Exposure is Everything
My whole life I have been enthralled by the world of books. As a child, I was an avid reader the school librarian could not keep appeased. I lived in the worlds of Laura Ingalls, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and more. Although I went to college to study business, as soon as I was out I sought a position in a bookstore; my dream was to run the literature section, and I did. I worked there for some years, fully stocked up my home collection, became the inventory manager, but then had a baby and so left the company.
We have 17 overflowing bookshelves in our house and books stacked on every available end table in between. I have been gathering up children’s titles throughout my pregnancy until now for my daughter, preparing for a lust of the written word comparable to mine.
People keep warning me that she may not want to read, she may not like it like I do. They keep telling me I cannot force my child to enjoy my hobbies.
I am not forcing her. I am making the written word available. She sees books everywhere, she sees people enjoying books everywhere. In addition to our own collection that we read from every day, we visit the public library for group readings and she sees people outside her family unit gathering to enjoy a book.
My daughter is one year old, and already she often chooses Eric Carle over a stuffed animal. She brings me Rainbow Fish and expects me to read it aloud while she sorts her blocks. It seems sometimes as though she is not actually listening, just sorting her belongings, until I stop reading and she looks up and points at the book. My daughter sorts through her picture books and flips through the pages, she even has her own little cushioned rocking chair she climbs into to do it. She rocks and pretends to read while I lounge and read in our library in our house.
My daughter loves books, and I am both amazed and proud. I implore the world to make books available to their children from a young age. Read aloud to them, they cannot help but be interested and thirsty for stories and knowledge.
Anakalian Whims 