Monsters

Oh dear. What made me think a book about Monsters might make good bed-time reading?

It was the 'mythological' that did it: tapped straight in to my middle-class misconceptions that if it's inspired by Ancient Greece it must be good.

And reading it was fun. Wittily and inventively illustrated by Sara Fanelli, it got me thinking I might dig out some of the stories in full. We counted Scylla's heads, we spotted the two closed eyes of Argus, we decided that Pegasus was our favourite.

Lights out. 'Dream really happy dreams'.*

Five minutes later. 'I can't dream happy dreams I can't. I can only dream of monsters'

At least, I hear you say, she'd absorbed the lessons of the night: now she will know her harpies from her furies - her classical education has begun.

No, I'm afraid not. The monster that would stalk her dreams was tyrannosaurus rex.

Thank heaven (Zeus?) for Pegasus. 'I like horses. I like that he has wings. I like that he carries the stars. And there are children. He's my favourite'. Also, we decided, if T rex did show up (apparently being extinct doesn't count in dreams), then Pegasus could whisk her up so she could bop him on the nose (while he scrabbles widely but ineffectually with his pathetically small hands) before flying off to safety over the mountain to swim with mermaids and dolphins in a beautiful lake.

This still wasn't quite cutting the mustard (I don't like dolphins. I like mermaids though) so I laid it on thicker, with the application of a fairy godmother who would turn all the monsters into frogs (no, into butterflies - ah my daughter with her poetic soul!). And last but by no means least, the magic spotty blanket that would make them all dizzy so they'd fall over.

Brilliant. So instead of giving her a solid grounding in the classical tales, I've sent her off to the land of nod with a rattlebag of nonsense.

Ah well, whatever it takes for a good night's sleep.

*Charlie and Lola afficionados among you will recognise this as a quote from 'I do not ever want my teeth to fall out'. Now absorbed into our nightly lexicon ...

Dr Dolittle, Jane Goodall

I've just watched a BBC Four profile of Jane Goodall. What an amazing woman - beautiful, calm, absolutely single-minded in her purpose - and inspired to it all by Dr. Dolittle.

The magic of books ...

 

Happily Ever After

I've spent this week immersed in fairytales, and I have to say I've been a bit distressed.

I was looking out one in particular, that I vaguely remembered for being about seven brothers who were swans and their sister who made them shirts of nettles to turn them back into men.

I remember it as magical and have a strong visual memory of something I've never seen - the boys turning to swans and flying in the moonlight.

I wanted to tell the story as part of my Book Week session at the local nursery, where they've been telling stories about their families and themselves. I thought the swan brothers and their loyal sister might suit the theme quite well.

The Grimm original turns out to be a complex tale, dark and twisted as they tend to be. And I find it a tough call: it's not the blood and poisons and death that I want to shield from my daughter and any other children I might be telling stories to. It's the wickedness of people: the calculating stepmothers, the careless fathers, the brutal siblings.

I think I want to keep the swan brothers as they are in my childhood memories: beautiful and endangered, but still somehow with a sense of purity and innocence. I fear I may be hopelessly naive and not preparing little a for the realities of life at all.

Or maybe it's that I feel Julia Donaldson's message is a better one to learn. We read Zog this evening at our friends' house. How brilliant: it has all those elemental elements of fairy tale - dragon, princess, knight - but with a great twist on the classic ending that gives them all an 'after' to the happily ever bit. And not a wicked stepmother in sight.

So, I think I will tell the story of the seven swan brothers, but with more of the beauty and less of the baby-snatching (the poor unlucky heroine in Grimm's tales suffers not only an evil stepmother but a wicked wicked mother-in-law).

And it turns out the shirts are to be made, not of nettles, but of starwort, a delicately beautiful water flower.

Everybody ready for a barnyard dance!

My dear friend Emma just reminded me of the brilliant Sandra Boynton. I don't think I've written about her, and that is just wrong.

Barnyard Dance came as a present when little a was born, or at least not long after, from relatives in Canada, and it's one of the best books we've been given.

If ever you wanted a book to get you up and dancing and shouting, it's the barnyard dance:
Stand with the donkey
Sliiiiiide with the sheep
Scramble with the little chicks
Cheep Cheep Cheep

Genius.

Also highly recommend 'But Not the Hippopotamus'.

Am inspired: rest assured, after school tomorrow, little a and I will be stomping our feet, clapping our hands, getting ready for a barnyard dance.

Maybe we should draw the curtains first ...

Black Beauty

I met a really lovely and interesting woman today who is 60 and has just re-read Black Beauty, because someone reminded her of it the other day.

I love that.

reading allowed

Three weeks in to her school career and little a is reading already. Well, that's what I thought until I clocked that in fact she'd learned the words and was reciting them back. But I guess she's sort of recognising the letters and that's prompting her memory, right?

We have reading 'homework' to do with her: books to read together, and a notebook to write down what she thought and how she got on. The first book she 'read' is called Nog. It's about a dog. Gripping stuff: Nog goes in. The cat runs out.

As well as the total rush of pride (misplaced as it turned out) I've also got deep deep nostalgia for the books I learned to read from myself. Desperately want little a to be learning from Billy Blue-Hat and the Village at Three Corners.

I can't imagine that Billy and his chums were any more exciting than Nog - and Janet and John certainly not. So it's just making me wonder: by wanting to read the books I loved with little a am I trying to trap her in an old-fashioned childhood that isn't relevant any more? I'm definitely really protective of what she reads and even worse about TV (basically, Charlie & Lola on very rare occasions and that's it). I'm an entertainment fascist. Am going to have to find a way of letting go ...

beautiful creatures

I've been dreading the start of homework, it seemed to mark the end of innocence more even than sending little a off to fend for herself in the world of big school, too-large skirt flapping below her knees.

But when we peeled back the velcro of her 'postal system' school bookbag to find a reading log, fithusband and I were actually quite excited. This is the kind of homework we can do.

Also, little a is choosing her own books to read and that's really interesting to see. Thus we've been introduced to the excellent Grumpalump (with perfect timing - that very weekend we saw a hot air balloon right up close); and a less excellent book about pirates (afraid I can't remember what it's called). And - as if we weren't spoilt enough with all this new reading matter - she came home this week with a bag from the Booktrust with two books, to keep! Much excitement.

And so it's been a couple of weeks of weird and wonderful animals, from 'the mole rolled' and 'the bear stared' in the grumpalump, to Eric Carle's slow, slow, slow Sloth. Like most people, I grew up with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but this was my first encounter with his sloth: and a menagerie of unfamiliar animals - a peccary, a quetzal, a cock-of-the-rock.

Tonight, to extend the theme, we dusted off Curious George goes camping; in which he gets the wrong end of a skunk with some stinky results. I'm not sure how I feel about Curious George - for a start, he was cruelly snatched from the jungle in book one and now lives in Manhattan with the man in the yellow hat. They're definitely tales from a different age.

But in spite of this new exotic array of beasts, Big Dog, Little Dog remain the number one favourites. Unlike George they're standing the test of time - and more importantly, the test of being read night after night.