Thursday, July 13, 2006

One, Two...Buckle My Bear

My daughter doesn't seem to want to travel anywhere these days without her three favorite travelling bears. She does have a most beloved bear who stays home...he is very old and getting a bit worn and is not generally an outdoor bear. The three bears who travel are a small blue one named "Blueberry" (I think D. or I named him when she was a baby) and then two slightly larger brown bears which she has creatively dubbed "Nose" and "No-Nose." In case you're wondering, they're so named because...well...you guessed it. Nose has a nose and No-Nose doesn't.

When the three bears come on car trips, at her request we usually buckle them into seatbelts next to her booster seat. This led us, a few mornings ago, to the silly phrase "One, Two...Buckle My Bear." The whole family worked together then to come up with a complete rhyme from one - ten. The Boop has been breathlessly quoting it for much of the week:

One, Two...Buckle My Bear
Three, Four...Go to the Fair
Five, Six...Sit on a Chair
Seven, Eight...Comb my Hair
Nine, Ten...Go Way Over There


I really like it! We happened to pick up Ruth Krauss' classic picture book "Bears" last week at the library, but didn't read it until a couple of days after we came up with our poem. And frankly, I think we've got the book beat. If only we could find ourselves the equivalent of a Maurice Sendak to illustrate it.

2 comments:

Erin said...

Hehe, I think you've got a winner! And Sarah is certainly a girl after my own heart with her fondness for bears. I've got an especially old, rugged one too, the one in that picture you saw of me under the tree. I still usually take him with me when we go out of town for a few days!

The Nose and No-Nose thing reminds me of one of the Ramona books, when Willa Jean distinguishes the two boys in her class with the same name by whether or not they "wee-wee in the sandbox." :-P I always got a chuckle out of that...

Beth said...

Sarah's old bear is actually my old bear. :-) I got him when I went away to college, so he's (gulp!) twenty years old. He's actually starting to wear out a bit, partly because he's spent the past two years being hugged constantly and used for a pillow. Oh, and in the past two weeks, she's been dressing him in her old baby clothes and pajamas, with several outfit changes a day. Small wonder his fur is beginning to wear thin in places -- tonight she tearfully asked me to put some of his fur back on.

I'd forgotten the Willa Jean episode. Ha! Ah, Willa Jean. Makes me want to go back and read the Ramona books...maybe soon!