The five of us sat outside -- Ma, Pa, Blondie, the little angel and me -- trying to capture the sound of birdsong and my parents' bubbling fountain in the background over our voices lovingly reading each other stories. (Disclosure: this isn't a review, but I did receive the books free from Hallmark when I attended a blogger event there on Friday -- more on that later.)

I had three of the recordable storybooks. Pa is the bedtime story reader in our family, so I wanted him to read one. Then we were all going to take turns reading the other two -- one for Blondie and one for us. On our first run-through, Blondie misted up a little and it was a poignant moment what with the birdsong and the bubbling fountain and that unicorn that came over the ridge right at the moment the last word was pronounced.

Then we tried to play it back.

Somehow we'd kept the recordings of certain pages and lost others, and the little angel kept scraping her chair and walking around with what she clearly thought were gossamer steps on the pavers but actually sounded like a bull elk wandering through Macy's.

Finally, we took the books inside. There was apparently some trick to laying them perfectly flat and perhaps daylight affected the little light-sensitive holes? So we recorded all three books over again, and when you press stop, it plays it back to you, then if you REALLY WANT TO BE SURE, you must then play the entire thing over when you are done, so all in all by the end we had listened to each other read these books approximately 32 times, yelling at Pa and Beloved every time they tried to have a conversation because OMG WE ARE RECORDING HERE and CAN'T YOU JUST WAIT ANOTHER 54 MINUTES?

Then we were done, and Pa wrote on the opening page of the book that he read "recorded on September 11, 2011," and I realized we hadn't even planned it, but it seemed entirely appropriate to be together on the ten-year anniversary of the scariest day in recent memory, recording our voices so we might always hear the inflections of love. Even though we came for the weekend not to commemorate September 11 but to help my parents fix a leak in their bathroom, but maybe that makes it even better.

The little angel will probably always wonder why 9/11 is such a big deal in the same way I could never understand why people could remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. I hope she never has a day in which she remembers exactly where she was when some horrible scary thing happens that rocks her faith in leadership or in humanity. It's not possible to protect her entirely, though, so ... the books. We wrap our children in as much familial love as we can, and we hope that shield of belonging and strength will be enough.