Paper Books

When I worked at Frontier, part of my job was to make sure all the stickers/labels/tags were off every item we shipped out. There were a few reasons for this. Sometimes it was b/c we didn't want the customer to see who our supplier was b/c they could cut us out. Sometimes it was b/c the pricing of an item had gone up or down since the catalogue & we didn't want there to be pricing disputes.

Still to this day, if there is something I won w/ a sticker that doesn't belong, I feel the need to remove it. Now, I don't remove labels from jars, but price stickers, other people's labels on books, anything of that nature MUST be removed.

Asher seems to have picked up my habit. I have to remind him when we are in stores that he may NOT remove any stickers or tags until we have purchased the item & taken it home. Unfortunately this also carries over into his books. If the edge of the cover is a little torn, he will finish the job. If the decal on a toy is starting to lift, he'll take it all the way off.

For this reason, he is still restricted to board books. We have lots of paper books waiting in the basement for when he can be trusted to just read them & not destroy them & I'm getting eager to read them! I decided that perhaps we should slowly integrate so that instead of all of a sudden having hundreds of new books, we'd have a few new every now & then.

So I sorted through a box & chose 3 books that I wouldn't be too sad about seeing wrecked. This was quite a difficult task, since I had purchased each of these books b/c they looked so fun & interesting. He's had these 3 books mixed in w/ the board books for about a month & there's been no indications that he couldn't handle them. Last night as I was cleaning up from dinner I heard him reading "Moosey Moose" by Chris Raschka.

"Moosey Moose is MAD..... Moosey Moose is REALLY mad!"

Then I heard:

"Uh oh, Mummy, I broke this page..... I'm breaking this book's page!"

He had ripped 2 pages clean out of the book. I'm not really sure why b/c "Moosey Moose" was in fine shape. I suppse we'll wait a few more months before we try again..... *sigh*