the very hungry caterpillar and other stories

It's wonderful how much children learn from books and how much they adore them, as well as the time they get to spend with you reading them. I'm so pleased Max loves books as much as Laila, it's a good job really as we have tons of them!

Laila and her collection of books in her room

The scratchy dinosaur!

 Max's first favourites were the "That's not my...." selection from Usborne. He has the truck, teddy and dinosaur ones. He has a favourite page in each and in the teddy one it's the scratchy panda, he will turn the pages really fast until you get to it, and don't even try to turn back to another one, he'll squash your fingers in the book trying to get back to the Panda!

The same happens in The very hungry caterpillar, this time his favourite page is the one with all the food, and he points at each item randomly for me to name it. So by the time he's 18 months I'm sure he'll be able to say Pickle, Ice cream cone and swiss cheese! He does like getting his little fingers stuck in the holes too.

Peepo is a classic, with really nice rhyming verses, luckily I know it off by heart now as he again turns the pages very quickly, I think he just likes the word "Peepo", so if I'm feeling a bit weary, I don't bother read it and just say "Peepo" for each page and he's happy enough!

Each Peach Pear Plum is really lovely, it has all the characters from classic nursery rhymes and stories in. Max has always loved the black cat in it, and so "Cat" was one of his first words. He also points out the "doh" which is the dog and I'm teaching him "baby" as he loves finding it in the book too.

Pop up books are not very successful in this house, we got out the ones that Laila had which have already been repaired several times with Scotch tape (french say "scotch" and not "sellotape"!), only for him to make them even worse and we have a pile of "repair work" of heads of sheep, roosters etc on top of our bookcase waiting to be done.

Lift the flaps are better, they seem to be more robust and don't tear as easily.Dear Zoo (a great lift-the-flap book) was a firm favourite a few months ago, I need to find it again and put it in his room as we haven't read it in a while. He loves pictures of animals thinks animal sounds are very funny. He doesn't make as many as Laila used to, but he'll moo for a cow and do "brrrh" for an elephant with his arm in front of his nose which is too cute!

Max checking which animals appear in his book

 It's good to dig out old favourites from time to time. Laila has lots of new french books, she gets one a month on the school book scheme. But the other day when tidying I put We're Going on a Bear Hunt and The Tiger who comes to Tea back at the top and we read them again. They took on a new meaning now she's older, she was extremely concerned about the Tiger drinking all the bath water AND daddy's beer! And the bear hunt, well she was under her covers by the end of it making sure the bear had gone back home!!