It's a bird, It's a plane, It's ReadingMan!!!

As the title implies, one of Andrei's favorite activities is reading books, well actually listening to us read him books. As brilliant as he is, he can't read at 23 months - I know, you're all as shocked as I am (so, no he's not actually reading in this shot).


But the boy loves his books. This weekend we got a great set of 10 books called Amazing Machines from Costco. Each book has a story about some type of machine, from boats to airplanes to cars to trains. He loves them but doesn't quite stay put for the whole story so we have to invent a slimmed down version of the story. Sort of the Cliff Notes version.

But he really loves books. We read every night and if it was up to him we would probably read 10 or more books. But I cut it down to just 2 or 3 depending on how long each book is. His library of books is getting so large we may actually need to build him a bookcase just to house his collection. But this is all good (or "good-goood-good" as Andrei would say) and we want to foster his reading as much as possible.

During the day he'll often go over to his stash of books and take out...oh...six of them and head over to either Steve or myself and plop himself down and have us read to him. There was some study done that showed that children that get read to are able to learn the alphabet at earlier ages and we can see Andrei looking at the letters, almost realizing, that they stand for something. He even likes looking at our books (which of course don't have pictures).

We don't really push him into doing anything fast. So the toys we give him are for his age, because we want him to have that sense of accomplishment. But at the same time we do try to lead him towards good habits (very little TV, more reading, more outdoor play, etc.). And it's pretty cool (and makes us feel great) that he'd rather go and grab a book than ask for the TV to be on.