The Burrow

Grampa was a big help, as Gramma collected the diaper bag and her shoes and her coat and the kid's coat and the spreadsheet with the address of Wednesday's story time. There were a lot of options on Wednesday's agenda, but the Notre Dame related English/Spanish class piqued our interest. We drove to the Notre Dame Center for Civic Innovation, a renovated building on the edge of downtown South Bend. There was a beautiful curving staircase, but we had a little one so the elevator made more sense.... especially since there were all those buttons to push. Toni Edgar Fein is the Director of Read Baby Read, a Family Literacy Initiative. She brought a bag of books, a sheaf of copy paper filled with Spanish language versions of all the baby songs we sang, and a loving heart. In attendance was a tiny crawling kid, a big girl in a pink sweater set, and Giblet, right in the middle. Jennifer Wittenbrink Ortega is the Literacy Program Director at the Notre Dame Center for...

Daddooooo and G'ma took me to see Pirates of Penzance when I was little.  They took me when I was medium sized and again when I was grown. I blasted the music on my car stereo as I drove to pick up The Cuters in elementary school, and we sang along with it driving home.  We saw it on the stage and we saw it on film. On Sunday afternoon, I took FlapJilly to the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame to see it, live, un-mic'ed, with a Mozartian orchestra - plus an oboe or two- conducted by a gentleman with a green parrot perched on his shoulder. I told her the story that morning, skipping lightly over the complicated 21st-birthday-leap-year scenario, concentrating on the Pirates wanting to marry the daughters and the policemen who marched, tarantara, tarantara. We talked about Ruth, who lied to Frederic about her beauty, and laughed in the afternoon when the actors rhymed it with booty.  They didn’t mean stolen wealth, they meant just what makes a 4 year old...