Spring Break is officially upon us, and both of my big kids, J and E have fun things going on this vacay week.

J was lucky enough to be invited to join her lifelong bestie pal N’s family in their travel to a foreign beach locale, and I hear from N’s mama via text that the girls are (not surprisingly!) having an absolute blast.

JCO & his very cute stepdaughter

As my regular blog readers know, fellow Babble blogger and Knoxvillian John Cave Osborne is one of my fave people.  JCO and I first met about 8 (or 9?) years ago, right after he had rather suddenly quit his promising corporate career, left the Pacific Northwest, and moved back to his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee to do something… different.

I have a great job. Seriously, I really have a great job. And I know it, so I never take it for granted. Every single day that I go to work, I kind of pinch myself on my way into my office because I can’t believe I get to do what I do for a living.

Of course, one of the reasons I am aware of how great my job is is because I haven’t always been this lucky. I have had some truly trying employment situations in years past. But as a working mama, I just had to suck it up and keep on doing what needed to be done. Those less than ideal jobs in my past make me extra grateful for what I’m getting to do these days.

I’m guessing that almost none of the working dads around the U.S. who are tonight getting organized to fly out to Austin in the morning for SXSW are primarily worried about not having any clean clothes to take with them.

Spike Jonze' version of Where the Wild Things Are

You had to know this was coming, right? After my previous post in which I ran down the ten BEST film adaptations of books originally written for kids and teens, it’s time to venture over to the dark side, and take a look at those unfortunate cases in which moviemakers got it mostly wrong or even ALL wrong in translating kid lit to the big screen.

The Gene Wilder movie version is THE BEST adaptation of the Roald Dahl children's book.

Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll definitely be taking my four year old daughter to see the new movie version of The Lorax. By that time, I am sure the critics will have already weighed in with their thumbs up or down reviews of this latest Seuss adaptation, but I will hold off on reading the reviews until I see the movie for myself.

I want to make my own determination as to whether the new Lorax movie lives up to the fanfare around its release, and I’m really hoping that it does because in years past, some of my very favorite movies have sprung directly out of the pages of books originally written for children or teens.

The subversive Lorax, spinning his pro-environmental propaganda

In case you are the last person in the continental U.S. who hadn’t yet heard this news, there’s a new movie version of the  Dr. Seuss classic, “The Lorax” hitting theaters tomorrow. The movie’s premiere date just happens to fall on the birthday of Theodore Geisel (AKA: Suess),  who was born on March 2 of 1904.

With all of the mainstream pop culture fanfare around the release of the new Lorax movie, it’s easy to forget that the history of the book behind the film is quite a controversial one. Yep, that’s right, “The Lorax” was and still is considered subversive, PRO-TREE propaganda by quite a few folks.

Perhaps no other group of American voters is more categorically vilified by (most of) today’s GOP candidates than those millions of women who have had abortions. And among that group of already stigmatized women, those who have committed the unforgiveable sin of having a “late term abortion” are made out to be the worst of the worst.

But that’s wrong. And unkind. And unfair.

Over at my friend Kristen Howerton’s most awesome blog, Rage Against the Minivan, she’s been running a fantastic series of guest posts from readers called “What I Want You To Know.” In the most recent one, an anonymous reader writes movingly of the unbearable, unthinkable choice with which she was faced in the 23rd week of her third pregnancy:

…the pregnancy was causing my body to shut down.  If I didn’t deliver my baby immediately, I would die.  As a mother of two small children, hearing this sent me into a horrible panic.  They wouldn’t remember me.  They wouldn’t remember me.  At 23 weeks there was no hospital that would revive the baby and my third son wasn’t going to survive.   This time, I wouldn’t be so lucky.  This time, instead of waiting for my son to come home, he wouldn’t.

This is a photo of me with Bonnie Blue, the purebred Jersey heifer I won in an essay contest sponsored by the Duck River Electric Cooperative.

I grew up in a small town in middle Tennessee called Bell Buckle. Yep, that’s really the name of my hometown. And I grew up surrounded by cows…lots and lots of cows…

To your left over there, you see 10= or 11-year-old me with one of those cows after she and I had just won the Junior Showmanship championship at the Bedford County 4-H Dairy Expo. I was super proud. Look how well I’d oiled up her little horns so she would look her very best!

Henry, before the brain injury

In the first two weeks after Henry entered the hospital, we were told that he’d suffered both major types of brain injury – traumatic and hypoxic. But that after he woke from the coma, he’d made it past the critical point. We all thought he was going to live. The online photo album I started at that time with photos from Henry’s hospital stay is still to this day titled, “Henry’s Recovery,” and I spent every moment I could in those first two weeks researching care and rehabilitation for brain injury patients, anticipating a long road back for Henry.

I just knew he could do it, and we would help him.