It is an understatement to say that Kelly loves books. “Book” and her own declensions of the word book: abook, bookoo, were her first words, and until we trained her not to do so, Kelly used to wake me and Peter up by pounding one of us with a book and insisting we read it to her. She has several hundred books, all of which have been read to her multiple times, and she loves nothing more than going to the library. Sometimes she gets up in the middle of the night, turns on her light, and sits looking through all her picture books.
Understandably, she’s also pretty greedy being read to. First she used to insist on multiple readings of the same book, so much that I think I was on the verge of having “One Fish, Two Fish,” memorized. Then she realized she could get more out of me with multiple books, which set off another idiosyncracy. If I asked her to get me a book I could read to her, she’d grab as many books as she could carry, and dump them on my lap. Then she switched up to not only giving me one pile of books, but running back and getting more piles of books to place next to me before she agreed to sit down.
And now she’s discovered the laundry basket. Yesterday evening, I offered to read her a book of her choice. Kelly ran off upstairs to her room (where most of her books are) and seemed to disappear. I thought she might have forgotten about my offer. As if! A few minutes later, she came back and asked me to help her. I followed her upstairs and discovered she’d gotten ahold of a laundry basket, and emptied a shelf of her bookcase into it. She wanted me to carry all the books downstairs and read them to her.
I shook my head and told her “one book” and lifted one finger in emphasis. “I’ll be waiting downstairs,” I told her, “when you pick out one book to read.”
A minute later, I heard more thumping and grunting upstairs and returned to check on her. I saw this as she was trying to get her basket of books downstairs herself:
I returned the books to their rightful place, and picked out 5 to read to Kelly. She was happy enough, but I’m sure she would have preferred more.
That is too cute.
Kelly is awesome!