A new release from an old favorite!

For the last two weeks, my life has been turned upside down by a host of routine-altering events both at home and at work. Our house has been under renovation for the last four months now and it is still nowhere near completion! It has now got to a point where none of us seem to remember why we even embarked on it, in the first place. So with our ground floor pulled apart, the aged and the ailing packed off to a relative’s house, Abhay sent off to my parents’, (which explains my absence from onestoryaday!), I along with my husband and my in-laws are all huddled into a three room portion of our first floor that serves as a living, dining and cooking area - so the four of us are literally breathing down each other’s necks! Of course, the fact that it has become unusually hectic at work only adds to all this sudden race against time! So in all this ….cuddling up to my little one (who is now hardly at home as he spends most of his weekday evenings at my parents’) with a book to read takes a hit!

But somehow today being Sunday and the carpenters, painters and construction workers being given a day off, I managed to find some time to read to my little one  specially because I stumbled upon a picture book by Peter Horacek whose ‘"Butterfly Butterfly" was the one of the first picture books I had read to Abhay almost three years ago in Portland….which seems like another world now! This one is titled “Elephant”, a story about a little boy and his imaginary friend, the Elephant. Narrated in first person, it begins with the  boy asking his grandpa to play football with him but his grandpa appears to be too busy and the same with grandma who is also busy in the kitchen. So he summons his imaginary friend, the Elephant who according to the boy is never busy to play football in the garden. Of course, it is the Elephant who is to blame for messing up the flower beds, or breaking grandma’s vase in the hallway, or splashing water in the bathroom floor, or for knocking over the orange juice! When grandma and grandpa don’t believe him, the boy is upset and darts off to his room. As he sits alone in his room, Elephant comes to cheer him up and plays with him all day. At night, the Elephant  takes him on a jungle safari to see a tiger until it is morning when grandpa walks in to his room offering to play football. As the boy wonders how did he get to bed, his grandpa too takes the name of the Elephant letting the boy believe that as he was tired last night, the Elephant carries him to bed! A delightful book to read with your little one whose imagination knows no bounds!

......On a side note, I'd like to make a mention that I now blog on momdairies and here is a link to one of my recent posts http://www.momsdiaries.in/book-reviews/reading-with-dad