Whenever my children express an interest in something (besides Star Wars), I love to just run with it. It's like the window of opportunity is wide open so I make that interest our theme du jour, especially if it's something that interests me as well. The other day, while looking through our bookcase for something to read to my boys, I came across a long forgotten book I'd had since way before kids, when I first fell in love with France.
The book, Linnea in Monet's Garden, is a favorite of mine and while I wasn't a child when I read it, I wanted to be that child, that child who gets to go to France and see art and paste a city map of Paris into a scrapbook.
Then, of course, many years later, I became a mother of boys. I shoved the book way in the back of our bookshelves, behind the Harry Potter and the Mercy Watson and the Magic School Bus. Linnea has a lot of text so I thought it might be a bit of a tedious read to my boys who love Star Wars and who don't, at the moment, like to read books where the protagonist is a girl (with the exception of Princess Leia and Hermione, of course).
Chalk Boy was all mine for story time one night (his brother was reading with dad) and so I pulled out the book, expecting him to give it the thumbs down. But Chalk Boy was game.
So we read the book, with Chalk Boy engaged the entire time. After he went to bed, I planted the Tiny Folios edition of the Great Book of French Impressionism amongst his bathroom reading (yes, we have a basket of books in the kids' bathroom) and opened it to the pages showing Monet's Japanese footbridge.
The following morning, Chalk Boy came running with the book in hand. "Look what I found!" he said, smiling, showing me the pictures of the footbridge. "It's just like in the book we read last night."
I love manipulating my children.
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