Dinotopia

This week I ran across the book Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, written and illustrated by James Gurney. I was floating around one of my favorite places, the Kennett Area Senior Center Book Store. It's a used book store whose donor base is often both affluent and educated, so the selection is good. I had a spare hour, child free, and wanted to enjoy every minute of it.

I am enamored by this book and plan to enjoy the other two in the series which follow. There's discovery and adventure, inventions and engineering, contemplation and philosophy. Read aloud season is upon us, when the kids and I bundle up in bed and enjoy a chapter book together. I might suprise them with this book soon.

For three weeks now, the paw paw trees have been yielding their sumptuous fruit. Some describe the taste of North America's largest native fruit as that of banana-pineapple, others say it is like a sweet mango, while others say it has an aspect of vanilla-root beer. Some hand sized raspberry plants padded into a small nursery bed in the spring quickly grew to productive canes within months. We've been enjoying the month long backyard harvest. Yesterday my husband brought in three chestnuts, the first ever to fall, from two trees which were planted when our seven year old was just a baby. We promptly set to roasting them, and enjoyed the warm, starchy sweetness.