Big Brother "Reading"

I so wish I had a picture to go along with this post. But when this happened I was feeding the baby and I didn't want to intrude on the moment by trying to capture it with a picture. Anyway ...

Saturday I was sitting in our family room feeding the baby when Ethan brought a book over for me to read. I told him I couldn't read right then but that I would once the baby was done.  But he couldn't understand this concept. I'm assuming that at this age there is no concept of time and everything must happen NOW because there is no such thing as later. So far, all evidence points to this conclusion.

After much frustration (on Ethan's part) and many tears, somehow Peter ended up agreeing to "read" the book to Ethan. Ethan was immediately happy again and I watched to see how this would go.

I saw Peter take the book into his lap and Ethan sat down on the floor next to him. With the two of them sitting right next to each other (which by itself is the cutest thing ever), Peter opens the book.

"Someone ripped this book." Peter says. The text block is tearing away from the cover on this book (can you tell I'm a librarian?), Ethan agrees, and I laughed to myself at this exchange.

I found a picture: the book.

Peter proceeds to flip to the first page and says, "One dog." Moving on to the next page he continued with almost the exact words of each page.

I was impressed when I heard him "read" on the page with the picture of a maze, "One dog going in, three dogs going out." And then he got to the first exchange between the two dogs about the hat and it was perfect:

"Hello. Hello. Do you like hat? No, don't like hat. Good-bye. Good-bye."

I was sitting across the room in tears from holding in my laughter. I was enjoying listening to Peter read with a little help from Ethan here and there as they went through this book page by page. And for three year olds, this is a pretty lengthy book.

The kicker for me is that this is a library book. It's been in the house for only about three weeks. But library books are so loved here that we read every single one, every single night. So I've started limiting how many we bring home. And unfortunately we don't get to the library as often as I'd like so we end up keeping them for the whole four week loan period.

I love that the boys love books so much. I also love seeing how well they can get along when they want to (it doesn't happen all the time, I can assure you). And I love that Peter tried to read the book and did a pretty good job at it too. I can't wait until the day when they really can read a book! Oh the worlds that will open up to them.