The Durango Public Library is kicking off its summer reading program today. This includes a party for teens 2-4 p.m. at the library. To cut down on paper usage, the library has moved its reading log system online. To register go to http://www.durangopubliclibrary.org/screens/srp.html.

The Ignacio Community Library also launches its summer reading program with registration until 3 p.m. today or any day after that at the library. The program runs through Aug. 3 and includes various events. For more information, call 563-9287, go to www.ignaciolibrary.org, or pick up a library newsletter around town. 

The Bayfield library kicks off its summer reading program on Tuesday, June 9. Registration begins at 10 a.m. and continues at the library through July. A kick-off party for teens and tweens takes place 5-7 p.m. Tuesday. For more information, call the library at 884-2222 or go to www.pineriverlibrarydistrict.org.

While our children are still a year or two away from organized sports, as the offspring of a former competitive gymnast and a former competitive snowboarder — in sports-crazy Durango, no less — it is undoubtedly in the mail. 

Part of me is eager to see just what activity captures their imagination. But part of me recalls my own injury-filled history with sports and feels trepidation. I started gymnastics at 6 years and felt I had found nirvana. The week I learned a round-off, backhand-spring I came home and did them over and over in our living room until I was exhausted. It was as if my body had found the manifestation of what it was made to do. And the coaches cooed over my rapid progress. Then one day, doing one of those hand-springs that by then felt second nature, I got sloppy. Instead of absorbing the impact, my elbow dislocated. The pain was intense, but soon forgotten. After a couple months, I was back at it. Several months later, it happened again. That time, I was put under general anesthetic to relocate it and was in a cast for about a month. The doctor said I should take a year off gymnastics to let the ligaments strengthen. I was devastated. I took ballet and tap in the interim but neither of them stirred in me the passions that gymnastics did. When the year was up, I insisted on going back.

But something had changed. Though I stuck with it for 5 years after that, until I was 15, fear of reinjury haunted me, and my hesitancy hurt my performance. Ironically, my worst injury came from the sport I took up after that: cheerleading. A fall from a pyramid shattered my ankle and left me with pins that remain there to this day. It’s become prematurely arthritic, and I put my husband on notice that we’ll be buying me a new one as soon as they become available.

In recent years, light has been shown on the growing risk kids face from overuse injuries because of the younger and younger ages at which they are specializing in a specific sport. This was the topic of a book, Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids by Mark Hyman. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers some recommendations on preventing injury in this article. Various sources mention rotating activities to give stressed muscles and joints a chance to recover. 

In the end, the benefits to having kids participate in sports are many and well documented. And I firmly believe they instill a life-long dedication to fitness. But keeping sight of the importance of enjoyment in it all is likely to not only prevent burn out, but guard against serious injuries that could hinder them throughout adulthood.

On Memorial Day I tried with varying degrees of success to listen over the din of toddler chatter to this interview on NPR with food writer Matthew Amster-Burton about his book, Hungry Monkey, on adventures in eating with a young child. What I heard was highly interesting. At first I thought it was going to be another cookbook with sneaky ways to get your kid to eat vegetables. Instead, I soon learned, he was arguing against the whole idea that vegetables are that important, making something of a culinary counterpoint to Super Baby Food — that ubiquitous tome that approaches infant nutrition with a scientific rigor that only a Tour de France racer could appreciate. Amster-Burton seems to be saying that parents should worry less about nutritional charts and more about fostering food awareness and curiosity, even when it comes to sugar. “If you’re brave enough to let it be, it’s kind of self-regulating,” he said. “Efforts to restrict sugar in kids tend to backfire and tend to make kids look for sugar anytime the parents aren’t looking.”

This especially caught my attention because my second child has shown not the slightest inclination to eat the gruel (i.e. pureed lentil, spinach, yogurt and tahini) that I regularly fed my first child. This kid literally turns his nose up to most baby food but claws at our plates during dinner. Amster-Burton’s interview gave voice to my own philosophical shift from a conventional approach to childhood nutrition to something more Montessori, or self-directed. I’ve come to see that by placing “healthful” over “satisfying” we risk laying the foundation for a conflicted relationship with food that manifests itself in adulthood as the vicious binge-diet circle that so many America’s find themselves in. Besides, the foods that I detest today are the ones I was forced to eat as a child (i.e. sweet potatoes). I didn’t really make peace with food until my 20s after a stint in Mediterranean Spain taught me that eating healthy isn’t about counting calories or fat but rather cultivating a varied palate that revels in each flavorful bite. Meals there were a celebration of food rather than a guilty indulgence, furtively inhaled. But when it came to my baby, I suppose the fear that any nutritional misstep would leave him disadvantaged for life led me to concoct creations that were less like meals and more like MREs. And, for a while, he ate them, poor kid. Until one day he tasted the forbidden fruit, in this case ice cream, and the scales fell from his eyes. These days I mostly let his appetite be the guide. Some days it will shockingly prompt him to eat a bowlful of broccoli while other it will hanker for cookies and only cookies. On balance, he gets what he needs. And his lucky brother will most likely be spared the joys of “super porridge.”

Knowing that we’ve got some readers out there, thought I would post this:

KSUT Public Radio has partnered with the Bayfield library for the Four Corners: One Book monthly reading selection. For June, the club will be reading The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley. 

Huntley is a Durango author who calls the book “accidental.”  She and her husband lived in Kosovo for a year as volunteers after the war.  The book is a result of her time with the people she met and the things she saw.

From 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, June 18, Huntley will discuss her book at the Bayfield Library, 395 Bayfield Center Drive. Donations are requested. Stay tuned for on-air interviews and more.

Four Corners: One Book is a monthly book club that tries to involve the entire Four Corners community. KSUT partners with different bookstores and libraries each month and asks the community to contribute to the conversation online at http://www.ksut.org/onebookfourcorners.html.

For a week now I’ve had the recollection of an interview with author Ayelet Waldman knocking about in my head. Waldman, who wrote the recently released memoir “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Graces,” sparked a controversy four years ago when she wrote in an essay for the New York Times that she loved her husband more than her children. In her May 5 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, she talked about her and her husband’s decision to abort a child that amniocentesis showed to have the chromosomal defect Trisomy 18. The decision, she said, rested on her husband’s recognition that if the child was born severely disabled, it would likely destroy their marriage. 

Her account was gut-wrenching and reminded me of someone known to me who is getting a divorce and has a severely disabled child. The child’s condition, which requires in-home nursing care most of the day, was undoubtedly a factor in the couple’s split. But this isn’t the inevitable result with a disabled child. A study released in 2008 actually found divorce rates were slightly lower among parents of children with Down syndrome. The challenges, it seems, draw them closer together.

Waldman’s story made me think how, as recently as my mother’s generation, little was know about babies until they were born. Now modern technology allows us to know and see so much more  – even a 3-D image of the baby’s facial features. When everything is OK, parents can revel over the ensuing months in the great joy of knowing that they have a healthy baby. But when it’s not, parents are faced with agonizing choices that will change their lives forever. This is the beauty and burden of knowing. For the former, we end up paying with the latter.