Not a Cannabilistic Pig as Previously Thought

It's been a while since I updated Sydney's list of favorite books, so here's the newest list:

1. Ten Little Ladybugs
2. Ten Little Tadpoles (same publisher, different author)
3. The Lady With the Alligator Purse
4. Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed
5. Hush Little Baby
6. Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose EVER
7. Going on a Bear Hunt
8. Hippos Go Berserk

Ten Little Ladybugs is just about to fall apart. I'm glad she took to Ten Little Tadpoles, because now she will let you alternate between the two. Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are all singing books, and I think she just likes the songs. She still loves Going on a Bear Hunt and will ask for it often. I think Hippos Go Berserk is the funniest of her favorites, though, because she really prefers to just listen to the first half -- when the book counts up the number of hippos arriving at the party. The second half when the hippos are leaving isn't as fun to her, and she will often take the book away, close it, and hand it back so that you will read it from the beginning again.

My favorite on her list, though, is the Mother Goose. I LOVE Mother Goose. I remember my father reading Mother Goose to me and using scary voices for some the darker rhymes ("Fie Fie Foe Fum" and "Taffy was a Welshman" spring to mind immediately). As we read Richard Scarry's version, I find myself looking at the pictures in the same way I imagine I did as a kid. While reading "London Bridge" I pick which of the four girls in the picture I want to be. Reading "One Misty Moisty Morning" I look at the building behind the characters and wonder what's inside. I notice for the first time that Tom the Piper's son is drawn as a pig and is stealing a "pig" from the cart labeled "Gingerpigs" and that one of the Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe's children is flying a kite from a back balcony on the second floor of the shoe. I wonder if Sydney is thinking some of these things or is she noticing completely different things as she looks over the pages. I wonder if Sydney will get to read this very same book to another little girl in thirty years or so and will notice then for first time some other detail I still haven't found. I hope so.