Literary Lilly

Lilly adores books.  She devours them.  Each day we read between 10-15 books.  Books are read at breakfast, dinner, before bed, and times inbetween.  There really are no true favorites.  We have read all the Poppleton books from the library, we are nearing the end of the collection of Mr. Putter and Tabby, and the same with Elephant and Piggie books.  My grandma got her started on the My First Little House on the Prairie books, which we also read often.  Then there are the different nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and then all the other picture books out there.  The girl (should I say Baby Lion) loves them all.  Our bookshelves have no room for more books.  And when I try to purge the shelves and put away books that we haven't read in ages, I struggle because we read them all.  And getting rid of the variety might be fairly painful for us.

Typically on Monday I pick Lilly up and we go to the library to get one new movie (usually The Cat and the Hat Knows a lot About That) and a minimum of seven books.  I try and limit the number of books we get, but usually she talks me into at least two more.  We usually have to read at least five of them while we are there.  Lilly usually requests, "Please read this one time here?" for every book we pick off the shelf.

The characters and events from the book don't just show up in the books we read.  Lilly has named her three dolls Baby Julius, Baby Owen, and Baby Carrie.  All three of these names are from books we've read (Kevin Henkes books for the first two, Little House for Baby Carrie).  She talks about going to the toy store, where we have never been (and don't have one in Ashland) which I think comes from Curious George Saves His Pennies.  She also likes to read "grown up books" and takes our books off the shelves and pretends to read them.

On Sunday morning Lilly found two pieces of wood and decided she wanted to build a tree house.  Saturday we returned the book, The Tree House that Jack Built.  So, Nick gathered wood, screws, the screwdriver, cut the wood and got everything set to build a tree house.  We kept waiting for Lilly to forget about it (she really wanted to bake a cake Saturday morning but eventually that slipped her mind) but no, the girl was determined to build a tree house.  Even after she dropped a board on her foot and gave herself a nasty bruise, she still wanted to build the tree house.

Lilly's googles are her protective eyewear.  She also dug through her dress up clothes
to find her construction hat, but it wasn't fitting right, so she told me she didn't need
her hard hat.

Nick loves to build things.  Designing, planning, and building things where he can see the results within hours is one of his favorite things to do.  The nature of his job rarely produces immediate satisfaction like building a project.  He is, however, a perfectionist and when he builds things he likes them to be just right.  But, when one is building a tree house on the whim of a daughter who is nearly three with wood scrounged from the garage requires one to put that level of perfectionism aside and just go with the flow.  Which he was able to do, somewhat.  He tries not to let the hideousness of the tree house bother him, but he really isn't happy with how it turned out.  Lilly essentially had the attention span for the first few pieces getting put together, but then lost interest and began cooking cookies and cakes at her play kitchen.  So Nick finished attaching the last few pieces on his own.

Between dinner and bedtime snack, Lilly began painting the tree house.  Which probably has not made the tree house any more attractive.

The ugly tree house

And a special thanks to Nick who spent time scavenging through iPhoto to find where these photos were hidden, I was convinced they were lost forever.  But they were just dated February 2, 2013.