Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I absolutely love the Little House books and have read them countless times before (and have written about them here on this blog before). But this time, I was reading this book out loud with Dane, and I enjoyed it even more. There is just something about sharing a book that you love with a child that you love. It made me so happy to see how engaged he was and how excited he got at the exciting stories about the panthers and bears in the woods, and how he loved learning about how they used all the parts of the pig when they killed it. Some of the parts get a little technical and too hard to understand for a kid his age (like about how they made their cheese, or about the harvesting using the threshing machine), but he gamely sat through it and loved looking at the pictures. I was so happy he wanted to read this with me, because part of me worried he would think it was a "girl" book, since it's about a girl named Laura, but once I started the first chapter he was all in. It was one of my goals the last year to read at least two of these books with Dane, and I definitely want to try and get through Little House on the Prairie and Farmer Boy before we move on to something else... but if Dane wants to keep going with this series I won't complain. (Not like the whole Mouse and the Motorcycle trilogy, haha!)