if you give a moose a muffin

Sherri, thank you for the stack of paperbacks you sent us back when we lived in Dallas. They proved perfect and lightweight for carrying in our suitcase to Africa!

Over the past couple years, I picked up some nice hardcover books for John at Half Price Books, but what exactly was I thinking to buy such heavy books? When it came to bringing hardcovers with us, only a couple kids' books won out, among them the boys' small Bible the Tolivers gave us (which John loves to read every day, mainly because each page begins with a large, colorful capital letter that he can "read" himself) and Ferdinand. If you have never read Ferdinand, please go out and buy it now. It is one of the books you need to buy, not just borrow from the library. I even found it in Latin years ago at McCawbers' Books in Saint Anthony Park; I still wish I had bought the Latin version, because it was so cute.

Okay, back to the paperbacks we brought with us (the ones from Sherri). Among them is a series of similarly-themed books with wonderful, very detailed illustrations; one of the books in this group is If You Give a Moose a Muffin.

Well, John loves these books. I think that the detailed pictures in them are why he loves them so much. See, for John, it's really unsettling if the words on a given page talk about anything that is not also included in the picture on that same page.

For example, today I was reading John some poems out of A.A. Milne's book When We Were Very Young. One poem talked about some cows who walked into a pond to drink water. The poem referenced a bird, and also some fish. The small picture on the page had cows, water and a bird in it. BUT, there were no fish in the picture. How did the artist miss this detail? This was a very big deal to John. "Where are the fish, Mama?! Where are the fish?!" he asked me with great concern in his voice. I tried to explain that the fish were under the water, therefore we could not see them. But ten minutes and a dozen poems later, he was still asking me, "Mama, where are the fish?!" Ah, two-year-olds.