Books We Love – Page 2 – The Creative Salad

I Think We’re in Trouble

Our five year old has discovered the infinite joy that is Calvin and Hobbes.

She even found my all-time favorite comic strip (shown in the middle):

When David and I were preparing for the arrival of our firstborn, I read a dozen pregnancy and baby development books, while he read Calvin and Hobbes. Looking back, we joke that he was better prepared than I.

That being said, we already had The Talk with our daughter: she is to resist the temptation to mimic any of Calvin’s antics. We’ll see how it goes.

Meet Simone

Our daughter loves role playing. Whenever she reads a new book (usually with an awesome female protagonist) we then, at her insistence, become the book characters for a week or two weeks or a month. For our kid, this game NEVER gets old. To David and I, it is the ultimate act of reading comprehension.

Recently our five year old has been devouring the Cam Jansen series by David A. Adler. Cam Jansen and the Mystery of Flight 54 has become a particular favorite thanks to a young French girl named Simone Green who travels to the US by herself. Oh, to be able to fly on your own! This greatly appeals to our independent girl (who lamented on her fifth birthday that she didn’t want to be five: “I just want to be a grown up already!”).

And so Simone’s bags are packed,

plane tickets have been procured (for Simone and Cam’s aunt Molly who’s also on the flight),

passports have been made (never mind that they are for US citizens),

and it’s time to travel.

Bon Voyage!

Grow It, Cook It

Our daughter has been pouring over a fantastic gardening cookbook for kids: Grow It, Cook It: Simple Gardening Projects and Delicious Recipes. Yes, a book about gardening and cooking — two of our family’s most favorite things! This cookbook aims to get children involved in growing and preparing their own food. What better way to get kids excited about the food they eat than to grow and prepare it themselves!

Let’s head out to the garden and harvest some strawberries!

Grow It, Cook It presents how to grow a particular plant, and then incorporate it into a delicious recipe (with stunning photographs!). Here are some examples from the book:

The book also includes a section on seed saving:

Now to make something with our harvest of strawberries!

I think a batch of strawberry fruit spread is in order. That is if I can convince our daughter to stop gorging herself on the delicious berries. Who can blame her?! Homegrown produce tastes the best.

Introducing the Concept of Evolution to Kids

We first introduced our daughter to the concept of evolution when she was two years old with this fantastic book, Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story.

While our toddler liked the pictures, the only part she really grasped on to was that we share a common ancestry with monkeys. For months after reading this book she’d ask us questions like, “Mom, when were we monkeys?” One day she exclaimed, “When I climb trees then I’ll have a tail again! No, no, no, we’ll never have tails again!”

She recently started asking more questions about evolution, so we felt it was high time to check Our Family Tree out of the library again!

I particularly love this book because it explains how we evolved over time with concise descriptions, poignant examples, poetic verse, and beautiful illustrations.

With each example of an evolutionary change, the author relates that shift to us today.

Our now four year old daughter soaked up the storytelling, the pictures, and the thought-provoking story.

I do believe we need to buy our own copy.

Tips: Landscaping for Privacy

I’ve been reading all sorts of wonderful gardening books from the library recently: Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard; Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living and The Essential Urban Farmer (never-mind that we live way out in the country!); Landscaping for Privacy: Innovative Ways to Turn Your Outdoor Space into a Peaceful Retreat; Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces; and Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region.

I particularly enjoyed Landscaping for Privacy, which focuses on using natural elements to block out visual and auditory clutter. I loved their use of water to reduce ambient noise, round-up of fence materials (some familiar, others creative and new), methods to keep pests from vegetable gardens, ways to incorporate play spaces for kids, and delineate spots for dogs. Here’s a sneak peak inside the book, featuring some of my favorite pages to savor and enjoy:

Someday we’ll own our own place and then I’m buying a copy for sure. This book’s a keeper.