Travis the Terrific and the Mystery Snack

The other day, I Googled some book ideas for Travis as he becomes more independent and advanced in his reading. I want to keep him engaged and excited about books.

In my research, I found near unanimous support and consistent positive reviews about the "Nate the Great" series. Nate the Great is a little boy who loves pancakes and solves mysteries. The books are well-written, cute and funny, and a nice next-step for Travis in his reading endeavors. They are a slight bit advanced for his current reading level, but something good to grow into.


So, two weeks ago at our last trip to the library, we picked out our first Nate the Great book, Nate the Great and the Monster Mess. The first time, I read the book to him. The second time, we switched back and forth taking turns reading, and thereafter Travis was content to look at the book by himself -- not always reading it all the way through cover-to-cover, but still perusing it, giggling at the silly parts, and overall getting into the story.

Needless to say, Travis loved the book and I did too. They will definitely be a staple of our future library adventures.



A few days ago, after Travis had been flipping through the book, he told me he wanted to pretend to be a detective. He asked if we had any detective costumes. So, we looked through the Nate the Great book and found out that detectives wear a) long jackets/trench coats with a collar and a waist-belt, and b) hats with flaps.


Well, I really don't have any true detective wear lying around. So we decided to improvise. For the jacket, the best I could do was the sport coat I had picked up for Ben at Goodwill for the 80s party we went to last fall (he went Miami Vice-style). It didn't have a belt, so we added one.


As for the hat, well, no detective-style hats in the house either. The closest we had was Ben's camo hunting hat, which includes flaps (albeit in the wrong place). But, it worked for our purposes.


Behold.... Travis the Terrific:





Next was to come up with some mysteries to solve. It turns out that I had not seen my stuffed moose (Travis has designated a stuffed moose for each person in the family) in quite some time. 6 days to be exact. The last place I remember seeing him was upstairs in my bedroom. Voila, a mystery. Travis the Terrific got his trusty notebook, wrote down some clues, and we went in search of the missing moose.

After solving the moose mystery (turns out he was NOT upstairs, we believe Sophie the Sorceress transported him downstairs at some point, and he was buried in the stuffed animal pile in the toy room), Travis was itching to expand upon his newfound detective abilities.


Luckily, Noah got into it as well. He was eating his snack, and loudly announced, "Oh no! There's a prob-yem!" Travis the Terrific and I went in to investigate, turns out the problem was that Noah couldn't figure out what his snack was. Another mystery.


So, Travis the Terrific analyzed the clues.... it looks like applesauce, it smells like applesauce, it tastes like applesauce... and deduced that the mystery snack must, indeed, be applesauce. Mystery #2: Solved.







Finally, after all that sleuthing, Travis the Terrific decided that he needed to partake of his own snack. Detectiving is exhausting work, after all.