Thank You Solo Mother -- Man! I Love The Web!

I'm thoroughly enjoying hearing my son play Hava Nagila on the clarinet. He's pretty good -- nice mellow sound, good rhythm. Think of all the money I'll save on a band if I can persuade him to play his own Bar Mitzvah.

Thanks to SoloMother for referring us to this hilarious piece to which we can all relate, whether we've been the victim, the perpetrator or both.

It's funny -- when my niece (now nearly 18) was a baby my sister noticed that most of their books had to do with sleepy time, nap time, rest time, time for bed, time to go sleep, time to be quiet... yet that kid never slept. You could pat her on the back for 45 minutes and just as you'd nearly made it to the door, tiptoeing backwards and not even blinking, she'd rear up in bed with a gummy grin and that was the end of nap time.

Don't worry -- she's making up for lost time now.

Look for this book:


Once Upon a Time, the End (Asleep in 60 Seconds) by Geoffrey Kloske and Barry Blitt

... a fresh approach to fractured fairy tales: take one small child's insatiable demand for Just one more story and add a sleepy parent's wish to get the bedtime ritual over with as quickly as possible. The result is this collection of eight condensed folktales. For example, Goldilocks and the Bears begins, There were some bears;/It doesn't really matter how many./There was a bunch./Let's get to the point: and ends, When the bears came back,/They found her asleep./She woke up, screamed, and ran home/So she could sleep in her own bed./Just like you. A few nursery rhymes (Hickory, dickory, dock,/A mouse ran up the clock./The clock struck eight./Oh, my, it's late!/So the mouse went straight to bed) and jokes round out the book... The cover shows an intensely alert toddler on the lap of a sleeping father, surrounded by several dozing characters (Goliath sucking his thumb, for example, and Red Riding Hood conked out next to the wolf dressed as Grandma). The sometimes sly, sometimes outrageous, sometimes simply silly humor will go over the heads of most preschoolers, but it's right on target for their older siblings (and tired parents, of course).–Lauralyn Persson, Wilmette Public Library, IL
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