Sophie is absolutely in love with this book. Her grasp of equine anatomy is shady at best, but she is all too eager to point out the various organs to you. She made me read it with her five times alone this afternoon, jabbing her finger at the bits and pieces as we went.
“That his brain, Daddy,” she said, pointing at the horse’s stomach with certainty. I could see where she would have trouble with this, because for a large animal, a horse’s brain sure is awfully small (at least in this plastic model it was; I’ve never seen a real horse’s brain, nor do I feel a deep-seated need to), and her stomach is right there, huge and obvious and just waiting to be pointed at by a sticky little finger. Oddly, the only organ she nailed correctly each time we went through the book was the horse’s uterus, which Molly had explained to her was where baby horses came from. Sophie has been on a “babies come from mommy’s tummy” kick the past couple of weeks, so maybe this explains why she’s Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden when it comes to a horse’s reproductive organs.
When I got home from work this evening, after Sophie had gone to bed, I went up to check on her like I always do. She'd pulled her baby's crib upstairs and into her room, and there was a doll propped up in it, looking disturbingly like one of those old Victorian photos of a baby, dead from small pox or cholera, that you could use to show your relatives what the child looked like before the funeral, some five or six months before the arrival of said relatives by train from the other coast. Sophie was asleep in her bed with her visible horse book cradled under her arm, where I assume she'd fallen asleep while pointing out its uterus again and again to her terminally ill, pox-ridden baby.
I'm guessing the baby's autopsy begins in the morning.
