I was going to write about Ben today. Since today’s his three-month mark. But I can’t think of what to say and I forgot to take pictures. Instead I feel like writing about Sophie. I’ll catch you up on Ben tomorrow. And I just realized I forgot about my book giveaway. I’ll do that tomorrow too. I’m so behind in everything.
But on to Sophie.
I love putting Sophie’s hair in pigtails. So cute. But it is almost impossible to part Sophie’s hair down the middle because she is very ticklish on the back of her head. I try to run the comb down to make a part and she flinches and shrieks and giggles. I’ve never seen anyone super ticklish on their head before. It’s very funny. And cute
Sophie’s new favorite thing is playing with bubbles in the sink. Now that she’s finally tall enough to be able to reach it while standing on a stool. It’s about the only way I know of to distract her when she’s in full whine mode, begging to be taken out to the swing.
Isn’t she the cutest?
The swing…. Oh my. Maybe it’s because she spent so much time sleeping in the swing when she was a baby. She’s in love with it.
First thing Dom gets when he walks in the door at night: “Awing, awing awing.” Over and over and over.
I wish there were a way to get her a swing she could get in herself. Or a toddler version of the baby swing that rocks itself and doesn’t need to be pushed. Seriously. The girl is addicted.
She’s in that climbing phase of toddlerhood. And has the scrapes and bumps and bruises to prove it. I’m afraid to take her out in public lest someone think the worst about my poor beat-up little girl. At least half a dozen scrapes on her face from at least half a dozen different falls. Mostly from chairs.
Her vocabulary grows by leaps and bounds. She’s in love with being read to. She has her favorite books. her favorite pages in her favorite books. Her favorite animal is the duck. She loves saying “quack.”
She’s in love with her big sister and her baby brother. She tries to do everything that Bella does. She carries her dollies around wrapped in blankets and puts them in Ben’s swing.
At every meal she tries to climb into my lap and will eat food from my plate that she won’t eat from her own. She clings to my skirts, literally, when I’m trying to move about the kitchen, crying, “Mama, mama.” She wants me to put on her shoes, take off her shoes, put on her jacket, take off her jacket twenty times a day. And I do it. Again and again. Because who could refuse those brown eyes.
Can you tell I’m madly in love with my Sophie?
Hey! I knew those rhymes. Mainly because we had an old book of nursery rhymes (the size of a regular hardback novel, not a picture book size) that I used to read.
I think it is getting harder to find good versions of classic rhymes. When I was working in a bookstore, almost every time a publisher brought out a new book of nursery rhymes, they had been modernized to get rid of things like “chop off your head.) Rosemary Wells was the exception to this, but the mustard yellow cover was really off-putting to me. My daughter, however, really likes it. So there you go.
I am afraid the same thing is happening with fairy tales too – whenever a publisher brings out a stand alone nursery tale these days, it is somehow turned upside-down. We have been reading a lot of Richard Scarry’s Mother Goose and Nursery Tales over here lately because they aren’t updated.
I will talk children’s books with you whenever you’d like.
Martha,
My nursery rhyme book from childhood is Marguerite De Angeli’s Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes, a beautiful book which I still have. I also had an Annotated Mother Goose that’s still at my parents’ house. I must have looked through that when I was older; though I don’t really recall doing so.
But I find I don’t read that one to the girls. It has beautiful illustrations but the layout is too busy, too much text per page. I’ve found that for reading aloud I really prefer books that have one rhyme per page. Our favorite for reading is actually a little board book I found at a thrift shop. Not a huge selection but the girls both have it memorized.
This is the problem I generally have with poetry anthologies for children. The big fat ones that have broad selection with many pieces to choose from are always this busy layout with too much per page that toddlers get bored with. I have learned through mothering that less is really more when it comes to books for the wee ones. Maybe when Bella is reading on her own she’ll dig through the bigger anthologies.
We don’t have many good versions of fairy tales. I have the huge Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen anthologies but like you say picture books with nice illustrations and text that preserves the original flavor are hard to find. And I really do think Bella is still too young for many of the fairy tales. She’s just not that into them. Except for Goldilocks maybe. She likes that and Jack and the Beanstalk. But I’m still looking for copies with really good illustrations.
If it’s any comfort, Miss Marple had this problem with a younger police detective who’d been raised in the 1930’s. Didn’t recognize “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”, even though I think most readers were expected to do so.
Funny, Oranges and Lemons was one of the most familiar rhymes from my childhood, not just as a nursery rhyme, but as a party game … two children stand opposite with hands clasped in an arch, other children go in pairs through the arch and back round while the rhyme is sung, then when you get to the chopper bit, the arch children “chop” their hands down. Whoever is caught between them is out and stands next to the original two to make another arch, and so on until only one pair is left. I think the rhyme is less familiar now than it was then, and I had forgotten the game completely until I read your post.
Michael (Tevye) was born within the sound of Bow bells, which makes him officially a Cockney (an East Londoner).