Great Expectations

 

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For the past few years I have been on a quest to find a copy of a book that I used to read to Molly and Bigger when they were in preschool and elementary.  I couldn't remember the name of it or the author, but I knew it was about animals in a barn making animal sounds at night.  

It was a building block kind of story that repeated the stanzas throughout like "the mouse squeaked and the horse neighed."  And then the next page would be the mouse, the horse, and a duck.  Or something like that.  And I knew there was a specific term for that kind of story, but I didn't know what that was either.  

As Cubby got old enough to have books read to her and to start reading, I really, really wanted to get my hands on a copy of it and was so frustrated that I could not pin it down. 

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Then, last week, I was telling one of my coworkers about it.  She is a whiz on the Google search, and you'll never guess what?!

YES!

She found it on Amazon!  I was so happy and thrilled I bounced in my office chair and cried happy tears.  Of course I ordered it immediately from Amazon.  It's called Inside A Barn In The Country.

Image taken from Amazon

When I took my lunch break, I texted Molly to see if she was available for a phone call, and she was.  When she got on the phone, I was babbling nearly incoherently I was so excited.  After I calmed down and actually got the whole story out and said, "Isn't that awesome?"  what I got from my darling daughter was "Suuuuure, Mom.  That's great."  

Can you feel the love?

Then she went on to say how she thought I was going to tell her I found a copy of the book about the boy who visited a duck in the pond every day and one day the boy didn't come so the duck wandered up to the house and found the boy sick in bed.  

Huhn...I sense another quest in my future.  

Her lack of enthusiasm couldn't squash my thrill at my good fortune, so I called Bigger to tell him about it.  

First we had to chat about his recent week-long ice fishing trip with two different groups of friends, and then I got down to brass tacks.  

"Remember that book I read to you guys every night for months?"

"Oh yeah, the one about the farm and it had puzzles and mazes and this one optical illusion where if you held the book and moved it clockwise, the tractor tires looked like they were spinning."

No, but I see a second quest on my horizon.  

When I explained which book it was, his response was a lackluster, "Yeah, I don't remember that."

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It made me think back to my own childhood and what books I remember reading.  There was The Firehouse Cat for sure.  

Then there was the one about the firefly that was used as a train lantern signal or something.  

And the one about the elephant that kept escaping from the castle courtyard by stacking big ice blocks up and climbing over the wall.  

Oh, and there was one about a chicken and her pocketbook who used an umbrella to float to town for her groceries.

We also had a really scary kind of one about two crows who couldn't have babies because a snake kept eating the eggs, so one day they made eggs out of clay and the snake ate those and died.  Yeah, that's a real warm and fuzzy tale for a kid to read, isn't it?!

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I don't care how much of a buzz kill the kids' unenthusiastic response to my newest purchase was, I have a reminder of good times from their childhood in my possession and that makes me very happy.  

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