What we're reading now

When Faith finished Little House on the Prairie, she had her choice of four books to read next: The Hobbit and the next book in three series she's already been reading -- The Road to Oz, Beezus and Ramona, and All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown.

Not surprisingly, when it came right down to it, she shied away from tackling The Hobbit next: That's a lot of long chapters of small print, with no interior illustrations. Instead, she went for the second book of the All-of-a-Kind Family series. I had to buy a used copy from Half.com, as all of the books but the first and last seem to be out of print. (And how random is that?)

She likes reading about the girls and their family, and we tie in the various Jewish holidays they celebrate with the Bible stories she knows. Ella read a story to Sarah out of The Red Fairy Book, and she was very excited to discover that we have the same book; she wanted to read what the girls in the book were reading.

We've talked about how authors like Sydney Taylor, Maud Hart Lovelace, and Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote books about their own childhoods. She said she wanted to write a book about what it's like for her growing up but was worried because there's not anything interesting about her childhood. I told her that there wasn't anything very out of the ordinary about Laura's childhood, or Betsy and Tacy's, or Ella and her sisters' either, at the time; it's just that as they grew up, things changed, and by the time they were grown-ups, little girls didn't do the same things they had done anymore. By the time she's grown up, her childhood might look a lot more interesting to little girls who grow up differently.

Then again, maybe not. She is growing up in my house, after all, and I'm pretty boring. Either way, she's 2 chapters from being done with the book, so it looks like I need to go back to Half.com and look for More All-of-a-Kind Family.