One of my very favorite things to do with Babs is to sit down and read the books and stories that I remember reading when I was little. Up until recently, we were only reading picture books. We have some great new ones like Skippyjon Jones and Princess Penelope, but my favorites are the ones I’ve kept since my childhood. The tattered and falling apart copies of books like How The Grinch Stole Christmas are some of my most treasured possessions.

Now that Babs is almost five, we’re not stuck reading books with a picture on every page, and the possibilities have greatly expanded. Ammon read her Pippi Longstocking last month, and now we’re two chapters into Ramona and Her Mother. We’ve also been skipping around through some of Shel Silverstein’s poetry books, and she thinks his goofy rhymes are hilarious. I remember lying in bed when I was little and reading A Light in the Attic from cover to cover- and then reading the whole thing over again. It is so special to be able to share this with Babs now, and to have her enjoy it so much. I hope she grows up to love reading as much as I do.

Here are a few of my favorites from “A Light in the Attic” by Shel Silverstein:

MAGIC CARPET

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?

SHAKING

Geraldine now, stop shaking that cow
For heaven’s sake, for your sake and the cow’s sake.
That’s the dumbest way I’ve seen
To make a milkshake.

THE FLY IS IN

The fly is in
The milk is in
The bottle is in
The fridge is in
The kitchen is in
The house is in
The town.

The bee is bothering
The puppy is bothering
The dog is bothering
The cat is bothering
The baby is bothering
Mama is bothering
Me.

1. Public toilets that flush when I’m still sitting on them.

2. Automatic sinks that never turn on no matter how wildly I wave my hand in front of the sensor.

3. Street lights that turn off just as I’m driving underneath them.

4. Electronic toys that start talking to me when I walk past them in the store.

5. Automatic doors that won’t open even when I’m jumping up and down on the mat.

6. Toys that have so many buttons and gadgets they are more complicated to use than my computer.

7. Elevators.

8. Toys that have moving eyes.

9. Gas pumps.

10. Self-scanners at the checkout counter that always yell at me for taking items out of the bag when I never do.

… a giant vat of mashed potatoes. Soooo tasty.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Dear Cat,

You are Bad. You are a Very Bad Bad Cat.

Yes, I know that if I had cleaned the fish bowl a little bit more recently, it wouldn’t have smelled so horridly vile when you knocked it down off of the piano, and maybe if I hadn’t put it up so high to begin with it wouldn’t have made such a mess when it landed, but I am not here to blame myself. I am here to blame you.

Imagine that you have fleas. Imagine that thousands of teeny tiny little fleas are running around all over your skin, and you are trying to pick them out with your teeth one by one. The problem is, every time you think you have one it wriggles out of your grasp and burrows down even deeper into your fur. That was what it was like when I was trying to pick up the jillions of little green fish rocks that spilled out of the bowl. I was down on my hands and knees (my hands and knees!) first scooping, then raking, then tediously picking the fish rocks up one at a time with my face a mere inches away from the nasty pool of fish poo water that was soaking my carpet. And I don’t want you to think that just because I didn’t throw up, it means the smell wasn’t that bad. Believe me, I thought about throwing up. I seriously considered throwing up. But it was only out of pure, unadulterated self-preservation that I decided the only thing that could make it all worse would be to clean up fish poo water, one jillion tiny green rocks, and puke.

The best part of the whole situation was when the carpet cleaner stopped working halfway through the clean-up, so that instead of sucking up all the poo water it basically just spread it around a lot. And you just sat there on the stairs, watching this whole thing like it was some sort of grand show I was putting on for your amusement. I understand that really, you have nothing better to do with your time than plot ways to make me go crazy. This is why you scratched up our leather couch during its first week home, and why you always wait until the exact moment I fall asleep at night to jump on my chest and scare the living crap out of me. Is this like, a birth order thing? The other cat is the older one, the “good” one if you must, so you have decided to be the “bad” one? You’re really doing a great job of fulfilling that role. But even though I know you’re just bored, that doesn’t make it ok. After the humiliation of sifting through poo water to find every last little green rock, my heart feels as sad and vaguely floppy as a fish lying on the carpet, three feet away from its bowl.

I’m hurting inside. And the only thing that can make this better is if you hunt down and eat every spider that scuttles through this house from here on out. So stick close by when I go to the bathroom. They like to surprise me when I’m on the pot and can’t jump up to catch them without peeing all over myself.

Sincerely,

Me

Isn’t she beautiful, folks?

More “glam” shots here.