As with every book, there will be a pair of Gracie’s Ballet slippers hidden in one of the drawings in PeeP! Do you see them in this week’s featured illustration? Really easy to find, right? But they may not so easy to find in the published book with its fifteen full-page, black-and-white illustrations. Oh, and there will also be one additional item to find somewhere in those drawings too! (Don’t worry. There will be a helpful clue in the “About This Book And Author” section at the back.)
But if you want to practice your finding skills, try this. How many chickens do you see in this week’s featured illustration? If you only see one, look again. There are actually two!
Here is a bit of a mystery for you to ponder. What is unexpectedly different about this garden gate? (There will be several garden gates throughout this series of stories. This gate appears on the back cover and with the poems at the beginning and end of each book. It is THE garden gate in the series title.)
You will read about another garden gate in the last section of PeeP! after Lefty and the others moved away. It contains clues about what is different about the gate in today’s featured illustration.
Each day, I would tell Gracie and Bessie, “This is your home. You will always be together.”
They would listen to me and stare at the empty stage we had set up in the open garden gate.
We had used quilts draped over the garden fence on each side of the gate to make the stage wings. “What a silly name. Wings are supposed to have feathers,” they would say and then giggle while hiding and waiting for their turns to dance on the smooth linoleum-covered plywood stage. Also hiding in the wings was The Record Player. We had fixed its arm so Lefty could select the songs to play, and he was careful to never scratch a single record.
With some red fabric on a curtain rod and a string of Christmas lights, the stage had seemed quite magical in the evenings for their shows. More than anything else, Lefty’s enthusiasm had helped make it that way. He loved to dance with Gracie. Without Lefty, it all looked like just an odd pile of junk in the backyard.