E has grandmothers who are all over the place. One is in Switzerland, the other leaving tomorrow for California. And anytime anyone travels anywhere it’s time for the map. This map was E’s Christmas gift last year, and she loves it. Tell her where you’re from and she’ll commit it to memory. Ask me where I left my cell phone, and I couldn’t tell you.
The other day we talked about Grandma’s trip to Switzerland. I offered to show her my old photos from there, and she curled up beside me on the couch and started looking. Flipping through two books of photos that spanned four countries, I searched for the pictures of Lucerne and the Alps. We flipped past pictures of the Eiffel Tower, and the Pompidou Centre and she told me, again, that she wanted to go to Paris. (Her love of the City of Lights stems from her love of the Movie of Ratatouille.) We found the Swiss pictures and marveled for awhile at the giant lion carved into the stone in Lucerne, and my favorite bridge, pre-fire in my first trip to the country, post-fire and reconstruction in my last trip there. She compared the rose windows at Notre Dame to the rose windows in our church, which in my opinion, are just as lovely. We dreamed of going there again, together this time. E and Dad looked at Google Earth and zoomed in and out of the Swiss cities Grandma was visiting, tucked in between amazing mountain ranges. (We’re getting her a globe for Christmas this year.)
On the way home from dinner tonight we talked about Nana and Grandpa’s trip to California. She remembered the name of one of our friends that lives there, and the tiny pot she sent to Ella that she picked up in San Antonio in May. And as soon as we arrived home, she bounded upstairs, pulled up a chair, grabbed a marker / pointer, and showed me on the map where California was. Once she’s on a roll, she’s naming every place she can remember, even the state where her buddy from school visited last fall. I’m pretty sure she’s going to grow up to work for AAA.
I finished up some invitations last night for a dinner shower that I am organizing for a friend who is pregnant with their third child. We’ve got 19 people, 20 with me, involved, so we’re hoping to have meals for their family every other day through Thanksgiving. I’m really excited by it, I hope it runs smoothly. This might be my new baby present idea – I know the meals our best friends brought us after E was born were some of the best presents we received.
E worked on some more construction paper construction – this time branching out from the endless baseball bat cylinders she was making, to an actual ball field. I helped her lay out the field, and she taped it up, cut the bases, and drew the baseball players. Pujols is playing third base, but I won’t tell if you won’t.
And here’s what we are reading from the library this weekend. The library is just so great – it’s like a big grab bag – you never know what you are going to get. Some books look so good when you pick them up, and then you read them the first night, and they are so tedious and boring, or the story line just stinks, and you try to hide them under the others and hope she doesn’t ask for them again. And then others make you groan in the aisles, and then you get them home and read them, and you find yourself reading them every night, and checking them out over and over again.
The title should have scared us away, and the inside front leaf listed all the words in Spanish. A book about poop in a foreign language is not a good sign…turns out we were wrong. A definite winner with a great rhythm and hilarious Spanish rhymes. Who knew you could rhyme “caca” and “espinaca” and have such a great time doing it? Lots of potty-mouth joy in this one free for the repeating. Look this up on your next library trip.
Benny’s Had Enough – really odd, a Swedish translation, but she loves it for its weirdness. Benny gets fed up with his mother and storms out of the house, tries to find shelter in a hot dog stand (yes, he’s a pig) and eventually finds his way back home to a mother who hasn’t even noticed he’s gone.
Lots of sister blame in this one. Nice rhymes.
Probably a bit too advanced socially for her (they’re fifth graders), but she loves this series, and the fairy godmother is pretty funny. Plus, it has the word bottom in it, so it’s all good in a potty-mouth sort of way.
