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Ceridwen

Ceridwen

You kids get off my lawn. 

The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby - Dav Pilkey, George Beard, Harold Hutchins This is another book that I don't think I should rate, but I'm going to this time. I liked this fine, but I am not 7. If you have a 7-year old, he or she will probably love it forever, and you should get him or her a copy right now. The humor is completely toilet-based. At one point as my boy was reading this he hit the phrase "cut the cheese". I stopped him.

"Cut the cheese means he farted, you know," I say.

"He farted?" my son asks. He's starting the kind of giggle that will overtake him and make him incoherent soon.

"Yup," I say. He reads out the line again, replacing "cut the cheese" with "farted". This makes it better for him, because he gets to say "fart" without me telling him there is no toilet talk at the table. We're not at a table, so he's safe. (And, we had a nice conversation about dropping the f-bomb earlier when I caught him yelling the full version of wtf at a video game. I only have myself to blame. Anyway.)

At the back of this book is a page asking if you are offended by this book, and entreating you to write and send a SASE if you are. The boy gets very excited about this, and we spend part of the morning writing a letter to the folks at Scholastic. I couldn't figure out how to google this, but I'm hoping whatever thing they would send to readers when this was published 8 years ago is still in effect. This is what the boy wrote:

frontpage

insideletter

The front page is fine or whatever, but the inner page is what makes my son a brilliant genius. (You are welcome to stop reading here, because I'm going to freak out, Mum-style, and that isn't always pretty.) Do you see the semicolon???? My son used a semicolon correctly, in a letter to an author about how he loves his books. I did not coach him in any way. Srsy.

!!!!!!!

So we'll see what happens in a couple weeks. We dropped this in the mail today, and I hope this letter finds its way into the hands of the author, and that my boy gets something in response. Even without a response, I'm over the moon. A semicolon. He is my son.

Oh, and that brings up another thing. There are a ton of misspellings and kid-dialect in this book, and in all of this series. I had a conversation with my husband about this, where he expressed his irritation with that. Won't this just screw kids up with their three Rs? I don't think so, not at all. Most kids are rule-enforcers, and spelling is one of those rules. This is play, and they know the difference.

Now, if only I could get the boy to stop using the grocer's apostrophe, all would be well.