Bedtime Book Club - Harry Potter

Ann and I have decided that IT IS TIME - for Wynn to enter the world of Harry Potter!  Over Winter Break we'll read the whole first book to her & wrap it up by watching the first movie!  This should be fun!

Bedtime Book Club - Folk Tales of West Lake

We got this slim volume from our friends JM and Elena - JM's father worked for Northwest and traveled quite a bit in Asia - this book was put out in Beijing in 1981!  Each chapter is a different folktale from the Hangzhou area in east-central China... lots of supernatural stories, a few ghosts, wise judges and clever inventors. Wynn is fascinated with the tales. I am noticing how most of the stories seem to end with 'and you can visit such and such place today'. (As if this were an advertising series put out by the Hangzhou Chamber of Commerce in the year 1581...) We both are picking up on some parts of these stories being used in other contemporary books we've read, and that's what is really neat about reading with Wynn - how she pulls together ideas from things she experienced a year or more ago!

Minnesota State Fair Alphabet!

Even before the Fair opened, as we walked around the grounds, we thought it would be a cool idea to find all the different letters of the alphabet in all the wacky ways they were styled. After a couple trips, we have a folder full of letters!

See if you can guess where we captured each one!

We'll probably have enough for another post like this after our next trip there!

That's Our Girl

We've gotten a few phone calls asking, so, for all you Twin Citians out there - yes, that WAS Wynn you saw briefly on the channel 4 news Saturday night. We went to a party that day to celebrate our friend RM's safe return from Iraq; WCCO was there covering the party; Scott was among those interviewed, and Wynn was media-savvy enough to give the cameraman a big, goofy grin, thus ensuring her a spot on the evening news.

This weekend Wynn started being more interested in books. She now holds them up, points at the pictures, and babbles along as if she's reading. Her favorite place to read is sitting on the potty chair. Hey, if ten times through "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" is what it takes to inspire her, so be it.

She continues to be a charming little mimic. Tonight, Scott was teasing her in her on-going quest for dominion over the remote. He tucked the remote down his shirt to hide it from her, which she, of course, was on to immediately. Now she's taking her toy shovel and spatula and sticking them down her shirt. When she has the toy hidden, she looks up innocently and holds her hands palms upward as if to say, "Nope, I don't have anything." We fear that she may eventually prove to be much smarter than we are. We figure we've got about two months before that happens, though.

I've included a couple pictures today. What I love about the first one is that she looks like she's auditioning for "The Exorcist: The Toddler Years". (It's oatmeal, and I keep assuring Scott that her self-feeding abilities will improve with practice.) What I love about the other picture is that in the background you can see all the trays from our kitchen strewn across the living room floor AND Scott passed out with a bowl on his head. Our house isn't as neat as it once was (and we swear our kitchen shrank by about 40% while we were gone), but we're having fun.

Ann