This and That
It was Mike’s birthday today, so I slaved away on a special Swedish cake last night. Why do I wait until the last minute? I always forget that it needs to sit over night to achieve optimal moist goodness, then I am slaving over the stove at 9 pm, trying to get the pudding and fruit gel to thicken. At least this year I remembered that I wrote the recipes down in English so I didn’t have to re-translate the pudding recipe and re-create the fruit gel recipe. The fruit gel is not really a part of the Swedish recipe, but it makes it more moist.
All that to say: cake, good. Mike, good. I got him a Color Nook. Probably way too extravagent, but our local library supports the Nook format and the color screen was way too cool to pass up. I think it will really help Erik with his reading.
Erik!
Reading!
Yay!!!!!
He is not reading a lot or well, but he is reading. It feels magical to me, but I know it is the result of a lot of hard work on the part of his pre-K teacher.
At the moment he will read me a couple of pages of sound-out words and then say he’s tired and ask me to read the rest. I don’t blame him a bit. It is very tiring to sound out every word and for some reason he doesn’t really have the confidence in himself to try to read a word without sounding it out. It will all come, though.
I found a whole stash of excellent boy books at B&N that are right up his alley. I hate to talk about boy books vs girl books. I wanted to keep things as ungendered as possible when he was little so he would learn that things are for everyone, not just boys and girls. And so he would be comfortable if he decided he liked pink or whatever. Turns out, he is very clearly a stereotypical boy and he is not interested in Target’s selection of leveled readers. Fancy Nancy, Oliva, and little fuzzy animals don’t interest him. B&N had a section with a bunch of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other boyish level 1 books, so that’s what I bought. It’s great to be idealistic, but sometimes reality gets in the way.
We went to a house warming party today and some crazy lady asked Mike if he was American. She was asking what Elsa’s name was and didn’t understand “Elsa” so after Mike spelled it she gave him this look and said “Are you American?”
I was standing behind Mike, talking to another guest that I sort of know. The other guest and I just about choked, we were laughing so hard. It was just so rude! And improper!
Then the crazy lady told Mike she had met the queen of Sweden when she [crazy lady] was at a Nobel Prize party.
When our hosts heard us talking about it later they immediately identified the crazy lady and said she was completely nuts.
Dang. Here comes Erik. Time for me to take him to bed. I guess that means this disjointed entry is over.
Also, Erik has named his private part “Squirty.” Someone please send help.