It’s getting harder to gloss over things in stories when I’m reading to Adriana. She’s often reading along with me and will point out that I missed a word. So tonight when I skipped a sentence as I was reading her The Trumpet of The Swan, I expected her to correct me, but she was too tired to be following the text that closely.
Sam Beaver has dropped Louis the swan off in first grade and gone to his fifth grade class where the teacher calls on him with a math problem immediately. After the class is finished laughing over his answer to that question the teacher says:
“And now, here is a problem for one of the girls in the room. If you are feeding a baby from a bottle, and you give the baby eight ounces of milk in one feeding, how many ounces of milk would the baby drink in two feedings?”
LInda Staples raised her hand.
“About fifteen ounces,” she said.
“Why is that?” asked Miss Snug. “why wouldn’t the baby drink sixteen ounces?”
“Because he spills a little each time,” said Linda. “It runs out of the corners of his mouth and gets on his mother’s apron?”
I skipped the bit about “for the girls in the room,” and just finished the chapter, which ended after that seen.
“But...why is the milk on the mother’s apron?” Adriana asked as I turned out the light. “Is the babysitter or the dad wearing it so they’ll, like, smell right?”
“Well, I guess the girl is just assuming the mother is giving the baby the bottle.”
And Adriana cracked up laughing at the silly girl who thought mothers give bottles.
