Abbie 451

There was a time when Abbie had a lot of books. She had a shelf full of books. She had so many books, that I could rotate the ones in use, putting half in the book basket and half on the shelf so Abbie could rediscover them each time I brought one into her view, like a goldfish swimming circles in its bowl.*

This time was probably before Abbie’s first birthday. We would sit in her room and repeatedly read her pristine books for stretches of several minutes. She was too young to manipulate the books, saving them wear, but was still capable of manipulating me into reading to her for stretches of several minutes by screaming every time I tried to put her down. The only way a book could suffer damage is if we read it so many times that its binding wore out. And there was that one time I spilled a glass of water on a book, which seemed like a bigger deal before Abbie learned to dump a proverbial glass of water every time she grabbed a book.

Around one year of age, she discovered the joys of bending a book backwards, turning the letter “F” into the front cover and the letter “G” into the back. This put excessive strain on the spine and often a crease in the cover, expediting the book’s demise. A couple months later she was turning the pages in creative new directions, shredding most of her original books that had survived that long. My 18 months of age, she was permanently lifting the flaps off the page, tearing them off and leaving a pile of once useful flaps in her wake.

Today she’s harder than ever on books. She has no lift-the-flap books left, or at least no flaps left to lift, though we do still pretend the flaps exist and read her denuded books like the swordfish is still hiding inside the shipwreck. To prove her malice, she found a flap book that we bought and shredded it, creating a flap pile at her feet within hours. Unfortunately that book was supposed to be a present.** I’m not dumb enough to buy her more flap books; I’m just dumb enough to leave them where she can reach them.

Of course most books don’t have flaps, but that doesn’t stop Abbie from looking. Any time she finds an edge of her book separating from its board page, she finishes the job and pulls the picture off the page. The covers are particularly vulnerable to her prying fingers as we have several books with a white hunk of cardboard where the title should be, which makes it hard to know what book we’re reading until opening it. Or there’s a similar white patch where the conclusion should be, depriving her of ever knowing what comes after “19.” Eventually the book turns white from cover to cover, and I have to throw it away unless I want to make up a story about a blizzard.

Because of her destructiveness, I can no longer rotate books. We have one basket filled with every board book she owns.*** This disappoints me partially because I have to buy new books when I want her to read something unfamiliar, but mostly because I wanted to pass her books down to her brothers. I imagined we’d have fun reading the same books her sister did while they threaten me with screaming like their sister did if I set them down. I suppose it’s just as well that the boys discover their own books. They’re already starting to chew on pristine pages anyway.

* “Hey, a plant! Hey, a castle! Hey, a plant! Hey, a castle! Hey, a plant! Hey, a castle!”
** Sorry, Patty. It was Star Wars themed too, so it could entertain both of you. Don’t worry, we didn’t pay much for it; it came from a garage sale, and it was from Episode 1, so you know it came cheap.
*** We still have a trove of books with normal paper pages tucked away because I’m at least smart enough to keep those out of her reach.