Mondays with MeiMei- Thornton Burgess Edition

So now that MeiMei is getting ready to start school and we're doing more deliberate reading, I'm going to try doing "Mondays with MeiMei" as a fairly regular feature.

This girl cracks me up.  After her first day of swimming lessons this summer I asked if she'd learned anything.  Her response? "Don't drink the pool water.  It tastes gross."

Part of our summer routine this year was reading more deliberately to MeiMei-- preferably chapter books.

Which meant I had to FIND chapter books... preferably ones that she would like but that were not as mind-numbing for me (can we please not repeat the stacks and stacks of fairy books we did with Boo??).

We started with Thornton Burgess.  My friend had a bunch that used to be her dad's so she suggested them and we borrowed a couple.

For an animal-loving child like MeiMei, these were PERFECT.  Yes, they're slightly old-fashioned and sometimes sound weird, but still.

We've read Whitefoot the Wood Mouse and The Adventures of Buster Bear.  I think we both slightly preferred Buster Bear, which felt a little bit less disjointed.  Also, Whitefoot ends up getting married to a shrewish little mouse who continually calls him "stupid", which I really didn't love.  I did some editing as I read aloud.

We've got Buster Bear's Twins in our pile still, along with Paddy the Beaver.  We'll see who she ends up liking more. :)

PLUS-- did you know you can find a lot of them for free on the Kindle??  That's actually how we read Buster Bear.  I don't love reading ebooks still (they'll have to drag me into the ebook era kicking and screaming, I tell you) and they don't have the illustrations (at least they didn't on my phone using the kindle app) but it's kind of awesome to have so many choices.  Especially since they're old enough that the library has very few.