In recent days, our house has been transported to the magical land of Oz. Thankfully without the turbulent trauma of a vintage Kansas twister. (Which is a relief because these days, I get dizzy just spinning the kids around a few times.)

Ever since my kids read The Wizard of Oz with their homeschool teacher, a woman with whom I go way back, they have been as enchanted as Taylor Swift. Borderline obsessed, even.

Greyson has cultivated many obsessions over the years, birds being the preeminent one. During the pandemic, he became one of the leading ornithological experts on the East coast. (No seriously, he’s a legit authority on the subject.) Violet joins him in his fixations to a less compulsive extent, happily looking through bird books and playing Bird Bingo and Bird Memory with him.

But never before have the two of them become jointly fixated on something like they have with the 1900 literary classic written by L. Frank Baum. We showed them the movie too — with the Wicked Witch scenes conveniently redacted to avoid nightmares — but it’s the illustrated book that they come back to again and again.

Nearly all of their imaginative play in the last few weeks has been constructed around the people, places, and animals laid out in that classic text. “It can be Oz!” is their repeated refrain when we arrive at a playground, or a state park, or an Appalachian Trail shelter. But most often, it’s our living room. Or the minivan. Pretty much any room or space they occupy. They designate one place to be Kansas and another place to be Oz, and their imaginations take over from there.

Sometimes Violet is the Scarecrow and Greyson is the Tin Woodman (that’s his real name, I have now learned). Or maybe Violet is Dorothy, holding a stuffed dog that is Toto, and Greyson is the Scarecrow, holding a stuffed lion that is cowardly. And other times they’re both Kalidahs, “monstrous beasts with bodies like bears and heads like tigers” which were left out of the film, presumably because Hollywood lacked the special effects to convincingly portray such a bizarre creature in 1939. (Stay tuned for the eye-popping CGI Kalidahs in the 2039 centennial remake!)

Greyson and Violet also like sitting side by side, each holding their own copy of The Wizard of Oz, and taking turns “reading” chapters to each other. Violet can’t read yet, but they both charmingly conjure up the story in their own words while looking at the pictures.

It’s delightful to listen to our little natural storytellers paraphrase Baum’s masterpiece with great expression. I particularly enjoy hearing Violet depict the 4 characters explaining what they need from the Wizard with her sweetly sing-song voice. “I need him to give me a brain.” “Well okay, sure!”

When we trick or treat next week, Greyson will be the Cowardly Lion and Violet will be Dorothy. After years of them being nothing but animals, maybe the kids are entering a literary-character Halloween stage. That would be apropos since their parents were both English majors who got married in a library. (Coming next year… 8-year-old Holden Caulfield and 6-year-old Hester Prynne!)

As a parent, you never quite know what will capture your child’s imagination. I wouldn’t have guessed that Greyson, when he was 4, would spend over 4 months consumed with Christmas carols. It lasted all the way until spring! Heck, I started to resent even my favorite holiday tunes by the time March rolled around.

And I certainly didn’t anticipate this Oz obsession. Kids are wonderfully unpredictable. Half the fun of parenting is in putting cool stuff within their reach and seeing what they grab (and what grabs them). Greyson and Violet each have profoundly distinct personalities, and what floats each of their boats is often profoundly different.

But they both love floating in their boats (or spinning in their tornadoes) toward the marvelous land of Oz. It’s pure pleasure for me to watch them take this journey. And it leads me again and again, just like Dorothy, to the same sentimental conclusion:

There’s no place like home.