Hattie didn't mind the children. They were about the only people on earth she didn't mind. She heard the parents telling them to leave her alone, but her seemingly bottomless tin of cookies, which ... [+]
There was a hippo in the kitchen. No one knew how it got there, or when, but there was undeniably an enormous, sloppy, disheveled hippo in the kitchen. "And," I said, examining the lunch my mother had spread in the middle of the table, "to make matters worse, he's a double-dippo hippo." "A what?" my father said. "He dips once," my mother said, frowning at the hummus bowl on the table, "bites, and then dips again." "And that's not all," my sister added. "He's also a slurping-sippo hippo!" "A what?" my father asked again. "He slurps when he sips," my sister said patiently, crossing her arms as t