One blissful side effect of my parents' visit is that LB is now letting us read her a wider range of books. She was on a book restricting kick for a month and we were down to only Maisy's Christmas, which has no narrative and is barely even a book. Now we are back in Badgerland with Bedtime for Frances. Much better, except that LB now finds the book scary, but still insists on reading it. For each page, LB asks "Frances okay?" and must be reassured multiple times before moving on. Is this a stage when we should stop reading books with terrifying themes like sleeplessness and the weird shadows made my robes?
I figured that I would test LB's gayby knowledge by asking her to point out the daddy, mama, and baby in a scene with Frances and her parents, but LB would only point out the cake, and chortle "LB's cake. LB eat cake!" On the next page she pointed out the daddy badger and baby badger, and to try and give her some frame of reference for the world of daddies, I reminded her that she has a granddad (one who looks a bit like the father badger in the Frances books). That was a happy thought and LB said "Granddad, Granddad, my Granddad!" This comes a week or so after one night a bedtime she started saying very insistently, "My daddy! My daddy!" for no apparent reason. I assume that's a daycare thing.
So far, LB is very anti gay-affirming children's literature. My mom says she read The Family Book to LB, but I know she never lets me read it. She would have nothing to do with Mama, Mommy, and Me when I got it out of the library. She tolerates And Tango Makes Three, but just barely. Her distain seems to come from a combined rejection of human characters and earnestness, and I can respect that. I can only imagine that her teenage years will be spent reading nihilistic sci-fi novels, but even so, you can fit gay mamas into any genre, right?
We are also ambivalent about gay family books. RR would prefer to yell O IS FOR OCTOPUS in Animalia than to dealing with the rhyming Mama Mommy and Me. The most milage we get out of that one is endless counting at the hide and seek page. We have had a lot of fun with Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. I don't read all the words (or the pages) because god knows it's long enough reading only half of everything, but she loves to find Goldbug and the animals are so diverse it's easy to get away from the traditional family unit storyline.
ReplyDeleteI'll check it out! My B. might have a problem with it, because she has a weird thing where she can't skip pages or words and books. I just told her that I often skip a few pages if LB is fading, and she was shocked. LB's been really into diggers (do they have another name?) lately, because Maisy plays with a digger and we've had one working at the end of the street-so I think the transportation might work for her.
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