Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Book Review for Anxious Kids
Not that this is rocket science, but if you have a kid whose anxieties routinely center around health, and who used to spend the ride home from nursery school conversing about the H for Hospital sign and who would likely go to the hospital and for which accidents, the book Plague is not an excellent choice. Swear to God, this thing had a giant picture of some sort of vermin on the cover (lice? Murrain?), and consisted entirely of descriptions of various deadly diseases. So he was reading this while I was on the computer, b/c it was safer if Mommy was in the room, and periodically (= every ten seconds or so), he'd say, "Do we get yellow fever in this part of the world?" or "Influenza. Can that kill you?"
A pox (see what I just did there?) on the librarian who let him take this thing out.
Maybe it's genetic: as I note below, my grandmother's favorite epithet translated to "Cholera on you."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like your grandmother. How did she say it?

Ruth

emily said...

Heh: it sounded like "Choleria," with a very guttural CH sound, like Bach or Chanukah.

 
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