"Story time" sounded a bit like "tommy time", an overused Boston moms expression for newborns with no clear meaning. What does it mean "story time" to a 4 months old baby? This is what used to mean to William's mom. Trying hard to hold yet another baby book in front of William and read few words to him while he was trying to grab and tear the pages of it with tears in his eyes. Despite that, mommy started to read a short story to William every day before putting him to bed. The first attempt was not successful at all. Maybe because mommy had the non brilliant idea of starting the story time with a Fedro's fairy tale containing Italian words even she could not understand. She then moved to a different book with stories marketed for babies. Mommy soon realized they were not appropriate for William's age - the first story was about diapers, the third one was about women's periods! After that, mommy moved to Disney's subjects such as sleeping beauty and decided to only read William two or three paragraphs of a story at a time before putting him to bed. She did in the bedroom with the lights dimmed. It worked! After reading two or three paragraphs of a story, William, as mommy was hoping, was happily closing his eyes and was falling into a deep sleep. But - mommy was wondering - was this the goal of story time? Make the baby fall asleep? Few days ago William received a book as a Christmas gift from his great ant Bev. Mommy saw that the story in the book was made of about four words per page. The rest of the book consisted of large pictures of animals. She asked herself "Will it keep him entertained during the day?" It turned out that William loved the large pictures of the animals and that the less mommy was reading the more William was happily entertained. Was this better story time? And the book on the jumperoo? Maybe that is the way forward in terms of story time for my little man. See video below.
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