black and white

So many ideas ran through my head for a mobile - but I never got around to it and one day, in the middle of a crying jag, Ben discovered the ceiling fan. He just stopped and stared. It moves and it is high contrast. And then I tried to get him interested in looking at other things (like the mural on his wall or the cat or a book) - but he wasn't. All he wanted to do was stare at the ceiling fan, and occasionally me, and then back to the ceiling fan.

So I talked to a friend who is a pediatrician and he recommended the Tanya Hoban books. They are black and white and red and just outlines -- good for little little babies. My brother gave Ben Who Are They for Christmas. This was fun because there were no words - it was more like a conversation piece. "The sheep has a lamb and says "baa" ... can you say "baa" good try ..." It is funny when your mom makes noises and so mostly we did that. It took me months to notice that there is a counting aspect.

Yesterday, we got Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman from the library. It was like the ceiling fan all over again - the surprise in extreme contrast. And the animals move; for example the Dd dove flaps between the photos and the Hh hippopotamus glistens. To make it more extreme, this is a paper page book so you can also accentuate moving the pages. And we sat and read the whole book - which has at least two pages for each letter, and then we looked through it again, and then we picked out our favorite page (mine: where the kangaroo meets the lion), favorite animal (his: zebra), favorite letter (Nn noctural) and then we read it again. This may never happen again, but it was an amazing 20 minutes.


(Today all that we could look at was the frogs and the binding page with zebra stripes and then push the book and crawl off.)