Zeke's version of Dr. Seuss

Presumably many of my three or four readers will be familiar with Theodore Geisel, b.k.a. Dr. Seuss, and maybe also his well-known graduation present book, Oh, the Places You'll Go. We have a copy of this lying around and Zeke has taken a liking to it. He has been asking to have it read to him a lot. But yesterday he decided to "read" it to Talia. I didn't get it all down, but here's a reasonable chunk of it.

When you're on earth, it's not much fun.
You're on the outside of the earth. You're done.

Oh, let's go, to the places you'll go.
It's in space. In outer space, you know.

You might catch, or you might score,
On the greatest one of all. One hundred. Or.

Except when it's not, there's a game you can't win.

The end.

In the original, there are a lot of pages that begin, "Except when it's not," or "Except when you don't," or things like that. Just in case you're wondering. Also, Zeke has suddenly gotten interested in outer space and asks lots of questions about planets. Someone at preschool must have mentioned the fact that Pluto has been demoted to, what is it now, a planetoid or something, because he has been asking me why Pluto used to be a planet and isn't any more. He wants to know if it shrunk.

At any rate, the first line really made an impression on me. And he definitely has the anapestic tetrameter pretty well down.

More experimentation with reading

Zeke's been able to recognize his own name in writing for a while now, mainly (I assume) because you just don't see that many short words that start with "Z" (especially when they're written on the back of, say, the pictures he draws at daycare). But this surprised me.

Tonight, Zeke stared at this bowl for a minute or two and then asked, "Daddy, what does this say?" I said, "What do you think it says?" Then he sounded out what he saw: "Tuh... ah... luh... Talia."

Later, I was reading him a book (about Rosa Parks -- not sure this is really the most appropriate for his age, but he likes the pictures of buses) which includes, in large type, the text of a spiritual, beginning with the words, "O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me." I read this out loud to him, and he interrupted me and pointed at each of the "O"'s in turn, saying "O feeding, O feeding, O feeding over me."