In which Kate channels Mo Willems

We are a family of Mo Willems fans. (Well, Andy hasn't really expressed any opinion yet, one way or the other, but I expect he will be a Mo fan as well.) Kate drew this montage of the pigeon and his friends.

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She lost interest coloring in the pigeon's body about halfway through, and asked me to finish that up for her. Everything else is pure Kate.



I think the duckling is my favorite.

I love this fan-created movie poster that Mo posted on his blog. Ha.

All for Kids

On Saturday we made a pilgrimage up to All for Kids bookstore in Seattle, which is about to close. I wouldn't even have known about it if I hadn't seen this post on Mo Willems' blog. When I read the article I knew we just had to go see it before it was gone.



Kate had a fun time playing in the kids' area and checking out the puppets (and even wanted to read a few books, later).



This is what I was there for--the event room, with its autographed and illustrated walls.




It was amazing. After we'd showed Kate the pigeon on the door, she wasn't really interested in staying in the room, so we had to take turns staying with her. So I'd go in and read the walls for a bit, and take some pictures, and then go out and find Doug and say something like, "Did you see the David Shannon in the corner?" and he'd go look again while I stayed with Kate for while.

















A lot of people are wondering what's going to happen to these walls when the store closes. Perhaps some wealthy benefactor will swoop in and save them, and have them removed and displayed somewhere. We can hope!

After the bookstore we stopped by the Seattle Folklife Festival for a while. It was insanely crowded, and it was also quite a bit hotter and sunnier than we'd been expecting, but we had a good time. Kate enjoyed a participatory drumming session.

Three!

Yes, it's true, we have a three year old. We are still rather stunned by this fact, but I'm sure it'll sink in eventually.

Kate has been learning about birthday parties, and blowing out candles and things, from Blues Clues and other sources. She's also been fascinated by candles ever since we put one in her jack o' lantern. So we knew we would have to have candles. Not being much into cake, though, we just cut a slab of panettone and stuck the candles in that. (Which was fine--Kate likes panettone.)



Kate watches Daddy light the candles. ("Candles! And little fire!" she said.) She couldn't quite figure out the blowing-out part, so Daddy helped with that.




Kate and the swag. She's finally getting the hang of unwrapping, but still needs a little help. (We've been trying to discourage paper tearing, in general.)




Aww, big smile! "It's Thomas!"



I found these cute boots for Kate (yeah, I forgot to take the price tag off. Oops). We've had a little snow this year (including some on Christmas day, which was lovely), but nothing that stuck. But hey, it could happen. Kate wore her boots when we went out later, and we were singing the Laurie Berkner song, with some adaptation: "In my pink boots! In my pink boots! I stomp around in my pink boots!"



More dinosaur stuff from Scott. Where on earth we're going to put it all, we have no idea.

We went out to the Indian buffet in Lakewood for lunch. Kate ate quite a bit, but finished before we did, of course, and then we had to try to keep her contained while we ate. That was a bit tricky.



After lunch we went over to the nearby Barnes and Noble and hung out there for quite a while. Kate thinks of bookstores as places that have toys. Oh yeah, and books, too. We found some cool pop-ups.



We also got Kate the Scholastic Knuffle Bunny video. Here she is watching it with her daddy (and her pigeon, and her Thomas), and following along in the book. Kate loves the Knuffle Bunny video. I think we've watched it like fifteen times already. (It's short.)

The video has some very cute framing stuff with Mo Willems and his daughter Trixie. (You can see quite a bit of it on amazon.) Oh, and apparently Knuffle Bunny is a girl. Who knew?

In the book, Mo Willems thanks the 358 6th Avenue Laundromat, the site of Knuffle Bunny's misadventure. I wonder if the laundromat has anything celebrating their literary fame. Is there a signed Mo Willems doodle on the wall? Do Knuffle Bunny fans make pilgrimages to the laundromat, and vie for the opportunity to put quarters into the "M" machine?

Kate just came in and saw what I was doing, and wanted to watch Knuffle Bunny again. These scholastic videos are pretty cool. We should get some more.



Our little girl is getting so big! (I know I've said that before, but she keeps getting bigger!) She's talking so much these days, and we are all enjoying the wonders of communication. We can tell each other things! Yes! She still has some pronoun confusion--when she's having trouble with something, she hollers, "Can I help you?" and when she wants to hand us something she holds it out and says, "Give it to me?" She's also become very interested in the smoke alarm, which she calls the "smokel arm." It's too cute. I know we'll miss these baby things as she gets older.

Happy birthday, Kate! I think three will be fun.