My Squishies & Veggies

When we were growing up my siblings and I had a set of books called Child Craft. I don’t know where they originally came from but I think they were published in the 1940′s. There are 12 volumes and each one has different stories and poems and  as they go up in number they become more like text books. I loved these as a kid and my favorite one was #1-the nursery rhymes and short poems volume. When Maddox was a baby my dad tracked down a set for him.

We have been reading them to Maddox every night before bed. Some of the stories we have to edit because apparently kids in the 40′s weren’t as sensitive to animals being eaten by wolves. One of the volumes has classic stories like The 3 Little Pigs and Goldilocks and the 3 Bears but they are not the endings I remember. There is one story called The Wolf and the Seven Kids (kids, as in baby goats). The mommy goat goes to the store and a wolf comes and eats 6 of the seven baby goats. When the mommy goat gets home she finds the 7th goat still alive and he tells her what happened. Then her and the baby goat go find the wolf sleeping so they cut his stomach open with scissors (no joke), let out her other baby goats (who are still alive, thank goodness), fill his stomach back up with rocks and push him down a well. Then they all jump around and celebrate. I am not even exaggerating a little. That is the story. Luke was laughing the whole time he read it to Maddox, probably because he was having to leave out half of the story so Maddox wouldn’t get nightmares. Maddox loves them though.

He decided this morning that he needed to put all of them on my bedside table so I would know where they were and wouldn’t forget to read them to him.

Last night Luke read him The Sugar Plum Tree, one of my favorites from back when I read them as a kid. It is a poem about a tree that grows candy. Maddox quickly became obsessed and didn’t stop talking about the “candy tree” until he went to sleep. Then he woke up this morning and the first words out of his mouth were ” We need to put on my snow clothes so we can go outside and find a candy tree and tell the gingerbread dog to bark at the chocolate cat and knock the candy down so we can eat it all and not get a bellyache because it’s in our dreams!”  Which pretty much sums up the poem word for word except for the bellyache part. I’m guessing Luke added that when Maddox was asking him 100 questions about this wonderful thing he never knew existed called a candy tree.

Well, since the sun was trying to come out we decided we would go look for this “candy tree”.

Maddox pulled Bella for about 10 seconds and then I took over. We looked all over.

But we didn’t find any candy trees. Instead we had to settle for The Better-est Hot Cocoa. Maddox was a little disappointed. I told him that we will just have to make our own candy trees. Sounds like the perfect project for another cold, winter day in our very near future.