Child(ish) Reads: The School for Good Mothers

Surprise! This is the first time Child(ish) Reads has reviewed a fiction title. So, a couple rule changes:

  1. I’m not going to spoil the ending.
  2. There will be no actual “advice”.
  3. Judgement-free zone here. Let’s call it a mix between a book review and coffee chat.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Blurb: Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

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Child(ish) Reads: Podcast Playlist

Lots of podcast action in rotation this winter. With many hosts on break for the holidays, I got to go through a backlog of episodes and found a couple new parenting podcasters to follow.

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Things We Loved: March

It’s been a moment since we’ve done one of these. March is always a tricky time for us. For Mary, it’s planning and prepping for two family birthdays. For me, it’s work travel and ramping up activities now that the Georgia weather isn’t miserable. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that we are very much looking forward to a little Spring Break.

Here are some things that we are loving this month.

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Child(ish) Reads: The Most Important Year

It’s kinda serendipitous that I picked this book this month. The Georgia PreK Lottery opens today!

In Fulton County, Georgia, incoming 4-year-olds looking for free, public PreK enter a lottery on March 1st. You apply for the public elementary school that you are zoned in, and each school has a limited number of PreK slots. If you don’t get selected, you can be waitlisted for other schools if space allows.

I have absolutely no frame of reference for the odds of getting selected. When we moved last year, I was satisfied with the elementary school we were zoned for, looking at the GreatSchools scores and stats. From reading The Family Firm, Troy and I were able to weigh our options for how we were going to tackle this very big school year. But still, some of our decisions would be null and void depending the outcome of a lottery that is in no way in our control.

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Coffee Chat: Encanto

Image: Disney

Encanto was released on Disney+ on December 24th.
My girls watched it for the first time in mid-January.
By February, it had reached Threat Level Frozen.

They request the soundtrack every day in the car, and ask to watch it as soon as they get back from school. And according to Instagram, my house isn’t the only one deep in the Encanto phase.

Since all the songs were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Troy may or may not be in deep as well. So, we’re leaning into it.

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