Weirdly, Ben has become obsessed with the book The Gift of Nothing lately. He likes me to read it to him every night (for the past three nights) and as soon as I finish he asks if I can please please please read it again, just one more time. Why this fascination? He hasn't made any connection with our buying-no-new-things project but there is definitely something in this book that captivates him. It is about a cat who seeks out a gift of nothing for his friend. After looking everywhere for nothing he finally finds it when he's not trying and immediately gets a box for it. My favorite part is when he looks at the box: "Then Mooch thought, Hmmm . . . maybe Earl deserves more than this." I like this part because I get tricked; I thought he was rethinking the idea of nothing. But instead he gets a bigger box and puts more nothing in. The book is cute but still not so cute as to account for Ben's obsession.
The fine print: yesterday I bought Ben caps(!) for his gun(!!). This actually doesn't count--I know that sounds ridiculous--BUT we promised each kid a small new thing before we started. Ben wanted caps, the store was out of caps, they came in over the weekend, Ben wanted them. So. But we would never had had this glaring slip if the caps had been in the store in the first place. (And the question of the gun(!) is a whole other subject).
For a moment there, I thought "The Gift of Nothing" was a different book "Something From Nothing" which I quite enjoyed reading to Karuna and Sarah when they were younger.
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We also have this book and Maeve, about a year ago, really liked it too. I think there is certainly something intriguing to kids about the idea of a gift of "nothing", in other words the focus being on the giving rather than the gift.
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