We took our two kiddos plus one cousin to the zoo yesterday, while we’re having a respite from the 100+ degree heat for a few days. I think we haven’t been since right before Sarah was born. Anna thinks we went once with Sarah in the stroller, and her memory is amazing and she’s usually right about these things; I just have no memory or photographic evidence of it. So we’re not sure.

In any case, it was the first zoo trip that Sarah was aware of and able to enjoy. And she did, mostly (aside from a melt-down when we left the playground area before she was ready). She loves making animal noises, and most things said either “woof woof” or “neigh!”. It was really sweet to see her recognize that something was an animal, even if she didn’t know what it was, and assign it some random sound. We did get her to roar like a lion, though. That’s her newest thing, and it just cracks her up.

I’m afraid I only took pictures one place. Sarah liked the penguins, and the penguins liked Sarah:

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I’m on a children’s literature kick. After reading the book Honey for a Child’s Heart, which I highly recommend to anyone with children, I am newly inspired to fill our home and our lives with good children’s books. I tend to go overboard with my inspirations, and I have an overwhelming desire to read every good book out there right now, forgetting that we have a lifetime ahead of us to enjoy them, and also forgetting that I need to cook dinner and do the laundry.

Lately I’ve been wanting to introduce more poetry to the girls, so I checked out Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. (I intend to buy one, but I first wanted to peruse the library’s collection to see which version I liked best).

For a baby gift, Anna was given the CD A Child’s Garden of Songs, which is a selection of Stevenson’s poems put to music. I had planned to read Anna some of the poems from the book this morning. Well, as soon as I explained to her what the book was, she went and got her CD, read the titles off the back, searched for the same poems in the table of contents, found them by flipping through the book to the correct page number, and proceeded to read them aloud to her favorite baby doll, Charity, whom she had retrieved from her room just for this purpose. All by herself. She’s four, for crying out loud! I just stood there watching. Literature, rhyme and meter, art, reading, research skills, counting and number recognition, nurturing role-play—all happening at once. If that’s not education, I don’t know what is.

And I wondered what we’d do all summer while she was out of school.

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