Good, clean fun

Today I got paid to make fake dust bunnies. When the candidates orate about job creation, neither mentions this sort of endeavor.  These were American-made fake dust bunnies, not imported from some Asian sweatshop.

There was nothing artificial about the fun had by all the kids at the "Read to Your Dust Bunny" storytime.  After we shrieked with glee over Jan Thomas' Rhyming Dust Bunnies, the kids were authentically astounded to find dust bunnies under the library chairs, along with a missing mitten, a kitten, a frog, a dog, a rock, a lock, some socks, and a guy in a box. Not Houdini, just an orange Lego guy inside a plastic box, but apparently a significant surprise for these kids. They even pitched in to help sort a basket of socks!

Rock around the socks tonight

Parents, grandmas, and kids were all entranced by Nina Crews' photo collage book, Below.* They were obviously worried about little Guy when Jack dropped him into a dark hole under the stairs. In a simpler day I would always panic when Henry B. Swap asked Mike Mulligan how he would get Mary Anne out of the cellar of the new town hall.

What a rush it is to suspend disbelief, to be captivated in the best sense. And isn't a library storytime a wonderful free, charming and influential incantation!?

2.	captivated - filled with wonder and delight beguiled, enthralled, entranced, charmed, delighted enchanted - influenced as by charms or incantations

Lego exhibit, National Building Museum, July 2012

This has been a complicated week in the Dallas area as communities struggle to decide appropriate responses to a large number of West Nile virus cases. One community has also had to act on the very big threat of artificial turf in front yards. Kind of makes me want to plant gigantic American-made fake dust bunnies in yards all around town!

*© Nina Crews 2006 Henry Holt & Company ISBN: 978-0-8050-7728-5, ISBN10: 0-8050-7728-6

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder