Empathy and Counting

We haven't been reading Miss Spider's Tea Party as much 'round here lately. No real reason, we thought. Max had been on a pretty steady diet of Miss Spider for the first year of his life. Lots of Miss Spider and her new car and Miss Spider counting mixed in with some healthy doses of Brown Bear, Brown Bear became a rock solid literary base for the boy.

We've moved on, though, to flip books and books with a bit more of a narrative structure. The other night,however, probably missing the sentence "Five rubber bugs stared silently", (God, I love reading that aloud.) Max pulled out a blast from the past and grunted an affirmative, "huh-huh", as he handed the book to Katie.

The whole premise of the book is Miss Spider trying invite other bugs to a tea party and, naturally, not knowing Miss Spider, the bugs assume she, as a spider, has some nefarious ulterior motive to her "tea party" (i.e. Come get trapped in my web, suckahs, until I decide to eat you). Nothing could be further from the truth, however, and Miss Spider gets pretty bummed when all the bugs decline her invites. She sobs as a matter of fact.

Apparently, from the last time we read this book, to last night, Max has learned what crying faces signify 'cause when Katie turned to this page:





all hell broke loose. It took about ten minutes and multiple singing of the damn "Fim-Fam" song to bring him down. He was less perturbed when the window shut on his hand. Katie thinks that he caught it from me 'cause last week, when I finished this, I had my own "Miss Spider" moment. It wasn't all bad, though. Once we got him calmed down, Katie turned to me and observed, "Well, at least we know he's not autistic."