Guest blogger: Reading to your newborn

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You wrote recently about the recent recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that parents read aloud to their children starting in infancy (yay, pediatricians!). My good friend Emily, who last guest blogged for us about grown-up poetry for YA readers, has been thinking a lot about this idea:

Dear Annie,

One of the hardest things for me as a new mother has been establishing so many new routines – for waking up, going to sleep, even for making my own tea in the morning now that I’ve got an infant attached to my hip – so when the American Pediatric Association announced its recommendation that infants should be read to from birth, I was overwhelmed. I could barely find time to do the laundry and now I should be reading to a being that can’t focus her eyes?

Lucky for me and my one month old daughter Alice, many wonderful friends gave us board books to celebrate her arrival. In search of a new reading routine, I put a few of them next to the rocking chair where I most often nurse, and a few more next to the bouncy chair where she sits in the morning, and waited for the right moment.

My first attempt was Mary Murphy’s “I Kissed the Baby,” a book Annie herself gave to us, which I read to Alice at six thirty am as she sat in her bouncy chair and I sat next to her on the kitchen floor. (Long story.) It was a hit! Four week old Alice seemed to be staring at the high contrast pictures -- or was she just gazing at the stripes on her chair? -- and the sudden, sing-song rhythm of my voice appeared to please her. After a few weeks of talking awkwardly about all the random events of the day – “Now I’m putting the sheets in the dryer!” – it was lovely for me to have Murphy’s lilting, warm-hearted text to work with. I ended up reading the book twice, once for Alice, who immediately drifted into a nap, and a second time for myself.

A few days later, I read “Owl Babies” by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson to Alice as she lay on my lap in the rocking chair after nursing. In it, a mother owl leaves her three babies while foraging for food, only to return -- surprise! -- in the end. Unmoved by the drama of maternal absence and return, and only vaguely able to focus on the expressive, high contrast faces of the three baby owls, Alice once again fell fast asleep. I was so happy reading, though, that I continued on through Susan Meyers“Everywhere Babies,” illustrated by Marla Frazee, and cried the whole time at the simple, loving text and diverse, beautiful families in the illustrations. Reading to infants, it seems, is perhaps more moving to mothers than to their charges.

There are several strains of books that Alice isn’t ready for, for instance the highly visual “Good Night,Gorilla” by Peggy Rathmann or the “Touch and Feel” sequence (we were given “Touch and Feel Kitten” and "
Touch and Feel Dinosaur”) that includes interactive panels (“Touch my ROUGH pink tongue”) fitting for babies who, unlike Alice, have control over their hands. That said, the sonically oriented books were perfect. I was initially concerned when Alice began freaking out during Sandra Boynton’s “Moo, Baa, La La La!” but it turned out she just had to burp. Stomach calmed, she once again perked up at Boynton’s appealingly rhythmic barnyard nonsense. In a few months, she’ll no doubt begin to appreciate Boynton’s charming drawings as well.

All told, I can now see why the APA might have made such a recommendation. (My wife, I should say, remains highly skeptical.) Though Alice herself is still mostly indifferent to literature, as a parent I really enjoyed reading to her once I’d figured out when and where it might be possible. I can also see how a board book or two attached to an afternoon nursing session might evolve into reading in the rocking chair before bed in a few months. Most lovely of all, though, I found myself repeating some of the refrains from our books from time to time, especially Mary Murphy’s “Of course I kissed the baby, my own amazing baby.” Perhaps the APA knew what it was doing after all.

Love, Emily

As I've said many times in the last couple of months, Alice is a very lucky kid.

Love, Annie

Independent reading

Dear Aunt Debbie,

What a prodigious feat of linking!  I love Bob's poem, and loved perusing your 1994 reading history, recognizing so many of the names listed and discovering a few I didn't know.

I wrote last week about the ways in which our family reading has come together in our love affair with the Bone graphic novels. On the flip side, my three children are each individually highly engaged with books of their own choosing.

At 11 months, Will understands that books are important. He has gotten terribly good at pulling books off the coffee table onto the floor, where he can sit and get them open. He takes dust jackets off hardcovers and mauls paperbacks, yelling when we take them away. We keep our board books on the lowest shelves in the living room, and about two weeks ago, Will started pulling out bunches of them and then bringing them to us to read to him. He can crawl with a board book in one hand, sit up, and proffer it with a raised arm and a hopeful glance. His most-requested list at the moment: I Love Colors,  My Face Book, Doggies, and Global Babies. Sometimes, he bats them open himself and pats at them on the floor -- this total independence is especially true with the Matthew Van Fleet books Cat and Dog. Pictures of babies still bring the biggest smiles and most vocalization.


Between her classroom library, your gifts, and our local library, Eleanor is speeding through a variety of series. She loves the Who Was... books, and tonight in the bath entertained us with facts about George Washington (he had a harsh, cold mother), Harry Houdini (he was the first man to fly an airplane in Australia), and Sally Ride (she had to strap herself in with Velcro in order to go to the bathroom in space).

Eleanor is also picking up historical facts from the Magic Tree House series, by Mary Pope Osborne. I'm so glad I followed your advice on not introducing these books until she was reading independently -- there are five million of them, all versions of the same plot and all written in the same flat language. The plus side is that Osborne does her research. Eleanor now knows about groundlings in Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and has learned how gorillas frighten away predators, among other things. After reading 10 or so of the series, Eleanor is becoming dissatisfied with it, however. Her complaint? The close third-person narration always focuses on Jack rather than his sister Annie -- you don't get as much of a sense of what she's thinking or feeling. (That's literary criticism I can get behind.)

The Jigsaw Jones mysteries, by James Preller, are another recent favorite. Jigsaw (his real name is Theodore, but he solves puzzles, so...) is a second-grader, who works to solve not-too-scary mysteries with his partner, Mila. There are more than 30 books in the series, and I think Eleanor is close to having brought all of them home. Apparently the gender balance in these doesn't bother her as much, though it's another boy-with-girl-sidekick situation.

And Isabel? Yesterday she spent close to an hour sitting on the couch with three Bone books and two Zita books, totally focused in her reading. We just took Bone #8 (of 9!) out of the library today. The series is getting darker and more complicated, and Isabel prefers her own reading of the later books to my offer to read the words. I have a feeling these will be some of the first longer books she learns to read on her own, in a couple of years.

Love, Annie

Global babies

Dear Aunt Debbie,

What a pleasure it was to see you and Bob for Thanksgiving, and to gather around our packed tables with family and friends!

As you saw on Thursday, Will has reached a couple of book milestones: understanding he now has the ability to pull books off of low bookshelves onto the floor, and reaching consciously for board books illustrated with pictures of babies.  He's not quite able to turn the pages yet, but he can open and close a book when I hold it, and pats the faces of babies with great glee.  We've written before about great baby-picture board books: cute baby faces, babies and animals, babies and food, more babies and food, and baby signs.

Two of Will's favorites which we haven't yet covered are multicultural treasure troves:


Global Babies contains text in English and Spanish, stressing how much babies everywhere are alike, and how all are loved. Global Fund for Children is listed as the author, and the book does have a little bit of a written-by-a-nonprofit, not an author vibe, but the pictures (by Keren Su and Frans Lemmens) are lovely. Each page is labeled with the baby's country of origin, and there's a lot of traditional-looking baby garb. Many skin colors, many expressions, some very sweet sleeping babies.

Then there's My Teeth, by Richard and Michele Steckel. It's another simple premise: each page has a picture of a baby (again labeled with country of origin) smiling to show off an ascending number of teeth, from "No teeth (South Africa)" to "10 teeth (Belize)."  The last two pages are "Bite! (Turkey)" and "Let's brush! (Ireland). Will, who at the moment has three teeth, is impressed.

Sandra Boynton's Doggies is another big favorite -- I'll keep you posted on where we go from here.

Love, Annie

Here comes the Rainbow

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your latest box of gifts, which arrived recently for Isabel's birthday, contained a number of gems, including one which has become Will's favorite book.

I haven't yet written much about Will's taste in books: at close to 8 months old, he's mostly interested in slapping at them and trying to eat the corners.  But he's gotten to that excellent baby stage where he thinks pictures of other babies are awesome.  We're hitting some of our favorites in this category, of course: Baby, Baby; I Love Colors; What's on My Head?


Eating the Rainbow is another good board book to engage this phase.  It's full of bright colors, adorable multi-racial babies, and healthy eating suggestions -- what's not to like?  Each two-page spread contains a picture of a baby eating a fruit or vegetable, with several other food items of the same color laid out on the facing page. It's good for baby faces now, and will be good for color and food recognition later, as well as supporting the idea that fruits and vegetables are good things to eat.  Will looks at these babies and laughs out loud.

In my free time, I've been reading some really good YA fiction.  I finally got Wonder from the library, and devoured it.  What a good book -- the kind where the characters feel immediately like real people, and start to inhabit your thoughts throughout the day.

Poking around online, I came across a story that led me to Eleanor & Park, a YA novel by Rainbow Rowell.  I'd never heard of Rowell, but after reading the book, I've put library holds on the two other books she has out, and will be watching for her new work.

Eleanor & Park is a YA misfit love story, set in 1986 in Omaha, Nebraska.  Eleanor is big and red-headed and poor, living with her mom, siblings, and abusive stepdad in a tiny house.  At school, she's bullied quite badly.  Park is half-Korean, into comics and punk music, popular enough but definitely other.  They fall in love, and Rowell writes about it in such specific, evocative detail that it made me feel like I was 15 again.  Holding hands on the school bus is the most intense of experiences:

As soon as he touched her, he wondered how he'd gone this long without doing it.  He rubbed his thumb through her palm and up her fingers, and was aware of her every breath.  

Park had held hands with girls before.  Girls at Skateland.  A girl at the ninth-grade dance last year. (They'd kissed while they waited for her dad to pick them up.) He'd even held Tina's hand, back when they "went" together in the sixth grade.

And always before, it had been fine.  Not much different from holding Josh's hand when they were little kids crossing the street.  Or holding his grandma's hand when she took him to church.  Maybe a little sweatier, a little more awkward.

When he'd kissed that girl last year, with his mouth dry and his eyes mostly open, Park had wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him.

He'd even wondered -- seriously, while he was kissing her, he'd wondered this -- whether he might be gay.  Except he didn't feel like kissing any guys either.  And if he thought about She-Hulk or Storm (instead of this girl, Dawn), the kissing got a lot better.

Maybe I'm not attracted to real girls, he'd thought at the time.  Maybe I'm some sort of perverted cartoon-sexual.

Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn't recognize all those other girls.  The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn't recognize the formatting.

When he touched Eleanor's hand, he recognized her.  He knew.

It's a gripping read, moving and real.  Like Wonder, Eleanor & Park doesn't shy away from the complicated ways that teenagers are both affectionate with and cruel to each other, or from the horrendous circumstances that many kids grow up through.

So of course it's been censored.  Some high school librarians in Minnesota liked the book so much they offered it as a community read, and invited Rowell to speak.  Then a couple of parents got hold of the book and counted up the curse words in it (apparently without taking much else in as they went through) and decided that it was "dangerously obscene."  Here's Rainbow Rowell talking about it in a brief interview.

I'm no fan of censorship in any case, but here it seems particularly misguided.  Eleanor and Park are good kids, and the vast majority of the cursing in the book comes from Eleanor's stepfather and the kids who bully her -- it's language she and Park feel as abusive, and try to move away from.  Linda Holmes writes thoughtfully about this issue on her NPR blog, here.  This is the kind of book I hope Eleanor, Isabel, and Will will be reading when they're 15.

Love, Annie

Baby Reading

Dear Annie,

Someone came into the store today looking for three books for immediate use by newborns -- a frequent question in my book department. I offered my favorite book for little ones:
I Love Colors. It's a board book with full-page photographs of babies' faces, each with a solid-color page facing it. The pictures are pretty straightforward, but the addition of various props -- "red bow," "purple sunglasses," "yellow boa" -- give it a lovely whimsical edge. Really good for little babies. Faces they can focus on, bright colors in contrast. And the babies are a variety of ethnicities, which is refreshing. He took that and Whats on my Head?
And the third baby ended up with a high-contrast black-and-white Look Look!

Years ago, I was showing I Love Colors to a mom with a 2 month-old strapped onto her chest, facing out. As I turned the pages, first one baby foot twitched, then the other, then both legs, and eventually all four limbs. It was delightful: little baby totally engaged in book.

What were the first books Eleanor focused on? I know you did the Goodnight Moon bedtime routine (I defer to you to describe that one), but what other ways did she start on books? And Isabel (now 8 months old) -- what does she think of books? We have some form of family lore that my grandfather, Grandma Helen's dad, would hold your infant mother on his lap and read her whatever he was reading, usually the newspaper (have I heard this story with the phone book substituted in here?). This was considered cute and funny and indicative of his charming personality, but it's also something I think is central to raising a reader. Making reading part of a cozy happy interaction (baby snuggled on Grandpa's lap, listening to soothing voice) is sending the message that reading time is happy time.

Wishing you many happy times,

Deborah

Books in this post:


I Love Colors

What's on my Head?

Look Look!