Banned Book Week : September 22 - 28, 2013

Here is the best site I have found for banned books:  http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics  This particular link brings you to the Banned and Challenged Classics page.  The first book listed is The Great Gatsby, one of my lifelong favorites.  I have not found a list of banned children's books on this particular site but it is not hard to find any number of them.  Suffice to say the list includes beloved children's books, Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte's Web being prime examples, that small-minded people continually try to keep away from our kids.

What a sad world we would live in without these books.  It's still not too late to celebrate Banned Book Week.  Buy Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, read Kate Chopin's The Awakening, or give some lucky kid a copy of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

When I was in Portland, we just had Fun

Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice

One day when I was in Portland, Gus and Rosie and I met up with Juniper and her Dad.  Even though the girls had spent lots of time together during the summer, they didn't immediately warm to each other.  Here's how these 2 year olds reconnected.  This took maybe 10 minutes -- not a word was spoken the entire time.

  

When I was in Portland, we went to OMSI

Rosie played in the sand. 

And she played with water.  Now that she is 2 she wears the red apron.  When she was little she wore the yellow.

She made things fly.

And the last thing Rosie did at OMSI was to play with Flubber.  I had never heard of Flubber but now I know it is the coolest stuff ever.  It reminds me of the green slime Gus used to have with his Ghostbuster's paraphernalia.  But Flubber can be made at home (there are plenty of recipes) and it is easy to clean up -- a huge improvement over slime which no doubt still lingers in the crevices of some old furniture.  

Rosie's Crush

Rosie loves preschool!

When I was in Portland, we went to the Zoo