Like any other kid, Caleb goes in fazes over which things interest him the most. Like right now, there is no stuffed animal more loved than Bear. But as much love as Bear is getting right now, I imagine that in a few months a different stuffed friend will take his first chair status.
Video-wise, Caleb's pick most often is our Scholastic video of fairy tales, which I find very interesting - both that they interest them and just fairy tales in general. It has 5 fairy tales on it based on actual books - 3 of them are James Marshall retellings - I think he was pretty witty and like his work (he passed away in 1992). The fairy tales included on the video are Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, The Three Pigs, Chicken Little, and Rapunzel. Caleb's favorite is Red Riding Hood.
We also picked up Hansel and Gretel at the library recently. I was very interested in how Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and Hansel and Gretel all have a forest motif. I started looking up the history on all these stories and was interested to see how each one has morphed over the years into the stories we are familiar with. For example, in the original story - Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the wolf...and no one comes to cut her out, the story just ends there - it was meant to be a story of warning to naive little girls to beware beguiling strangers.
Most interesting of all to me though is probably the story of Chicken Little. In Chicken Little - a small chicken is convinced the sky is falling and manages to alarm all the other birds on the farm. In their distress they put their trust in Foxy Loxy, who intends to eat them. In our video version - Chicken Little, Ducky Lucky, Henny Penny, and the other various fowl are rescued from Foxy Loxy. But in the original Chicken Little story, the birds do not return from Foxy Loxy's lair - like Red Riding Hood, there is no rescue. I think that this story has a timely warning - when everyone is losing their heads in panic, be wary of whom you trust, they may just be your enemy.
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