The Blubbering Reader

As part of our WW II unit study, I read Sadaku and the Thousand Paper Cranes.  What a beautiful story, but sad.  So very, very sad.  It's only 60 pages and by 55 I'm crying.  At 57 I'm sobbing and sniffling.  Just one chapter left.  It's only 3 pages of reading!  Can I do it?  Well, maybe I could have, I don't know.  Cameron took over.  He said he'd read it!  The last sentence is her falling asleep and not....  Cameron skips to the next page, which talks about the memorial.  I didn't know he had stopped at the last 2 words.  I thought there may have been another paragraph.  He looks at me and says, "You don't want to know."  I said, I already know she dies.  So, he says, "did not wake up."  I think I used half a dozen Kleenex.  I'm so glad we read this story.  It touched me (obviously) in such a profound way.  Growing up, I knew about Hiroshima.  It was just an event in our history.  The holocaust was always brought to life by The Diary of Anne Frank.  I'd never read anything from the Japanese point.  This is definitely been an eye opener of a unit study to me. 

On a lighter note, because I had to do something other than end the story with her death.  We decided to look up her memorial at the Hiroshima Peace Park.  Then we looked up origami cranes.  They are pretty complex, so we just looked up origami.  Cammy being the cat obsessed one was interested in making an origami cat.  So, we did.  He made a big one that he could use as a mask, and I made a little one.  Aren't they cute?