mother, Lynn Margulis.
Jennifer's story, "I Not Spill," is about the difficulty staying patient while eating dinner with a toddler & a 3-year-old.
Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia
Junius P. Rodriguez, editor. ABC-CLIO, 2007
“Free African Society”
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol 239:
American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870.
Edited by Amy E. Huddock and Katharine Rodier (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 2001)
“Lucretia Mott"
Chronology of World Slavery
Edited by Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999)
“Theories of Slavery” (4-5), “David Hume (1711-1776)” (w/ James di Properzio, 71-72), “Slavery in Southeast Asia” (97-98), “Arab World” (102-103), “Hausa Uprising” (180),”“Free Africa Society” (240), “Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF)" (382), “Iqbal Masih” (386).
The Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris, Trudier Harris-Lopez, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford UP, 1997)
“Jamaica Kincaid” (420-421), “Colleen J. McElroy” (488), “Aishah Rahman” (618), “Herbert A. Simmons” (666)