I have an addiction. It's a healthy addiction though. To books. Also to donuts. And liquorish. But that’s another story. And less healthy. So anyway, I’m a bibliophile. A book worm. A heavy reader. Bookish some might say. A savant, or at least a wannabe-savant. Bibliomaniac. Nerd. I’m okay with any of these.
I knew from a young age, and I mean a really young age, that one of the things that was going to be an important and very pleasing part of motherhood for me would be reading to my children. You know, the way you see them doing it in the movies, all snuggled up in one bed in a dimly lit room that has some sort of fairy-lights display on the wall.
It turns out the snuggling, even with one child, is more a process of constantly rearranging the pillows and bedding in a futile effort to avoid neck strain and the soft lighting will make you go blind in the blink of an eye. It also seems that I prefer a bedtime reading outfit of my Captain America Civil War nightie and mismatched socks to a pair of chinos and a twin set that all the mums in the movies seem to favor.
All that aside, it is, as long expected, one of my favorite parts of being a parent and most definitely the highlight of my day. I started the ritual of reading to our son at bedtime, and any other time of the day the little Duracell bunny would sit still for more than 47 seconds, from very early on. I was most upset to find that he wasn’t naturally inclined to sit quietly in a state of divine rapture in my lap and soak up the words, or even the pictures. I persisted. Clutching to me the advice that anyone happened to discard in my general direction about how their children hadn’t loved story time either at first but that at the age of about two and a half/three/four and eight months/seventeen...something clicked and they started enjoying it.
In the end it did stick, and at the time I realized it was actually a particular story that he became interested in. Caterpillar Spring, Butterfly Summer, written by Susan Hood. It was a board book, perfect for a 3yo and more resilient to his tendency to grab, chew on, hit things with and bury in the garden than other, more delicate stories we had. Nothing fancy or famous or even necessarily very good.
It did have a couple of things going for it though. One was that it had a springy green caterpillar, literally a sort of short slinky covered in a sort of green stocking inside the book by way of a hole cut in the thick board pages so that the caterpillars body was sticking out on each page. According to the back of the book it was meant to mimic a crawling caterpillar.
I initially thought it was this interactive caterpillar that was what he liked about it, but I soon realized it was actually the rhyming cadence of the short story. We read Caterpillar Spring every night for about 5 months. EVERY. BLOODY. NIGHT. It was probably just as well actually because knowing it off by heart after 3 days resulted in a lot less eye strain. We didn't realise it was the rhyming verse that he liked until we read a new book one night, one I’d picked up from the $5 table in some bargain bookshop somewhere, and this second book also rhymed.
It was another board book, but a full sized one this time so quite big as far as kids books go, called Huggle Buggle Bear. I know, catchy right! Please, refrain for leaping to your Amazon app in a flurry to seek it out and order it, at least until you finish reading my post. Alas, it was again not the sort of book you would go out of your way to find and order from Amazon. Not brilliantly written. Not exquisitely illustrated, though to be fair, not badly illustrated either. But it had the golden ingredient; it rhymed. The next night when choosing the books he wanted to read, he came back with these two...again. And so three days later I knew Huggle Buggle Bear off by heart.
Previously, I’d always been drawn to a particular book for him by the story and the illustrations, not surprisingly given writing and drawing/painting etc are the things I do, but I’d just realized that these points didn't really hold any appeal to him.
What did appeal to him was that they rhymed and that I made voices when I read them and exaggerated certain words in funny ways. He liked the pictures too but it wasn’t about how beautiful or how colorful or well illustrated they were for him, as it was for me. It was that I would point to the butterflies on a page and ask him what they were and could he find all of them. Or point to the books on a shelf in the picture and ask him what colors he could see. In Huggle Buggle Bear there is a page with a toy box and various kiddie instruments lying around and he would tell me what they were and I had to make the sounds for them. These were the things that he loved about story time.
I changed my selection process when it came to finding books for him then and started looking for things he liked rather than the things that appealed to me; the cadence of the story and how I could turn a page of illustration into an interactive game of eye spy or hide and seek.
My bookishness started very early, and only increased with age and I guess this was why it wasn’t only upsetting to me but actually a bit of a shock to find that my only child did not share this personality trait. But to be fair, he was not a placid or serene baby that was ever likely to be content to sit still and be read to. He was a delight, always giddily happy and hell bent on bending strangers to his will with huge shining blue eyes and a toothless guppy grin, but even that he did while disconnecting himself from his safety harness and standing up to lean over the back of the pram and stare people down in elevators. He just didn't sit still. Why sit when you can stand and climb on things. Even before he was born he was annoying the crap out of the midwives where I was in hospital because they never knew where to find him for the daily EKG. Expecting him to stay in one place long enough to drink a whole bottle or eat something was hard enough, let alone for a whole 3 minute story.
But it turned out to be a matter of finding the things that he was interested in. We found many more favorites after this discovery and as he got older it was no longer all about if a book rhymed or if it had pictures I could use to make a game. From about age 3 and a half this became less important. Now he likes different books for different reasons. Sometimes I have no idea what the reason is. Sometimes it's something simple like the fact that it was one that I liked when I was a kid, as is the case with The Velveteen Rabbit. Sometimes it's that the characters in the books have the same names as his friends. Sometimes it's that the book has the word ‘poo’ in it. In fact you can pretty much bet money that if it has the word ‘poo’ in it, he is going to like it.
When I started writing this, I thought I was going to be writing about one of our favorite picture books. It turns out to have been a different post altogether and when I realized it wasn’t going where I thought it was going, I decided to carry on anyway and instead talk about this thing, this part of being a parent that is immensely important and joyous for me and which began as a little more cultivated encouragement than inherited delight.
I realise now this is actually a better place to start what will probably become a bit of a regular topic for me. You can find a plethora of reviews or personal opinions on every other sort of book that there is in existence, and while there are a few on children’s picture books, the ones I’ve come across seem to be more about the well known and already very popular titles. This is a shame I think because there are some really fantastic books out there that just don’t find an audience. So this is the first in a series of posts that will cover the ones we love.
I hope you’ll come back and read my next post in this series and hopefully find a few new favorites as I share ours. Not just the books we love to read now, but the ones that started him on the journey; that delivered him into the arms of story and which I hope will see him through a lifetime love affair with books.
Until next time, dontbeanarsehat and try to read at least one book made of paper a month.
Brooke.
Ps, sorry if some of the photos are a bit on the blurry side, I've just had some drops put in that enlarge my pupils, or in this case, one pupil, which looks ridiculous because one is enormous and the other is like a pin head, but they also blur my vision so I can't actually tell if the pics are blurry or not.