Expect The Unexpected

Parents have certain expectations of things their kids will love--mostly because they wanted it and couldn’t afford/find/have it--and go to great lengths to produce or procure them…only to discover the kid had something else in mind. When my mother was a child, for some reason she truly longed for but never received a Raggedy Ann doll. So, when I came along, even though we were complete opposites in every other respect, she just knew that my childhood would never be complete unless I owned an honest-to-goodness Raggedy Ann doll with the yarn hair, the blue-flowered dress, the striped legs and white pinafore. A real one, not a knock off. And for my sixth birthday, that is what she presented to me with great ceremony and anticipation of my ecstatic response. I remember clearly, there in Chatsworth Park with its spooky tunnels, tearing off the wrapping paper and sensing very clearly from my mom that I was supposed to be feeling something very specific. But not knowing what that was. I loved the doll, all dolls, but it wasn’t the life-changing experience for me that my mom had been hoping for. Nor was it when I gave Keilana her first spool of cotton candy thinking she would be transported by the amazingness of it. Except, unlike me, she h-a-t-e-d it and spent the rest of the encounter yelling, “Off!” when it touched her. Not successful. In Thomas Crawford’s Sticky Stanley, Stanley thinks he wants candy all the time. But he really doesn’t.

http://www.amazon.com/Sticky-Stanley-Thomas-Crawford/dp/B000JJTKVW

http://www.librarything.com/author/crawfordthomas