First Draft

Indulge me for a moment, while I brag about my oh-so-literate children.

Tonight, Owen wrote a sentence. Nay, a story. First, he wrote "it was sanny" (sunny), then he wasn't happy with that direction so he deleted it (because of course, being a child of the aughts, all this is on a computer). Then, he wrote this:

the Cat Name Was Matthew O.
He live in Wisconsin Work
At a Menards

Brilliant, no?! I helped him spell a couple of the words, and the Wisconsin and Menards were copied from a map and a hat, respectively. Actually, at first, Matthew the cat was from Washington, like "Abraheem Lincoln" he said, who, by the way, is died because he got shot like Martin Luther King. But then it was decided that Washington was too far away. So, he became a Wisconsinite. (And, by the way, I did correct him that Lincoln wasn't actually from Washington -- I think he just had a lot of George Washington and Washington, D.C. spinning around in his brain. He also came home today with a paper ax and the story of the cherry tree. Does any of this stuff ever change?)

Then, there's little Nora, who takes a book to bed with her every night. Her favorite right now is Clifford's ABCs. And as I sing the ABC song at the end, she practically vaults toward the crib with the book and her blanket in hand. Sometimes, I look back as I close the door and she's "reading" the book out loud by the light of her aquarium toy. When left alone in the playroom, she'll often pull down book after book from the shelf and look through each one, talking out loud to herself and creating a growing pile around her.

These things make the writer and former book hound in me smile.