What do these 2 have in common? I’m so glad you asked…and I promise that I’ll get to that...in just a sec..
We just finished this book…
We just finished this book…
Not to be confused with this book… 
Wait a minute, they have the same title, what is the difference? I will tell you…a lot…and that’s what I think is soooooooo interesting…Just a disclaimer here, I am not overly elegant with words, although I LOVE to use them…so I will do my best to try to explain my “That is really interesting” moment that I had concerning these two books…
So back to the explanation: Book number 2 was written in 1929. It was recommended to me by different people, including Barnes and Noble booksellers…Since my girls are into dolls, I thought I’d give it a try (let me interject here: The story is a “memoirs” of sorts, of a doll made of wood…since she’s made of wood, she obviously can’t talk, but she is “alive” and basically will never “die”, so she just tells her story as she passes from one owner to the next over the course of her First Hundred Years)
So, that leads me to thinking that my girls would indeed like this book…the problem is that book number 2 is rather large novel and the literature is a bit more “meaty” and I wondered if my younger one could handle it…not that she doesn’t sit and listen to many novels, but her personality is very different than my eldest. My eldest will sit and listen to books on CD, read alouds, read to herself…for hours…she gets completely caught up in the story and it’s like a movie to her that she doesn’t want to turn off…My second gets antsy…not because she’s not into the story, but because her imagination starts working…
For example, we are in the middle of the Boxcar Children series as well…I can’t go 2 chapters with her stopping me, and asking me questions like, “Mommy, do you think I look like Violet? Do you think I could play the violin like that?…Wait, I have an idea, how about we pretend that I’m Violet and M can be Jesse…and let’s make a box car out of the bunkbed…”
Do you see where this leads? She wants to PLAY the story out…so I’m lucky to get through a few chapters at all…
For this reason, I went with book #1…it is a sort of “abridged” version of the novel, but in a picture book form…it is still over 100 pages long, but the pictures keep the imagination from traveling too far from the story itself…therefore keeping both girls active in their listening!
Okay…so back to the difference between the two…What is amazing to me is that this 2nd book was written in 1999 as opposed to 1929…now follow me here…you do realize that history just keeps getting bigger and bigger as time goes by…my girls will only learn the “Main Points” about things like the Civil War, WWI, WWII, because they’ve got to remember the Iraq war and this new technology age, and so much more…My parents and grandparents know so much more of the details regarding those things because they (grandparents) either actually lived through it OR they were taught more about certain events in history because there wasn’t as much to cover…is this making sense?
So, in book #1 “Hitty” (the doll) meets Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and ends up with the granddaughter of one her first owners from back on a plantation…In Book #2 she meets someone named Adalina Patti and sits for a Daguerreotype…Do you see what they have done? With the picture book, the details are actually more general…my kids will know who Abe Lincoln, but have no idea who Adalina Patti is…however, I bet if I asked my grandmother, she’d know just who I was speaking about.
Anyway, that was what was interesting…now, some of you reading may say..."I read all the way through this incredibly long blog for THAT?" Okay, well...sorry if I disappointed you, I"m a little nuts sometimes and the craziest things sometimes catch my interest!
In the end, the girls “needed” a Hitty doll for themselves now that we finished and they could actually act it out…This is where my Pack-rat-ism comes in handy…You see, down in the depths of my basement lie boxes upon boxes of STUFF…in one of those boxes I remembered were old dolls that are never played with…but low and behold, they now make PERFECT Hitty dolls! 
The girls spent the afternoon cross stitching HITTY’s name into a very pathetic camisole that I sewed quickly for them…now, they matched the doll in the book and all is well in their world!
