Do You Know This Man?

You do if you have a baby. It's the zookeeper from Peggy Rathmann's delightfully wordless "Goodnight Gorilla", which was a fixture in our house for many months.

Boy, there are some great children's books out there.

Lila can hear a story over and over again in one sitting, but I think my personal limit is somewhere around eight times in a row. Her stamina is remarkable. Nana and Pop Pop gave her a great book of about 60 nursery rhymes and she'll happily sit through the entire thing, beginning to end (Although it does lead me to wonder how I'll ever explain why the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe treated her children thusly: "She gave them all broth without any bread/And whipped them all soundly then put them to bed").

The downright annoying books are pesky; they often get put high up out of toddler eyeball range but she knows what she wants and so I have read "Copycat Faces" and "Where Does Maisy Live?" far more times that I would have liked.

Then there are the ones you love...in theory. Like "The Monster At The End of This Book" ("starring lovable, furry old Grover!"), which is such a clever little tale, and I find the muppet personalities to be totally winning (even Elmo, who I don't think you can really like unless you have or spend a lot of time around toddlers). But it's hard to read because each page is packed with so many words, that Lila is always turning pages before you are done. And there are clever moments, but pretty much from the get-go it has an air of franticness that is hard to maintain in the narrator role. In a similar vein, I find most Dr. Seuss books to be too long. "Green Eggs and Ham" makes me wince at the mere thought its length, although at the moment we're all enjoying "Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now?" ("Get on your way, please, Marvin K.! You might like going in a Zumblezay...") which is mercifully brief.

For a while Lila and I both loved the Boynton board books. For a long time the last book of the night was either "Dinosaur's Binkit" or "The Going to Bed Book" about a boatful of animals on the open sea at bedtime ("...And when the moon is on the rise/They all go up to exercise! And down once more, but not so fast/They're on their way to bed at last. The moon is high, the sea is deep/They rock and rock and rock to sleep."), which I love because of its identical structure to Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and it's much easier to memorize.

But all you moms and dads out there get a pen and write down Lila's current obsession, another Peggy Rathman classic I'd never heard of called "10 Minutes till Bedtime". It's another bravely underwritten tale of a little boy and his enterprising hamster. As the boy's father calls out the dwindling minutes till bedtime from his oblivious seat in the living room, the boy and the hamster entertain hundreds of vacationing hamsters taking the "10 minutes till bedtime Tour" which follows the boy as he gets ready for bed.



Every page is packed with hundreds of images, and each time you read it, you see more and more details. Lila is particularly captivated by the baby hamster, who has one word exclamations on each page, like "Whee!" and "Potty!" and "Hee hee!" One hamster meticulously documents the tour with Polaroids, which decorate the inside covers of the book. There's even a cameo by Goodnight Gorilla, and his zoo can be seen in the background of one scene. We've been reading it regularly for weeks and I'm not at all sick of it yet.

...All this to say...we still don't have a new camera, and so sorry, no new pictures of Lila to add.