I had been thinking for quite a while to write a series about my son’s books and the one’s from the library that he read. But I didn’t want to commit to a weekly or anything, because God knows the stress involved in meeting my NaBloPoMo commitment. But these 2 books are just too good to miss.
This one was Pappu’s first book, and his best too. It’s so close to my heart because I bought it about 2 years before he was born. Got it on clearance sale in landmark. Even though I had no plans or wishes to have a child then, I figured out that it was too good a price to miss. So I brought it all the way to Singapore along with my other books during relocation. I read it to him first when he was just 2 months old and he surprised me by cooing his loudest and happiest coos of that time. I don’t know what exactly he saw in it but he loved it. May be it was the brilliant coloured and clearly spaced pictures that caught his attention.
The book was always with us and even when we went to India for a month last year, we brought this along with only his rubber duckie, the two of his life savers. Whatever the situation might be, it would be solved if he had either of these.
At one stage when he started crawling, whenever he wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do, I would tell him to search his book and would say a sentence or two from the book. He would immediately laugh and run in search of the book. He would find it out and thus engage himself. I had read the same book over and over to him so much that he knew it all by heart.
And of course, not to mention the robustness of the book, it has survived for 13+ months of playing with and it still holds it’s charm and is still in his favourites list. Looks good enough to save for the next child, except for this:
A part of it has already been ingested.
This is another book that I hold close to my heart because of the value it creates. Even though Pappu is still too young to learn to pray, considering that even his parents are also learning to pray now, we thought it was a better idea to start him up early so that we can learn together. This book came as a bliss. It’s not religious, which is a sigh of relief for me. I wanted my family to learn to differentiate religion and faith even though we will be teaching him the value of religion.
And the best part is it’s all about saying thank you. What a great way to get children started on prayers!
It serves as a great tool to create family time at the end of the day, when we all get to bed ready to cuddle and then to sleep. Because this is also a time for Pappu to learn a proper bed time routine without involving mommy’s breasts. As I said , we are all learning together. Regarding his current routine of drinking himself to sleep, I certainly need hubby’s help.
It talks about everything that a child might think of. It starts thanking god for the morning (I read this part every morning) nature, and then the animals, friends, rain, sunshine, scary things too, and family and ends with a couple of night time songs and rhymes. Even though Pappu looks a bit too young to understand all these, I keep reading it every night and soon he will start to read himself and understand the true meaning of it.
