Needs more Nazis

Sophie and I were in the video store one evening, looking for a movie to watch together. Sophie kept picking out all these newfangled ones, all fancy and shiny... Backyardigans, Dora, Thomas the Train, you know the type. I figured that we'd aim for something a bit more classic, and gave her a choice of some older Disney ones - Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, the usual suspects. Eventually, she said she wanted to watch Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which it turns out I've never seen.



So we took it home, started watching the credits, and on comes a witch. Ah, I think, this explains the broomsticks. Very good. And then the witch starts magicking all these weapons and suits of armour to march one way, and lo and behold, who should appear marching against them, but a troupe of Nazis, machine guns blazing! I had no idea that a fairly significant part of the plot revolved around WWII. We still watched it, though, and it didn't have any gory bits, a la Inglorious Bastards. Much of it was still over Sophie's head, although she really enjoyed it when people got turned into animals, and also when things moved around by themselves, thanks to all the magic.

It just made me think back to the video store, looking at all the innocent movies Sophie wanted to watch, saying (in effect), "No, not that one, kiddo. Let's find one with more Nazis."

Sophie's Adventure

Sheesh! You leave her alone for one minute and...

A letter to Jan Brett

This Easter, we gave Sophie a copy of the lovely book, "The Easter Egg" by Jan Brett. In the book, Hoppi the bunny tries various sorts of egg decorating before finding out what he's best at. The illustrations are dripping with detail and I love the various styles of egg decorating that are represented (how often do you get to see pysanky in a kids' book?). There is a great video on Jan's website showing how she used real live animals as models for the book. Sophie and I decided to write a letter to author/illustrator Jan Brett who lives in Massachusetts. It was hard to send away Sophie's very first drawing of a bunny, so I scanned it before we sent it in the mail. Click on the images to enlarge.