Reading to Karina

The past couple of months, Karina's interaction with books has really blossomed. Not only can she turn pages and pull up tabs (as in Where's Spot), but she'll point to things she notices - usually people's heads or faces, but also anything brightly colored or obviously different from the rest of the page. That makes it the perfect time to haul out the "touch and feel" books, and thankfully, she got one for Christmas.

As we go page by page, she reaches right out for the textured surfaces - a woolly sheep, a soft chick, a rough piglet. But her favorite is the sheepdog, with its long, shaggy hair that's remarkably like our cat Killer's long shaggy fur. She loves to dig her hands into Killer's fur and YANK. Killer is decidedly less excited about this activity, and some days it takes pretty much all of my attention to keep her from bothering him.

But the sheepdog in the book? She can yank on that as much as she wants! Once she found that page, she kept returning to it over and over, uninterested in the rest of the pages past a single rote feel. Now her only difficulty is that it's hard to hold onto the fur and also put it in her mouth, because the rest of the book gets in the way. As a testament to the book's quality, she hasn't actually been able to pull any hair out at all. It's definitely well-made!