Book signings and cross-cultural play dates

Has anyone ever heard of the book The Kissing Hand or any of its sequels? Last year in Kindergarten Hailey brought home a "kissing hand" to me. She traced her hand on construction paper and glued it onto a card with an explanation on it. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, a mother raccoon lets her little raccoon know that her love will go with him anywhere when she places a kiss on the palm of his hand. It's a very sweet story, and was great for a kindergartner who was going to school for the first time. Well, today at a book store in Arlington, we got to meet the author, Audrey Penn, and have her sign our books. She is quite a nice lady, and she was wonderful with the kids. She has 2 other stories in this series, A Pocket Full of Kisses and A Kiss Goodbye. Both of them are good little stories. Her books deal gently with issues that younger ones sometimes face (starting school, getting a new sibling, moving). She plans on publishing a new book for every school year. If you aren't familiar with her books, you should check them out sometime. (As a side note, a bunch of copies of The Kissing Hand were sent overseas to the military. The servicemen and women were recorded reading the book, and the recordings were sent back to their families so their children could have dad or mom read a bedtime story to them. I thought that was such a wonderful thing. Apparently they will be doing it again with her latest book.)

After the book signing, we went to a park nearby so Mia could run around and get out the wiggles. (She could run around and get out the wiggles 24 hours a day.) While we were there we met a very nice Russian lady and her daughter. She is from Moscow and her daughter, though born here, speaks Russian. Mia and Olivia are only a month apart in age, so they had fun playing together despite the language barrier. It was quite funny, actually. Olivia was making up words because she wants to be able to speak English and has a difficult time with it, while Mia was making up words because that's just what she does. Perhaps on some preschool level they understood each other. While we were there another Russian man and his son showed up. He didn't speak much English, but Luba, Olivia's mother, spoke English very well. Also there was a woman from Poland with her daughter. I think we were pretty evenly divided, half native-half foreign. We really are in a multi-cultural area here in Arlington. It's a neat experience that we never got in California or Arizona. Too bad my Russian speaking brother-in-law wasn't here--he would have been in heaven!