The Bear Scouts by Stan and Jan Berenstain

The Bear Scouts by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Rating: 5 stars

We have a soft spot in our collective family heart for the Berenstain Bears.  Well...except for the most recent ones by Mike Berenstain, whose books must make his father roll in his grave.  (Seriously!  In the last one we read, Brother called Sister a twerp.  Thanks, Mike.  That's what I want my daughter to learn.)  But before I go off on a tangent about how much I dislike the most recent books in the long series of great books, let me go back to the beginning.

The first books they wrote are the I Can Read It All By Myself books.  Do you remember them from when you were a kid?  My dad still has a bunch of them at his house, and Lorelei and I both happily dive into them each time we're there.  One of these days I'm going to smuggle them home with us...  These were some of my favorite books growing up, and I wonder if I have an emotional connection with them because they were some of the first books I read by myself. 

So I'm thrilled to the core to see Lorelei get so excited about this set of books.  Since we read all of the longer Berenstain Bear collection, even the ones I don't like by young Mike, I was really happy to remember about the original ones.  But I kept forgetting to order them from the library.  Then, a few library trips ago, we came across the I Can Read It Myself section and...ka-bam!...we found about eight of them, right there in front of us.  Lorelei looked as if she was reuniting with an old friend she'd not seen in awhile.  She just started making a big stack by our library book bag.  "I want this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, too!" 

We read them over and over and over again, and I'm really tempted to buy the whole lot of them so that she and Ben can read them anytime they want, and then store them at their house for their kids and grandkids.  But, as of now, I'm being good and not buying them.  We'll see how long this good spending behavior lasts.

I should write a blurb about the books, I guess!  They are great because the text is simple and the story is always funny and straightforward.  I do feel a little sorry for Papa Bear, whose character is the blubbering fool-type, though he always comes out all right in the end.  Most of the books have just Small Bear; Sister is not born yet.  And, funnily enough, Mama and Papa Bear are pretty skinny!  Are Stan and Jan trying to tell us that we all get pudgy when we get married and have a family?! 

A word on these two pictures.  Along with the Berenstain Bear books we checked out (The Bear Scouts is the first on the stack in the first picture), we checked out a whole lot more.  I went a little crazy, I admit, and came close to the 50 book maximum.  Who does that?!  We do.  Anyway, Lorelei doesn't nap but has quiet time, a minimum of 40 minutes reading books quietly.  Sometimes it lasts 2 hours!  She reads each book one at a time, reciting it if she knows it by heart or making up the words if she doesn't.  She almost always follows along the text with her cute little finger, even if there is little similarity between the words coming out of her mouth and those in the book.  These pictures were taken by GrandBill, who was half of the babysitting team while my husband and I scooted away to Colorado, of Lorelei during her quiet time one day.  I like the triumphant "after" shot, after she read those two dozen books!