To London! With Snail and Spit.

Traveling with small children is not easy, especially if one of them--the six year old--has strep. But The One Recovering From Strep is also The One Who Is Beside Himself With Anticipation That He Will Be Traveling to London, England, Tomorrow Night. This is his first trip abroad. He now has a passport. So does the other one--The One Who Is Tonight Excited But Perhaps For Reasons He Does Not, Being Only Two, Understand.

We're going to London to help launch the hardcover UK edition of Moby-Duck, the inaugural title of Union Books. Its cover is pictured here.

For the last few weeks, I've been preparing six-year-old B. and two-year-old M. for their trip to London by resuscitating a bedtime tale that I first began to spin for B. back when he was a two year old. It's the tale of a squirrel named Snail, who lives in a hole in a tree in Washington Square Park. ("That's funny," M. said the other night. "'Snail' is a funny name"--for a squirrel, he meant.) Snail's best friend is a duck named Spit, who almost always goes by his full title, Spit the Bulgarian Wedding Duck.

(Long story, short version: The night the spinning of the tale began, there was a story about a Bulgarian wedding band on the radio. Spit plays the trombone, and any trombone player will therefore guess the provenance of the name Spit.)

Basically, the tale is a highly derivative remix of Milne, Graham, and Henson, but that doesn't make it any less effective as a soporific. Last weekend, Snail and Spit stowed away on a big old jet airliner bound for London. We'll be catching up with them there tomorrow evening.

Time to pack.