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Yesterday, we took a quick bike trip across town to one of the Little Free Libraries — Ess on a tag-along bike, only one wheel to it and a rigid attachment to my seat post. The season of drought has partially lifted and the green leaves in the gentle late summer sun and the blue sky… I don’t think there’s room to improve on the lovely weather we had. We looked for bunnies and sang out when we saw them, Ess got harassed by a barking dog at a stoplight, we huffed and puffed up hills… the usual bike stuff.
Some library books we’ve been reading to Ess recently:
Herman and Rosie is a jazz and NYC-themed love story and when Ess wanted a story read to her in the middle of the night, that’s the one she picked. I think she picked it because it’s long for a children’s book, but it still has a nice gentle pace for late-night.
Here’s a collage of the covers of the books we currently have checked out from the library:
Ess enjoyed the narwhal and penguin fact books very much. She gets super-interested in different animals; penguins a few weeks ago. It has been ducks for the past few days.
“I’m tinier than a pinky nail. I’m so tiny tiny tiny in your hand. Wow.”
This is Ess “reading” from her Bones book, one of her favorite books she has ever checked out from the library. The full title: Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Animals written by Gabrielle Balkan and illustrated by Sam Brewster.
That’s Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie dePaola.
Another round of library books Ess is reading — she is rapidly moving beyond board books and into these easy-reader ones. Basic plot seems to hold her attention now, and we see the storylines incorporated into her imaginative play.
I was out at continuing education tonight, learning about our current opioid epidemic, and I got home just before Essie’s bedtime. She and Mykala were upstairs in our bedroom, reading some stories when I got in the door. I ran up the stairs and I could hear this little voice going “dada! dada!” and when I opened the door, Ess ran up to me and gave me this GIANT hug. Then she asked me to read her this library book:
I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:
Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:
From the Paris Review’s famous interview of E. B. White, 1969:
Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.
“Todd!” Ess knows what Todd Parr’s books look like.
When we realized it had been a year and a day since we took a video of Ess on September 14, 2015, we decided to recreate the video. Same location, same stroller, Minnesota Parent baby issue (2016). What a year!
This book is called I Know a Monkey and it is about Ess’ stuffed monkey Marge. In the book, it calls the monkey “he” but we change it to “she”.
Reading Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia.
This book has six pages—it’s one of those indestructible, untearable books, which is a good thing considering that Ess carries it with her wherever she goes. It came from Nannie’s, and Ess currently has it out on loan. It goes in the car with her, she plays with it during the day, she shares it with George, but she can’t take it in the store anymore because she isn’t great at holding on to it for long periods of time and the last thing we want is to lose it.
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