When we were young, about the only thing we were reliably allowed to do was read books. Our mother promoted reading, probably one of the very few things she did that was good for us, so by age 3 we had a whole shelf of Braille books. At that age, our favorite story wasn't Cinderella or Snow white, but a little book entitled “Froggy Gets Dressed” in which a little frog wakes up from hibernation in the middle of the winter and decided that his goal of the day is to play in the snow. The problem is, that he keeps forgetting to put on his clothes, so his mother has to come out and tell him to put them on so he doesn't get sick. Spoiler alert, by the time he has all his clothes in place, he decides that he's too tired and really just wants to sleep more. We enjoy that book in part because the transition of the hyperactive frog to the sleepy hibernating frog is rather amusing. Incidentally, the paper and glue of that particular book tasted particularly delicious to the three year old me, something that despite seeing the page torn by little baby teeth every time she opened the book to read to me, our mother never mentioned. That was ok though, back when we were little we apparently had an eidetic memory and could read books word for word without actually having to read them. Wish that was as good as it used to be. On the topic of eidetic memory, my parents used to tell the story of a crocodile named Cuthbert. Apparently at age 4 I was found pretending to read the print book where the story was located while reciting the story word for word. The irony of that is that I can't even remember the premise or plotline of the story. Later on, our mother bought us books from a little outlet called blue diamond audio books, which no matter how much we try, we can't find readily, so theorize that they may have gone out of business. Stories that came from them which were enjoyed by us include “Puss and Boots”, “Cinderella”, specifically the version read by Jennie Day, “Tom Thumb” and a story about a snowman of which we cannot remember the title. We also enjoyed “Hansel and Gretel” because we were just that type of kid. Now we think of it, that particular book was our sleepy time music for about a year. We enjoy that one, especially thinking about it now, because the little girl outwits the witch and kills her. We read several other books from that little outlet, but can't really remember any of them ... yes we can. There was this book called “The Goose Girl” which we only popped into the cd player because of the humorous title. In this one, the fairy tale story doesn't go as planned. The princess, going to meet her true love, gets betrayed by her servant on the way to the new Kingdom. The servant takes the princess's place and the princess can't tell anyone until she does. Throughout this time, she is placed in charge of the flock of geese, or rather she is paired up with the original person who was in charge of the geese. But to stop him from seeing her as she really is, every time it's time to brush her hair, she sends him away. Not sure why you'd brush your hair out in a field of geese, but hey. that wasn't the main plot of the book. In the end, and the reason we enjoy this particular book, she gets put back in her proper place. The false princess is asked what she would do to a person who betrayed their princess. that sentence was carried out on her. that's why we enjoy that book. At the age of 9 years, along with our first iPod, our Illinois family gave us a whole heaping stack of audio books. Our top favorites include “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “Around the world in 80 days”, and “The Time Machine”. Problem is, most of these I believe were abridged copies. So therefore, we may not have gotten the whole story for any of these. By age 10, our family in Illinois had gone from audio books to braille books, and spent a probably large sum of money to get us the entire set of 7 Harry Potter books in Braille. We read all of them, eventually finishing them when we were 11. We wanted to read one of them with one of the other kids who lived in our house, but our mother discouraged such behavior, telling us we were too smart to wait on others. I wish we'd told her to shove it and read the book with our friend ... reading books together is a good bonding activity. When they got me the braille Harry Potter books, they also got me 3 of the books they thought I hadn't read yet. I remember lying on the bedroom floor listening to the Chamber of Secrets or the Goblet of Fire because I had nothing else I truly enjoyed listening to.

Conclusion

This has been a relatively short, and admittedly late, post about our favorite books as a child. We won't publish plans for the future for this one, because it's been months since we updated the blog and we need to get ourselves reacquainted with writing regularly.