I had a particularly lengthy off-hours stint of work on Saturday, so I decided to take today off to make up for it. Iver found a pamphlet somewhere yesterday extolling the virtues of Minneapolis. Included in the pamphlet were some pictures of water fountains, so he’s been talking non-stop about going to visit one. Being mid-April in Minnesota, of course none of the fountains around here are operational. But I wasn’t 100% sure, and thought it would be a fun diversion, so we got in the car and headed out to find a fountain.
Month: April 2017
Tonight Iver and I read Chapter II of Winnie-the-Pooh, in which Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s front door after eating all the honey and condensed milk Rabbit had on hand. While Christopher Robin is explaining to Pooh that he will remain stuck in the hole for a whole week, Pooh asks if someone would please read to him from a Sustaining Book:
“A week!” said Pooh gloomily. “What about meals?”
“I’m afraid no meals,” said Christopher Robin, “because of getting thin quicker. But we will read to you.”
Bear began to sigh, and then found he couldn’t because he was so tightly stuck; and a tear rolled down his eye, as he said:
“Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?”
(I love how A. A. Milne uses capitalization to emphasize Words of Great Importance).
There’s a lot going on in our world. Reading the news about the refugee crisis or the opioid epidemic makes me glad we get to read this Sustaining Book together over and over again.
When Catie was young she was given a stuffed bear from Dayton’s. It came with a backpack and hiking gear and was named Boundary Waters Bear.
He’s well loved, to the point where we searched eBay for his brethren and have so far acquired three more of them (if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing?). Iver has had a couple of them in his room since birth, and this morning he announced that they were now named Pooh and Christopher Robin. Catie put some Identifying Socks on them and they are now joining us at most meals. From the sound of it a great many adventures were had with them throughout the day. Here they are eating breakfast:
I don’t really have a point to make here, other than I love my kid and Winnie-the-Pooh is a Sustaining Book when you feel like you are a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness.
I’m a baseball fan in general, and a fan of the Minnesota Twins in particular. It was not always thus. I grew up with generic notions of local sport team fandom as most children in a city with (usually) four major sports teams probably do, with the most fondness for the Twins. This was likely due to being 5 and 9 years old when they won their two World Series’. Baseball is the sort of game that’s easy enough for a young child to understand on the surface, and I have very fond memories watching those ’87 and ’91 teams make their championship run.
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