The Suess Massacre

Lucy loves to read. In fact, she will usually leave a room with a TV in it to go read a book. That is, if said TV does not contain Elmo, because then all bets are off. She’ll go into her room, climb into her rocking chair, grab a book and sit there for 20 minutes at a time, reading to herself. And when I say reading, I actually mean babbling incoherently and violently turning pages. But it counts. And I love that she likes reading. I always loved to read as a kid, and was pretty good at it. I was three grades ahead in reading for my age, and all I remember was that meant I had to go sit in a room with giant 12 year olds when I was only 9 and it was the scariest thing ever. It makes me happy that this trait may have been passed on to Lu, and that someday she’ll spend hours in her room reading the Boxcar Children or the Babysitter’s Club books, or whatever is popular these days (are there Hannah Montana books?).

For her first Christmas, Trent informed me that he had bought a special present for Lu. Since he doesn’t do ANY of the Christmas shopping, I was surprised. But he was so proud of his purchase. A huge, Dr. Suess pop-up book. A little much for a six month old, but still, a wonderful gift. We kept it on a shelf and he would read it to her at bedtime every once and a while. But lately it is the ONLY book she wants to read at night. And let me tell you, this book is freaking annoying to read to a toddler. Because she wants to pull all the tabs and screw with every, single part and I just want to be like, “and the sneeches are sneeches, and no kind of sneech is the best on the beaches. The. End.”

One rule of the Dr. Suess book is that it must be put away after each reading, or else the child may try to read it alone, leading to the destruction of the beloved book. Well, someone (ahem, Trent, cough, cough) left the book out the other night, and after I realized I hadn’t heard anything from the child’s room in a good 20 minutes (a telltale sign of trouble), I went in to check on her. And found this…

Before:

After:

OK, dude, what are you smiling at?!