Interwebs! I’ve missed you, with your daily forced blag of months past. How the heck are ya? I’m still pretty busy. I keep thinking things will slow down any day now, then things pop up. Such is the downward slide til the end of the year. I’m chewing over a big post deconstructing what has of late become my dread of the Christmas season (complete with highfalutin’ references to anthropological essays!), but don’t have the gumption for it tonight. And maybe dread<\/i> is too strong a word, anyway. Something like annoyance + unease + fatigue + nostalgia is probably better. Is there a word for that?<\/p>\n
I was going to do “what we’re reading,” but I have not had time to read much of anything lately, either for fun or for work (my infostreams are neglected + unruly, sigh). Gus, on the other hand, has been a reading fiend. Apparently the trick is to tell him he can read before bed — it makes him think we’re letting him stay up later (which of course we are not).<\/p>\n
I am not at all a reading snob when it comes to kids books. Honestly, he can read whatever Star Wars Spongebob Lego Captain Underpants Pokemon crap he wants to, as long as he’s reading. I do, however, prefer to reserve the ca$h money for purchasing books that he’s likely to read more than once (and that will take him longer than an hour to read, too). These are the suggested house rules for everyone, actually.<\/p>\n
So we hauled off to the library one recent weekend morning and picked up a pile of paperbacks for him. While scanning the shelves I found a craptastic series called Beast Quest. You know the kind — there are 8 bazillion books in the series and they’ve all been published in the past year and their names are all formatted like so: <Crazy Fake Mythological-sounding Name> the <Weather\/Elemental Attribute or Scary Thing> <Kind of Beast>. Plus cheesy cover art.<\/p>\n
Well, he ripped through Zepha the Monster Squid<\/a> in like 2 days, and similarly Tartok the Ice Beast<\/a> (who is, apparently, a girl, I’ll have you know). These were middle books in the series so I requested the first 3 from the library. But then I started to feel bad that he’d have to wait for them, and yesterday was<\/i> his birthday, so I headed out on my lunch hour on Monday + bought them for him.<\/p>\n And I have to say, they do work like magic. He’s been most excited about his new Nintendo DS, but he did pick up Ferno the Fire Dragon (Beast Quest book 1) today. I probably have about a week, tops, to order up books 4 through 8 bazillion from the library, so I’d better get on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interwebs! I’ve missed you, with your daily forced blag of months past. How the heck are ya? I’m still pretty busy. I keep thinking things will slow down any day now, then things pop up. Such is the downward slide til the end of the year. I’m chewing over a big post deconstructing what has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,19,33],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kid","tag-library","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}