Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

During his physical some months ago, Tab's doctor noticed a heart murmur. He thought it was probably nothing but wanted Tab to have an echocardiogram just to be sure. Tab's appointment for the echo was scheduled for this morning. The boys overheard us talking about it at dinner last night and asked why Daddy would be going to the hospital the next day.

"It's just a kind of checkup. They're going to take a picture of my heart," he told them.

"Ewww," all three of the boys said.

"Will they take your heart out?" Daniel joked. "I saw a guy on Indiana Jones who pulled another guy's heart out of his chest!"

A few days ago I had made the mistake of letting Daniel watch the second movie in the Indiana Jones trilogy. Temple of Doom is much more violent than either of the other two movies in the series. I'd forgotten just how awful it is, having only seen it once.

I shook my head. "Guess which movie you won't be watching again, Dans," I said.

In honor of the birthday of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, Daniel took The Sneetches and Other Stories to school to read to his class. Some of Dr. Seuss's morality fables are a little heavy handed, but you gotta love the story about the star-bellied sneetches, who lorded their belly stars over those unfortunate sneetches who "had none upon thars."

At the library today, the twins selected two Dr. Seuss books that we don't have at home, The Lorax and The Sleep Book. This afternoon before their nap, we read The Lorax. Now there's a dark book. It's a cautionary tale about respecting the environment: a worthy message, but the ending is very bleak.

When my youngest sister was little, I read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to her so many times that I still know whole sections of that book by heart. It remains my favorite Seuss. How can you not love a book with these lines:

From there to here
From here to there
Funny things are everywhere

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