(Listen to the radio version: Part 3a and Part 3B)
We’ve known for many decades that reading aloud to children, starting when they’re very young, enriches their lives in a great many ways. I wonder if anyone’s tested just how adult lives are also enriched when we read aloud to children. When I was still in the hospital with my first baby, I started reading to him, and when we came home, I read to him once or twice every day even when he was a clueless newborn. Russ and I both especially enjoyed Helen Oxenbury’s charming baby board books and any of Sandra Boynton’s sublimely silly stories. Babies are a captive audience, and when I was up late nursing one when I wanted to be reading a paper in The Auk (the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union) or an article in The New Yorker or Newsweek, well, I could do two things at once by reading it aloud to the baby. I’ve never yet heard any study showing how reading to a baby keeps a parent up on ornithological research or current events, but in my case it did.
By the time my kids and now Walter were walking, even before they had many words, they were choosing books for me to read. Toddlers and preschoolers often get fixated, wanting the same book over and over and over. As you might expect from a person whose absolute favorite birds are chickadees and Blue Jays, I’m one of the lucky adults who doesn’t get sick of the same things over and over and over, so when my son Tom got fixated on Goodnight Moon when he was one and two, I loved reading it to him two or three times every single day for months, and I never found it boring. Indeed, the repetition was what helped me notice how as the evening progresses, the time on the mantel clock and the moon’s position in the sky change. Joey and Katie were very tolerant of hearing Goodnight Moon endlessly, too.
I usually read aloud to my kids every day right after Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood before nap time, and Russ and I took turns doing bedtime duty. Each child chose their own book, and they all were entirely in the habit of listening to each other’s stories as well as their own. As they got older and moved on to chapter books, I’d read one chapter—two or three if all three kids were so engaged that they all choses that book. From the start, Russ or I also got to choose a book each night, though if we were exhausted or it was the night St. Elsewhere was on TV and we needed to hurry a bit, we’d forego our own choice. Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” books had Russ and me both so engaged that whoever didn’t have bedtime duty stayed in the living room to hear the story, too.
All three kids went through a dinosaur phase and a shovel truck phase, and even though I’d never found either all that interesting before (yeah, yeah, yeah—birds descended directly from theropods, but today’s birds are birds, not dinosaurs), their fascination was contagious. Of course, I wanted my fascination for birds to be equally contagious, so I’d throw lovely real-life stories like Jane Yolen’s lyrical Owl Moon into the mix when it came out in 1987. Indeed, for a while, I was as fixated on that book as Tommy had been on Goodnight Moon, and the kids were just as tolerant, since they each got to choose their own story, too. I made plenty of mistakes as a mother—babies don’t come with a user manual, and if they did, it would be impossibly long and you’d need a whole different one for each baby—but one thing Russ and I must have done right was show them how to respect one another’s interests and even learn cool stuff just because one of the others was interested.
Many children’s picture books ostensibly written for children are far more interesting for adults. Biographies of real people fall into that category. Last year, I received a copy of a lovely picture book written and illustrated by Andrea D’Aquino, She Heard the Birds: The Story of Florence Merriam Bailey, Pioneering Nature Activist, about one of my personal heroes. The story is beautifully written for small kids, and I love it, but Walter, whose only experience with guns is on a couple of pages of Horton Hatches the Egg, simply cannot grok how, long ago, people who studied birds shot them to study them close up, and I’d just as soon he stayed innocent for a while longer. The two times I read She Heard the Birds to him, he was engaged, but he’s never once chosen it on his own.
I treasure some books about individual birds, like the beautiful Piping Plover Summer by my own good friend Janet Riegle, but Walter has never seen any shorebirds yet so doesn’t quite understand.
Jennifer Richard Jacobson’s lovely Oh, Chickadee!, published just this year, is more to Walter’s liking because it’s about a bird he knows very well. He’s interested when I read it to him, but he’s much more likely to choose Are You My Mother? and I have to pretend to like it.
As parents, we can’t help but have favorites among our children’s books, and as a grandmother, I love reading to Walter the exact same stories his mom and uncles loved. But it’s also fun to learn of new books. Some have quickly become new favorites of mine.
The Listening Walk, by Paul Showers and illustrated by Aliki, is about a little girl who takes walks with her father and her dog. She listens all around and hears such sounds as her dog’s toenails scratching the sidewalk, lawn sprinklers, a bus’s brakes, pigeons saying prrrooo prrrooo, a woodpecker hammering, and wind whispering in the leaves. Walter and I have heard many of these sounds on our own walks, and we often talk about the sounds we’re hearing, which may be why The Listening Walk is a book he asks for a lot.
Before he discovered the “Monkey with a Tool Belt” stories, Walter was fixated on another book, The Uncrossable Canyon, written by James Dongweck and illustrated by Sean Bixby, about a gnome who comes to a gigantic cliff at the edge of the Uncrossable Canyon and builds a strange and wonderful contraption. Only one little squirrel helps him—the other animals watch and ridicule. The only bird character is a rather stereotypical monocle-wearing, disapproving Owl. The Uncrossable Canyon would have been the kind of book I’d check out from the library—not one I’d expect a toddler to read over and over for a couple of months. But Walter is his own person, and he knows what he wants.
Keala and the Hawaiian Bird, by Patricia McLean, is about a child who loves going out in the morning to hear bird songs. Holly Braffet’s charming drawings show an assortment of the birds one would see on Maui. One morning Keala hears a new sound in the mix and tries to track it down, but it stops before she gets close. She hears it again the next morning, and the next, and finally discovers the sound is the tea kettle in her grandmother’s kitchen. Walter seems to enjoy this book whenever I read it.
Before Walter started nursery school, I sometimes brought him to story time at the library, and I fell in love with one book they read, Mel Fell by Corey Tabor, so I bought a copy. It’s extremely fun to read. Mel looks like a Common Kingfisher—a Eurasian species—but was hatched in a cavity way way up in a tree, which Common Kingfishers do not do. Normally that would drive me nuts but, as the author says in a note to parents at the end, Mel is a very special bird.
This story, and the unusual layout, won my heart. You have to hold the book sideways at first because the two-page spreads are vertical. When the story begins, Mama is away and Mel decides it’s time to learn to fly. Her siblings are alarmed and she’s a little scared, but she jumps, flips, spreads her wings, and plummets down, passing various creatures in the tree. Some try to save her, but she keeps falling all the way down until splash! Under the water, the page spread becomes horizontal as she chases and catches a fish. Then she flies up up up with the fish, and the page orientation again becomes vertical, but now the other way. When she reaches the nest, she shouts “I flew!” dropping the fish who ends up at the bottom with another splash, giving the story a happy ending for everyone. Walter and I both love Mel Fell. Having to turn the book different ways seems a bit gimmicky, but it’s so organic to the story itself that it’s a feature, not a bug.
Lucy’s Life List, by Sally Deems-Mogyordy and illustrated by Christina Baal, is a charming story about a girl whose parents make her “unplug” from her phone, computer, headphones, and other gadgets every now and then, so she takes her little brother outside to look at birds with her avid birder friend Nate. Walter particularly loves where Nate points out a Peregrine Falcon to some kids on the football team, the highlight of the whole book for Walter being a picture of a football on the ground, because one time when Russ was walking with him near the UMD playing fields, a football player let Walter hold the ball for a moment. Lucy’s Life List may ostensibly be about watching birds, but for Walter, at least right now, it’s about a brown football with pointy ends at both sides. And somehow his pleasure in that makes me realize that this world in which I’m so laser-focused on birds also contains brown footballs with pointy ends at both sides. As I read to widen Walter’s world, my own world is stretching, too.
I think my favorite of all the books I’ve newly discovered with Walter is Wherever You Go, by Pat Zietlow Miller and illustrated by Eliza Wheeler, about an unnamed bunny on a bicycle, off on an adventure with a unnamed owl friend. Like real bunnies and owls, these two could be male or female—that isn’t important. The book conjures the loveliness of the journeys and adventures I’ve taken. It starts:
When it’s time for a journey,
to learn and to grow,
roads guide your footsteps
wherever you go.Roads give you chances
to seek and explore.
Want an adventure?
Just open your door.
Even though real owls never lug a satchel or ride in the front basket of a bunny’s bicycle, this story is utterly satisfying for me. The drawings are wonderfully engaging, and the lyricism of the text is satisfying to read aloud or listen to. After they’ve bicycled through all kinds of adventures, the book ends:
Roads take you all over the planet,
but then…
…you always can follow them home
once again.
Sharing books with Walter—snuggling against his warm little body, my finger tracing 26 letters in endless, scrambled strings to reveal whole new universes as we take in drawings, laugh and giggle and talk seriously about the many beings, real and imaginary, living together on this beautiful planet and beyond—is one of the greatest joys I’ve ever experienced.