AJ is starting to get to the stage where he is more interested in looking at books when I read to him. AJ's Chicago Grandma is a reading specialist and told me that it is great to start reading to him from day 1. Since AJ and I are home together all day anyway and need to find things to do to fill our time, I did start doing that pretty quickly. For the first few months, he was a captive audience who wasn't interested in the books but who also was incapable of escaping my lap. At first I started off with books that I remembered and loved from childhood, such as Make Way for Ducklings, but I soon learned about board books with coated pages for babies after AJ tried tearing and drooling on a few of the classics. Around five or six months, he became very interested in one book--Brown Bear, Brown Bear with Eric Carle illustrations. We discovered his interest in the book by accident once on the drive back from Iowa when he was crying and calmed down when I read it to him as a last resort. Brown Bear became an obsession for several weeks, and the pictures would fascinate him at each reading. Then, suddenly, AJ was over it. No more Brown Bear. If I started reading it, he looked in the other direction, bored out of his gourd. I have heard that this is how it goes with kids--they become obsessed with one toy, one movie, one outfit, one food and want it and only it all the time until--poof--one day they wake up and want nothing to do with it.
Lately, AJ has been showing some interest in two other types of books. The first are peek-a-boo books with pictures or objects hidden behind flaps that he can pull up and look at (see pictures above). The second are sing-song books with rhyming songs like The Wheels on the Bus. To be honest, though, at 7 months he would much rather spend our reading time pushing the books out of my lap so that he can watch them fall onto the floor.
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