or how Elena almost got a time-out for reading The Secret Garden.
I’ve been reading The Secret Garden to Elena. If you’ve read it, you might remember that it’s filled with characters speaking in a Yorkshire dialect. Not to mention that it was written in the early 1900s, so the vocabulary is a little quaint. One word that pops up over and over again is "queer," as in "strange." We’re sitting at the dinner table the other night and I’m explaining to Elena that January 3 is my brother’s birthday and the very next day is my birthday, but that we are 11 years apart. "That is so queer!" she says! Mike, not being part of these reading sessions, just about fell out of his chair. Luckily I recovered myself quickly enough to save Elena from getting an earful from her father.
