Play With Me

Sava's favorite book for the past month or so has been a 1955 story called Play With Me, which we got, as all other books these days, from the Mountain View Public Library. It tells the story of a little girl who goes to the meadow to play, but as she tries to befriend a series of woodland creatures (grasshopper, blue jay, chipmunk), she scares each one of them and ends up sitting alone on a rock, watching a bug making trails in the water. While she sits still, the creatures return to her one by one, and she ends up surrounded with all of them, including a baby fawn who licks her cheek. We've now read the book so many times that Sava has memorized entire lines. The first thing he said a few mornings ago when he woke up--which we could hear through the monitor--was, "And then the blue jay came and sat on the bough, and jabbered and scolded the way blue jays do." I'm pretty sure Sava does not know what "jabber" means, but it melted my heart to hear him recite those words. I could hear my own voice in his, as he sought to replicate my inflection, and I realized that reading to him has been one of the greatest joys of parenthood so far.