{"id":4230,"date":"2011-02-23T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=4230"},"modified":"2011-02-23T06:00:17","modified_gmt":"2011-02-23T11:00:17","slug":"cute-kid-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=4230","title":{"rendered":"Cute Kid Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The past three days I&#8217;ve been treated to the cutest kids and since their stories are still making me laugh, I thought I&#8217;d share.<br \/>\nThe first kid was an exuberant, extremely fast-talking three-year-old named Gussie. She has a thick head of brown hair that was forever falling in her eyes that she brushed away with a fast flick of the back of her right hand whenever she was making a point,which she did a lot.<br \/>\nHer main conversation was talking about her cat, Flower. This cat apparently is a superhero. &#8220;Flower eats the monsters under the bed. She eats them all up. We call her Bouquet now, &#8216;cuz she got fat on the monsters.&#8221;\u00a0 I cannot make this stuff up. I tried not to laugh, but she was so earnest that I had to tousle her hair and chuckle. I find myself just walking around saying &#8220;Flower got fat, and we call her Bouquet now.&#8221; What a lovely family.<br \/>\nWe&#8217;re hosting a Fairy Party in March and have had a signboard up by the front door announcing this. Sunday I was working alone and I heard the thunder of kids&#8217; feet careening around the corner. I practically heard the screech of their sneakers as they shouted,&#8221;A FAIRY TEA PARTY!!! We love fairies!&#8221; Then two sisters came in and went right to me at the counter. &#8220;What can you tell us about the party? Can we dress up? We have fairy costumes.&#8221; I told them, yes, of course they could dress up. &#8220;Will you be dressing up?&#8221; I&#8217;m not really a fairy dress-up sort of person, but I do actually have a pair of wings.<br \/>\nThen they looked for fairy books, and they knew right where to go, and added almost haughtily,\u00a0 &#8220;We buy all our fairy books here.&#8221; I love it when kids take ownership of the store. They found things faster than I could and helped reorganize the section, so that every fairy was with her right group sport fairies apparently cannot be intermingled with pet fairies.<br \/>\nThe last little kid was Norah, and she was shy at first. She opened up when I asked her where she lived as I knew she was visiting Vermont. She was quiet and I said, &#8220;Are you from New York City?&#8221; (as every customer I had yesterday was). She said, &#8220;Yes, I live in New York City.&#8221; Her parents looked at her and said, &#8220;Sweetie, where do we live?&#8221; The little one said New York one more time. Her mother finally said, &#8220;Norah, we live in Montreal.&#8221; Norah got an impish look on her face and said, &#8220;That&#8217;s right! We live in Montreal, not New York City.&#8221; And then she burst out laughing.<br \/>\nThese are the days when I just love my job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The past three days I&#8217;ve been treated to the cutest kids and since their stories are still making me laugh, I thought I&#8217;d share. The first kid was an exuberant, extremely fast-talking three-year-old named Gussie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}