Is that you are Zeus for Halloween.

This was an amazingly easy costume to make, which from my perspective (the mother and chief seamstress) was key.

Outfit includes 1 toga (instructions and helpful video for tying a toga found on youtube) made from a white sheet putchased at the thriftshop for $2; a wire crown gussied up with some gold leaves purchased at a crafts store; and a gold belt made from a scrap of gold fabric I had lying around. Shoes were this summer’s sporty sandals - they still fit him or else I’d have spray-painted them gold.

We also made a lightning bolt out of cardboard and tin foil. This was shoved into the plastic pumpkin after a minute of use. Good thing it was bendable!

His other idea was to be Poseidon as depicted in the Percy Jackson books, which would’ve involved bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and sandals. Maybe a shell necklace or something. But he worried that no one would get it.

No one really got the Zeus outfit, actually. Every other kid we went trick-or-treating with was dressed as a vampire.

I don’t know if we had H1N1 or not, but the week before last LittleJ (my 7 year old) was out for 2 days with something virusy-flu-like, and feverish, and last week BigJ (my 10-year-old) was out 3 days with the same.

Me, I had a little fever, too…but I went on in to school. I can’t be out 5 days in 2 weeks with my kids and let a little old fever stop me.

When my kids are sick I relax the screen-viewing rules. Normally the rule is this: no screen time (meaining TV or non-school use computer) on school days, screentime on weekends only after rooms are cleaned to momma’s specifications, and limited screentime on those days. Like not all day. Not even all morning.

But when a sick, feverish, headachy little boy is home for the day then I allow unlimited screen time while brother is off at school. Sometimes it’s part of the cure. Zoning and dozing in front of the TV for a day or two is fine in this situation.

But the boys surprised me. Sure, there was plenty of TV watching. But there was also plenty of reading. BigJ reread The Last Olympian twice (perhaps his 5th and 6th readings of these books?), and started D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths for the third time. He also got a ways into the relevant section of Bulfinches before he became frustrated with the Roman names for the Gods. And his 3rd day of being sick, when he wasn’t sick at all (we were obeying the 24-hour fever free rule of school), he read the most recent Cressida Cowell Hiccup Horrendous Haddock book as well as Syren, the most recent Septimus Heap.

Yes, the kid can read.

Now, LittleJ is in 1st grade and just jumping on the read-to-himself bandwagon, but he is certainly very text aware and he looks at books all the time. He especially looks at graphic novels - mostly his brother’s. He has memorized every picture in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, loves his Scooby Doo and Batman graphic novels/picture books - really more the length and size of chapter books, but not comics - it’s hard to categorize exactly what these are. His interest match up exactly with the interests of many of the 6-9 year old boys at the school in which I work - most of whom are both emergent readers and English Language Learners. It convinces me that we need LOTS and LOTS of this kind of text in our library…but I digress. The long and the short of it is that LittleJ also spent a lot of his sick time looking at books. Lots more than I’d have thought for a very early reader. I read one or two to him, but that wasn’t what he was interested in. He was making sense of the books by himself.

I am convinced that the reading was what cured us of our flu so quickly. And me? I was cured by the happy little readers at school…and at home.

How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell

Hands down, Cressida Cowell’s adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III have been my favorite bedtime reads with my 9-year-old that we’ve done in our 3-year history of reading chapter books. And we’ve read a lot of books that way. Some, we’ve had to give up on the reading-out-loud midstream, as they’ve been too, too long and we realized we just wanted it over with (most recently Dragon Rider, by Cornelia Funke fit this bill). But that hasn’t happened once with the Hiccup books - although my son did jump the gun and read the last one in one night without me since he couldn’t wait to see what happened!

The reason these books, starting with How to Train a Dragon (book 1), moving up to How to Ride a Dragon’s Storm (this is the UK title for book 7; it may be changed once it’s put out in the U.S.), are so great is that Hiccup, the hero of the books, is a fantastic character. The books take place when the Vikings ruled the seas (although this should *not* be considered historical fiction. I mean, I guess it is, but it’s pretty loosely based on those times and most of the details are comical and stereotypical as opposed to accurate), and Hiccup’s father, Stoick the Vast, is the ruler of all the Vikings in his tribe: the Hairy Hooligans. Hiccup is the heir to this throne, but he is nothing like his father. He’s skinny, weak, a bit timid, and most unlikely to lead anyone into battle. But he is smart, and we know he eventually grows up to be a great leader because the books are presented as his grown-up accounts of how he came to rule his Viking tribe.

These books are funny, poignant, and fast-moving - all qualities I *love* in a book. Someone I work with says that I’m secretly a 10-year-old boy because of my taste in chapter books, but I think it’s that I have little boys in my house and I see no need to read books that will bore them! There’s so much great stuff out there, like the Hiccup Horrendous Haddock series, that we don’t need to waste our time reading anything but the best!

And…apparently they’re making a movie of this book, which is very fun! It’ll come out in 2010, so if you give the little boy in your life this series now, he’ll have them all read by the time the movie comes out. Or if he’s anything like my son, he’ll have them read by the end of January!