Magic Tree House

Seeing that the theme this week around here is media, I want to re-visit the audiobook.

Last year I wrote about the girls' obsession with audiobooks, and probably mentioned how they work as efficiently as the babysitter we call TV but without so much of the guilt associated with screen time. They have to listen carefully for extended periods of time, and the pictures they see are only the ones they create themselves, in their heads. I was sold.

Our library started out with Shel Silverstein reading his poems and a series of Frog and Toad books. We moved on to fairy tales and greek mythology, added the Hobbit and Moby Dick (the kid's version, of course), and then, sometime last year... we got our first Beverly Cleary book - Beezus and Ramona. And we got stuck there.

They have listened to hundreds of hours of Stockard Channing read the Ramona books: Beezus and Ramona, Ramona the pest, Ramona the brave, Ramona and her father, Ramona and her mother, Ramona Quimby age 8. I couldn't take it anymore. What had once been a pleasant escape for all of us had turned into sheer torture for me.  And whiny little Beezus was actually wearing off on Bela, to my complete chagrin. I staged a hostile take-over of the audio library and then made another bold move: I used the credit Chris was saving in his audible account to purchase the pricey collection of The Magic Treehouse, books 1-8.

And they LOVE it. LOVE IT! Dinosaurs and mummies and sarcophagi and pirates and ghosts, oh my! They were so involved in this story that we listened to it during dinner last night. They traveled down the Amazon in their minds at bathtime, and they dueled it out with ninjas in their beds, in their darkened room. When I finally took the computer from their bedroom they realized that a story filled with tombs and robbers, mummies and pirates, ninjas and knights,  might make it difficult to fall asleep peacefully, and surely enough they both ended up in our bed last night.

But no hard feelings, because this morning I awoke to find Bela on the couch, under a blanket, listening to the story with the volume turned low. When the battery finally died on the computer half-way through breakfast, the girls turned to me and asked: Can we watch this again when we get home?

I love it. They want to watch it, so vivid are the pictures in their heads.

Thank you Magic Treehouse. Thank you thank you thank you. And thank you Leslie for suggesting it. I couldn't take one more chapter of the Quimby's on Klickitat Street.