Sam's Favorite Songs

As of late, there are two songs that Sam continually requests to have playing while we drive together in the car. I suppose it's my fault for introducing him to these songs in the first place. About a month ago, I found an old CD mix that had a bunch of miscellaneous songs from my family's computer - including Danny Kaye songs (originally downloaded by my sister C) and Weird Al songs (originally downloaded by my brother C). I can't even remember how I ended up with this mix.

Anyhow, as I was going through the CD, Sam listened to the songs with me...and subsequently became obsessed. We talk about how "The Black Fox" is like a superhero at least once a day. We also continually recap the info about "Star Wars" mentioned in Weird Al's "The Saga Begins." Sam always calls the Weird Al song, "A Long Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far Away."

Favorite Books From My Childhood

Last week I read Sam a short story from "Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle." It was fun for me to introduce Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to my son; I really loved reading the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books as a kid. In keeping up with my recent posts on movies and television shows from my childhood, I wanted to write down some of my favorite books. I really liked fantasy and mysteries back then, along with a smattering of non-fiction books. Now that I think about it, guess I still have those preferences today.

• The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series by Betty MacDonald
• The Ramona series by Beverly Cleary
•  The Magic series by Edward Eager (Half Magic was my absolute favorite book from the series)
• The Oz series by L. Frank Baum
• The Incredible Treasury of Amazing Knowledge (and all of the other "Amazing Knowledge" books in this series by the Creative Child Press)
• The Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
• The Betsy-Tacy and Tib series by Maud Hart Lovelace
• The Adventures of Calico Cotton by Helen Lawrence Backman. (For a long time, I used to tell people that this was my favorite book.)
• The Narnia series by C. S. Lewis
• Edward Gorey books for children (These books would sometimes scare me a little bit, but I couldn't tear myself away from them. I would usually run to the "G" section of the library first, to see if there was a book on the shelf by Gorey that I hadn't read.)

What about you? What were your favorite books from growing up?