The Pee-Pee Book and Other Literary Problems

I don't know about you, but I don't think that's the title.

Gabby is very much into books these days. All books. Anything with pages, pictures, and words. She particularly enjoys books that rhyme, and she is very adept at memorization, especially if the rhyming scheme is good. 

This makes bedtime difficult for me, because since putting the girls into the same bedroom, my M.O. is basically to keep Gabby quiet so she doesn't wake Lilly up. So, now in addition to her usual, "I wake baby up!" outbursts, I am battling her passion for reciting every book at the top of her tiny (but powerful) lungs.

I added "Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch to the bedtime pile, thinking it would be a sweet singsong-y way to end the evenings. It took one reading before I was being echoed as that little boy in the book "goo and goo and goo." She also memorized the song, but only the last word of each line, so she would mumble, "hmmmm-hmmm EVER, eehhhhhh ALLLLLWAAAAAYYYYS, hmmmm-hmm baby BEEEEEE." That book is out of the rotation now.

I also had to stop reading Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book. This book would be a fantastic book to lull any other two-year old child to sleep. Most of the words are made-up, so comprehension is low. The rhyming scheme never changes, it has a very steady rhythm that makes me drowsy when I read it aloud. No, the problem with this book is that she doesn't know what anything is, and so she gets bored. The number of pages I had to skip in the book was getting out of control. I knew she was going to ask me, "What's that?" when I got to the page with the machine that counts how many people have fallen to sleep or the page where the Bumble-tub Club is sailing along the river. It was just riddled with disruption and ritualistic asking of questions I had given answers to nightly for months in a row. It was madness.

A friend gave me a stack of books her daughter has outgrown. There were a few good ones in the pile. One of her new favorites is "Just Be Nice -- To Your Little Friends!" by Caroline Kenneth. This book is referred to as "The Pee-Pee Book." Because my child does not know the difference between pee-pee and Pooh. <Insert face palm here> Maybe I need to find a book about potty training...