If you are like me, you know Patrick McDonnell mainly for his comic strip, Mutts, which records the adventures of Mooch the cat, his best friend Earl (a dog), and their human companions. But he also has several picture books, with whimsical art, simple text, and heart-warming stories to appeal to readers of all ages.
Preschooler, after wolfing down a graham cracker and a peach: Mommyo, I want something else to eat. Me: OK. What do you want? Preschooler: Oh, anything.…
At the beginning of the summer, my daughter asked me where she could go to dig for dinosaur bones. We had visited the tracks at the Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop as well as the Dinosaur Footprints at Holyoke, MA last fall, and my daughter wasn’t interested in simply going to see more footprints. She wanted bones. And she wanted to dig up least two of them, so that she could keep one for herself and give the other to the Museum of Science.
Signs posted around Jamaica Pond declare it to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace. For years, I had assumed from this that it was a man-made pond, dug under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted. In fact, the 68-acre 53-foot deep kettle pond was carved out by glaciers millions of years before there was a Boston or a Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape it.
Mother, quizzing her daughter on a new vocabulary word: “What does tropical mean, anyway?” Preschooler, unconcerned: “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a good question for Caterpickles.”
Daughter: “Daddyo?” Father: “Yes?” Daughter: “I’m going to talk to Mommyo. Mommyo, <insert question of the moment here>“
We interrupt our regular transmission of Science News to wish a very happy 138th birthday to Lee De Forest, a prolific inventor who collected hundreds of patents before he was done.
Somebody Else’s Nut Tree and Other Tales from Children is nearly unique on the Caterpickles bookshelves in that it does not contain stories written for children by adults, but stories told by children to adults. Or rather, one particular adult, Ruth Krauss.
Another in our ongoing series: What We Did This Summer. Capron Park Zoo is a beautifully maintained mini-zoo (think park with creatures) in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Walking…
Last spring, when I was experiencing an extreme case of Cape deprivation, my husband and daughter very kindly agreed to come with me on a day-trip to the Cape. We decided to visit the Sandwich Glass Museum because it was one of those things that we had wanted to see on our vacation in the Cape the previous summer, but which we had somehow never quite gotten around to. Funny how a live glass-blowing demonstration sounds more appealing on a drizzly 42 degree March day than it does on a sunny 95 degree August one.
CATERPICKLES 