Barnes and Noble

In keeping with my storytime theme, Everest and I went to the local Barnes and Noble. While they don't advertise a story time, they do actually host two each week - one on Thursday morning and one on Friday evening. We stopped in after a(nother) failed attempt at the gym's child care to find a grandmotherly woman reading books about dragons. It was your pretty typical story time, like what I remember from elementary school and what I expected. With some bonus moralizing at the end of the book (did we have that at library story time?) The two books she read were: If I had a Dragon and The Tale of Custard the Dragon.

If I had to give it a grade, I would say C for average. Everest was completely uninterested, and we did not stay for the end. Note, this is not a guage of quality, more of his mood :-)

Como Zoo

Last week we found our selves over by the zoo with a couple of hours to kill, so we stopped in. If you can get past the "zoo as cruelty to animals" thing, fall turns out to be a really cool time to go to the zoo. The bring most of the animals (i.e., the ones that live in Africa) indoors, so you can see them up-close and personal. The ones who like the cool weather stay outside, and they are super active. No great pictures of E here, but a couple fun ones of the animals.

Winter wear

I'm kind of dreading the winter. I have a hard enough dressing myself for the weather, and now I also have to dress a baby! So far, he doesn't seem to mind the cold, and some friendly neighbor (if it's you, can you please identify yourself?) dropped off a box of baby snowsuits. Here is E in my personal favorite.

I love the bear ears! Maybe I will just start thinking about it as one more chance to play dress-up with my son!

Red Balloon

Now that it is halfway over, allow me to announce November's theme - story time!

There are several story time's throughout the community. Most are sponsored by either a library or a bookstore, and I think I accidentaly stumbled upon the gold standard of story times with my very first visit.

The Red Balloon Book Store in St. Paul hosts 3 story times each week. One is geared toward infants, one to toddlers and a third to preschoolers. I'm not exactly sure what that means as far as an age breakdown, but I know E is an infant, so we went to that one.

The storytime is done by Sara Waters, who describes herself as a "children's librarian and mother." She is high energy, and puts on quite a show, complete with puppets, musical instruments, songs, books, silly hats. . . The list goes on! I'm not sure if E totally loved it, but I think in a few more months he will. Unfortunately, story time is on Tuesdays during our music class, so I don't know when we will be able to go again. Sara has a class on Thursdays that I think consists of another weekly story time, only with a much smaller audience. We tried to sign up, but she was full :-(

This will be hard to beat!