We picked up Susan Pearson’s Who Swallowed Harold on a whim. The Five-Year-Old’s whim to be precise. She thought the picture on the front cover looked funny. I thought that was as good a reason as any. What a happy surprise this book was!
Although The Five-Year-Old loves a good Pajama Day at home, I get cranky if we string too many of them (read: >1) in a row. But there are only so many times you can go to Capron Park Zoo, Jamaica Pond, the Boston Public Garden, Moose Hill, or even the Boston Museum of Science. Consequently, I’m always looking for good day trips with The Five-Year-Old, and with summer coming up, I was pretty happy to find Outdoors with Kids: Boston at our local bookstore last week.
I hate brushing my daughter’s hair. I’m not alone in this. My daughter hates it when I brush her hair too. Sadly, The Five-Year-Old’s hair is super-fine and extra tangle-ly, which means that every morning we have to deal with a major case of bed head before packing her off to preschool.
Although you would hardly know it from the silence on the site today, we are still reading very good books here at Caterpickles Central. We highly recommend Coyote Steals the Blanket by Janet Stevens. We love it. In fact, we are so very busy loving it we haven’t had any time to write a proper review of it.
Our mini-course in animal folk tales continued this week with Jane Yolen’s Meow: Cat Stories from Around the World. Yolen’s collection mixes familiar nursery rhymes and Aesop fables with lesser known stories from India, Burma, Oman, and Thailand. Within its pages, you and your child will discover why tiger is angry at cat, why cat always lands on her feet, why having one very good trick is better than having dozens of poor ones, and most importantly, why cats and mice don’t always get along.
As you may remember, after last week’s unfortunate fairy tale incident, we decided to give folk tales a try. How the Guinea Fowl Got Her Spots was an excellent and encouraging first pick for this new strategy.
Last week I picked up a copy of The McElderry Book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales for The Four-Year-Old from our local library. I chose this book in part because of its attractive and not too scary illustrations, the relatively simple language and brevity of the stories inside, and the fact that the cover copy implied that this edition had been developed specifically for reading aloud.
If I could give a book six stars, I’d give them to M. Christina Butler’s Snow Friends. My daughter made me read it three times in a row last night, and still couldn’t get enough (at one point I buried it under the stack of library books, while asking her to choose between two others for the next story–she dug through the stack, pulled this one out and pushed it onto my lap).
My favorite book as a child was without a doubt the Burgess Bird Book for Children. I read my copy of it so many times I wore out the spine. Reading the book to my daughter has reminded me of how much fun this book is to read.
Growing up in a big city, like I did, you can easily feel disconnected from nature. Turns out growing up in small town Massachusetts, like The Four-Year-Old, is not that much better. The world around us still feels pretty well-groomed and not terribly wild. Even if we do have a rabbit living under the shed in our backyard. That’s just one of the reasons I was thrilled to find Nona Estrin’s In Season: A Natural History of the New England Year.
CATERPICKLES 