Walking to our airport gate last week I saw a man and woman running at full pelt, luggage tangled behind. I felt a sympathetic tug at the panic of being late. Then I heard laughter, and looked again. At the end of the corridor the man had stopped and turned, his face ebullient and victorious. They were racing. A father and grown daughter, racing each other.

It took a while to recognise because it was adults, in an airport (a place of serious forward motion), but they were playing. It felt sweetly unexpected, almost rebellious.

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Cognitive psychologist Jaak Panksepp has made his career researching play, mostly by conducting ‘vigorous manual stimulation of the ventral body surface’ of rats. Which means he tickles rat bellies until they laugh (rats laugh!).

Panksepp’s research has confirmed play is a primal biological drive; vital for brain, emotional and social health. You can take out a rat’s entire cerebral cortex, and they will still want to play. The deprivation of play creates a deep neurological ‘hunger’ similar to the drive for food or water. We are one of the few species that continue to play as adults, which, though under threat, has allowed us to adapt and flourish.

But while essential (one of the common attributes of murderers on death row is a lack of childhood play), the benefits of play are slow, indirect and hard to attribute. You can’t weigh the dosage like your daily creatine scoop and test for muscle strength afterward.

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We seem mildly perturbed by behaviours with indeterminate outcomes, activities which won’t neatly stack and build. The inefficiency of natural human development has become almost distasteful to us.

And anyway, outrageously, the airport racers weren’t even thinking about the oxytocin and dopamine they were building as they ran. They were playing for the sake of it. For the intense lovely aliveness of it. For the for-itself-ness.

As C Thi Nguyen, wrote last week on the work of philosopher Bernard Suits, if human life were all about outcomes and extraction, games would make no sense. To play a game is to be, as Nguyen puts it, inefficient on purpose. Less Darwinian species survival, and more species thrival (a word I just made up).

In play you can change the game at any time because, as Nguyen touchingly concludes, ‘the points aren’t what matters, your own joyous action is’.

Your own joyous action.

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It reminds me of a concept in Hinduism called ‘Lila’ - divine play. The perfection of Brahman (the infinite timelessness underlying reality) creates the universe in a spontaneous dance of delight.

Our world, ourselves, as an overflow of joyous action.

We have eroded our capacity for play so far that sometimes we can’t even recognise it. I almost didn’t realise the airport racers were playing, and the flush of excitement when I did felt almost illicit.

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Our rat-tickler Panksepp has shown videos of his rats in action to adults and kids. When were asked to describe what they saw, the adults answered that the rats were fighting. The children said they were playing. The four to seven year olds were right. What does it mean for our future when something so essential to our species is unidentifiable?

So this weekend I’m trying this - for 2 hours, or even for 20 minutes. A summer to-do list I can get behind.

Laura x

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Now, your morsels of delight:

• Live fiction maps - trace the journey of the Odyssey or Sherlock Holmes across the globe - journeys from fiction drawn on real maps. (Thank you !)

• ‘Steal my thunder’ comes from the real-life stealing of a thunder sound-effect from a playwright in Drury Lane London in 1704 who, on hearing his trick copied, called out "That is my thunder, by God! The villains will not play my play, but they steal my thunder!". (Thank you !)

• Crazy photos of what lives in drops of seawater - there are several generations of copepods in this droplet. Freaky and cool.

But of course the real backup is the phone-in-my-head: grim-scrolling upcoming tasks, pointlessly looping self-recriminations (just me?).

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This time that autopilot was a millisecond late igniting, so I decided to try something else. I just looked around, took things in and let them spool out.

I saw a couple in companionable perusal of the saturday paper, young Spanish tourists deep in conversation, a floppy-eyed dog, diagonal stripes of light.

There was attention, but it was soft, loose. Almost flabby. The word popped into my head and I was pleased with it. It had a corpulence, an indulgence, an excess that matched the feeling.

Flabby attention. A noticing that dares have no object. A watchfulness with no objective, not even rest.

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It was a feeling with more content than pure mindfulness, but less content than focussed attention. It was imaginative, daydreamy, somewhere in between.

I asked myself little curiousities, lightly, without any need to complete their stories. What does it feel like to be that dog? Are the couple happy? What is light like?

Our culture is so manically, constantly directed that sometimes even its prescriptions of rest are exhausting. There’s always a sneaky agenda - wellness, or improved focus. This was different.

Children, when they’re allowed to, relish this kind of deep/light interest-led attention. They are masters of the mono-task. Alison Gopnik (Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at UC Berkley) talks about children’s awareness as ‘lantern consciousness’ - designed to cast a wide light and take in everything around them; in contrast to adult awareness, which is more spotlit and focussed, but with all the attendant blind-spots.

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We can move our consciousness between these states, we can switch the lantern light wider. I want to attend in its latin origin of the word; for my mind to ‘stretch toward’ things instead of casting its usual mental grappling-hook (an attention so singular and crude it’s as likely to demolish as to perceive). I want the world and I to meet each other, instead of capture and extract.

Imagination is the essence of that deliciously plump state of mind.

My wondering train ride had an equanimity I don’t normally associate with public transport and luggage and kids. So my summer resolution is to get brain-fat. To follow some of Lian Cho’s advice, taking vacations with my mind, like a kid would. And if you need more inspiration on the beauty and pain of paying deep/light attention in the age of late capitalism, read this beautiful essay by Devin Kelly.

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Flabby attention here we go,

Laura x

And now, your morsels of deliciousness:

• A funky 30 hour playlist for summer lounging and hosting. You’re welcome.

• Family-friendly TV - I last recommended Time Bandits, but forgot to caveat there are some scary bits. Same here - A Series of Unfortunate Events is amazing (and a rare example of being as good as the books it’s based on Lemony Snicket’s series).

• A list of unexplained sounds. Someone get on the ‘Longfellow Boom’ please. (And these seem like excellent story starters). Also from Laura Olin, this deeply pleasing literature clock , which reminds me of this:

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I thought I was working for kids, but soon I realised it was us adults who need help.

So, like a travelling anthropologist I’m back from the country of childhood. And I have some serious field notes for the grown ups.

Starting with something so obvious you hardly think of it. Ready? Timpani roll please….

Kids are childish. Like for ages. If you live with one you probably spend an inordinate amount of time trying to cajole them out of it. The bad news for kid-co-habiters? The point of childhood is not to get adult, it’s to languish in seeming incapacity for a ludicriously long time. And even sillier, the point of adulthood is to keep some of that childishness. Because it turns out that childishness is the secret sauce in our species’ success.

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No other juveniles are as disastrous at keeping themselves alive as humans are. We bobble-head into the world, unable to lift our craniums unaided for months. By contrast, the Australian Brush-Turkeys hatch in hot mounds of filth, claw their way to the surface, and pop out with adult-level coordination - able to fly just hours after birth.

Feel for those of us still wiping kid-butts.

But it turns out that these insanely long childhoods are deliberate. If someone else is focussed on keeping you alive for years, you can be focussed on growing new ideas, new ways of thinking.

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Human brains are fiendishly brilliant because they have longer to be stretchy and childlike. And they’re especially brilliant because we keep some of that childish mindset even as we take on the practical responsibilities of adulthood. It’s called neoteny, and you’ve got it.

Neotenous animals are an elite and distinctly weird crew - the naked mole rat, axolotls, bonobos. You can spot them by the baby features they keep as adults (don’t throw shade at the mole rats please, their mothers love those hairless bodies). But unlike the axolotls (who seem to be in it for a short-cut to sexy time) human neoteny brings flexibility of mind.

We are a remarkably plastic species - we make our brains as we go, and we can remake them any time. Rather than inheriting set behaviours, each generation writes their own. We stand on giant’s shoulders, but we’re always renovating - adding a stilt here, chipping one down there.

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Theorist Eva Jablonka compares the human brain to a human hand - not designed to do any one particular thing but able to do many things, including things we can’t think of yet (suck on that naked mole rats with your cool movable teeth). Imagination is what makes the brain hand-like - proof and operation of our highly flexible intellect.

Our childish nature is profoundly imaginative, that is what enables us to adapt and transcend. And surely no age needs adaptability (not to mention transcendence!) more than our own? Dare you to disagree!

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Laura x

And now some morsels of delight:

• More super mature baby animals (‘superprecocial’ (awesome word alert)) - the Blue Wildebeest, which can outrun a hyena by the end of its first day, and Weddell Seals who can find their mothers in frigid polar waters by 3 weeks old.

• How David Hockney discovered that artists used basic cameras to capture realistic images -four hundred years before the photograph was invented!

• If you’re after some superb family (or solo!) T.V check out the Time Bandits:

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When it flows, that feeling of first-draft deluge is hard to beat. Keeping up with the words like a clairvoyant séance-ing ideas in real time.

The mid-point can bring a delicious feeling of immersion. Addictive, but not like the dull compulsion of scrolling, or the necessary compulsion to finish tidying the kitchen. It’s a moreishly deep focus, Csikszentmihalyi’s true flow state.

And after there’s the razor-click of editing, the satisfaction of positioning the puzzle pieces just-so.

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Writing is a form of communication that feels like it could be perfectible. You chase the possibility that if you keep polishing, Golem-like, the magic will land. The hope you can transform the swirling lava in your head into petrified permanence.

Other times you write in circles, searching for the sentence to end all the sentences, to write yourself out of writing. The Grand Unifying Theory of articulation. Futile, inevitably, but along the way you can bump on foothills of truth worth following.

We write to be heard, by ourselves — to understand; and then by others — to be understood. To write is to try to render from your experience what is irreducible, what is universal. We write in hope of being able to say: this is me, this is the world, this is truth — here I’ve written mine, and in doing so hopefully some of yours too.

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At its best writing is a conversation across years and generations. You won’t get all the replies, but you may not need to get them to hear them. It can be a near-cellular conveyance, born of that longing to voice the eternal, the heart of what matters, of what lasts. To capture things so elemental that once caught, they almost cease to need expression.

That’s the feeling to write in search of. The feeling everyone should experience. Young people need it more than ever - to write for agency, for authorship, but most of all for communality. To find our voice in order to lose it, and find it again in the collective voice of what it is to be human.

Who’s with me?!?

Laura x

And, because you deserve them, some morsels of deliciousness:

• These Japanese street signs warn drivers to look out for leaping cats.

• National Writing Day is run by First Story, a great organisation supporting young writers. They’ve got a prompt for today to ‘write a book by its cover’ - here are tips and inspiration from their ambassador

• Composer Matthew Wilcock creates music out of everyday patterns - check out this hypnotic motorway cycle.

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Woolf takes her exam question - women and literature - but she also shows us her working. And as she described reaching her titular conclusions I realised it was her approach that felt most dated. She doesn’t wrestle the problem down, she wonders it out. It’s like she sets her brain the essay title and then lets it roam.

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Here’s Woolf writing about the start, sitting by the banks of a river; and while you read, here’s your spot-the-difference challenge - what about this seems off?

“There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought… had let its line down into the stream. It sways, minute after minute… letting the water lift it and sink it until - you know the little tug - the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line”

When did you last sit somewhere, gazing blankly, no phone, and get lost in thought? How often do you feel that ‘sudden conglomeration’ of a genuinely new idea?

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In neuroscience terms Woolf gives a near perfect description of the imagination at work, of how the brain uses its daydreamy mode to create new ideas. It’s that ‘came to me in the shower’ feeling, except nowadays the shower is the only place we get it.

And here’s the extra kicker.

Woolf thinks wealth, security, and privacy help us be creative, and that women, in particular, have none of that. She depicts art as coming easily to the comfortable working man, able to pop into the office for a spot of careering before coming home to dabble in poetry.

There follows a lot of chat about partridges and the inferior food at women’s colleges which I’ll skip, but then she thinks of

“the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space”.

Her point is that wealth affords ease, and ease allows more art.

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What about the super wealthy in our times? Are they feasting and barding it up? Not as far as I can see. If anything the rich seem to speed up, work more, acquire more, spend more in maintenance. What does it mean when status is off-market injectables and self-embalming instead of time to read in an easy chair?

We have lost something vital since Woolf was writing. More women, and men, have literal rooms of their own - but the rooms in our heads went to the highest bidder decades ago. The space that should have been sacrosanct, the river-daydreaming bits, have been invaded. That’s the imaginative room we need to fight back for, the one in our heads.

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Do you agree?

Laura x

And now your Morsels of Delight:

• A stray cat ambled on to a live a production of Romeo and Juliet by the Imperial Russian Ballet Company and just stayed

• The word for a fear of long words is reaaallly long - Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

• A challenge: list as many animals as you can for one minute

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• These mini building bricks in a little ziplock - light, won’t matter if you lose some, and can make a crazy number of things - Plus Plus blocks .

• Magnetic dolls and scenes - we love the petit collage ones - and magnetic means harder to lose on trains and planes.

• These smart puzzles - challenging enough for older kids (and adults!), options for younger, and as a bonus they can role play with the characters (bunny hop, cats in boxes and preschooler 3 little pigs).

  

• An audio player to synch with Spotify playlists and do nothing else - The Mighty, and for kids’ audio books - The Yoto.

• Plain paper - making paper dolls and outfits (this tutorial uses tracing paper - inspired!), playing heads-bodies-legs, writing a story a hidden line at a time, playing hangman or one of these paper games.

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• Sticker books - the classic but also reusable puffy ones for younger kids (more playability), and these fancy tweezer scene ones for older - and colouring books.

• A new notebook each (aspirationally for travel diary and sketching, possibly mainly for hangman).

• Origami paper and a simple instruction book.

• Plasticine for making anything - bring ruler and scissors for making shapes and ziplock bags for storing.

  

• Paper and a step by step book for drawing almost anything.

• Reusable drawing tablets.

• Finger puppets with a few of these and paper for drawing backdrops you can put on a play.

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• Fidget toys to fiddle with while listening to audiobooks (we love needoh and these magnetic cubes).

• Train and road tape - and bring a couple toy cars and trains too.

• Paper box toys - fold them and then use them as characters.

  

• A handful of playmobil, sylvanian, lego or any other character to use with the sticker roads, hand-drawn paper scenes etc, sometimes less figures can mean more play. For bonus cheer buy new and surprise them with them when the mood most looks ready to turn (like these mini LOL surprise balls).

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• Blue tack, glue sticks, scissors, drawing shapes.

• Colouring pencils and pens - we were given this fancy set in a storage roll and they are the best for travel (Lamy do lots too), and these stabilo colouring pens with their own ring so caps don’t get lost on airplane floors.

  

• Books - obviously - and not just for reading, detailed illustration picture books can be used as spotting books, choose-your-own books or story-writing prompts. And read chapter books aloud anywhere - waiting rooms, buses, train platforms - start regardless and soon they’ll get listening.

Give me your tips! What are your favourites?

Laura x

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Now we definitely think we’re fancier than the woodlice, and we kind of think if anyone is in charge it ought to be us instead of the dolphins, but we also sort of hate being alone up here. That’s why, although we panic out about AI, it’s also a bit in our comfort zone to contemplate the prospect of a new Top Dog. We’re missing the gods, but we can replace them with these electronic golems. New motherboards to worship and rail against. Adulation and terror, Old Testament style.

As humans we fear we are both too much and not enough. We are scared of our own nature, of the terrors we’ve wrought in the world, but also delightedly in thrall to our own creativity. We can’t decide if the answer should be more control or less.

The whole thing sounds a lot like what it can be like to be a kid - alternating between longing for absolutely autonomy and for helplessness to be held. Make believe is childhood’s release valve for the tension of that strange pairing. Pretend play allows children to create worlds they can own and manipulate at will, it is also how they can safely experiment with the feeling of being out of control, of the worst they can imagine coming to pass.

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Might our perspective on AI shift if we separated the needs and fears driving the popular dialogue around it? If we could do some collective make believe to release our excitement and fear about having both too much power and too little?

Aristotle, one of the originators of the Chain of Being, had, as many of his bearded colleagues did, a rather lovely thought. He saw existence as a continuum, the perfection of the universe expressed in many parts, a oneness coming into multitude, one a big light refracting into rainbow. There is classification there, blue vs orange and all that, but we all get a slice of the colour, we are all symphonic in the whole.

Perhaps if we rewind some centuries of codification we can get back to that feeling. But to get there we need to get rid of the artifice of our model of intelligence, the root of our AI worship, and bring back a more intuitive, imaginative weave. But that’s another post…

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And now for your well deserved morsels:

• An owl in a towel, brought to you by the vital owlsintowels.org

• We LOVE Sophie Blackall’s work, so of course I gobbled up her list of 20 all time favourite picture books - some real gems in here

• A reminder to give creative birth, even to the ‘bad’ babies, from Lynda Barry

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Young children, mine at least, generate fountains of mess. To the person who spends a surely unreasonable amount of time re-homing tiny items, who dreams of going upstairs without a pile of things to be triaged, it feels like low-level thuggery.

But often what looks like the imprint of a human confetti cannon is actually full of cohesion. The things are everywhere, but there is a story that brings them into more order than they’ve ever known - just not an order I recognise (and, crucially, an invisible kind).

Because it turned out when I listened more closely to my four year old swirling the yoto cards on the floor, she was also muttering to herself. She had at least two voices alternating - sounding like Ms. Hardbroom and Mildred Hubble from The Worst Witch series - and was intoning injustices and casting reversal spells, all while she looked for the card she wanted to play. The movement was centrifugal, but the narrative was centripetal. In one way there was complete chaos, but in another there was absolute coherence.

It turns out the formal definition of entropy in physics is a “thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system” - that’s it. The hot impulses of the four year old are not available for conversion into the work of ordering things away, they are being siphoned off into building a world we can’t see, but which her brain needs more.

From the adult vantage point lots of childhood has this pallor of entropy, of wild disorder and randomness, but there is a logic of its own, of magic and creativity - the working through of emotions and ideas more important for development than a tidy floor.

I’ve wondered since what it would be like to allow myself bursts of the same chaos, but in my mind (because no one needs more of it on the floor). So much of modern living, of modern parenthood and work, feels driven to reign in, to order, to rationalise; but creativity and innovation live in the novelty, in the domain of the imaginative. That requires a different kind of thinking, one that pulls concepts from disparate parts of the brain and reforms them in unexpected ways, the divergent thinking which is the hallmark of imagination.

What would it be to deliberately allow oneself seasons of messy mindedness, of open-ended exploration going nowhere in particular, to forestall the low-level panic about needing to bring it all together? What might it be to look closer at our children in the act of mess and see not the mad recrimination of a small person bent on driving you bananas, but the creativity of a mind using every tool available to break and refashion the world around them into new stories, better stories?

It would be nice, and different.

But afterwards, sweet lord, afterwards, let’s tidy up.

Laura x

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Some morsels of delight:

• A cool tool for tracing the origin of our words back to Proto-Indo-European, the language which became half the world’s words!

• And while you’re at the wordy thing, a game, how far back in history can you read and still understand English? I gave up around 1300.

• A picture book I’m obsessed with, Kiley Frank and K-Fai Steele’s, ‘That Always Happens Sometimes’, a masterclass in how one person’s seeming chaos can hold creative genius, and a loving portrayal of a highly distractible kid.

  

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Here’s what we’re doing instead. It’s big and you’re hearing it here first. Instead of trying to empty your brain to nothing, just redirect it. Switch the channel to something dreamier. Welcome to the mind-wandering prescription. We’re forming a new coalition - The Society of Daydreamers.

As adults we may not pretend play much any more, but we have our equivalent. Time-use studies have found adults have around 2000 daydreams a day, and the average lasts for about 14 seconds. That means we spend almost half of our waking hours (46.9% to be precise), a third of our lives, in daydreams.

Daydreams, like pretend play, activate the default mode network (DMN), which is the less goal-oriented part of our brains. The DMN allows us to consolidate learning, to access creativity and deeper problem solving, to switch between tasks without losing efficacy, to plan for the future, to embed memories, to meaningfully self-reflect.

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You already daydream, but the problem is you do it all wrong. Your mind can’t help but wander, but our productivity-nutty culture means you feel guilty, so the wandering gets subverted - twisted and jammed on stop-start. Obsessive thought loops, fantasies of tidy closets, daydreaming your way to the end of the inbox. Your brain is going to imagine with or without you, the difference is whether you get to enjoy it, and how useful it gets to be.

We think of daydreams as ‘wasted’ time, even the scientists studying it feel they have to headline the evidence that daydreaming increases productivity (true story by the way). But these imaginative breaks are more than a nice respite for improved efficiency. Jerome Singer and Dorothy Singer (one of the many superb science husband-wife research teams I’ve found going super-geek on imagination) led the field of daydreaming research in the 1960s. He showed how daydreaming is a tool for greater mental resilience, a healer of trauma, a problem-solving-power tool, a productivity juicer and a source of genuine relaxation. It’s even been found to reinforce and enhance social skills. And it can be fun, a literal holiday for our brains.

What if we were as intentional about our daydreams as we might be about mindfulness? What if we set the clock, gave ourselves a prompt, and let the make believe rollercoaster take us somewhere luscious.

A recent study showed that 11.20am is the peak daydream hour for adults in the U.K. Apparently the most popular distraction is to dream of holidays. So at 11.20 this morning let's all try it. But not just any holiday, how about the holiday you’d take if you won the lottery, or what a holiday from 1760 would have looked like, or one in 2106. What about a holiday for a snail - let’s get weird folks. If you’re home on Easter break with the kids ask them and report back!

Laura x

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And now for some morsels of delight:

• You know I love a mini-book - the world’s smallest books at the Victoria & Albert museum.

• These nut-free granola bars are super easy to make and have been a kid-hit (they feature Rice Krispies so, naturally).

• Francesca Hornak’s post took me on a retro-toy joy ride - Keypers and Hasbro Glo Worms anyone? Her whole substack is deeply pleasing.

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Imagined personas as a therapeutic balm are as old as kid-dom. Psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg was one of the first to realise how fictional playmates act as psychological support. Enlisting pretend friends as scapegoats allows children to distance from painful misbehaviours, gradually learning to internalise criticism and parental expectations by first punishing a split personality.

In Selma’s example it was invisible Gerald getting the blame for Stevie having broken his father’s pipe - a sentence which gives you an idea of how long researchers have been on to this trick. It’s a move we know well in our house. Our three year old regularly blames things on her seeming legion of imaginary younger siblings - “Dylan did it” or “Goga made me”.

But it works the other way round too, you can get a little side personality to help to boost you up, Doggy style if you will. CBT practitioners might suggest conjuring an inner cheerleader to help step into more self-assertive guises, or arm yourself for a task ahead.

It might even help you work harder. In a recent study on ‘self-distancing’, children were set a boring repetitive task, and asked to keep themselves on point by regularly checking in on their progress. The kids who posed their questions in the third person “Is Laura working hard?” focussed more than those who just wondered “Am I working hard”. But the ones who adopted an alter ego, “Is Dora the Explorer working hard” or “Is Batman working hard” focussed most of all - sticking with the task almost 25% longer than the first person interrogators.

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Think of it like fancy dress for your brain. The next time you’re flagging, or getting yourself down, call in an imaginary friend. The only question is will it be more Dogg or Dora?

Laura x

And now for some morsels of delight:

• Insanely beautiful leaf art - Japanese paper cutting on leaves

• The best of kids’ books last year (yes, it’s been a while since I’ve substacked, but these are still delightful - we’ve especially enjoyed the two X.Fang books listed)

• It is really very important to add vampire fangs to your doughnuts

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So when friends suggested a lecture from a self-improvement guru earlier this year I thought I’d be all over it. The talk was about the science of achieving great things, reaching your highest potential. It emphasised effort and character as against innate talent and the prodigious chance of birth. It said there were no limits to how far you can reach if you just believe, and keep trying.

I found myself bristling at the topic, genuinely annoyed. I congratulated myself that this might be a sign of personal evolution, but the irritation came from a secret attraction too, so it took a while to work out what was irking me.

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The message, valuing hard work over talent, should be worthily democratising. It should signal progress from medieval notions of fixed humours determining our fate. But in fact it remains catholic in its idolisation, in reaching for something beyond and outside of us. There’s still an altar to kneel at - it’s just that the talent we are elevating is the talent of work itself. Effort. Grit. And it is work redeemed and known by the reaching of peaks. Character is shown by your response to hard obstacles in your path, and your response should be as hard as rocks - push push push.

There’s very little room here for the mess and backwards loops that usually characterise ‘progress’. And none at all for things that aren’t defined by their ending: for the mountains you circle and flail around, the ones where you tackle a goat or two, or maybe just pick daisies, but never plant a flag a-top. No space for that end of exploring which arrives where you started and knows the place for the first time.

The one man vs mountain model is firmly in the 19th century heroic explorer mould. But applied to our new Everest - the scaling of personal character in search of equanimity and perfectly smooth production levels* - the Victorian Gentleman Explorer becomes especially noxious. It adds a fart of individualism, a crusading whiff of entitlement, to personal enlightenment.

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Most damningly, given personal growth is rarely a straight path you can crampon yourself up, it gives the dispiriting feeling of failure-in-advance. We think we’re living in the kind age of Disney’s Inside Out, but we still have a Gentleman Explorer inside us, assuming we can pick-axe our way through emotional mastery to master producers.

The guru giving the talk seemed to suggest the measure of you is not what you achieve, but how hard it’s been to achieve it. But why are we so fixed on rejecting what comes naturally to us? We have such scorn for the things that come easily and beautifully to us, both as individuals and as a species. The inspiration that pops up lying in a sunny field is worth less than the one sweated from candles at both ends.

It’s revealing that the famous Mary Oliver line “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” is often taken as an urging to Get On With Things That Matter. But if you read The Summer Day , it’s actually an instructional on “how to be idle and blessed”.

The imagination is all sunny fields. It won’t be pushed. It can’t. The imagination has no place in that arid grafting land. It’s circular and anti-productive and, though often individually pursued, beautifully conversant.

….. Or perhaps I’m just justifying why I’ve taken so long to post again. I’ve been slow-cooking something I hope may come to light one day, but also, also, trying to make wax hands. I think there’s something in that.

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Laura x

* The late-stage-capitalism-ness of all of this is a whole other thing, listening to How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is helping.

And now, some Morsels of Delight:

• The Thing You Fear Is Not the Thing That Kills You

• Our planet swallowed a planet - a planet called Theia crashed into Earth, it’s still stuck in our core and the collision made the moon!

• Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett make me want to read Where the Wild Things Are right now, and to think how five-year-olds might be better at reading than adults

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I heard this interview with him after a bedtime reading of ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’.

Which brings me to the post literally no one is asking for - condensed life lessons from a fictional rabbit and a world-famous rapper:

1. Pay attention to what you pay attention to, then let serendipity do her thing. André’s new direction came after hearing Surfer Kassia Meador play her flute at a breathwork class, following his interest, then bumping into experimental jazz legend Carlos Niño at a health food store (could it BE any more L.A?). Velveteen Rabbits are given, forgotten, revived, thrown away (because scarlet fever sucks) and found again. Stay with what’s happening and it will bring you grace.

2. Find a crew and let them help you. Life is a Skin Horse-Boy-Fairy team effort. Which is how André credits his success (to collective magic, not Victorian toys), he talks about his art as midwifed by friends whose first reaction is to ask how they can help, not if they’ll like it or not.

3. Don’t be embarrassed. Not everyone will like it. There are haters, from wind-up mechanical toys to music critics, but authenticity speaks to those who’ll hear; or as the old Skin Horse says, “once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Also, play your flute in ubers (and that’s no euphemism).

4. Sometimes it will hurt. You will grow shabby. You’ll lose whiskers. You might wish, like the Velveteen Rabbit pre-consciousness-raising, to become Real without uncomfortable things happening. But “when you are Real you don't mind being hurt”. As André says, you’ve got to learn how to ride the rollercoaster with your hands up because, whoever you are, it’s going to be a rollercoaster. Also, scarlet fever sucks.

5. Allow it to take time. André’s been pretty quiet for two decades; the Rabbit was left in the closet for ages after his first Christmas but the Skin Horse assures him, “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept”.

6. Follow your own magic show. André says he’s not special, that everyone has their own magic show, if they tune in. Artists are people who respond to what’s in front of them, living with their antennae out in the world. He’d love to be rapping, but it’s just not what’s coming to him, he talks about presenting what’s given to you at any time. Let life lead. In Skin-Horse parlance (again, what a wise dude), “Real isn’t how you are made, it's a thing that happens to you”, with, through, love. Still, scarlet fever sucks.

7. Carry a flute instead of a phone. Full disclosure this is quite André specific, with no rabbit parallel, but I love that he carries a flute everywhere. In any slack scroll-ish moments he will just '“pick it up and see what’s happening”. Like a phone, but way better. Also I love how he sees the flute a device with its own updates coming through, just waiting for his likes and comments. Like a phone, but way better.

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Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Laura x

Morsels of delight:

• I gorge on Austin Kleon’s newsletter, it’s where I first heard this André 3000 NPR interview.

• My new favourite kids bookstagram has done a gift guide roundup and I’ve just signed up to her parenting newsletter too - thank you Youngna Park.

• There are so many beautiful re-illustrated editions of Margery Williams’ ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ (see below examples from Sarah Massini, Komako Sakai, Maurice Sendak and Erin Stead) and I saw after drafting this that Apple has released a new TV version!

My girls have special topics each term at school, and I get very excited about them. I’ve already lined up 4 non-fiction books for myself in delight at the current year 1 ‘frozen world’ theme. Last year they learned about dinosaurs and Ancient Egypt (not together, though there’s a idea), and reviving those was awesome.

Heaving inbox? Masochistically procrastinating on your taxes? Floors full of abandoned lego pieces slicing your sole? Don’t bother with deep breathing. No need to count to ten. Just conjure a world full of Argentinosaurus’ as heavy as 15 elephants each. Instant mind-expansion.

What quicker way to scale your worries than realising the Ancient Egyptian civilisation lasted for 3,0000 years, and twitter hasn’t even had 20? Or finding out salamanders bigger than humans once ranged our prehistoric Pangea?

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Our bodies respond to awe differently than other emotions. It even has its own facial expressions. The feeling of awe has health benefits, and may be as vital to our well-being as joy or love, calming down the nervous system and releasing oxytocin.

Awe quietens negative critical internal voices - it centrifuges and centripetes all at once (those aren’t words, but they should be!) - somehow the larger perspective can feel more cosily containing.

The key, according to Dr Dacher Keltner, psychologist at University of California Berkley, is to immerse yourself in ‘perceived vastness’.

And to do that immersion we need to imagine.

The sheer size of the milky way is awe-inspiring precisely because your head is near the carpet (with the crushed up animal crackers). It’s the gap, the differential, that engenders awe, and imagination is the travelator that gets you there. Your mind has to envisage, to make believe, that the ground you’re on was once a Megalosaurus door mat. There’s a playfulness to it, which is why it feels like being a kid again.

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There’s an excited uncertainty, an unsure-foot-ed-ness as you build a mental vision of a world where you’re the size of a quark, or believe in cat-headed gods. A quality of contemplative wonder explored by philosopher Kieran Egan, and by Anders Schinkel, whose Wonderful Education project looks at how the threshold imaginative state is vital to growing minds that can understand, question, create anew.

Awe sits between the known and unknown, and drives us to expand both. St. Bonaventure, a 13th century Italian scholastic theologian, wrote “the more we wonder at the newness of the thing the more earnestly we observe it; and the more carefully we consider it the more fully we come to know it. For attention grows by wonder and knowledge by attention.” (These and other gems come to me from Maya Pope’s substack on wonder & poetry).

Poetry Today

Wonder Wednesday

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper,” wrote early 20th-century writer, Eden Phillpotts (that name!). You’d think that poets, whose daily calisthenics include a sort of rarified attention, would have a natural advantage so far as the universe is concerned. But, like all language handlers, we benefit and …

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3 years ago · 56 likes · 14 comments · Maya C. Popa

Have a WONDER-ful week,

Laura x

Morsels of amazement for this week (first up on space, one of my personal top-trumps of instant awe-transporters… black holes, paleocene penguins, the stone age - things most grown-ups don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about):

• Science-writer Philip Ball has posted a free PDF of a book he wrote while home-educating his kids - “Science (All of It) In Three Questions”

• Lists of some of our favourite dinosaur kids’ books (like Everything Awesome About Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Beasts! by Mike Lowery) and great Ancient Egypt kids’ books (like Egyptology by Emily Sands).

• It’s the time of year for dinovember! A silly thing that brings us regular joy - hiding toy dinosaurs around the house like this ….

A small start is OK - but only on its way to being big. But small as an actual intention? Not so much.

I started Fabled after leaving a life of Big Institutions. But that didn’t mean leaving my institutional mindset behind.

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It slurped back into my thinking, as these watery assumptions do, that bigger was better. I found myself surrounded by a new institutional miasma, the cult of the ‘start up’, where scale definitely mattered.

I was once asked if I planned for Fabled to be a ‘lifestyle business’, a term used to refer to thrifty self-sustaining ventures. It sounded like a reasonable question. But leaving aside the elephantine fact male founders are probably never asked it, it was a telling one.

You see they weren’t really asking about my profit intentions (most would-be ‘unicorns’ are loss-leading), they wanted to make a value judgement. Without having to really listen to the substance, they wanted to know whether I was serious about what I was doing. Because being serious meant being big.

The kind of big that eats everything around it, the kind of big that wants the competition, and the lives of its own founders, to be small - for scale, for victory, or just for fun. It meant planning to raise all the money, capture all the users, take all of everyone’s time (but quickly), and make all the money.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that, I’ve no truck with big. The problem is where big becomes code for worthwhile. I was caught in that trap for a while - internalising quantifiers as yardsticks for value (all these measuring words, we have so little other vocabulary here).

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You see I am as serious as you can be (while being seriously silly) about make believe, children’s voices, storytelling, the imagination; so I wanted to be taken seriously.

But scale is a crude proxy for gravity of intent. Soon I realised that being serious in that entrepreneurial mould, following that technical credo, could bleach my solemn commitment to child’s play; sacrificing mission to a mania for capture at all costs.

Now, I realise there’s another way things can be everything and not take up everything around them: they can be done with a whole HEART, one comprised of all the values and ways of living you seek to infuse the rest of your life with.

It can be all of you, without being everything you do.

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Holly Tucker, who started Not On The High Street, and her amazing co-founders and team, have done something glorious and joyful in service of that idea this month. Holly Co is a new marketplace for small business, taking pride in smallness as a active virtue. I’m delighted (and still somewhat surprised) to say Fabled is one of their founding ‘Cos’ selling our book of stories by kids (for everyone!) and bags and poster with our ‘The Future is Make Believe’ manifesto.

I do still believe the future is make believe. And after all there’s something else that, like my small business, is small in scale (but big in impact), low on visible output, and can shrivel in proportion to hours spent in slavish grindstone productivity - and that’s the imagination itself…… so I’m trying to practise what I’m kid-preaching.

For this edition’s delightful morsels I bring you creative goodies from Holly.co:

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Pictured above, going clockwise from top left -

• Art and activity kits like this make your own house from Lots of Lovely Art

• Little pouch tooth fairies & other dolls & elves from Bokuno

• The Happy Self wellbeing journal for kids

• Adventure kids’ animal shape multitool from Mims & Family

• Cut and make circus from Wini Tapp

• Enamel crocodile mug by Esther Kent

• Mabel and Me Mimi Mouse sleepover set

• Personalised kids’ posters by Lorna Freytag

• Woodland animal wall decoration kit from Black Rabbit

And also, pictured in the post above are kidpreneur 12 year old Molly’s prints from Happy Rainbow; Laura Long’s personalised dolls made from kids’ drawings; and kidpreneur 12 year old George’s pencils, bags and pins from D is for Dyslexia.

I’ve spent my summer squirrelling offline - seeding some Fabled projects I hope to harvest soon. But now I’m back, and today I want to sell you on the cold months ahead.

We think of being young as one long summer. Our minds-eye view of childhood is a movie shot in bleached-out sunlight.

Now I’ve got nothing against the sun, that would just be silly, but I think the real spirit of childhood is Autumn and Winter.

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Darker, shorter, colder days are full of magic and stories — the currency of kid-dom. Long nights beg storytelling….. Mary Shelley and a troop of Romantic poets huddled by Lake Geneva setting writing competitions (cue Frankenstein), Dickens embracing the old tradition of ghost stories at Christmas to bring us Ebenezer.

On Friday I decided we needed a family dinner to mark the season switch. Inspired by a line from “The Parent Trap” * I made chilli (“disgusting”), cornbread (“I like Grandma’s”) and blondies (“okaaaay”).

I covered the table in white paper, left pencils and wistfully suggested we draw some memories from the summer and wishes for the Autumn.

My family drew a graphic illustration of the week we were all vomiting with a tummy bug. Hopes for the season ahead included “yuck” and “nothing”.

But even through this desecration of my schemes, even though two kids only ate rice / rice krispies and the third wore a backpack the entire meal, it felt sweet. The gathering against the dark, the marking of a day, a season. The next day my middle said what she wanted for Autumn was more special meals together like that.

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From October onward there are occasions galore. Our house celebrates Halloween, Bonfire Night, two Thanksgivings (Canadian and American), and Christmas over just a few months. Your cosy season might start with Diwali. Whatever the culture, odds are it marks the closing of the year.

These rituals are full of shared stories: vampires and ghosts, elves and reindeer, gods on earth, lights in the sky. Traditions captured and transmitted through story. Tales told year after year to explain what the days mean, to remember how we celebrate them, to connect. They are like a ready-made play kits - fantastical set pieces with movable scenes and characters to make believe around.

They are days laced with things we know kids love (candy, presents) but also things we forget kids love more (family, togetherness). And what magics and holds them together, what they all share — is that they are days of stories.

So that’s some of what I’ve been thinking about.

And now, some morsels of delight:

• A shelfie of some of our favourite Autumn picture books

• Brilliant parent/ human advice on creativity and living from my favourite ‘productivity’ newsletter The Imperfectionist by Oliver Burkeman “in the end, you have to live the sort of life you want your child to choose to embrace”

• Apple ring ‘doughnuts’ - seems ingenius and fun, anyone tried?

Happy making and believing,

Laura x

* We’re on an old school family movie kick at the moment - started with “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” which holds up pretty well, where should we go next?

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We were hot, hungry and stuck. The queue was long and the kids were sniping and snapping. Suddenly I remembered.

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I reached into my bag, grabbed the nearest book, opened and started reading aloud.

They sidled in and started to listen. It felt like magic.

It’s a high risk strategy. I’ve had it backfire. But even when it fails it breaks the tension (mine at least). Most of the time it works. When it does you feel powerful as a snake charmer.

The magic of reading itself is no snake oil. There’s a bunch of research on what it does - from strengthening cognition to building empathy. And reading aloud, to any age, is literacy and relationship glue (as this lovely book will tell you). Most importantly reading is big time imagination juice.

So here are my tips for more reading:

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1. Read aloud — it’s never too soon and it’s never too late. Reading aloud links books to the thing we all want most — connection. Babies listen to anything, so read the books you want to read. Teenagers secretly love it so don’t be afraid.

2. Five minutes is longer than you think– you cover quite a lot while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil, or the train to come (that goes for your reading too, speaking of which….:).

3. Read the talk, put your page where your mouth is– show them books matter. Talk about what you’re reading, let them see you reading. Try carrying a book around the house instead of your phone — it’s the most acceptable face of ignoring your kids. (And five minutes is longer than you think).

4. Reading is more than books– love stories and books will follow. Encourage make believe play and their own storytelling (Fabled of course!); listen to audio books and podcasts (Fabled of course!). It doesn’t have to be highbrow, follow their interests.

5. Books aren’t just for bedtime — make books your go-to for pre-dawn risers, reluctant bath-times, fussy mealtimes, entertainment on the bus, restaurant distraction, you name it. (And five minutes is longer than you think).

6. Books aren’t just for shelves –make them available and easy — keep baskets and piles of books in all your rooms — even kitchens, bathrooms, and hallways (waiting spaces) — and always one under the buggy, in the car, in your backpack.

7. Make it delectable — create rituals that make it a treat — family weekend reading parties with a book each (wordless picture books or ‘reading’ to toys for preschoolers); a popcorn read-a-thon; a trip to the local café for hot chocolate & read aloud.

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Here are a few people I follow for recommendations -

The Secret Society of Books (also on instagram)

The Little Literary Society

Little Library Owl

The Book Mommy (also on instagram)

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And a tip if you’re buying online and want to preview first - for picture books do a google image search of the title and zoom into to read snippets; for chapter books this website has excerpts of lots of titles free to read.

And now your morsels of creative deliciousness:

• A whole load of adorable things you can make from toilet tubes. Roar-some.

• “I like to be terrified because that’s how you learn. I mean, going out and doing something you don’t know anything about, and giving it your all, is what a kindergartner would call Tuesday morning.” Picture book guru Mo Willems in this inspiring interview.

• Somehow I missed World Penguin Day last week, but here’s a cute penguin, and a penguin quiz to make up for it.

  

Happy making and believing,

Laura x

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So if you have mixed feelings about telling stories about Easter Rabbit visitations, you’ve got centuries of company. But here’s why you and the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t need to worry:

Kids’ belief in the Easter Bunny & co actually helps develop rational thinking. 4 year-olds who regularly engage in fantasy play are better able to distinguish appearance from reality.

It may seem counterintuitive, but fantasy supports abstract reasoning. Research shows it develops kids’ reasoning skills by forcing them to work through the hypothetical and counterfactual. How can the Easter Bunny deliver all the eggs? What happens if the chickens go on strike?

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They’re more motivated to do this, because it’s all packaged as a story, and we humans are addicted to story. Plus, at Easter, odds are there’s chocolate, so already any rational 6 year old already has all the motivation they need.

Children quite readily understand that the Easter Bunny is not in the same category as their Headteacher, or the Queen. But that doesn’t mean they dismiss him. “Young children have this ability to know that something is mythical, but yet experience it vividly at the same time,” Alison Gopnik (see last week’s newsletter) says. “They recognise that fantasy and reality are different worlds, but they think the border between them might be porous. Even when kids in some sense believe in Santa Claus, they recognise that he’s in this separate category.” Somewhere between belief and imagination - she calls it ‘bemagination’.

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I would go further. It’s not that children can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, it’s that they aren’t as obsessed with it as we are. Children intuitively understand how myths and stories can be true, how they can feed us and transmit the facts that matter. They don’t suffer our adult illusions of control, or expectations of mastery, and they are braver and more imaginative for it.

So maybe this Easter you should try believing….. or at least enjoy some story playing with your kids using the ready-made character and setting of the Easter Bunny. You can do it guilt-free, knowing you’re building their reasoning skills as well as their day-dreams.

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Easter nuggets of fun:

• Humans have been decorating eggs - symbols of fertility and rebirth - since ancient times, for as long as 60,000 years.

• In some parts of Australia, it’s an Easter bilby that brings the treats. These cute marsupials were in decline but thanks to conservation efforts numbers are rising.

• Some of our favourite Easter picture books.

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Happy bunnies chocolate and spring things,

Laura x

Which makes kids a lot like poets (the good ones or the bad ones).

Poets because poem-making is, as Jane Hirschfield put it recently, “a matter of noticing what is ordinarily unnoticed” of “noticing what’s at the margins”.

Children are tenacious, fantastic and often deeply inconvenient noticer-s. They offer that noticing in the form of story, and use imagination to suture the scraps into new tales. Pointing out our wounds, collecting the discarded, and patch-working a new whole. The best kind of Frankenstein-ing.

Which also makes kids a lot like politicians (but only the good ones). 

Politicians because they use their spotlight focus (that ‘mono tasking’) to dissect the world around them, and then apply the imaginative balm of ‘could be’ thinking to heal it into new futures. Skin grafts on Frankenstein, if you will (and fair enough if you’d rather not).

I’ve just finished Johann Hari’s alarming book on our waning ability to pay attention. In it he proffers a new category of lost focus - “Stadium Light attention”. It’s our ability to collectively identify and work together to achieve long-term goals as a society, and it is on the wane.

It made me think of Eve Garber’s argument that attention is a “collective good” . Garber says it matters deeply what we decide, at a societal level, deserves attention and what we decide “deserves ignoring”. An indifference to which could be, to Rob Walker’s mind, the eighth deadly sin.

I think to recover that attention we need to go back to our Research & Development division. To engage the natural outsider perspective of all children, and of the children within us all; to notice like poets and rebuild like politicians (the good ones).

Actually poetic noticing is already political, and children are its natural rebel front. As Hirschfield goes on to say “one of the jobs of all art is to look at what the central focus of the culture is not looking at”. And looking at the thing you’d rather they didn’t see is big time Kid M.O.

Childhood can teach us to recover that surgical attention, to skin graft the Frankenstein for a better future. The imagination is how.

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And after that somewhat strained and rather gross analogy, some morsels of delight:

• Winning wildlife photographs, like this natty little bee, to spring your step.

• One of my favourite newsletters - The Art of Noticing - is full of joyful perspective-jolting tips to fire up even the most jaded inbox (thank you to Rob Walker for lots of today’s inspiration).

• The world’s most amazing bookshops - I’ve been to one of these, have you?

Here’s to make believing better,

Laura x

We went to the Hockney exhibition this week (it’s completely joyful, go if you can), and trailing through London with kids was like trying to gather wood chips with a magnet.

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I find my five year old several paces back, oblivious to the swirl of commuters, pointing at things and muttering; my seven year old starting to follow another family; my one year old a wind-up toy, set her down and she’s off.

I feel irritation swell - how hard is it to remember to follow me? To lunch? With milkshakes?!

Then I look again.

My one year old is searching for stairs, laser-focussed on her next physical milestone. My seven year old is layering her understanding of relationships, watching strangers is like brain food.

And my five year old? I listen in and realise she’s counting - the paving stones, the railings, the escalator stairs, everything. A sysphiscan task (my irritation rears again) but her brain is building its story about quantity and number. Playing at the edges of mathematics as she knows it, with a focus so complete even the prospect of cookie-flavoured milk can’t reach her.

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We think of kids as incapable of focus, but really they are very good at it. Adults multi-task, children mono-task. However hyper they seem, children don’t do two things at once - they dive deeply one moment, and deeply again the next. That dreamy ‘lost to the world’ expression is actually a form of effortless concentration, total immersion. And the imagination is the route there.

Pretend play builds working memory, attention and the ability to self-regulate (the ‘inhibitory control’ which is so critical to future academic focus and success). A recent study monitored over 5,000 children and found that for toddlers, every additional hour of solo playtime per day resulted in an average 5% improvement in their self-regulation skills by age 7.

More than that, the imagination is the stage on which they build their understanding about the world. It’s a curriculum they set entirely for themselves, naturally, effortlessly, and it’s all the human learning equipment they need.

Kids are masters of attention. They just don’t always attend to what we think they should.

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p.s. did you know you can’t actually multi-task? Your brain switches between activity, papering over the gaps to make it seem like a constant stream, losing brain power as you go - a productivity loss of up to 40% and the brain-function equivalent of being drunk! The term multi-tasking was developed to describe computer function in the 1960s, its not for humans (and p.p.s even the computers can’t do it!).

And now some morsels of delight:

• One of our hands-down most beloved book series - Dory Fantasmagory by Abby Hanlon - has a new sequel! Pre-order book no.6 or catch up here!

• A new competition for young authors - pass it on to any writers aged 11 - 14!

• Some dreamy sky collages from artist Alex Hyner via kottke.org

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Happy weekend,

Laura x

It all feels so unoriginal - cliched hero/ villain stuff, obvious copying from their favourite authors.

It’s full of the latest fads - salacious romance and imperial battles; swooning over Byron, Wellington and Napoleon having it out. You know, the stuff tweens love.

Wait, Napoleon? Yes you read that right because GUESS WHAT you’re a parent in 1834 and this is Emily Brontë’s diary and you’ve just dismissed a future literary icon.

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We tend to be more critical of children’s writing than anything else. I noticed it talking to parents when I started Fabled. We’re quick to dismiss things - even if not aloud - as unoriginal.

Why?

Artists are allowed, and encouraged, to sketch, doodle and copy. We call it practice. We even celebrate the results, putting those sweet first scribbles up on the fridge.

Why not allow the same scraps, sketches and copying in their storytelling? Unfinished sentences and chapters, derivative Frozen/ Paw-Patrol/ Wimpy Kid mash-ups, it’s all welcome. Let’s put those up on the fridge too!

It’s not just how we learn and find our voice, it is art in itself.

Think of the oldest storytelling we know - myths, fairy-tales, the Odyssey, the Bible. It’s all unashamedly samey, and with good reason. Human lives are pretty samey! Recognising the story of what it is to be human in every other story of humans is the very stuff of art. It’s the part that makes the heart swell.

So embrace the copies. Maybe try some yourself (note to self!).

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And now, this week’s morsels of delight (+ one of madness):

• Humans are amazing - Canada has a glow-in-the-dark two dollar coin.

• Humans are insane - this was a real-life ‘Despicable Me’: a 1958 plan that to nuke the moon. Carl Sagan helped, and it got pretty far, all to boost morale (!)

• We’ve been on a board game roll lately, I love Dad Suggests for tips (great picture book reccs too) - here’s his list of best board games for kids by age.

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Happy weekend and here’s to make believing better,

Laura x