When Bard was just a youngster, about six years old, she went to visit a friend of hers who shared with her a book called The Seven-Year-Old Wonder Book. She came home and told me about it. The book, written by Isabel Wyatt in 1958, inscribed "for anyone who has ever been seven years old, or is, or soon will be," follows the sixth year of young Sylvia who lives in a white cottage at the edge of a dark woods. Each entry talks about something that Sylvia experienced that day, and is followed by a story told to her at bedtime which relates to her experiences. These stories celebrate the seasons and holidays of the passing year. Each night, Sylvia pulls her Wonder-Book from under her pillow and turns it to a new page, setting it out for the Rhyme-Elves to write poetry in big, beautiful letters and painting beautiful pictures to go along with the poetry.Since Bard was living her sixth year, and since I love journaling, she and I decided to create a Wonder-Book for her, though it would be known that I was the elf, and it would contain not only rhymes and pictures, but stories (both real and fictional) and questions and anything else I could stuff into it. Bard, too, would participate,
answering the questions and drawing pictures in response to my entries. The cover was decorated with a collage of things that Bard loved and coated with Mod Podge.The Wonder-Book sometimes went for months without any attention. As Bard got older and we both created blogs, the Wonder-Book was neglected for years. When she packed up most of her things and moved into her first college dorm, I sought out the Wonder-Book in my melancholy nostalgia, watching those years fly by with each turn of the page.
Sweetheart found me there, wandering through that sea of memories, and I realized that I'd not created a Wonder-Book for her nor The Baby. That was soon remedied, and now all of the kids have Wonder-Books of their own.
The Wonder-Book isn't a scrapbook or a photo album (there are no photographs at all, actually), but an ongoing conversation about life, happenings, seasons, emotions, dreams, disagreements, encouragments and poetry, both ours and those we admire. It's a book for a child to set on her bedside or yours, and to awake to, kind of like a coin from the tooth fairy. It's a place where a mom can share her thoughts and appreciations and apologies and a child can vent her frustration and admiration. Sometimes it's just a simple letter written in ball-point pen, sometimes a smattering of ideas dotted with stickers, and sometimes it's a full-blown art project, complete with scrapbooking markers and creative drawings.
Here are a few sample pages from the different Wonder-Books through the years.
