"Dark stormy night"

This morning at breakfast Sam kept saying "dark stormy night" and I realized that he was not celebrating the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest where WWW means "wretched writers welcome" but instead was quoting a line from an "Olivia" book. We've been getting this series of books by Ian Falconer from the library and they're absolutely wonderful! They've got adult references (such as "it was a dark and stormy night") and are amusingly droll which makes reading them over and over and over and over more tolerable than the average kids book. The illustrations are wonderful and include things such as Jackson Pollack's paintings, a Degas dancer, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sphinx, etc. And oh, by the way, Olivia is a pig.

The facial expressions of the parents are wonderful. In the one we've currently got, Olivia loses her favorite toy and her dad promises to get her an even better toy the next day so she's giving him a huge hug and telling him that he's the best daddy in the world. Her mother has a wonderfully exasperated expression on her face.

Recommended reading for all kids and adults. And very amusing to hear coming from your child.

Oh, one other thing he likes from the books is that "Olivia moves the cat" so now Sam tries to move the cat. It works ok when he does it with Lola but look out when he tries to pick up Mo!