Sam & Stella

When Stella was born, many of our friends considered it their duty to introduce her to the other Stella – Stella, Princess of the Sky; the Forest, the Snow etc. I immediately fell in love with the books, because of the gorgeous drawings and the quirky, sweet dialogue. Of course, since Stella is a little young to be reading just yet, the books ended up on Kaspar’s book shelf. And believe me, when I say it’s a big book shelf with a lot of books in English, Latvian and French!!! So, it was no surprise that it took Kaspar a few months before he discovered his true love of Stella and Sam. But ever since that first day, when "Goodnight Sam" was read to him at the very least twenty times over the course of twelve hours, Stella and Sam have become a part of our every day, friends of a sort.

Occasionally Kaspar will catch me by total surprise… "Stella, are you sleeping?" I’ll hear a faint whisper of a question behind my back while I’m folding the laundry. "Yes, Sam! Aren’t you sleeping?", is supposed to be my answer. However, sometimes I’ll stray off course and Kaspar will go back to his normal voice and scalding me a little, firmly reminding me of my lines in the play. He’s managed to memorize the dialogue from every one of those Stella and Sam books and we can spend hours pretending to be Stella (me, of course) and Sam (Kaspar) chasing snow flakes, listening to frogs snore or trying to find Fred (Sam’s dog), who tends to be a chameleon like creture in our house - taking on the visual appearance of a stuffed rabbit one day, a cat rattle another and sometimes he’s just an orange on the kitchen table. It’s not easy keeping up with the imagination of a two year old!

Today I finally went to our local Library and took out a library card for Kaspar. We’ve gone there before, but rarely have we signed books out. We usually go and just spend some time reading and looking at stuff before going back home again. Today we found the only Stella and Sam book that we don’t own and Kaspar just had to have it! I had one happy child on my hands. We read and read and read and read and read and read the book front to back several times. He took the book to bed with him so that "we can read it tomorrow morning again, mommy, ok?". And as he was beginning to drift off to sleep, he started another Sam & Stella dialogue with me… only this time I was not prepared and a little caught by surprise and I could not remember exactly what it was that the polar bears ate with the snow for breakfast. Oh man! I caused the biggest meltdown on this side of the universe. It took me no less then an hour to calm him down. I had to read the story one more time and cross my heart and promise to learn the lines tomorrow. Thank God the real Stella was a good little camper and slept through the entire ordeal.

Sadly, I don’t think he still understands the concept of having to return the books to the library. I’ll have to deal with that one of these days. Uh… leave it ‘till next week, I think.