A while back, I remember trying to read books to Laurel and despairing because all she wanted to do was chew on the pages. (OK, so she was only 4 and a half months old when that picture was taken, but the tendency persisted for months.) We had to go through a lot of play-acting to keep her interest for more than a few pages. Meanwhile, some of her slightly-older friends were poring over books as though they held the clues to the location of the Lost Ark of The Covenant or something. It was a little discouraging.
However, she did eventually begin to love books — and demand that we read them, again and again and again. We can recite Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop and Jamberry and Barnyard Dance without looking at the pages, we’ve read them so many times. A few months ago, Laurel began not only naming her books (“Animals book,” “Water hole book,” “Germs book,” etc.) but quoting passages from them. Then she started being interested in longer books with more text than pictures, and quoting passages from those. It’s been really exciting and very rapid.
I mentioned in my last post that Laurel has been recently asking us to identify all sorts of things, including things she knows the names for already. But she’s now also pointing to words on various objects — books, signs, plates, where-ever she notices words — and asking, “that says?” She’s worked out that those combinations of letters represent particular words and she wants to know which ones. This is coming much earlier than I expected, and it’s kind of thrilling, especially to parents who love to read and write. Both of us were early readers, so it makes sense that she might be, too. Right now, we’re just trying to satisfy her curiosity as much as we can.
Oh, and remember how I said she was saying “walrus” a lot lately? I figured out what she’s saying. “With us.”
— Beth
The Carraway Seed 
Leave a comment