Career Talk With the Boy in Our Family

Tonight, the kiddos discovered a new book from the "my-mommy-used-to-be-a-teacher-library" that is now in our home. It comes in quite handy at this homeschool! Anyway, the discovered and asked to read at bedtime, "Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse" by Leo Lionni. My son immediately noticed that the book had been a Caldecott Honor winner. He loves to look for gold and silver medals! And then announced that he had chosen his future career. "When I grow up, I'm going to be an illustrator like Tomie De-Poe-la!" He's always loved Tomie and even as a tiny boy has been drawn to and easily recognized his illustrations. We love the Strega Nona books, his illustrated Bible stories, and now my son is reading "26 Fairmount Avenue" which is the first in a series of memoirs that Tomie has written about his life. I just thought that was a sweet story about the connections he is making in his reading. And that he is realizing that writing and illustrating are careers. And that one day he'll be a grown up needing one (a career, that is!).

On the career note, we've recently been talking with the children about the fact that daddy will be needing a new job soon. And that might mean that we have to move. I asked the children if they would ever want to move back to London. "No!" both the big kids answered adamantly. Interesting! Anyway, my son had a new career path for Daddy and some good logic to go with it. His suggestion? Goodwill. Now, this made me ask why! He said, "Well, it's very close," which I suppose it is since daddy now works 30 minutes away, and the Goodwill is about 8 minutes from our house. And since we had been discussing London! I also began to think that all the decluttering that I've been doing lately had really impacted the way my son had been viewing life. From his perspective, we are always dropping something off at the Goodwill, so why shouldn't Daddy work there. During the week days we'd certainly get to see him more often! ;)