Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, My Home is Littered with Doilies and Glue

My house was overrun by Valentine's Day preparations this weekend. Each of my three children had to construct their valentines boxes, the boxes placed on their desk during the class party to collect valentines from their classmates. The kindergartner's was easy. Cover a shoebox with red paper and stickers and call it a day. My eight year old daughter spent a fair amount of time joyfully creating a pink and red, doily covered, ribbon bedecked, glitter encrusted confection. While it screams "Valentine's Day" (and that its creator has two X chromosomes), something similar won't cut it for my nine year old son. It's a real balancing act, constructing a manly valentines box. Luckily, he likes to build and has a great imagination and ended up making this ice hockey rink out of an old shoebox with some help from his dad. Note the slots in the goals so his friends can shout "Score!" if they are so inclined while depositing cards in the box.

Speaking of boys with good imaginations who like to build, have you met Iggy Peck Architect? My son in kindergarten chose to share Iggy Peck Architect for the following homework assignment. He says he loves it because "it is funny and has good words and pictures." I couldn't agree more.

Andrea Beaty has written a great book about a boy who loves to build using found objects (shoes, food, diapers). His Great Sphinx and St. Louis Arch are impressive, but it is a suspension bridge he builds that saves the day and convinces his second grade teacher that architecture is worthy of study in school. David Roberts' illustrations are fantastic, and they need to be to convince the reader of the beauty of buildings. And while this might be lost on young readers, I would kill for the gorgeous retro outfits Iggy Peck's mother and teacher wear in this fun picture book!

Foodie Friday: Little Pea

My mom gave my son Ethan a sweet little picture book for Christmas, Little Pea written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and adorably illustrated by Jen Corace. Mom told me she picked it up at a winery in California that she visited with my sister last summer. This blows my mind in several ways. She started her Christmas shopping in the summer! In a winery! A winery that sells children's picture books!? Forget Disney World; that sounds like the happiest place on Earth.

Back to the book. Poor Little Pea doesn't like to eat sweets, but if he doesn't eat his dinner of candy, Mama Pea and Papa Pea will not allow him dessert. What is his dessert, you wonder? Spinach, of course. This little book's strengths are its illustrations of the Peas and its turning the normal order of things upside down. It is sure to charm picky preschool eaters and their parents.

I Said I Wouldn't Do This Again!

I'm about to do something I vowed never to do again. No, I'm not perming my hair or drinking a tequila shot. Believe me, neither is pretty. I'm going to write a post about bear books. After black bears had gone through my garbage cans one too many times, I declared The Book Bench a no-bear zone on November 10, but we've been enjoying two bear books that I feel I must share. The first is Kevin Henke's Old Bear. My son Ethan and I have read this half a dozen times in the past few weeks. Old Bear goes into hibernation and dreams that he is a cub again. It is a lovely book about age and seasons and the colors and sights we associate with the seasons. It's the perfect lapsit book.

Ethan loves Old Bear, so please don't get the wrong impression from the following photos. I'm warning you; they are a bit disturbing. Ethan purchased a Nerf gun last weekend with some birthday money. You would think he was buying his first home judging from the amount of time he spent considering this purchase. He wore a groove in the linoleum of the Toys R Us Nerf gun aisle examining all the options.

We brought it home and he shot every surface in the house. There were suction cup arrows affixed to doors, windows, ceilings, and eyeglasses. Kindly, his sister created several bull's eye targets for him from construction paper and markers. They were great for a few hours, but he eventually tired of them and went hunting for something new to shoot. It seems his hunt took him past the book bench where we keep library books. I assure you, this was not what I intended when I checked Old Bear out of the library! I think I need to return him to the (relative) safety of the children's section soon!

Another book bear avoided the Nerf gun. I think that is because while nice to look at, the illustration on the cover of Wonder Bear by Tao Nyeu is not as large as that of Old Bear, and therefore it's a more difficult target for my pint sized marksman. Wonder Bear was a birthday gift for Ethan. It is an exuberantly illustrated wordless picture book. According to the dust jacket, Tao Nyeu received her MFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in NYC and "Wonder Bear was her thesis project inspired by an odd-looking gummy bear with magical powers." When my boys were toddlers, I disliked reading their wordless books because they insisted that I say exactly the same thing for each page at each "reading." However, I couldn't always remember what I said the last time. They would really flip their toddler lids if I strayed from the script as it were. Now my little guy loves it when I make up something different with each telling, and the illustrations in Wonder Bear inspire some wacky storytelling.

Off the subject of bears, Stephen Colbert is at it again. Last night he mentioned Neil Gaiman's Newberry medal winning book The Graveyard Book on the Colbert Report. I'm beginning to think he was a children's librarian in a former life. Also from that episode, his reading of a Danielle Steel novel with Steve Martin is priceless. If you missed it, I imagine you'll be able to find it on YouTube soon.

I'd Like To Thank The Little People

I received a fabulous award this week from Ginny Marie of Lemon Drop Pie. That's it on the left. Thank you so much! I'm amazed that anyone other than my mom and husband read this blog. I think I'm supposed to pass it along to some other bloggers which I plan to do soon. There are quite a few that I enjoy, Lemon Drop Pie for one, so it's hard to narrow it down. It seems part of the award is listing five things I'm currently into. Since this is supposed to be a blog about reading (although carpooling, snow shoveling, and candy eating find their way in), I'll try to keep it to the written word. Here goes:

1. Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie by Ken Haedrich. My mom gave me this book for Christmas. I've shed some drool on the pages.

2. The Cheat Sheet on The Daily Beast website.

3. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. It's our current nighttime read aloud book and all of my kids are enjoying it. Even my husband has been listening in. They get a big kick out of the character Constance.

4. Soft powdered sugar doughnut holes. (You knew I wouldn't stick to reading material.) Sometimes I'm in a salty place food wise and sometimes I'm in a sweet place. Rarely am I in a vegetabley place.

5. I can't stop listening to "Human" by The Killers. I'm also really digging their cover of the Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet." Do you remember that one, "Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start..." You know what, that one kind of counts as reading because although it's pop music, it contains a Shakespearean reference.

Tell me something you're into at the moment.

How I'm Using All My Hours of College Spanish

Don't you just love Target? You go in to buy bleach and come out with five (make that cinco) boxes of conversation hearts in Spanish. The last time I confessed that all I had read during that day were the words on candy hearts it was January. At least now I'm eating them in febrero, the appropriate month for Valentine candy.

Amazing Athlete, Great Nonfiction Book

Lerner Publications has just released a new title in its Amazing Athletes series aimed at readers in the second through fifth grades. This one is Sidney Crosby by Jeff Savage. Sidney Crosby's story is a great one. His father first taught him to play hockey at the age of two, and he began skating at three. Savage includes some interesting anecdotes. For example, the young Sidney Crosby practiced slapping pucks into the clothes dryer in his family's basement. His mother must have been a patient woman! Savage also includes the types of stories hockey fans love, of Sidney playing with a broken foot and having his front teeth knocked out by an opponent's skate blade. He went on to be the NHL's number one draft pick in 2005. He was named the Pittsburgh Penguins team captain, the NHL's youngest captain, as a teenager in the 2007-2008 season. Clearly, Sidney Crosby's impressive achievements make a good story, but this is also a great example of well written nonfiction, the kind of nonfiction more kids should be experiencing. The book presents information in a variety of ways. It includes bolded words in the text which are defined in a glossary, relevant sidebar information, captioned photographs, a table of contents, index, and suggested further reading and websites.

Monday Morning Sports Round Up

How about that Super Bowl last night? What an exciting game! This is why you shouldn't expect Monday Morning Sports Round Up to be a regular feature here at The Book Bench: what really made that game exciting to me were the delicious buffalo wings I ate in the third quarter and Bruce Springsteen playing at halftime. I'm a Jersey girl after all. There is another sports story I have been following pretty closely this weekend. I'm really torn up about the photo that was released of Michael Phelps smoking marijuana from a bong. First, I'm disappointed in myself because my very first thought, honest to God, was that "toke" rhymes with "backstroke." What does that say about me? Then my next thought was, "No wonder all those magazine articles told us he consumes like 10,000 calories a day!" Second, I'm disappointed in Michael Phelps. No, not the person; I don't know him. I'm disappointed in Michael Phelps the great story of hard work and goal setting I held up to my kids. My son perused the Scholastic Book Order last week (before the pot smoking story broke) and considered ordering a book about Michael Phelps, but in the end decided that $12 was more than he wanted to spend. I'm curious to see if the companies whose products he endorses decide against spending so much on him as well.