Sharing the Love

A wonderful thing happened the other night. In a darkened bedroom with the curtains drawn and a lamp lit, my little girl pointed up to her bookshelves and said, "I want that one there, Mummy. The one in the middle. The one with the mouse." "What, this one?" I replied, hopefully, picking up Slow Loris by Alexis Deacon. "Yes." Heaven!

I have always, always loved this book. Originally published in 2002, it was Alexis Deacon's first book and, amongst other accolades, was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 Best Books of All Time.* It's a work of comedy genius and if you've never experienced Slow Loris, you are in for an absolute treat.

Everyone at the zoo thinks that Loris is boring, because he's SO slow. It takes him ten minutes to eat a satsuma, twenty minutes to get from one end of his branch to the other and an hour to scratch his bottom (this is a particularly favourite part for Little C). But what no one knows, is that Slow Loris has a secret: at night, he likes to do things FAST!

I loved reading this book with Little C and I was even happier when she asked me to read it again, and then again the following morning. Sharing things you love is one of the great joys of having a small person and I can't think of anything lovelier than enjoying a book we both love, cooking together, playing the piano together and making things together. I can only hope that there will be more and more of these magical moments as she gets older. There is so much to look forward to. Lucky me!

* More on this list in a future post, I think.

Read it Again!

Read it again, Daddy!

One of the things that always pleasantly surprises me about reading with a small person is their amazing ability not to get bored. I remember once going to a talk about children and reading and being told the statistic that on average children will read the same book 40 times. 40? Yes, 40! And I'm beginning to suspect that that's a conservative estimate.

Every single night for the last three weeks, I have had the pleasure of reading from Yummy by Lucy Cousins. It is a brilliant book, but a very dark book indeed – no doubt about it. Foxy Loxy does bite the heads off Ducky Lucky, Cocky Locky, Goosey Poosey and co. The wolf does swallow up Little Red Riding Hood and her poor sick granny and the woodsman then really does go on to hack his head off. From the format of the book, the level of the text and the bright, cheerful illustration it's obvious that this collection of traditional tales is aimed at two-year-olds but to me it's a bit scary. Lucy Cousins' stories and illustrations are pretty terrifying (albeit terrifying in primary-coloured way) but Little C cannot get enough of them. She gets five stories (or sometimes more) a night and if she had her way, they would all come from Yummy.

Just a few of our current favourites

Mummy however, has a lower tolerance for repetition and limits this anarchic toddler-fodder to two or three stories per night with the remains of the quota made up from a regular selection of firm favourites. I love it when we like the same books and I always feel a little bit proud when she chooses a Walker Book. A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton, I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klaassen and the fabulously feminist The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton never fail to please. But we also love The Gruffalo (who doesn't?), The Storm Whale, Orange Pear Apple Bear and just about anything illustrated by Britta Teckentrup. We like books that rhyme, books with lots of different voices (even if my accents are a bit inconsistent), funny books and above all, books with animals in them.

It's nice to bring new books into our (not-so) little library, but we will always return to the old favourites. Even if we have read them a time or two too many!