Sometimes simpler is just better.

This seems to be the lesson that I've learned from reading Betsy-Tacy with Frances. The book is old, and it feels that way. It simply lacks the intrigue, intensity, and self-focused issues that are so common in children's books today. No trailer parks, 12-step meetings, mothers in rehab who didn't tell that's why they left. These are just simple stories about two little girls, 5 or 6 years old in the first book, who go for picnics up the hill near their house, who care for each other when there is sadness in the family, and who think of imaginative ways to spend their days.

I didn't realize Frances was so interested. It turns out to have been not only interesting, but inspiring. First, yesterday she woke up and announced that she wanted to go calling. "Do people still go calling? Will people know what I'm doing?" she asked. Would they invite her in to sit their living room and sip tea? I told her I doubted that, but that it might be nice to go calling, make some cards to leave to say she had been there, and perhaps bake some cookies to bring to the people she visited. It's unfortunate that most people aren't home on a Thursday morning to receive callers, so she mostly left cookies on doorsteps with a calling card. But she did talk to one person. Both she and Rutledge had worn their finest: she in a tiger striped leotard, fluffy jazz skirt, and knit boa, and he in a cape and sunglasses.

Unfortunately, partway through her calling she decided that maybe it would be even more fun to make a little money with the cookies, and she came home with $2. I was not all happy that she had gone door to door as a saleswoman. So the money had to go back. Then she set up a stand with her cookies, but given the extreme heat and humidity and the early daytime hour when people were at work or shut up in their houses escaping the heat, there were no customers.

Then today she made paper dolls with people she cut from magazines. This was another chapter in the Betsy-Tacy book. The girls cut out families from magazines and then cut out clothes and household items. I remember how much I used to love to do this with the Sears catalog when I was growing up. I'd choose the cutest babies to paste into notebooks that were supposed scrapbooks of my imaginary family, a family filled with boys under 2. Funny how one day our imaginary musings can kind of come true.

Her paper dolls ranged from cute to monstrous--little heads on giant bodies, grown women in onesies and snap-up pajamas. Then she used the box that the Rock Band 2 guitar came in to make a house with many rooms and pictures on the walls. I love seeing so much non-battery, imaginative fun, as well as seeing how she makes books her own. Right now we're also living with a giant clubhouse refrigerator box--with a skylight--in the middle of our garage after we had many nights of reading one of my favorite childhood books, _Christina Katerina and the Box_. These are the kinds of days that I wish could go on forever for her, free from self-consciousness, free from outside ideas about what she maybe "should" be doing, and just reveling in being 7.