Reading, Writing And -- Oh, Never Mind!

I have a confession to make at the start of this post. While I've never really talked about it, I've been known to fret inside me that The Bhablet has never shown any 'proper' interest in his fairly big library of plastic and cloth books. Obviously, after the earlier, harrowing incident I stopped letting him near real, paper books.

When he was ill and listless last week, I decided to strike while the, er, forehead was hot. He was too feverish to sleep and too whiny to play so I put him in his cot, put the side down, pulled him and the cot up to the bed and lay next to him showing him pictures in the book that he was gifted by my favourite second-hand bookseller. And get this, he was interested. I nearly jumped out of my skin with the excitement. I nervously offered him a Dr. Seuss (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) and he liked that too. He read it upside down quite often but pointed out all the bibbis and the kukkus and the daddas, not to mention the buteis and the babababas. We discussed, fairly civilly by our standards, how kukkus say "bow-bow". All in all, we were fairly merry for two people down with the virus.

The next day we were both better and I was taking a quick gander at the blogworld after V left for work. I figured if The Bhablet would co-operate, I could have half an hour before getting down to the chores. But he wasn't interested in his toys and wanted me to play with him. Bolstered by the previous day's success, I found him some paper, dug out an ancient crayon from Dada's schooldays, if I'm right, and showed him how to make marks on the paper. Was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Had got as far as planning out the consequent blog post when he came to me with guilt writ large all over his face and a mouth smeared with suspicious looking purple flecks. He hadn't liked the taste of it at all and so spat out the rest of the crayon.

It was right then that I decided to hand over his education to those who are paid to endure such trauma.

P.S.
The interest in books continues but he won't have them read to him and he'll certainly turn his own pages, thank you very much.