E's eight!

We recently went up to Portland to visit our daughter and granddaughter. Usually just my wife goes there, but this time I also went along. The reason to go in May is supposedly the chance of having nice weather up there as well as it being granddaughter E’s birthday. This year she turned eight and was very excited. She originally asked for a company cheese cake like the one her mom made before, but then changed her mind and asked for a carrot cake. Dad was up late the night before grating carrots and making one from scratch, ending up with a pretty good cream cheese frosting the next morning. Somebody really liked it.


Yes, she was very excited to be turning eight. Everybody in her second grade class made her birthday cards (the teacher gives them class time and materials to do it) and several of them were of wombats – her topic for a class project and now her favorite animal.


E reads a lot, I’m impressed with her level and her understanding. We try to send her several books every month, and she is moving far past what we thought. She finished the Hobbit (and complained about what was different in the movie) and is on to the Lord of the Rings series. She finished the first Harry Potter book, we watched the first movie when I was there and she pointed out things that were different than the book, things I hadn’t noticed. So in order to skip all of those postage costs we decided to give her a Kindle, so that we could just pick out books for her remotely. The last time B was up there E kept taking her Kindle so B had to resort to paper books (oh my). Her mom is opposed to her getting a web device so we figured a Kindle that just let her go into the cloud and grab new books we purchased would work fine (though we did get complaints).

I think she liked it, especially the backlight so she can read under the covers without mom seeing her room light on. (we also did an Ikea stop while up there, and E ended up with one of their mice)


What is she reading? Well, I had on our Kindle last time The Butterfly Dress by Miranda which E read twice back then, and she wanted to read it again so that is the book she picked. What else is on there? Miranda’s new book the Blue Mermaid, Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, Pullman’s His Dark Materials (she started on the hardcover Golden Compass on her last visit), Heinlein’s Door Into Summer (one of my fav old sci fi books) and I had to include a horse story for a little girl Bryant’s Horse Crazy. We gave her paper copies of the first three Diskworld stories a few weeks ago, and will probably upload some more as she reads up what she already has.