One side benefit of having kids is getting to revisit all my favorite childhood books. For the last five or six months, our house has been full of the wonderful, wacky world of Dr. Suess. We read classic favorites (Green Eggs and Ham, Mr. Brown Can Moo, The Cat in the Hat) but have expanded our repertoire – so far for Kai – to include the moral lessons of Yertle the Turtle and politically potent stories like The Lorax. (I can’t help but think of An Inconvenient Truth each time we read it.) I don’t remember reading these as a kid, and am continually amazed at how brilliantly these simple rhymes convey some complex life lessons.

The other day Meli started asking for her favorite storybook by name: “Hop hop!” (Or maybe it’s “Hop pop” – that’s the beauty of the tongue twister.) She first said it while holding Hop on Pop but the next morning called a different book “Hop hop” as well. And as soon as she opened a page continued with the first lines of the Suess story: “Up pup…” It’s so fun to see her making connections between words and things – even if sometimes they aren’t yet fully formed, so to speak. Needless to say, I’m thrilled that she’s such a fan of Suess.

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