Easter Tails

Grammie's famous Easter Egg hunt started out well, despite the lingering snow. But soon....

"This is the worst Easter ever!!!"

What? It turns out we have Easter Egg thieves around here. We could hardly believe it, ourselves. The first hint was when Auntie Belle noticed something odd in the backyard carrying off a colourful thing...

A little later, after hunting for some time back there, the kids only managed to come up with 3 of the expected 12 hollow plastic eggs that the Easter Grammie had "dropped". So the Easter Grammie herself went to help find the bright and elusive spheroids. But they were gone! Obviously stolen.

It seems within the hour between the placing and the hunting, squirrels had run off with 75% of the candy. (Though the squirrels only got one of the six bigger bigger candy-filled chicks which were eventually found.)

"I don't like squirrels any more!"

Istra's going to take a while to get over this harsh betrayal by nature.

Grammie had more Easter surprises up her sleeve this year. The next day she revealed two little (5") e-readers she got the kids.

So now we all have our own ereaders. And here we are enjoying our ebook readers together. (Emeth sporting his spiffy new Easter orange shirt & zip-off pants from Aunty Belle.)

Emeth is reading "HippoSPOTamus". Istra's into "A Prince for a Princess". (And I'm afraid I'm deep in the middle of this old thing in the picture---which sadly is still quite relevant, though written in 1894, and now finding itself on an ereader.)

Here's the kids' Easter message for everyone, as found scrawled on the driveway...

Keeping track of the books...

For some time I've been keeping track of the books I've read on a site called Goodreads (which I seem to be doing a lot of, particularly lately). Recently Selena has joined me over there. More recently still, we decided to hook the kids up. They were interested in rating their books, too.

It's kind of interesting to us to see how they rate things: both the ratings they give, and the process of them deciding on a rating. It's hard to tell what goes through their brains, to bring them to their judgements. Of course, they have a somewhat generous tendency towards "amazing", but I've been surprised at how nuanced they can sometimes be with their stars.

One star means you did not actually like the book. Two allows that the book was "okay". Three indicates that you did actually like the book. Four says you really liked it a lot. Five is simply "amazing". 

Anyhow, as an easier way to keep an eye on things for myself (not unlike the cat in the picture), I've created a new page on this site (with a link over on the side), that displays the most recently read books for all of us. If you're curious, feel free to have a look at our Family Reading.

(Goodreads also has an interesting recommendation system, where based on your rated books it suggests other books you might be interested in. It's not the most accurate thing in the world; but it's interesting to see how Istra and Emeth's recommendation pages have already diverged based on their rating, despite having read quite a bit of the same books.)