Let’s hear it for books that endure. The decade of my birth has supplied all of our bedtime reading these past three nights.

For F, who turns two next week, the lesson lately has been that there’s no such thing as a little Orange Splot. For Christmas I got him a $4.95 paperback of Daniel Pinkwater‘s The Big Orange Splot, and boy, have we gotten our money’s worth. In addition to the delight he’s gotten from the many, many times we’ve read it — and to me it seems more like a quasi-religious parable with each reading — Mr. Plumbean’s favorite drink has inspired F’s first three-syllable word: lemonade.

Two nights ago, I read And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? to S, and tonight he asked for it again. (Yes!) Last night S asked me to read him Christopher for President, a book my parents bought for me during my premature flirtation with running for the presidency when I was six or so. And they say that Jimmy Carter wasn’t an inspiring leader…