The Mitten

The Mitten, adapted and illustrated by Jan Brett, is a simple and charming story about Nicki, who persuades his grandmother to knit him snow-white mittens. Out exploring in the snowy woods, he drops a mitten. Along comes a mole, burrowing through the snow, and the mole decides that the mitten looks like a snug cozy place for a rest. He's joined one at a time by several forest friends, including a hedgehog, an owl, a hare, and a bear. Finally a little mouse wriggles his way in, right on top of bear's nose. ACHOO!

The story is sweet and simple. I've read it over and over since the lovely lady was small and I'm not tired of reading it yet. Even better than the story are Brett's lovely and charming illustrations. The mitten-shaped windows to the side of each page develop the story beyond the words on the page and help young children predict what's to come on the next page. It's absolutely charming, one of our favorite picture book read-alouds.
Brett's site has some lovely crafts and activities to go along with reading The Mitten, including animal masks, a lovely letter about the creation of the book, a coloring page, instructions on how to draw a bear, and much much more!


The Mitten made a perfect jumping off point for the Bridgeway House Theater troupe, though Brett's tale has no fairies, trains, or tornadoes. Read about the play based on The Mitten and put on by a cast of children with autism here (or click on The Mitten tag at the bottom of this post).

Curtain Call

"Am I Famous, Mom?"

The newspaper article on Sunday's Bridgeway House production of The Mitten (read my glowing post about the play here first if you haven't yet) was in today's newspaper, the feature article on the front page of the Arts section. I was delighted when I saw that the article was out. I showed lovely lady that her play was in the paper, a nice long article. I sat down to read it right away.

And....hmm.

When I'd finished reading, I felt let down. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I didn't feel inspired any more. The article was very long and detailed, well-written, had good photos of the children, and ended nicely. But still....

It wasn't until later this afternoon I realized why. After dropping off lovely lady at her girls group, I chatted with the mothers of lovely lady's two friends who'd also been in the play, and found that they'd felt the same way-- somehow disappointed but unable to really express why. Driving home, it dawned on me that we hadn't seen our daughters, our lovely, joyful, beautiful daughters in the article. The reporter, a very nice and gentle man, kind and well-meaning, had walked in expecting to see disabled kids, and that's what he saw. So that's what he wrote. Our children disappeared behind their labels and behaviors. We got to read about the difficulties and the behaviors and the tears instead of how the kids persevered and practiced anyway. Was the play a challenge? You bet. Darn tootin' it was, just ask the exhausted director and the parents who had to help their kids hold it together during and after play practice. My lovely lady had an utter sobbing meltdown over changing her clothes after the last dress rehearsal.

Because the play went well, Mr. Keefer wrote that they "played above their game." But they didn't. They really didn't. This was no miracle. The cast of The Mitten responded to the audience, to the fact that it was the real thing, to the energy in the theater...just like the cast of any play anywhere. It was their moment to shine, and they knew it, so they shone. Because they are children first and foremost. Great kids. Funny kids. Charming kids. Who happen to have autism.

I did like this part, near the very end (the lecture happened during the run-through, not during the actual performance):

The show was sweet and funny. But was it art? This was, after all, nothing but a half-hour grade school performance. People like to gush about "risky" art, even when the risks are utterly conventional. This was a true theater of risk. No one involved had a clue what would happen on Sunday afternoon, from the kids and their parents to the director. "The Mitten," in that sense, was a grand piece of conceptual artistry, raising questions of identity and difference without a moment of preachiness. When Annie stormed off stage to lecture that hapless mom, she broke the fourth wall of theater more honestly than any postmodernist playwright ever has. We are all part of the show, the moment said, no matter how much we might prefer to sit back and watch.

~Bob Keefer, “Opening Act”, The Register Guard, February 22, 2007.

I liked the online slide show better. It's got lots of smiles and fun pictures. There's an absolutely stunning picture of my lovely bunny near the end, holding her roses. I'll try to link it here, but it may not work. We'll see.

The Mitten

A child with autism in the family. When people learn that we have a child with a disability, they typically think of challenges and hardships. And those certainly exist. Difficult behaviors, obsessive and repetitive conversations and play, difficulty with abstract concepts and reasoning are all part of our daily life with our autistic lovely lady. When one hears of a child with a disability like autism, triumph and inspiration aren't exactly the first things that spring to mind.

Today, through Bridgeway House, a local agency serving children with autism, lovely lady and several other children on the autism spectrum put on a play loosely based on the picture book The Mitten, Jan Brett's adaptation of a Ukranian folktale. The production was a rousing success. A local company filled a grant allowing Bridgeway House to get rehearsal and performance time in beautiful new community theater, The Wildish Theater in downtown Springfield. Each child got to choose his own character, so the story expanded to include two fairies, a tornado and a train, in addition to the usual forest creatures. The children had been rehearsing since December, the costumes were fun, the theater was packed, the story came off perfectly, and the actors (and actresses!) received roses and rousing applause at the end.

I'd watched most of the rehearsals and was expecting to sit back and enjoy the show with a smile on my face. I didn't expect that for most of the show, I'd be be near tears. The production has been followed from start to finish by a reporter from the local paper. I'd arrived early today to help with set-up, and was sitting in the front row trying to fix lovely lady's fluffy white tail (a feather boa) onto her white pants. He sat next to me and asked if he could do an informal interview. "Sure," I said. We chatted about lovely lady, the play, the rehearsal where she fell down the steps. Then he asked me the questions that had me near tears, the good (but embarrassing) kind of tears: "Tell me about how she's changed over the years," and "What do you see in her future?"

This is the second time in the last two weeks I've been asked a question that really made me consider lovely lady's past and present-- the first was in a videotaped research interview for an autism treatment study, and the interviewer asked "What would you like to go back and say to all of the people who knew your daughter when she was first diagnosed?" To my credit, today I didn't break down crying like I did on the video. I managed a watery-eyed answer. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what I said, even, because I was trying not to cry. And as I sat waiting for the play to start, I couldn't stop thinking about how lovely lady has exceeded my fears, my expectations....maybe not my dreams, but when she was four and spinning in circles repeatedly reciting dialogue from Disney's 101 Dalmatians, I certainly didn't expect that I'd eventually see her hopping around on a real stage in a real theater in white bunny ears arguing over a giant mitten.

"Tell me about how she's changed over the years." She's gone from a child caught in her own world to a young lady, quirky and lovely, gladly living in ours.

"What would you like to go back and say to all of the people who knew your daughter when she was first diagnosed?" Look at her now. I wish I could take her to all of those people who said she'd need visual schedules and extra supports all her life, and say "Look what she can do!" I wish I could take her to all of the people who told me, "Look at all the time she's spending in therapy. She needs time to be a little girl too." I'd say "Look at my daughter now. Because we spent so much time teaching her and pulling her into her life, she's able to be a lovely young girl."

"What do you see in her future?" For the first time ever, I can honestly say, "I don't know." I have no idea because her life has opened up. She wants to be a teacher, an artist, a mom. She may always need minimal supports, but it's likely she'll be able to work and to live by herself and to live her own life. She's going to be able to participate in her life and pursue her dreams.

So it's not the play itself that turned me into such a weepy sap. All parents sitting in the audience of their child's play are proud and excited, and rightly so. And, well, you all know I'm kind of a weepy sap anyway, so I'd probably have been a little teary no matter what. But all of those challenges lovely lady has encountered make her victories doubly sweet. A hundredfold sweet. I watch my other children and marvel at how they seem to sail through life's challenges, learning and growing seemingly without effort. And I celebrate this autistic lovely lady's victories with tears because they have been so hard won, because she and I have worked hard and battled to get to where she is now, and because my worst fears have not come to pass. She can carry on a conversation. She has friends, real friends, of all different abilities. She can pursue her dreams.

Along with the challenges and worries and hardships come blessings. Not silver lining blessings. Real, genuine, life-is-sweet blessings. Life is good. Really, really good.