A Dragon! A Dragon! I swear I saw a Dragon!

***If you're coming here from Heart of the Matter, this post was posted last week, but I entered it in today's Meme anyway. It is such a great book! My kids loved it and I wanted to enter it, even though the post is a week old.

Have a lovely day, and feel free to refresh the page after you read it for more recent posts.***


Today we’re having a slow day. The boys have some extra curricular stuff they want to do, like install a stereo into Will’s truck. The girls are both coughing and Eve has a fever of 101. So we’re keeping it light.

The boys are going in and out and saying things like ‘wires’ and ‘tools’ and ‘amps’ and other things that are not really in my vocabulary.

The girls and I are reading the book The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. What a great book! We’re half way through it. Neither one of them really feels like doing much more than lying around so I’m trying to redeem the day by reading. A mind can only take so much Sponge Bob before it turns to mush so I feel that our choice of The Reluctant Dragon was a good one. The language in this little gem is beautiful.

Here is an excerpt…

What the Boy had feared however soon came to pass. The most modest and retiring dragon in the world, if he’ s as big as four cart horses and covered with blue scales, cannot keep altogether out of the public view. And so in the village tavern of nights the fact that a real live dragon sat brooding in the cave on the Downs was naturally a subject for talk. Though the villagers were extremely frightened, they were rather proud as well. It was a distinction to have a dragon of your own and it was felt to be a feather in the cap of the village. Still, all were agreed that this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed to go on. The dreadful beast must me exterminated, the countryside must be freed from the pest, this terror, this destroying scourge. The fact that not even a henroost was the worse for the dragon’s arrival wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with it. He was a dragon, and he couldn’t deny it, and if he didn’t choose to behave as such that was his own lookout. But in spite of much valiant talk no hero was found willing to take sword and spear and free the suffering village and win deathless fame; and each night’s heated discussion always ended in nothing. Meanwhile the dragon, a happy Bohemian, lolled on the turf, enjoyed the sunsets, and told antediluvian anecdotes to the Boy, and polished his old verses while meditating on fresh ones.

Is not that just lovely? I love it. Surely that overrides all the Sponge Bob, right?