Photo by Greg Ortega, Unsplash
I’m a huge fan of the library. I go there several times a month. It makes me happy to see people sitting reading or deliberating over which book to choose. Thankfully, the libraries I belong to are busy!
In working on a scrapbook of my son Tim, a calendar entry reminded me that his first public outing as a baby was to our local library with his three-year-old sister Laura. So it was no surprise to anyone that both my children grew up loving to be read to and then later reading avidly on their own.
One of Laura’s favorite books at three was James Herriot’s Moses the Kitten. It’s the story of a bedraggled orphaned kitten that is taken in by a family. Moses is adopted by the farm’s mother pig; he joins her litter of piglets and is nursed back to health. Literally. Nursed, that is. I remember the page with all the babies suckling, and I’d point down the row of little bodies and say, “Pig, pig, pig, pig, pig. Cat!”
The only difficulty with the book is that it’s written in the prose of Herriot’s rustic English of northern England’s Yorkshire County. So a three-year old would not understand the language. When I “read” it, I simply made up the words to match the pictures and storyline. My sister Beverly came to assist our family when Tim was born. I can recall dozing on the sofa while my sister read to Laura. Naturally, Moses the Kitten was included as part of the selection.
Bev struggled valiantly with the unfamiliar word usage and phrasing. Part way through the book, Laura reached over and closed it saying, “That’s not the way my Mommy reads it.”
I was the primary good night stories reader, but sometimes my husband took over. Once when the kids were in upper elementary school and he was taking a turn, one of the chosen books was The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! by A. Wolf as told to Jon Scieszka. It’s the “true” version of the familiar story as told from the wolf’s perspective.
I guess I should have prepared my husband as this was the first time he’d seen the book. It’s hysterical. He started laughing on page one, and by the time he reached the part that asked, “And do you know what that rude little porker answered?” he couldn’t read any more. Tears were streaming down his face. He was trying to read aloud, but was really just making a braying type of sound.
I had rushed upstairs to see what was going on. My children were just staring at their dad, laughing a little, but I could see they were also a bit frightened, not quite sure what had possessed him.
Here’s a link to a PDF of the story. Warning: If you plan on reading it aloud to your children, do a couple of practice runs so you can get through it when it’s story time. https://www.sps186.org/downloads/basic/610716/The_True_Story_of_the_Three_Little_Pigs1.pdf
To my readers: Tell us about a favorite bedtime story of yours, your children, or grandchildren.
It’s funny that your blog is about The Three Little Pigs. I also have a story along those lines. When my granddaughter, Morgan, was 4 years old, I was reading her the “traditional” Three Little Pigs. I didn’t know there was a revised edition of the book. In the new edition, the pigs don’t get “all eaten up.” Well, I didn’t know there was a new version of the story, and only had the old storybook version. Morgan was sitting on my lap while I read her the story. When I got to the part where the first little pig , well, (and he ate him all up), Morgan reeled around to face me, and with an anguished look on her face said, “That’s a sad story!” When i told my daughter what had happened, she said, “Mom, we don’t read that version of the story anymore.” Gosh, I hope I didn’t traumatize my own children when I read them the old version of The Three Little Pigs.
I can just hear her saying this.