The Cow Lady

A few weeks ago Jaydon and I attended his first "Meet the Author" event. We met Carol Weiss, the author of When the Cows Got Loose and who we now refer to as the "Cow Lady". You can see why.

She read us her book and brought lots of silly and fun cow things to show us. She pulled the kids into the story by relating personal details about some of the characters in the book, pointing out small details that otherwise might have been overlooked, and asking the kids questions along the way. I found it more intriguing this way, too. After the story, the kids made cow puppets. Jaydon had a grand time and LOVED his cow puppet.

For at least two weeks straight after this event, we read "When the Cows got Loose" every night before bedtime (I seriously contemplated hiding the book, but didn't). We can recite it from memory. The one good thing that came from this is that we switched from always reading two books before bedtime to one book because, we explained to Jaydon, this was a LONG book. Fortunately, Jaydon didn't fight the change. So the new rule is that if it's a long book (like When the Cows Got Loose), we read one book before bedtime. If it's a short book, he gets two books. It's all subjective, of course, but so far no conflicts in determining which books are short and which are long.