Abbie, Destroyer of (Literary) Worlds

Abbie started life like all babies, as a blob that’s incapable of interacting with any inanimate object. While she was a blob, I handled her books exclusively, and kept them in good condition, ensuring they’d last long enough to fetch a good price at my future garage sale. For the first nine months of her life, the most damage any book suffered was when I dumped a glass of water on one. Around nine months though, I let her start turning the pages, and ever since she’s been discovering creative directions to move the pages. She started ruining books at a pace of a book a month at that point, but lately she’s been destroying a book a week, and it’s usually good books she destroys. I could understand her wanting to ruin the books she hates, but not “Seek and Slide in the Sea.”

Her first destruction technique was bending the book the wrong way. Say you’ve got a book, and you want to hold it open without having it take up twice the space. You might open it up and fold it in half, so the page you’re reading (say page 174) is facing you while the page on the other side of the binding (which would be … um … opening a book … finding page 174 … page 175!) would be facing outward and toward all the people you’re practically running into while trying to read and walk through the airport. This fold in half technique works well when you’re reading a paperback thriller (“A is for Alibi”) but not when you’re trying to read a tightly bound children’s board book (“A is for Alibi! B is for Battery!”). When Abbie folds her board books in half, I can hear the binding creak as the integrity gives way, especially when she pushes really hard because the pages won’t lay flat. Eventually the binding gives out and the book literally falls apart at the seams. I could tape it back together, but if book glue barely challenges her, she can shred tape in less time than it takes Duke to lose a tournament game.

She destroyed two great books for babies with the fold in half technique: “My Little Opposites Book” and “My Little Counting Book” by Bob Staake. These were Abbie’s first two favorite books because they had two unique features: One word per page and bright colored yet simple illustrations. Children’s book authors insist on creating books with flowing sentences and whimsical drawings, which might be great for entertaining an older toddler. Or maybe they hate that style. All I know is I couldn’t reach the predicates in these books before nine-month-old Abbie was slamming them shut in boredom and frustration because she couldn’t find anything interesting to look at amidst all the whimsy. Baby Abbie loved to read these two books repeatedly, so much so that she recently bent both in half a few too many times. I had hoped to read them to the twins when they get old enough, but I’ll have to settle for “My Little 123 Book” which is firmly on the shelf beyond Abbie’s bending clutches.

Recently she added the remove the flap from lift-the-flap books maneuver to her repertoire. Apparently she got tired of having to repeatedly lift the slide flap to discover who is purring behind the slide. She doesn’t just accidentally lift these flaps a bit too far and wind up pulling it off either; she tears those suckers off with a vengeance. The other day she methodically pulled all 26 flaps off the alphabet section of a book. I went into her room to figure out why she was being so quiet, and discovered a pile of letters at her feet. Fortunately that book was “Arthur’s New Baby Book, How to Be a Great Big Brother or Sister,” so that one wasn’t going to be passed down to her brothers. Abbie did like that one though.