I’ll give you two that my daughter has had to squirrel away:
**
Brown Bear, Brown Bear** and Duck Rides a Bike
She’d previously mentioned that when she would read Brown Bear to the kids, at the last page, they’d whimper so much she’d have to start again. and again, ad nauseum.
Then there’s Duck… We experienced their obsession with that book. Phew. Read it once, read it 5 times more. Or else.
Yesterday, my wife and I babysat our twin grandkids (~15 months) and in the course of it, one of them kept going to the relevant bookcase and pointing toward the top where Duck Rides… is usually ensconced. Not there.
So, I scoured all the other bookcases and still couldn’t find it. Turns out Mom had hid them both in another room. We talked about it when she got back from work, and later in the day, she sent us an email:
I just read Brown Bear 11 times. I might have to hide it again. They don’t know I found Duck. I might have to hold out until the weekend for that!
I love it. I’m quietly hoping this might be an indicator that the children will become avid readers—like their Mom and Grandma.
I have hidden a few of them recently. She has a Winnie-the-Pooh book (some kind of Disney easy-reader crap), which has the dumbest story line I ever read. I couldn’t stand it any more, so I hid it.
I also hid Saggy Baggy Elephant for a while, because it’s kind of long, and I was reading it multiple times a day.
More recently, she had a bunch of Christmas books that got unpacked over the holidays. There must have been 20 or so of them, and she latched onto one Golden Book that’s about a cat that climbs a Christmas Tree. It is also a long one, and we must have read it 500 times over the holdiay. I could not wait to pack it back up with the rest of the Christmas stuff (we did it when she wasn’t looking!) She still is talking about Benny the Cat climbing the Christmas tree, and the stuff has been put away for a month!!!
I’m with you, I’m glad she likes books, but the repeat reading can really drive you around the bend!!!
That’s because Sandra Boynton is mind-bogglingly good at writing children’s books. My little one gets The Belly Button Book read to her at least once a day, and I’m fine with that.
However, her real addiction is a book of nursery rhymes. However, she’s only really interested in “Hickory Dickory Dock”. I read her that one and then turn the page, but she just reaches over and turns it back to that one. She can’t seem to get enough of it.
A told B and B told C,
I’ll meet you at the top of the coconut tree.
Ugh. I love the book, I really do (Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, of course), it’s just got such an infectious rhythm that it gets stuck in my head. My son loved it 14 years ago, and when I picked it up again with my daughter, I found that it was still all there in my head.
Not nearly as bad as the Laurie Berkner Band CD, though. We don’t have much “kid’s music”, but my SIL gave us that one. It’s great, but if I wake up at three in the morning humming, “We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching…” just ONE MORE TIME, I may have to look her up and stomp her earth flat.
Goodnight Moon – Every night for 2 months. Where the Wild Things Are – I loved this story until my son asked for it every day for 3 months straight. I memorized the words and didn’t even look at the pages after a while. The Hobbit – Yes, I am referring to Tolkein’s classic tale about Bilbo Baggins. I had read some longer stories to my 6 YO daughter (Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking-glass, etc.) and thought I’d try out the Hobbit. She loved it! Every night we read a chapter (I edited some of the vocabulary so it was easier to understand) and when we finished she wanted it again. And again. And again. I tried to start the Lord of the Ring trilogy but she has no interest. We have now read it 6 times and I am officially sick of Bilbo, Gandalf, Smaug and Thorin Oakenshield! The book is now hidden in my wardrobe.
My mom loves to tell the story about me and the Dr. Seuss book Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? According to her, I asked to hear “Marvin” read to me so many times that she and my stepfather were driven insane by it.
One day, I complained that I couldn’t find the book. “Where did Marvin go?”
There were pirates on the prowl in Busy Town Bay.
No one was safe.
But that didn’t stop Uncle Willy.
He was going sailing pirates or no pirates.
Off he sailed with a cherry pie for his lunch-**
My son always laughed at the part about the ‘spiky palm leaf’. His laugh at that phrase was just as much a part of the reading as the reading of the book ritual. I don’t know why he laughed at that. It wasn’t ‘a funny part’.
I read that book 9 times in a row once, and actually had to buy a second copy when the first one wore out.
Interestingly, DS (somewhere on the autistic spectrum) didn’t talk, other than an occasional word or partial word, until he was 2 1/2. The day he began to talk we were driving in the car and he suddenly repeated the whole book just out of the blue. That was June 6, 2000- it was a stand out day.
I don’t have kids, but I used to volunteer for AmericaReads, which meant reading the book of the month to kids at Wic clinics. If I ever have to read “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” or “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” again I may hang myself.
Reading 20 minutes a day to a kid gives them such an advantage, but given the nature of children you have to read the same things over and over…I think you have to just grin and bear it until they can read on their own.
I still remember a conversation I had with my Dad right around my 4th birthday “Shannon, Daddy is tired of Green Eggs and Ham and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Very tired. So we’re going to teach you to read them!” He was highly motivated to teach me, and I was reading well enough to take the test to get a library card less than a month later
I wish I’d been smart enough to hide Wacky Wednesday. It’s one of those pseudo-Seuss books…Theo LeSieg, maybe? Anyway, it’s a book where you’re supposed to find all the things wrong in the picture. You’d think once the children had found everything on every page a hundred times they’d be sick of looking at it…but NOOOOOOOO!
Maybe I’m lucky but he’s usually willing to let me exchange a book if Mommy is tired of it. At least for a day or two. (Or he just goes to get Grandma to read it to him instead!). I’ve had to hide them more because he can get too rough with them (I’ve replaced a few books already, but some I can’t replace as they were from when I was a kid and are no longer in print) but he’s getting better.
Here’s an odd one: The Scrambled States of America. For the last year, bricker Jr (now 5) has loved this book to the exclusion of all others. He’ll insist that I read it to him, but then each and every page we stop to examine the minute details. He has a comment about each states’ wakefulness at the beginning, about all the commentary each state has during their moves… it’s amazing.
On the plus side, he knows the capitals of all fifty states.
I don’t have kids, but I recall when I was little my mom got so sick of reading The Lorax to me that she finally made a tape recording of herself reading it that I could listen to every night before bed on my Fischer Price tape recorder.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot
nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
