Bookworm

Reading is my favorite thing to do and always has been, and I’m hoping that Owen will love to read as well.  Owen has a collection of board books, and it is interesting to me how opinionated he is about them.  There are some that he has loved from the beginning, some that he has learned to like, and others that for some reason make him get up and crawl away each time I read them—and usually he will abandon them at precisely the same moment each time too.  For a long time his favorite book was “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” by Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury—from four months until about eleven months he would sit quietly and laugh and concentrate on each page.  Now he is done with that book though, and his favorite is Good Night, Gorilla.  I don’t really know what it is that he likes about that book; it’s a wonderful book, but a lot of the story has no words, and I don’t know if he understands what happens in the pictures or just likes to look at them? 

In general he is interested in animals in a book, and he really likes the board books that have one picture and one word on a page.  He likes “Freight Train” by Donald Crews now, although for the longest time he wouldn’t let me read that one to him.  He also used to like a (hugely) abridged board book version of Alice in Wonderland, but now that one bores him.  Strangely, since I think they are hilarious, he doesn’t much like the Boynton books, except for “Blue Hat, Green Hat” and “Moo, Baaa, La La La”.  I keep reading them to him anyway, but he keeps crawling away about a third of the way through.

I have learned to keep trying with a book though, as I can never tell when a previously disliked book will pique his interest.

One thing that really makes me laugh is that I can call him back into a room by reading a book.  If he is crawling around the dining room table and getting into mischief, all I have to do is open up Good Night, Gorilla and start reading it loudly and he will come slap slap slapping in a crawl version of a sprint until he reaches my lap and joins me in the reading.  Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!

Here is Owen choosing one of my cookbooks to peruse: