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 Literary Agent
Imagine what Alex hears when I read to him. Being two, of course, he doesn't let on, just brings you the book, places it against your thigh, and starts looking down at the pages in complete expectation that you will, in fact, read aloud.
"Goodnight clocks, and goodnight socks."
You should read to your child so they get to know your voice, digest the language, and catch the rhythms of the written word. Experts, most of whom are not children, prefer furry animals and no grown-up stories. "Do you ever read to him?" a nurse asked way back in the NICU, when he was still in the isolette. When he came home from the hospital 14 months ago, I read to him after his bath. Figuring it didn't matter to Alex, I read Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. This appeared to do him no harm.
First to hook Alex on books was one of his therapists, Ron. Alex would sit with Ron the whole hour, selecting the books from among a few choices, then scarcely lift his head throughout the story.
 Maybe as a result of this, Alex reads to himself a lot now. He sits with the book on his own thighs and flips the pages, murmuring in his priceless, private language.
"I see a red bird looking at me."
"Bunny is eating his good supper."
Alex believes that to really know a book, you have to re-read. On the mitten page of It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Alex likes to slap his hand down every time. He presses his face on the picture of the sun in the color book. He used to like when I flipped up the lid of piano in Where's Spot and said a deep "No!" for the rhino and a tiny "No!" for the bird. He doesn't like this so much anymore. Little Fur Family gets the early hook, and to this day I don't know how Runaway Bunny ends. The copy of Alex Alligator I bought in Florida spent months at the bottom of a toy box, and may have missed its window.
"Peek a who? Peek a MOO!"
Jill got him engrossed in Miss Spider's Tea Party; I hate spiders, and "Five rubber bugs stared silently" is a nightmare line to me. One of his nurses gave him Goodnight Moon. Did you ever notice how the moon rises in the window as the story goes on? Or how the bookshelf contains a copy of Runaway Bunny, one of the author's other books? The mouse moves around the room, too. And is Pat the Bunny merely asleep or in some kind of stupor? Is that even Pat the Bunny, or a different bunny in the book within the book?
"Polly put the kettle on, Polly put the kettle on."
 His feeding therapist gave him The Cheerios Animal Play Book. My friend Sean gave him a Spot book in Gaelic ("Bran ag obair ... "). Our friends Tom and Naomi gave him a copy of The Wheels on the Bus; inside are real wheels, and you pull a tab to make the riders on the bus go in and out, in and out, make the windows on the bus go open and shut, open and shut, and make the wipers on the bus go swish swish swish. (The wipers were the first to go). My boss gave Alex a big Richard Scarry book. I'd never heard of Richard Scarry, but apparently he's famous. Fathers learn something new every day, whether they want to or not.
"Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clements."
Those who haven't read these books don't know what it's like to have that weight on your knee, the little face fixated while the timeless, simplistic phrases tattoo themselves onto your mind. "If I have to read this damned 'Oranges and Lemons' once more ... " says Jill, lifting Alex.
His favorite places to be read to are mom's lap, my lap, or beside us on the couch. Often an initial request for reading delivered to your thigh will, upon lifting him, degenerate into a session of Scrambling Toward the Devil Bunny on the Wall. But often too he will sit and listen.
"And a quiet old lady, whispering 'Hush.'"
 Sometimes the requests land on your thigh at a busy moment. "Oh, Alex, mommy will read to you," I'll say. Sometimes he'll go the secondary reader. Sometimes not. There's nothing to do then but lift him and read. I'm ashamed that I don't read to him every night. I mean to, but when I come in at 9 p.m. and find him asleep, I realize that another night has slipped by without a goodnight story.
We're still in that time before he's talking. What he absorbs from the pages stays in, or at best dribbles out in his private language. But somewhere ahead, one by one, his murmurs will turn into words. He will begin to tell us what he reads, it is we who will get to know his voice, and I may never learn what happens to that runaway bunny.
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