LBPL CONNECT
CELEBRATE MOTHER'S DAY WITH LBPL

LBPL is celebrating Mother’s Day this week in a special newsletter edition dedicated to our favorite women. First up, Mr. Carl hosts a Mother’s Day storytime for the whole family, featuring songs, story, and a craft! After watching this, we think you all will be inspired to create handmade cards for your mom. Stay tuned to LBPL social media for the release of another Mother’s Day storytime premiere on Sunday from Miss Janine.
MAKE TIME!
If our storytime feature fired up your passion for crafting (and we think it did), our latest installment of Make Time will take you to the next level. This week, Studio Guide Richard demonstrates a Japanese book binding technique and shows you how to create your own bound journal. Hint: your mom might like her own journal, too!
WE RECOMMEND

This week, we recommend mothers sit back, relax, and enjoy a great book. Here are a few selections to get you started, all available on Overdrive.
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
This memoir explores the meaning of family as the author embraces her adopted family while also searching for her birth family and experiencing the birth of her own child. It explores sisterhood, race in America, adoption, and so much more.

That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam
Overwhelmed with new motherhood, Rebecca Stone hires a black nurse as her nanny and the two women become close, raising Rebecca’s son together. But when Priscilla unexpectedly dies in childbirth, Rebecca steps up to adopt her baby, and soon finds herself raising two sons, both of whom she loves equally but who will be treated differently because of the color of their skin.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
For fans of The Joy Luck Club and Big Little Lies, this story of four generations of Korean immigrants in Japan offers both a sweeping family portrait alongside plenty of drama and intrigue.

Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou
The moving story of Maya Angelou’s relationship with her mother is shared here, in a book that traces the evolution of their bond and the opportunities for healing and reconciliation they found in the journey.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
A hospital visit brings together an estranged mother-daughter pair who grapple with the trauma of the past in order to understand the present.

Dear Girls by Ali Wong
Ali Wong shares letters to her daughters, covering everything they need to know in life, like the unpleasant details of dating, how to be a working mom in a male-dominated profession, and how she trapped their dad. Heartfelt and hilarious.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle
A memoir from the author of Love Warrior is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live.
FROM THE LBPL ARCHIVES

The tradition of wearing carnations on Mother’s Day is thought to have begun on the holiday’s first major celebration in 1908, when Mother’s Day creator/advocate Anna Jarvis reportedly distributed 500 of the flowers at her deceased mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia.

By the time the holiday was officially recognized in 1914, carnations had become firmly established as the unofficial flower of the celebration. The color symbolism of Mother’s Day carnations developed over the years, with people wearing a pink carnation if their mother was still alive and a white one if their mother was deceased.
In 1918, as this article notes, Long Beach sent 10,000 Mother’s Day carnations to the troops training at Camp Kearny—an army base near San Diego established in 1917 to prepare soldiers for the battlefields of World War I Europe— so each soldier could have “a token of love, the wearing of which will bring sons closer to their mothers, wherever they may be, during that day and give them new determination to so live that their lives will honor the mothers whose prayers ascend for them daily.”
The Daily Telegram, April 30, 1918  
GET BACK TO YOUR ROOTS

Celebrating Mother's Day got us thinking about mothers. And grandmothers. And family. And finally, family history! If this sounds familiar, turn to the LBPL Digital Library and check out Ancestry , an online resource to help you trace your family tree. A family tree can take you back through generations, unlocking the story of YOU with sources such as censuses, vital records, immigration records, family histories, military records, court and legal documents, directories, photos, and maps. This resource is typically only available for in-library use but through the end of May, you can access Ancestry from home with your LBPL library card .
Long Beach Public Library | LBPL.ORG