Happy birthday to Samuel

He turns five tomorrow. Quite a ritual awaits him at school. He’s to carry a globe around the classroom five times while his teacher and classmates sing to him and eat granola bars. Photos of his short life will be displayed.

Karin & I worry about the singing, which Samuel doesn’t always take to; but we’ve drilled the expectation into him, and he bears it stoically.

He now seems to like school. He was downright excited at the bus stop this morning after what must have been a too-long Fall Break.

(The driver took the wrong street but quickly turned around and came back for Samuel.)

He’s losing various perks: the WIC vegetables, the books from Dolly Parton, the visits from privately funded social workers. But he wouldn’t eat the vegetables, anyway; and he continues to peruse the books that arrive for Daniel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I ought to mention, today I saw one of the brightest “firework displays” of my lifetime: Madrid’s and Dortmund’s rehash of last season’s Champions League final. I have no love for Madrid, but my goodness, what talent, what tremendous self-belief. Pedigree is real.

Illness; reading to Samuel; reading to Daniel; the canceling of books

Nasty colds this week for Samuel and Daniel. It’s the first cold of Daniel’s life. Samuel, poor lad, is old enough to ruminate upon how unpleasant illness is – and to feel not just ill but, also, demoralized.

To cheer him up, I read him four chapters of Fantastic Mr. Fox. He enjoys it well enough, and then he abruptly goes off to play.

When he is demoralized again, I read him half of The Enormous Crocodile.

“Do you like this book, Sammy?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

But we soldier on. When we finish, I again ask, “Did you like that book?”

“Yes,” he says in a low, raspy voice.

It won’t be very many days until we finish Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then Samuel will have had his first full excursion through an (almost-)novel. We’ve read a good amount of Stuart Little, too, but I had to put that devastating book down for a bit because I was demoralized. Samuel liked it pretty well until he was confronted with E.B. White’s rather technical descriptions of the schooner Wasp.

He may not yet be ready for Herman Melville or Patrick O’Brien. I may never be ready for Patrick O’Brien.

Like his brother before him, Daniel has been signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and this week he received the usual first installment, The Little Engine that Could, which I neither enjoy nor admire, and of which we already own maybe a half-dozen copies. This version has new drawings. Have the old ones been deemed to be morally beyond the pale? Or just too ugly? I know that a couple of years ago Samuel was given a copy with the old drawings. Since Samuel was born, some of Dr. Seuss also has been canceled, and Roald Dahl has had his bitter prose sweetened up by his publishers. I need to make sure to buy the editions that I like before they disappear.

(It’s hardly a new thing, of course – the canceling of children’s books because of a decline in tolerance for this or that wrongful or different attitude.)