A mountain of books

We went to the States with five suitcases - three of them empty. What did we bring back? Books, books, books! C, Will and I each built our own mountain, though as C said, she's willing to share with me if I will share with her. Most of my stack came from our old collection, which I bring over bit by bit each year, but I did bring some newbies (marked * below) home too.

Now that the dust has settled and jet lag disappeared, I'm on a great rereading kick and just finished Treasure Island last night. Have you read it lately? When I was a child I was a bit terrified by the book, and the pictures made me shiver with delighted fear (illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, the paintings tell a vivid story by themselves). But after reading all the Patrick O'Brian books, and the even more gruesome Matty Graves novels, Treasure Island seems much more pacific to me these days and I only had to turn the lights up high a few times in my midnight readings.

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Middlemarch Part 1 & 2, George Eliot
Mr. Darcy's Dream*, Elizabeth Aston
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Agent Zigzag, Ben Macintyre*
Pon Top Edisto
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, Ellen Gilchrist
A Working Girl Can't Win, Deborah Garrison
The English Patient, Michael Ondattje
Drawing for Children, Mona Brookes
Audubon, Robert Penn Warren
Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Swan Lake, Mark Helprin
An Incomplete Revenge, Jacqueline Winspear*
Johns Island*
Burning Bright, Tracy Chevalier*
Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Riverside Chaucer
Treasury of Art Nouveau Design & Ornament

The Play's the Thing

 

Or, at least, the puppet theater is.

One of my favorite holiday pictures - C dressed in her Christmas finery plays with her puppet theater for the first time (thanks Ellen!).

Since that first act, she has expanded her repertoire from Little Red Riding Hood to some of her favorite books and characters. Who knew Jemima Puddle Duck could be set to marionettes? And when Misty of Chincoteague met the Princess Elzebeta it was a touching moment indeed.

We live in the land of marionettes, so I'm looking forward to expanding the cast and we're drawing up more backdrops too (mountain scenary just doesn't give the right salt marsh feel to Misty's performances and we'll definitely need an island scene for any pirate skits!).

Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne would make mince meat out of these guys

We've entered a new phase of the project outside my window - an earth digging one. I've spent hours watching as the digger politely taps away at the hill and J snuffles on my shoulder. After a few days of this, Caroline and I dug out Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so we could read about our favorite shovelers again (and marvel at how fast they dug that cellar).

C paid closer attention to the story this time than when she first met the book. When we finished she worried about Mike and Mary Anne, stuck in the cellar for all time. We talked about their friends visiting, and Mike getting out for a walk every now and then. All this talk of walks inspired me to start getting out of the house too, despite an incessantly crying baby and well-meaning ladies who think babies should stay inside until they start kindergarten. But that's a story for tomorrow.

A new chapter

Caroline and I are reading her first chapter book - Charlotte’s Web, a present from my brother. She wonders where the pictures are, but every night asks for more. We begin by skimming through what we've already read, looking at pictures and talking about what happened yesterday, the day before. Then we start reading the next chapter. Sometimes, while I’m reading, she’ll sit down beside her children in their bed on the floor and pat them, making sure they are happy and falling asleep. (The children are small stuffed animals, the bed a shoe box. They are wrapped in a cloth diaper.) Usually by the end of the first chapter she is ready to jump on the bed and on me to bounce out her energy. After a few jumps I grab her and we start reading again.

I’ve worked on the voices and she listens carefully when I get to Wilbur or Charlotte. I don’t have a good Templeton voice - Paul Lynde’s voice echoes but I can’t get its whiney tones right. Uncle Homer's voice is my favorite and I dig out all the gravel I can when I read his lines. E.B. White is a writer who knew how to edit. Every word is placed right and I read them all. It is a pleasure to do so.

Tonight when we finish our two chapters she roots through her bookcase for two more books - picture books from when she was a baby, Pat the Bunny and Just a Snowy Day. She reads them to me, and shows me each picture. She asks for five more minutes to read, so we kiss and I pull up her covers and say goodnight.

Brown Bear redux

Did I mention that Caroline is telling her books to us now? She’s been working on this for a bit - first lip syncing as I read to her, then echoing every line or jumping ahead to reach a favorite word or phrase before I get there. Sometimes during the day you can hear her rehearsing: "Do you like my hat? No, I do not like your hat. Good-bye! Good-bye!"

We often read the same book three times in one night. This is not always fun, especially if you and the Cat and the Hat don’t get along so well. So now I say that third time through is Caroline’s turn and hand over the book. Sometimes she’ll go for this, and ramble through the story ad libbing as she turns each page. She’s a perfectionist though and eventually she gets dissastisfied. In the middle of her account she’ll decide it‘s time to sing songs, or do something else more entertaining, or at least less work.

Then we tried Brown Bear. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. is a simple story book with beautiful illustrations and a catchy bit of repeated chatter: "(Brightly colored animal), what do you see?" "I see (another brightly colored animal) looking at me." Caroline loved it when she was a little baby, but we hadn't read it for nearly a year when I pulled it out again a few nights ago.

And discovered that the book is great for reading by heart because "what you see" is always the animal on the next page. Brown Bear sees Red Bird and Red Bird see Yellow Duck, and Caroline can easily keep going through blue horse, green frog, and on to gold fish with no problem. This is satisfying.

With Brown Bear, Caroline doesn’t let forgetting her lines phase her. The first time she read almost all the way through with no problems until she reached nearly the last page and realized she had no idea who the lady with glasses might be. She blinked twice, renamed the teacher "Green Shirt," and moved on with a flourish. Finished, she cheered in victory, gave me a high five and ran to the other room to tell Will, "Dada I did it!"

Now at night I ask her to read me Brown Bear, Brown Bear all by herself. She’ll go for it once or twice, but by the third time she’ll tell me, "Okay Mommie, how about a new one, this book looks good too don’t you think?" And I’ll say yes, and stretch out on the bed with my hands behind my head to hear the next rendition of stories from Caroline.

Snowy Saturday

Snow has fallen all day, and the sidewalks and streets are covered. Tomorrow, if we’re all recovered from a cold that snuck into our flat, we’re going to take Caroline out for a ride on her sled. It has been waiting for her since just after the last big snowfall, when I bought it as insurance against too many weeks of city slush (sleds, like umbrellas, seem to keep precipitation at bay).

In the meantime, we have stacked books up like LPs on an old turntable, waiting their turn to be read. Caroline likes to stick to one author at a time, so we read first through Seuss, then Boynton and the Corduroy books before we get to the singletons. When it all gets too sedentary, Caroline shows off her tumbling act on our big bed - one somersault after another and then takes a few loops around the flat until she is back in the kitchen and a song catches her in mid step and she has to stop to dance to its beat before she begins her loops again, or stops for another book.

Filed under: winter toddler_tales Seuss music

Dr. Seuss as Mother Goose

"Oh deah, oh deah, I cannot heah, will you please come over neah, will you please look in my eah?" said the small one to Will the other day, in a croaky stilted voice. He dropped the magazine he was reading and got on the floor to look at her. “Julia! There’s something wrong with Caroline’s ear!! Get over here quick!“

But I just answered, "Say, look a bird is in your ear! But he is out. So have no fear!“* and Caroline laughed and practiced her line again.

*As says Seuss in One Fish Two Fish, if you’re a little rusty on your kid books these days.

Filed under: toddler_tales nursery_rhymes words

Cookies are cool

Caroline and I had our first hanging out together, mother and daughter chilling and contemplating the ceiling, late evening chat last night. We’d spent the last three hours together, C keeping me company in the kitchen while I cooked, then gobbling up the chicken I accidentally caramelized in apple juice and sunflower oil (a happy accident), I keeping her from drowning in the bathtub and pouring out all of Will’s shampoo, entertaining her through toothbrushing & flossing, pajama assembling and milk pouring. Then we read, about fifteen books but especially her current favorite Mem Fox book, Sleepy Bears. That we read twice, singing along to the rhymes.

After that we sang some more, “Jingle Bells,“ “Sleep sleep“ and “Little Birdies“, Caroline drank her milk and then I was going to leave until she said, „Lie this, Mommie, lie this.“ (this = there). So I did, just for a bit, and since Will wasn’t home yet. And we looked up at the ceiling and I hummed a little more and then Caroline raised herself up, hand underneath chin, looked at me seriously and said, „Mommie, cookies are cool.“

I didn’t understand at first what she meant, but she said it several times, and when I understood, I had to agree. Then I gave her an imaginary cookie, took one myself and we lay back and crunched for awhile, until she gave me an apple (apfel she said) and we ate that too and then I gave her a kiss, said night night and left her to sleep.

Rhymes with, looks like…

Orange! C says, triumphantly pointing out the orange table in Kleine Bär. Broon Bear. Blue boat. Red shoe, purple balloon. Everything this week is color and while she is showing off her yellow jacket to me before we go out on a walk, I am marveling at how she learned colors, in English, despite her lazy parents. I’m guessing the credit lies with one of her babysitters, Lucie, who is part of our family of wonderful sitters and the most creative of them all. Sometimes I take notes on the songs and games that she teaches Caroline, so that we have something to do on rainy Saturdays when C gets tired of my favorite rainy day past time - creating personalized coloring books (it doesn’t require any talent I don’t normally possess except complete self mortification – usefully stocked up so that I don’t care when my carefully rendered drawing of Christopher Robin gets annulled by magic marker for the third time in five minutes).

Our relationship with books has changed generally, because Caroline likes to help out now, listening carefully until it’s her turn and then jumping in with the rhyme or the key word on a page. Dr. Seuss is great for this, and I’ve become a fan of his nearly indestructible board books. Mr Brown Likes to Moo, The Foot Book and There’s a Wocket in My Pocket all have Caroline rhyming or even singing along (Try Mr Brown set to "Turkey in the Straw"). Sometimes she guesses the rhyme when we’re reading a new book and it is always fun to hear her guesses. There’s a Nink in the... "Pink! "

Filed under: toddler_tales words Seuss creative