Books, books
I read them every day
How many stinkin’ children’s books
Will I have to read today?
OK, so I’m not bothered by all the books I’m reading my daughter.
It’s fun and I agree with my wife that it’s a much healthier habit than teaching her to throw darts or saw wood in the back yard like I was trying to do last week. She’s only 1-year-old after all, and doesn’t understand the whole measuring thing.
So we’ll stick with books. But it sure can be tedious, especially when you’re reading the same one over and over again 13,000 times in the span of 15 minutes. If you’ve ever overcooked broccoli, that’s my brain by the time I’m through.
Mostly I read to her at night when I’m supposed to be changing her diaper and getting her ready for bed. I plop down on the floor among some of her pillows and wait for her to crawl over with a book. I know she’s ready for me to read it by how she whacks me in the head. It’s her special way of saying, “Read, fool, now!”
So I start reading and she crawls off to get another one, which she will of course hit me in the head with, and the whole process starts over again. If you see me on the street and wonder what all the welts and bruises on my forehead are, it’s just a little nighttime book reading.
Many times I get the feeling it’s not so much about me reading to her, as it is about making me read. She’s on a power trip and sees me as her pet monkey. “Read, pet monkey, read!”
That isn’t to say she can’t enjoy a good book reading. She does. Her attention span is really growing and is now measured in milliseconds. She laughs and smiles as I turn the pages and it’s the most amazing little moments when she looks up into my eyes, so appreciative, so dazzled, so Whack!
Moment spoiled.
My wife has taught her how to roar like a lion, which she does every time we stumble across the furry beasts in a book. She does it with a whispered sweetness that is infectious, if not ferocious. She can always find a lion to imitate in her favorite book, “Dear Zoo.” It’s one that she can’t get enough of, and wants me to read over and over.
She’ll be digging through her bookshelf and I’ll be just praying, “Please not ‘Dear Zoo’ again. Anything but ‘Dear Zoo.’ ”
But I could bury that book in concrete out back and she’d manage to find it. Out it pops, and whack! It’s “Dear Zoo” time.
Forget the fact that it makes me want to go crash my car into a tree. Forget the fact that it’s the same story, which I really hate to tell her this, doesn’t even make sense. A little kid writes to the zoo to send him animals, and they do. That doesn’t happen in real life!
But it makes her smile. I smile, too.
Many of these books take me back to my childhood. They trigger vivid memories and strange sensations, like the sweet, stale smell of a soggy cookie that was once pressed between the pages of “Go, Dog, Go.” Over the years it became little more than a thin, flaky crust that crumbled away with every reading. But the smell never went with it, and it can only be described as a combination of dog feet and pine bark. Don’t ask me to explain why, but that’s exactly what it smelled like.
Now, here we are making new memories — memories that will one day be re-lived as she reads to her children, curled up on a floor with a child who announces she’s ready for a new one with a good whack to the head.