But then we'd need a skating rink...

Welcome to this week's Thursday News of the Absurd Will Someone Please Write Me This Book Inspirational Moment (TNoftheAWSWMTBIM).

Scene: this morning, breakfast. Tink (and she was being serious, I think) announces, "Mama, I do not want a guinea pig any more."

"No?" I say, chuckling to myself at the fact that she felt it was necessary to tell me this. Because otherwise I was about to rush right out and add RodentStinkAndChaos to our already zen-like existence.

"No," she announces. "I want a penguin."

I laughed. She said it again. I laughed again. She said it twenty more times in increasing levels of whininess. I said something suitably soul-crushing and mom-ish like, "Okay, Tink. It was funny the first time. Now cut it out."

"But I DO!" she said.

Thor chimed in. "We'd need to turn the backyard into an ice pool."

And I thought, "What if we did?" And then, "Oh, this is a book."

Have you read When Dinosaurs Came With Everything (by Elise Broach, illus. David Small)? Great fun, that picture book. But I want penguins.

Mostly, I want a chapter book, I think. I want the little girl to hear her father say, "We'd have to build an ice pool in the backyard" and to believe him. So she starts planning and saving, and maybe even building. It's never going to happen. Obviously. It's impossible. But what if she doesn't know that?

She has to get it in the end, of course. Despite the fact that it is ludicrous, she has to convince them and it has to work and be wonderful and make us all feel like maybe we need to widen our ideas of what's "possible."

Also, it has to be hilarious and it has to ave a scene with men in tuxedos who look like a colony of penguins.

Who will write me this book?