Jeanne Pitre Soileau vividly presents children’s voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children’s lives. What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second-grade boys and girls at a Catholic school, another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression. Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

Snagging jobs as assistant cooks at a camp crawling with weird individuals, Lucas and Justin decide to get even with "The Blob," the camp leader, by grinding up roadkill burgers. Original.

Gathers children's rhymes and parodies which deal with sex, pregnancy, illness, death, bodily functions, and television

In a day when rules are being rewritten, guilt has come up with a bad rap. Many parents rush to emancipate their children from such troubling apprehensions—and the results are telling. This coming-of-age memoir traces the challenges of a fatherless boy growing up amidst the folly of his peers and the ever-present predators who cannot be wished away. Faced with the reality of evil, the theological concept of Original Sin looms large. This book is an observation that trouble often springs from circumstances that look pretty benign. It's the prerequisite of every murder trial, that accidents happen from a confluence of events and decisions that seem innocuous but end badly. We who live in the world are wounded by the same evil that sociologists explain away. Yet part of adulthood is the willingness to call things what they are. When Jesus cast out demons, he first asked their names, because naming something is to see it clearly. We must render verdicts. Sound judgment is a forgotten virtue, and failure to judge will leave us accountable to our children for the weeds that have grown in the course of our neglect, as evil that goes unchecked is sure to grow.

Front cover: A book of rhymes, games, jokes, stories, secret languages, beliefs and camp legends, for parents, grandparents, teachers, counselors and all adults who were once children.

“Awjeezma!” was the universal dissent, whined—repeatedly if necessary—at an unreasonable mother who wanted the vacuuming done now-not-next-year or a pile of encrusted dishes washed or the sputtering heater refueled. “Awjeezma! Do I gotta?” “If I have to tell you one more time—” “Awjeezma! Awright! Jeez!” Through the telling of his own madcap childhood, David Benjamin pays homage to the exuberance of countless untamed boys who grew up in Middle America in the 1950s. Whether he’s stalking frogs through the bogs of Tomah, Wisconsin, playing four-kid baseball with his bothersome little brother and two favorite cousins, or sneaking into the theater to watch Saturday afternoon Westerns, Benjamin is the kind of little kid who eagerly would have fallen in with the redoubtable Tom Sawyer. His tales—including one about a truly sorry incident with Snappy, the snapping turtle, and another about a run-in with a particularly fiendish squirrel—are by turns hysterically funny, caustic, aggrieved, and movingly sincere. Traversing the nooks and crannies of kidhood, from ballfields to swimming holes, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked captures a moment in twentieth-century American life, as Benjamin magically recalls the myriad scrapes, intrepid adventures, and wanderlust that once made childhood such an exhilarating enterprise.

The Giggles Are Gonna Get You! Bolt the doors and get out of earshot when kids discover A Bad Case of the Giggles. One of the funniest collections of children's poetry, this book includes creations from some of the most entertaining children's poets, including Kenn Nesbitt, Bruce Lansky, Eric Ode, Bill Dodds, Joyce Armor, Linda Knaus, Eileen Spinelli, Robert Scotellaro, Rebecca Kai Dotlich and more.