Read aloud

I'm going to go ahead and upgrade Abby's love of books to an obsession. I will, at times during the day (usually during Caleb's morning nap) leave Abby alone just to see what she'll do. She's always been great at entertaining herself and playing alone, and it seems that trend is continuing into her 2's.

On most days, when I tell her it's time for her to play quietly for a while, she'll pull all of the books off of her bookshelf, stack them up on the couch in the living room, climb up next to them and work her way through to the bottom of the stack, carefully "reading" each one aloud, narrating the pictures she sees or repeating the phrases she's heard us attach to particular stories. She's memorized a number of her books already (Goodnight Moon, Corduroy, a few Clifford books, Splosh, portions of Peter Rabbit, a number of Dr. Suess books and a couple of Bible stories, to name a few), which I was pretty excited about until I realized it meant I could no longer skip pages. Now instead of us reading stories to her, she likes to climb up on our laps and recite the stories to us.

On this particular day, she decided that her toys (and a few bracelets) made a much more captive audience than her mom. So she lined them up at attention, grabbed a few books and proceeded to spend about an hour sprawled on the floor"reading" to them about big red dogs and Jesus and cats wearing hats.