A couple days ago I was in the middle of giving instructions to one of the children, and the phone rang. I picked it up and said clearly into the receiver....

"Come here, please!"

I think I'm losing brain cells rapidly.

In other news, I've been asked a few times for titles of books that we've enjoyed reading with/to the children. I know with my English background I ought to be able to give people quite a list at a moment's notice. But I never can seem to think of any. So today went through the bookshelves and wrote down the titles of books we've read with/to the children (chapter books, I mean). It's actually a fairly short list, for reasons I will explain later. Here's what I came up with:

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Little House books

Anne of Green Gables

Several books by Patricia St. John (The Rainbow Garden, for example)

The Hobbit

Several stories from The Happy Hollisters series (which are sweet and wholesome and totally unrealistic )

The Triplets Have an Adventure and several more long-out-of-print books, mostly British

Several missionary biographies

Misty of Chincoteague and Stormy, Misty's Foal

Ned, of course ( you didn't really think my kids would escape that one, did you?)

We're about to start The Secret Garden

That's quite an unsatisfactory list, really. I'm sure I've forgotten a few, but not many. One problem is that there's no inter-library loan here, and the offerings in our local library are few. We do actually have thousands of books at our house, but so many of them are just over the level that my kids could handle (theme-wise; they're very good at language).  Right now they're enthralled with non-fiction books about history. I'll try to post about new books we read as we read them.