Just looked at the pictures of the Lipizzaner Stallions from last night. None of them came out good enough to keep. They had the stadium lights down and used flood lights, making pictures from where we say just blurs of bright light. It was a great show, with amazingly well trained horses. To basically go from a stand to all four feet off the ground, with a rider on his back, is pretty darn impressive. It was so cute to see all the little girls down on the floor pretending to be horses during the intermission. Lots of them left with a stuffed Lipizzaner. I remembered the Marguerite Henry novel about a young boy Hans and he desire to work with the stallions. Sadly, The White Stallion of Lipizza is out of print, but there are lots of used copies available on B&N and Amazon.

Steve headed out to his first day volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. Too bad it is such a chilly day. I was grateful he turned the heat on this morning when he got up. So Sophie and I have a quiet Saturday to ourselves. Just watching the birds out the window has tired her out - she's fast asleep in her bed. I was going to go down to Educator's Saturday at Barnes and Noble near us but we didn't get Steve's car picked up yesterday. Will do that after he gets home today. Wow! Just got a phone call from the sales woman - had to give her a credit card number to hold the car as someone tried to buy it out from under us.

I have a copy of Titanic: The Ship of Dreams in front of me - Scholastic's paper engineered title that is a mix of fictional narrative by a young boy on the ship, information/data about the ship and other events of the time period, as well as flaps to lift and a handful of elaborate pop-ups. The one of the Titanic itself that folds out and up won't make it through but a couple circulations in a library, but it is a great title to have for in-library use. The fictional narrative is based on an actual young survivor of the disaster. Elementary and MS age readers will enjoy exploring the flaps and reading the information, but from a librarian's perspective these books don't hold up under use. At $18.99 I'd buy it for a young reader who is interested in the Titanic, but would not put it in the circulating collection of a library.

Okay - now to work on summer school syllabi!