THE POISONS HAVE LEFT THE BUILDING!!!!!!! Errr...I mean the boy! HOORAH!

We had tried every imaginable home remedy...thank goodness I didn't have to resort to the joys of OTC remedies...because I absolutely could not bring myself to ask the pharmacist for a good enema for my 2-year-old son...

In fact...he just proudly walked over to me, patted his tush and said "Poop!" Just in case the odor that preceded him was not enough, he has taken to announcing his waste-production. Joy...

That being said, I shall get to the business of what I really wanted to post upon today!

I was reading FarmWife's post about their broken TV and the subsequent reading to her by QM of the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series, and The Chronicles of Narnia before kindergarten, and it got me to thinking about my own childhood reading.

You see, as the youngest of the kids (until my adopted sister came to live with us when I was 8), I had the benefit of 3 models of how to do things. From tying shoes, to riding bicycles, to math, to reading and playing games...I was given a world of models and helpers and teachers! SO...at the tender age of 5 3/4, during a family road trip to New York to visit my daddy's family, and then down the coast to North Carolina, where we visited my mom's parents, I was trapped in a conversion van (yes...it had a bench seat that folded into a queen-size sleeper and it totally rocked!) with my 3 brothers, and only car games, coloring books, and one tiny tote of Barbie things to fill the hours. Keep in mind this was 27 years ago people - VCRs had barely gotten popular and were far too expensive to even imagine having one in your car...CDs and DVDs didn't even exist yet...and in fact, our totally cool van actually had an 8-track player...we listened to Joan Baez for hours...along with Abba...needless to say, my musical tastes are varied and diverse. But I digress...

On said trip, I was mostly reading books like Dr Suess and the like...nothing fancy, and nothing with chapters yet. Mostly because my mother didn't think I could...not because my parents were mean or anything...After we got to Grandma and Grandpa's big white house in the hills outside of Asheville of North Carolina (remind me to tell you about that summer because it was awesome!), I was out of things to do, and didn't have any place to spend my vacation money...so, while I was relegated to sleeping on a lawn chaise, the kind that you could fold into a triangle, with a sleeping bag, I found a book on Grandma's book shelves titled "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe". I picked it up, and my parents amusedly said I could read it. So I did...the entire book in the 3 weeks we were in North Carolina. It was at the point, the summer of 1981, in which my love affair with all things Narnian began. Since that time, I have owned 2 paperback box sets of the series (I read the first one so many times they actually fell apart and couldn't be repaired), and am now the proud owner of a "coffee table" copy of the whole series with colored original illustrations...we are reading it to Captain Chaos...I started reading it to him when he was only 6 weeks old. And in the last almost 2years, we've read it through once, and are on the beginning of the 2nd time through. I know he may not remember it from this early an age, but I want him to know it like I did.

The other books I devoured before 3rd grade included the whole Little House on the Prairie series, every Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and a series of books that a parent of a friend loaned me...for the life of me I cannot remember the name...maybe you can help. It was a series about a young lady that was adopted, and went on to become a concert pianist...the titles of the books always had her name in them...sort of like "Nancy Drew and the Case of the Clock"...only it was the main character's name...they were a Christian series that were probably published in the early 50s...augh! This is going to bother me until I remember it...help!

My whole point is that I only pray that I can instill a love of books in my children, and that they will grow to love the books that I read when I was little...like Stuart Little, the series "The Littles", the Mr Men/Little Miss books, books like "Rikki Tikki Tavi", classics like "Treasure Island", "The Jungle Book"...and I mean the real books, not the nice little books that Walt Disney turned them into...I want my children to know the story of Robin Hood that has people, not singing animals (although that is my favorite Disney movie), and that the Jungle Book did not include a bear that sang a song about the "Bear Necessities of life"...I want them to know the feeling of bliss of opening a brand new book, smelling the pages, and escaping from reality into the world of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, to imagine what it would be like to be catapulted into the future, and learn about the Eloi...or to open a collection of short stories and wonder what it would be like to be hunted...or to be on the island of Dr Moreau...and not see Faruza Balk as a half-person, half-cat in a poor attempt at a cinematic version...

I want them to know that the sky is the limit in what they can dream, and that while someone may attempt to put their version on the screen, there is nothing better than picturing what Laura Ingalls sounded like...and what it would have felt like to sit in the cold, and twist hay into sticks to keep the fire burning during the Long Winter...

What memories do you have of your childhood, and what were your favorite stories? What do you remember the most fondly of the times you curled up in bed, or the rocking chair, to hear your mom or dad (or whoever) read to you...and what were they reading?

Help me compile a list of things to read to my children to open their little minds to the world of literature!