Where does the time go! Perhaps we’ve been so busy reading there’s been no time for blogging. Who knows but we’re definitely still reading and it’s a very different experience to what it was a year ago. At 21 months, our son is now fully in charge of what we read. He picks his bedtime books, his morning books and any other books we read throughout the day. He has his definite favourites. Some that we read over and over and over for several days and then temporarily abandon and some that come out less intensely but over months and months. Over the next few posts I’ll do a quick run down of those that have been big hits over the past year.

First, I want to add that Goodnight Moon, which was an earlier post, is still a firm favourite. It was one of two bedtime books (the other Goodnight Gorilla, see below) that we pretty much alternated  every night up until about three months ago when George started asking for other books instead. But over the past couple of weeks they’ve made a comeback and it is really interesting to see how much he remembers them but also how much more he now understands. It’s amazing to think back to when we first read the books to him and he just started to recognise the characters, animals and things in the pictures and now he not only recognises them he can say most of the words too. At the moment he gets a little too distracted by the fire in Goodnight Moon – “hot hot ouch ouch” – so we reintroduced Goodnight Gorilla.

Goodnight Gorilla: Peggy Rathmann

I can’t include a quote from this one as aside from a few Goodnights there aren’t any words. The lovely illustrations follow Joe the zookeeper through the zoo as he says goodnight to all the animals. Little does he know, but the cheeky gorilla has stolen his keys and is following along behind letting all the animals out. The trail of animals follows Joe out of the zoo, into his house and up to bed. He’s so tired he doesn’t even notice them curled up in his room. It isn’t until his wife says goodnight and all the animals answer that the game is up. So off she goes to take all the animals back to the zoo, but the gorilla and his little mouse friend have different ideas.

The lack of words allows for a much more flexible story once your child starts speaking even a little bit. George inserts words here and there that change the story a bit each time. I can’t imagine he, or we, will ever tire of this book.