Kids Books

It has been a couple of years since somebody suggested that I should get the "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Silverstein for my son, and I did. Since then I bought a whole bunch of Shel Silverstein's books, "Lafcadio, the lion who shot back" being one of the last ones. I was really amazed by that book and by the problems it touched on and made kids think about. The lion in this book is first living in the jungle, then he takes away a gun from a hunter that wanted to hunt him and learns to shoot, becomes the best shooter in the jungle, meets an impresario who helps him to become rich and famous, begins to live like a human and almost forgets that he is a lion, until one day his rich human friends tell him "let's go to Africa and hunt some lions" and he goes with them to Africa, where he meets a lion who reminds him that he shouldn't be killing lions because he is also a lion. Lafcadio is being torn in opposite directions when his friends are telling him to go with them and hunt some of his own kind and by the lion who says "let's go and kill some people". He leaves everybody at the end of the story, because he doesn't want to side with either one of them. It's a very sad story which depicts one of those situations that make us think...

Kids say

When I was visiting my family last weekend, my 4 year old son at some point said to me: "I love your computer" and then added: "I love you. I love both of you" :-)

At a friend's house

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving that we got an invitation from my wife's friend Diane to visit them. So, we went. Pretty much all of us, my wife, my 22 months old son, my mom, my dad, and me.

Diane has a 6 year old daughter, who was at her dad's house at the time, so my son got to play with all her toys without having to share them with anyone. He is right now at that age where he doesn't like to share his toys with anyone. So, he got to play with all the toy cars, horses, and other toys, while everybody else was having a cup of coffee and some snack. After having played enough, he noticed that there is food in the room! He asked for some potato chips. And then came Mandy. Mandy is a 5 year old boxer (a kind of dog). She saw that my son had some food in his hand, so she approached him and tried to eat it out of his hand. I told my son to just give it to Mandy.

After he gave the chips to the dog, he still wanted some for himself. Then, we let him get as many chips from the bowl, as he wanted. So, he got one in one hand and one more in another hand. He then was very happy and you could see by the expression on his face that he was going to do something. This is what he did: he squatted and then jumped up with the potato chips in his hands and yelled "bah!". It was a lot of fun to watch him do it!