Clifford the big red fearmonger

The other morning I decided to shake up our normal, weekday routine and took Taylor to her first-ever story time at our neighborhood library. She has been so good at letting me read her books lately – meaning I can actually READ them to her now, and not just watch as she violently flips through the pages as fast as she can – so I decided to test our public literary skills in front of other judging, Asheville mothers. And when I parked the car in front of the building, I was 94-percent super-excited for T to go to her first public book reading, and 6-percent nervous that we’d be the mother-daughter duo that is stuck in the back corner, me feeding her an ungodly amount of gummie snacks to keep her from shouting out random words, like Dora, Elmo and Ruby.

The library was pretty packed, with tons of moms and kids crowding the tables and pulling books off the shelves. Apparently the big attraction of story time that day was an appearance by Clifford the Big Red Dog, and most of the kids were all jazzed to meet one of their favorite book-series characters. Well, except Taylor. We only have one Clifford book, and while she loves it, she never cares much about the big red dog once we've finished the story. But it didn’t seem to be a big deal, as the first thing everyone did was sing and dance to Bingo. And T LOVES to sing and dance.

And after we got done boogying, we all sat down and an extremely pleasant and tolerant woman read us a book about a naughty puppy. And while Taylor could have cared less about that puppy, she sat super quietly and just watched all the other kids, not disturbing anyone and not forcing me to dig into my pockets for sugar. And just when I was feeling good about the whole situation, the star of the show arrived:

Here she is being all, Um, is that THING gone YET?

So. We didn’t stay much longer after the big red dog showed up, but as we were leaving a random, naughty little kid all-but tackled Clifford to the ground. So we definitely weren’t the most disruptive team there. And barring anymore random appearances of other gigantic cartoon mascots, we just might start making it a regular gig. At least we’ll have scheduled singing and clapping time.