Owen Goes To The Library

Owen continues to have what I will carefully call an interesting relationship with books.  He’s not like my nephew Henry was, who at Owen’s age would back up into your lap with a book the minute you sat down.  But I wouldn’t say Owen is NOT interested in books; it’s just that it takes a little finagling to get him to sit and pay attention to one.

He still likes the books he likes, and the books he likes tend to be the books he knows very well.  If I sit down with Owen and try to read him a book that is new to him, he will push it out of my hand and say No.  But if I can immediately show him something on a page that interests him, then perhaps he will be intrigued enough to give the book a chance.  We’ve also had some luck in this regard with Sean reading a new book to Owen as Owen sits in the tub.  He’s a captive audience, and is thus then willing to give a book a listen, while he pours water from one cup into another.

On the other hand, if he likes a book, then he will want me to read it over and over and over, perhaps five or six times in a row.  The other Saturday we took him to the library for the first time to get books for him.  I had to search quickly, so can’t really vouch for the quality of the stack we borrowed.  However, I did make sure to get some Maisy books, since we have about four of those at home that he really enjoys.  And he immediately obsessed over the two new Maisy books we got – "Maisy Cleans Up" and "Maisy Drives a Bus."  Both were big hits, especially the cleaning one since it involved six cupcakes waiting to be eaten.  Owen also likes the Eddie Elephant character, and always lets me know that Eddie is “An Epiphant!”

Another of his favorite books at home is “Sheep in a Jeep”, and while at the library I discovered that there are a whole bunch of Sheep books, and so borrowed “Sheep in a Ship” and “Sheep on a Hike”.  But whereas I liked these books muchly, Owen isn’t too interested in them:  it turns out it was the Jeep he liked in the previous book, and not so much the sheep (even though one knits!  And they are always getting into a funny muddle!).

So two of the nine books we borrowed were hits, which I suppose isn’t so bad.  I will keep trying, at any rate!

I’ll leave you with pictures of Owen reading my biography of Pepys, which he snatched from the table and then wouldn’t give back, telling me emphatically, “It’s mine!”  I’ve been reading that book since August, so perhaps he’ll finish it before I do.

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: