I Love You, Good Night by Jon Buller & Susan Schade

I Love You, Good Night by Jon Buller & Susan Schade, illustrated by Bernadette Pons

Rating: 5 stars

This book goes way back.  I mean waaaaay back.  It is from my very best friend, "Auntie Stacey" to our kids.  She and I go waaaaay back, to Mrs. Rose's first grade class at Sacred Heart Elementary School in West Point, New York.  Catholic school uniforms, ribbon barrettes, and Brownies gave way to clandestine trips to take Cover Girl photo shots, manhunt games in the streets, and embarrassingly bad hairstyles when our fathers were stationed together again in Hawaii when we were in middle school.

Stacey has a theory that no two people read a children's book the same, and had me read this out loud to her when she gave it to me/Lorelei, and then she read it to us.  It's true!  We all focus on different words, emphasize different syllables...it is pretty interesting.

Kiefer cozying up with a bunch of books...

Anyway.

Stacey gave Lorelei this book when she was a baby, and now Kiefer enjoys it today.  I like it because it's simple and short and has a nice rhyme to it.  It's a nice, quiet bedtime book.  I also really like it because I can easily make it silly--on the page with "I love you like I love blueberry pancakes," Kiefer and I pretend to scoop the pancakes off the page and into our mouths.  On the page "I love you like strawberry milkshakes," we pull the book to our mouths and pretend to sip from the straw on the page.  We chuckle and then read, chuckle some more and then read some more.

Kiefer is definitely beginning to love books.  Last week he started to pull books into a chair and read them, one by one, and then going to the shelf to get more.  He's 18 months old now, around the age when Lorelei began to become book obsessed (crazy! so young!).  His attention span has grown drastically in the past month or two, and he can easily sit through many lengthy board books.  Today when he woke (too early, and unhappily) from his nap, he was quickly mollified when I pulled him on my lap and read eight books to him.  Then--no joke!--he pushed me off the chair in his room and kept reading on his own.

This is a cute book, and Kiefer is a cute kid.  Not that I'm biased.  Thank you again, Auntie Stacey!