ANNOUNCING THE TEDDY BEAR GIVEAWAY WINNER…AND A TEASER FOR TOMORROW!

I can certainly see why people use the random-number method of selecting a winner for their giveaways…this was hard! Little Bear and I enjoyed all the wishes you made on her (or his!) behalf. But—and I didn’t know this before—this bear has a definite literary bent and is well up on the bears of children’s literature. So the winner of this Little Bear is (drum roll) Aloha Jan, who wrote, "I have 3 wishes: to travel like Paddington, have adventures like Pooh, & find love in the arms of a child like Corduroy."

Pretty good wishes for anyone, bear or not! So, Aloha Jan, I'll be getting your bear to you ASAP. And I told Bear you’re a Hawaii lover, so he (or she) is expecting to go along on your next trip!

The rest of you wishers mustn’t despair. I have four more miniature bears I'll be giving away in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. And heaven only knows what I might pick up at a yard sale to give away!

Now, about that teaser…I did something rather fun over the weekend with a couple of yard sale finds—one from a free box, the other packaged in plastic; a bit of Elmer’s glue; and two short pieces of elastic. It's colorful and functional. Stay tuned tomorrow and see what it is—bet you can't guess, but I'd love it if you tried! (Okay, the whole truth is, I left my camera at work, and it has the pictures I need still on it.)

Meanwhile, let me close with my favorite line from another children’s book about a bear. Corduroy was not the only bear that Don Freeman wrote about. Some of you may remember Beady Bear, published way back in 1954, which ends with this wonderful sentence:
“Down the hill to home they went, hand in paw and paw in hand.”