Eyes on Dr. Seuss

It's Dr. Seuss's birthday! Kate had a special assembly at school today, and she said their principal dressed up as the Cat in the Hat.

Dr. Seuss's whimsical artwork is certainly distinctive and probably instantly recognizable to just about everybody.  There's one particular thing about his illustrations that I noticed a while back--how often he draws characters with their eyes closed. 



I first noticed this when reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I had commented to Doug that the kids come across as rather annoyingly smug.



You've never milked a cow like this?  Obviously, you're not as cool as we are.  In fact, we are so cool that we can milk this cow with our eyes closed.  Even the cow has its eyes closed.



The closed eyes seem to indicate that a character is calm, relaxed, untroubled by the bizarre circumstances he may find himself in. Stuck in a pail? Not to worry. Balancing an umbrella on one finger? Piece of cake.




Many characters have their eyes closed when first introduced.





Mr. Brown never does open his eyes for the entire book. He seems to be a remarkably self-assured individual. Either that or he developed his unusual talent to compensate for his lack of eyesight.



Closed eyes come in clusters.



Even Knox, at the beginning of Fox in Socks, is happy and calm, until the Fox starts making things difficult for him.



He does have his eyes closed in many pictures, though, as you can see, it's rather a different kind of eye closing. The fox has that familiar annoyingly smug expression.




Not until Knox finally gets the better of the Fox at the end does he look happy again.. (Hopefully he won't trip going down those stairs with his eyes closed.)



Sam I Am and his unnamed companion are both in a good mood at the end of Green Eggs and Ham.

And of course we can't forget I Can Read With My Eyes Shut.

In closing (heh) here's a picture of Doug when he was three years old, with a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (along with big brother Al and baby Craig).



Happy birthday Dr. Seuss!

Dryer Casualty

This is a page from The Happy Hocky Family by Lane Smith. (If you haven't read it you should really check it out. It's hilarious.)



This is (or was) Kate's plastic slinky that she got from the dentist.

Alas.

Picture books on Kindle

Kate and I just finished reading My Father's Dragon last night.  I spotted it in the Kindle storeand it was only 99 cents, so I thought it would be fun to read together.

We've read a couple of heavily-illustrated books on the Kindle.  It's been interesting to see how it handles the pictures. I took some screen shots, in case anyone else is curious about this.



Apparently the way the text splits around the pictures in the book is a bit different from what they chose to do in this ebook edition. I can see why they changed it, but for some reason they felt the need to insert "illustration appeared here" in the text, often right in the middle of a sentence.  I found this annoying.



These drawings are so cute and detailed. The small screen size is a bit of a disadvantage here. (The original illustrations are also black and white.)



Vertical pictures fill up the screen pretty well. Horizontal pictures come out much smaller, since of course they can only be as wide as the screen.



You can change the orientation to landscape, which increases the available width and makes the picture bigger, but it's awkward to flip back and forth. (Unfortunately there isn't a quick and easy way to do this--it requires multiple clicks each time.)

Kate and I both enjoyed the story (we read it in three installments). It was fun to see the pictures but I do think we would need to read the paper book version to really appreciate the drawings properly. We'll have to get the other two books out of the library to find out what happens next.

We also read Dick King-Smith's Funny Frank. Many of Mr. King-Smith's books feature animals behaving in unconventional ways, such as a pig who wants to fly,or a cat who keeps pet mice.This one is about a chicken who wants to swim.



There are quite a lot of illustrations--pretty much one per page. The drawings are small and simple, so I don't think you really lose anything viewing them on the Kindle screen.




The spacing of the pictures leads to large blank areas on some pages, which can make you think you're at the end of a chapter when you really aren't.



And there was this one egregious formatting error. Grrr.

This is a short chapter book for young readers. It's a cute story, if you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept that someone could make a wet suit for a chicken out of a hot water bottle, and that it would actually work.

Dick King-Smith is also the author of Babe,of course. He just passed away on January 4th. I have fond memories of reading some of his books to my siblings. I think Kate would enjoy hearing more of his stories. Another trip to the library!

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.

>

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.

Just So.

Some time last summer, Kate ran across some of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories on totlol.com. (Edit: It's gone to a pay site, but they're on youtube too) Such as "How the Whale got his Throat" and "The Elephant's Child." She seemed to especially enjoy the one about the whale, and watched it over and over. They're fairly good adaptations, though they do change things a bit.

One night at bedtime, Kate asked me, "Can you tell me the story of how the whale got his throat?" (At the time she was pronouncing it more like "fwout.")

I said, "I can do better than that, I'll read it to you!"

I got this bookwhen I was at BYU. Dr. Tunnel, my children's lit professor, had a copy that he showed us in class, and I fell in love with the illustrations--gorgeous paintings with intricate patterned frames and gold accents.



The stories are rather wordy, and the book doesn't have pictures on every page, but Kate enjoys listening. I have, at times, read to her from whatever book I'm in the middle of while she falls asleep. This is after the regular bedtime stories and books, of course. The current bedtime routine includes stories and books with Dad ("stories" usually means acting things out with her stuffed animals), then teeth brushing and family prayer, then three more books with Mom. I went through a brief Three Investigators revival a while back (must have been something with the pregnancy hormones), and I read to her from those. She'd ask questions every once in a while--enough to show that she was paying attention at least a bit--but even with that she'd usually fall asleep pretty quickly.

We've been reading a Just So story almost every night for quite a while now. She hardly ever falls asleep (except sometimes when we do one of the longer ones). They're just fun to listen to, with the rhythm and repetition ("the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees").

They're meant to be read aloud. It's not just about the stories, it's about the words. Which I can understand might not appeal to everyone. There's an introduction in the front of the book that includes an excerpt from a spoof "Very-Nearly Story" published in the humorous magazine Punch, which tells "how the Ruddikip got His Great Big Side!" The Ruddikip announces:

"I will now turn to the Small Children, and I shall address them in decapitated polysyllables."

Wherefore and 'cordingly, oh, Best-Beloved, the most and-altogether-beyond-record-'defatigable Ruddikip took his little pen, and he wrote. Then they took the writing of the 'defatigable Ruddikip, and put it in beautiful, big black print. For they knew, oh, Approximately Invaluable, that this is the kind of talk you like, and that you would thank the Ruddikip ever so much for tales written in just this way!

"Chuck it!" said the Modern Child as he rose and fled.

Ha. For the time being, anyway, we're both enjoying them. We have the Whale, the Camel, and the Rhinoceros in regular rotation, being the shortest stories. "The Beginning of Armadillos" is very cute, but quite a bit longer.

It's so fun to see Kate synthesizing and using things that she's heard. The other day she was playing with her Hungry Hungry Hippo game, and I heard her say, "And he swallowed the 'Stute Marble down into his warm, dark, inside cupboards!"

Major cuteness, with goats

Doug brought home a book of The Three Billy Goats Gruff from the library, and we have been having lots of fun with it. We read the book over and over, tell the story, and act it out (taking turns being the troll). Doug just finished making this little flash animation for Kate. They both contributed voices. Click here (or on the picture above) to watch it. And turn up your speakers!

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.