No, David!

Zoey has a new favorite book.

I picked up "No, David!", by David Shannon, yesterday at the consignment store. My daughter has been so hooked on her "aminal" book (the title is something like "First 100 Animals", I forget, although I shouldn't--I've read it at least twice a day since my sister, Michelle, sent it to her for Christmas!) that I thought a new book might come home unnoticed for quite a while.

I was wrong.

I asked last night if she wanted to read a new book about a little boy who gets told "No!" a lot, and you could see an obvious glimmer of curiosity in her eyes. We sat down on the couch together and, thanks to the simple verbage (how many different ways can you say "no"?) and great illustrations, Zoey was hooked. You could tell by the look on her face that she found a kindred spirit--someone who, like her, is quite often told NO. She was delighted with each page and walked around repeating phrases from them for hours afterwards.

"I shid NO!" (I said NO!)

"Shettuh dawn, Dave-Dave!" (Settle down, David!)

"Dash A-NUFF!" (That's ENOUGH!)

The saddest part of the story occurs at the end, when David is sitting in a time-out for breaking his mom's vase with a baseball. Zoey spent most of her day today discussing the ins and outs of David's behavior on various pages, but the ball breaking the vase was it for her. "No, Dave-Dave! Time-out...shad Dave-Dave. Shoey time-out. Mommy no, no, no! Shad Shoey."

(The entire gist of this conversation centers around Zoey's relating to the sadness that IS a time-out.)

I love watching my child's love of reading unfold before my very eyes. I am a big fan of my new blogger friend Maggie's blog titled "A Slice of Wife" (link is below on the list of blogs I am following). She has two young girls and was just writing the other day how great it is to see that her oldest daughter is completely in love with reading (despite the fact that said daughter wakes her up routinely at 5:15 a.m. to read with her).

So move over, First 100 Animals, because David has arrived on the scene...