The Polar Express

Last year, Nora received a copy of The Polar Express in a children’s holiday book exchange I participated in with some friends. At that time, she wouldn’t even let me read it to her.

A few weeks ago, we ordered some Christmas movies to add to our (very small) Blu-ray collection. One of them was The Polar Express. Our nephews are into it, so we thought maybe Nora would like it, too. It arrived on the night before Thanksgiving, so on Thanksgiving morning, when she got bored with the parade, we turned it on for her.

She was into it.

After that Nora requested to watch The Polar Express every morning over the Thanksgiving weekend. She doesn’t make it through the whole thing—her standard attention span for such things is still only 20-30 minutes in most cases—but she liked it a lot. So one night, while I was putting her to bed, I broke out the book. I showed her the “choo choo” on the cover, and I cracked it open. She immediately tried to close it. But I forced the issue a little and once she realized that this was actually a GOOD book, she let me read it. I skip over some of the lines on the pages with a lot of copy, but read enough for her to get the gist.

And now she is in love with the book.

She went from calling it “choo choo” to “pwess book” (express book). She likes to carry it around and look at the pictures, and wants to read it every night at bedtime.

I love Christmas.

P.S. She is also TOTALLY IN LOVE with this random book that we got from the library—Happy Holidogs.

It’s just the “12 Days of Christmas” song, but with dogs instead of all of the other random objects that the true love gives to me. :) “On the first day of Christmas, Santa gave to me… 1 pup under the Christmas tree…” and so on. It’s tedious to sing the whole thing, but Nora LOVES it. It’s only been a week and she seriously knows a lot of the words to the song and sings along. I think she might lose her mind when we have to return it to the library. Eeek!