The Mayards!

We went to the library yesterday afternoon and picked up a pile of great books. There's this one book called "bats at the library". I thought we might read about bats as i'd seen them hanging upside down like ripe figs on the trees in the botanic gardens. They looked so cute. We had also read "Stellaluna" that day too.
We were reading through the books when dad rang. Ollie ran to pick up the skype phone and said hello, a-gong at the airport, no, a-gong not at the airport, a-gong in taiwan, and so forth in his monologue. Then dad asked him a few questions and i just saw him nod and say 'yep, yep, yep, i think'. It was so much like a real conversation, except i'm not sure he understood the questions dad was asking him.
Then it was my turn to talk to dad so Oliver picked up this bat book and started flipping through the pages. He runs over to me and points to a page and says excitedly 'Mayards!! Mayards!! Mayards!!' and I say 'oh that's nice' in an offhanded way without in any way understanding what he was saying. He keeps pointing to this picture and keeps saying Mayards! and i say, oh you mean Madeline? or Magnet? He's pretty frustrated at this point so i just take the book and read it from the beginning. It's a story about bats who get into a library at night and start reading books. They imgaine themselves to be characters in books. There's a page where little bats are crossing a road with the policeman blowing his whistle. The illustration from "Make way for ducklings", except with bats. The Mallards are the ducks in that story. I wouldn't have noticed it at all had Oliver not pointed it out to me. When we got to that page, i laughed and said "AH HA!" so you mean the MaLLards!
This was definitely a 'we must homeschool' moment. Such precious moments in your life that you miss out on when you send them off to school. Shared book memories. I love that. We have memories based on books. At the library Ollie heard a mother reading "We're going on a bear hunt" to her boy and he wandered over to listen. Then he took the book when they'd finished with it and wanted me to read it to him. It's so comforting to have books that you remember. He still remembers it from when we read it over and over and over when he was about 18 months old.