They know exactly what happens on every page, and while they may not technically read a book cover to cover, they offer the illusion that they’re reading every word.

The first time I was aware of this with Sierra was with Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?

It wasn’t just the easy animals. She already knew that cows mooed and birds chirped and she could make the sounds, even if they were a little off. She tried to snort for a pig and instead just spit all over the place. She was sure horses said “geigh,” and sheep always uttered “ba ba black sheep.”

It was the tougher stuff, too. Lightning goes splat? Well of course it does, and now, she’s able to anticipate that page with lightning-like quickness. Butterflies whisper whisper. Horns blurp. Big cats slurp.

Every noise was a new experience, soaked up as only a toddler can. And from there, the noises were no longer new, but standard, as if our child came complete with a full set of onomatopoeias at her instant disposal, rattling off a cock-a-doodle-doo at simply the mention of a rooster, or a sizzle sizzle when seeing a frying pan.

Mr. Brown was Sierra’s favorite book for about a month, which in her mind is nearly an eternity. And though it’s a longer book – I’ll take an 8-page Sandra Boynton book at bedtime any day – it was never difficult to get through.

I suspect it has a lot to do with her understanding – her ability to match picture to sound to real life experience. The synapses are firing, now, and before long she’ll be surprising us with things we never knew existed.

It’s what makes me laugh at 3 in the morning when Sierra, awake and ready for the day despite my bleary eyes and unkempt disposition, relays to me with excitement usually reserved for Christmas.

There’s thunder outside.

It’s going BOOM BOOM BOOM!

There isn’t. And it’s not. But her relaying of sound from Mr. Brown shows how much her imagination has grown in the past year.

And despite the time, and the darkness, and the fact that I’ll now spend the next 15 minutes in a trance, attempting to get her back to sleep, I understand that this curiosity and imagination might be one of the most beautiful things in the world.

She wasn’t born yet. It wasn’t an act of consciousness for her – simply a vehicle for getting her used to my voice: the second voice in her life, and the one she often heard when her mother’s was quiet. She didn’t pop out quoting lines from the book, and her propensity toward books is caused more by availability than some deep-seated memory of reading while still in the womb.

It doesn’t matter. We read it to her anyway. And with Baby Boy Vilhauer, we repeated the task – this time with The Velveteen Rabbit.

I understand that Baby Boy Vilhauer probably won’t remember a word from The Velveteen Rabbit.

But that’s not exactly the point, is it?

Really, we read it for ourselves. We both rediscovered the simple joy in making something real – remembering our own Velveteen Rabbits, those childhood items that we loved more than anything, believing they held some kind of magic powers that keep us safe from evil.

Our minds flowed back to the innocence of youth, finding comfort, understanding that as we grow, our own cherished things become more fragile. Harder. Unwilling to protect us. I find no solace in an old clock, or in the cold sharpness of a family keepsake. But I do see that comfort in Sierra’s toys. As if they weren’t designed for play, but for protection from some unseen tragedy. Designed to keep people young, to preserve that innocence.

More than that, we understood that, by reading The Velveteen Rabbit to Baby Boy through the constricting nature of the womb, we were reaching out to him. Longing to meet him.

The Velveteen Rabbit became, without doubt, Baby Boy’s book. That’s an important connection in our household – a story that will forever be connected to a time and place; laying in bed, Kerrie propped on her side, we went through all 33 pages in two nights, reliving the memory of a classic story, and introducing it to our next great discovery.

Sierra had that with The Little Prince. And, though I understand it’s all coincidence, she has grown to be a caring and peaceful individual, seemingly learning from the lessons of that book.

If our baby boy can move forward with his lessons – on accepting everyone, on loving without barrier, and on the importance of believing in yourself – we’re confident that his first book will be as meaningful to him, even if unknowingly so, as it is for us.

It’s the warmth – the dark reds and greens and golds, all shaded by the cloak of night. It’s the comfort of the shade as it descends over the room.

It’s the warm comforter. The old lady whispering hush, looking over the room and making sure everything is safe. The kittens playing, oblivious to the night creeping in. The paintings. The fire. Especially the fire.

Sometimes, it’s that twinge of goofiness that makes it fun for an adult. You don’t typically say goodnight to a bowl of mush. Or to the paintings on the wall. Or to your socks. Mittens. Nothing at all. But in this world, you do. In this world, you say goodnight to everything.

Which is why I think I love the book so much. It’s irrelevant, yet it encompasses every part of the day – from morning to night, from living to imagined. From light to dark. From nourishment to triviality.

It’s hard to explain exactly what makes Goodnight Moon so special without simply saying, “It’s just good.” That might be the only explanation you need. It’s just good. It’s not offensive, or annoying, or too long or too short. It’s mind blowing in that it’s so simple. So catchy.

Most of all, it’s the safety in repetition – in saying good night to every single thing around you.

Just as Sierra does each night, sometimes whispering, sometimes yelling: “Nigh nigh.” Nothing is missed. Everything is accounted for. Order is comfortably restored and ready to be destroyed the next morning, once the moon has set and the sun is ready to show its face.

Goodnight television. Goodnight Becket. Goodnight rubber duck. Goodnight door. Goodnight mommy. Goodnight balloon. Goodnight daddy. Goodnight light.

Goodnight moon.

Yet, all I needed to do was turn around. There Sierra sat, surrounded by a pile of books. Opening each cover. Turning each page. Pointing at each puppy, each duck, each ball, each recognizable item illustrated by each illustrators hand.

Sierra was reading.

Kind of.

And I watched. She was completely enthralled. She’d finish looking at one and grab another. She’d pile them up in a circle around her chair, reach for another, begin again. We have a bottom shelf filled with her books – a discovery she’s always known about but has just begun taking advantage of – and when that was empty, it’s contents dumped in various states around the room, she moved up a shelf, erroneously grabbing Walden, followed by the biography of Edward R. Murrow.

She wasn’t impressed. She turned back to My Two Hands. She had no idea I was staring at her.

Kerrie has noticed this as well. And it seems all so natural. We’re a family of readers by nature. In action, the reading has trailed off, what with our available time used to relax and catch up. But by nature, it’s what we do. Almost by nature, it’s what she’s doing.

So to see this sends me into overdrive. I’m Proud Parent Number One. I’m already planning the next steps.

Ramona Quimby. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Where the Red Fern Grows. Harry Potter. And later on, John Steinbeck. Dave Eggers. Or will she turn to Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith? Will she buck the entire family and latch onto Jane Austin?

When you have a child, you naturally wonder what he or she will grow up to be. Will she be kind? Wily? Quick-tempered? Intelligent? You wonder if he or she will be artistically inclined, or technically motivated. Cars and electronics or books and paints?

And you naturally create your ideal view. Knowing you’ll love her either way. But also knowing how cool it would be to have a friend with similar interests, someone who shares your same desires, someone you can connect with on more than just familial bonds.

I have always believed in acting as a gentle but caring father, who will stand by Sierra without forcing her hand, who will lead without making choices for her. I expect nothing more than for her to do her best. I refuse to get caught up in the typical child rearing competition. And aside from reading books each night, we haven’t influenced this in any way.

I mean, she sure didn’t get it from us, the way we read anymore.

But Sierra is reading. Or, at least, taking the first steps toward reading, by focusing on the books, opening them and studying them and becoming completely lost in them, just as her mother and father do, just as her grandmother has always done, just as everyone before her has mastered.

And it’s amazing.

When he reads it, he’s going to enjoy it. You should watch out – he’s going to want a computer to type on.

He’ll write and write about how cool the book is. He’ll be so happy with it, he’ll want to show everyone, which means you’ll have to get him a printer.

A new printer never comes with a good ink cartridge, though. So of course you’ll need to go to the store.

When you go to pick up the cartridge, he’s going to want to go with to make sure you get the right one. And naturally, he’s going to want a new box of pens, too.

If you buy him the pens, he’s going to want something to write in. A Moleskin, maybe. So you’ll need to go to Barnes and Noble.

When he finally gets his notebook, he’s going to start writing. Eventually, though, he’ll run out of things to write about.

He’ll think about what he does best.

And then he’s going to ask you for a good children’s book.

(Previously reviewed: 16-Page Read: If You Give a Pig a Party)

We weren’t always in possession of a favorite book though.

Think about it. We weren’t born with a favorite book. Likely, no one remembers their first favorite book.

Regardless, we had one. At sometime during our first year, we grabbed a hold of a book and claimed it as our own, selecting it above all others as “favorite,” and though we may not have cognitively known the importance of our selection, and though we may not have even been conscious of the fact that it was a book at all, it became our favorite.

I bring this up because Sierra now has a favorite book.

All I can do is beam, really. I think it’s so cool – my little girl, enjoying books. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed like she was done with books, for a while at least. But now, here she is, enjoying books. (Enjoying. Not reading. Reading would actually involve a working knowledge of words an concepts.)

She sits on the floor, grabbing books, ripping them open, making little excited sounds and holding them up to us. She enjoys sitting in our lap and pointing at the pictures. At times, it seems like she “gets” what’s going on. She’s on that precipice, staring over the edge, ready to jump into reading like her parents and her grandparents before her.

So yeah, she enjoys books. But of all the books she has, she especially enjoys Hug by Jez Alborough.

Hug is everything you want a children’s book to be – easy to read, simple, a little emotional, a lot of fun. It follows a baby gorilla – Bobo – in his search for his mother.

I’m not going to lie. This book can be heartbreaking. It tugs on all of my parental heartstrings. After all, Bobo has lost his mother, his safety net, his giver of hugs. And as he sees each pair of animals, he is reminded of that loss – what begins as a happy recognition becomes a sad tale of remembrance, a sadness that can only be cured by a hug of his own.

Bobo views each hug (performed by a continuing cast of jungle animals) with growing panic until, finally, in a flood of tears, he cries out for a hug of his own. His mother arrives, everyone hugs, then everyone hugs again, then everyone hugs in an inter-species group hug, and everything ends happily.

So you’ve got diversity. You’ve got real feelings. Best of all, you’ve only got three words (“hug,” “Mommy,” and “Bobo.”)

More than that, you’ve got a book that manages to affect us as parents, the idea of our children being lost without us, searching for nothing more than a hug. The only thing I can ever think of doing after reading Hug is to reach down, give Sierra a hug of her own, and start again. We’ll read it two or three times through, and a hug is given at the culmination of each reading.

Maybe that’s why it’s her favorite. And maybe that’s why, after 11 months of reading children’s books, it’s quickly becoming one of mine.

I should take that back. She’s never really wanted to read books. She’s instead sat idly by while I showed her pictures and read through the words, flipping pages for her and explaining the finer points of Where the Wild Things Are far before she could even comprehend what a book was in the first place.

As she’s grown older, she’s taken a liking to the book themselves – not the pages or the words or the pictures, but the solid item of matter that a book is. It’s a piece to chew on, a physical creation to pick up and hold and turn around and – especially – drop on the floor.

Sierra read books with me because she was a captive audience. The books were more for my enjoyment, serving more as a promise of things to come than a cognitive memory.

Now, she’s active. Sitting in Dad’s lap is fun for about two minutes. She likes her books to be fuzzy, soft, chewable and, most of all, quickly read.

This leaves us small chunky books, books with flaps and other movable parts, plush books that double as teething rings and books that simulate animal fur. More Sandra Boynton, less Mo Willems.

I’ve come to accept this. I still try, and she’s becoming more and more tolerant. She enjoys helping me turn the page, and if she’s in a good mood we can often read the book a second time (but never a third – don’t even dare). Of course, there are still some books that are better left for the future.

Green Eggs and Ham, for instance.

Listen, I love Dr. Seuss to death. But his books aren’t exactly the most colorful batch on the bookshelf. They’re often tri-colored with awkward looking characters and even more awkward situations. They’re weird, to say the least, in a way that a two or three-year-old would enjoy, but a nine-month old would ditch in favor of something that squeaks. They don’t translate well to the pre-year crowd, is all I’m saying.

But hey – that’s okay. When I attempt to read it to Sierra (never making it past the page introducing the box and the fox) I really read it for myself, to relive my own childhood, to revel in the words and the rhymes, the lines that I remember from longer ago than any other book I can think of. It was my first love – one that led me to purchase the cartoon retelling of Green Eggs and Ham on VHS from Best Buy knowing full well I’d never watch it and one that led me to choose it as the perfect children’s book to read during Speech class in high school.

And here’s the funny thing: it’s taken me this long to realize that Dr. Seuss’s most famous book is actually an ode to trying new things.

Yeah. I know. Pretty obvious. But I’ve always seen this book from the anti-egg/ham character’s point of view. No, I don’t want those damned sickly green-colored foodstuffs – I want a normal plate of ham and eggs and I would rather they’ve not been in anyone else’s house or next to a filthy fox. But that’s not it at all. What we’re looking at is a classic tale of “just one bite, I guarantee you’ll like it.”

It reminds me of this scene in a Calvin and Hobbes comic, where Calvin will absolutely not eat any tortellini; he absolutely hates it and refuses to even touch it if his mother cooks it. The next image, after a pregnant pause, is Calvin looking up the word tortellini in the dictionary, proving his fear of the unknown – an aversion to anything new, regardless of whether or not he knows what it is.

The moral in Green Eggs and Ham is simple. Try things once. You never know if you’ll like it if you don’t try it. And if it just so happens you absolutely hate it, then at least you’ll know firsthand.

How about that? It’s only taken me 25 years. But I’ve finally found a moral in a Dr. Seuss book.

Sierra would be so proud of her dad. That is, if she’d stop chewing on the corner of the book and listen to me.

For me, it was a Scooby Doo stuffed animal. My parents had spent hell-knows-how-much in securing it during a vacation to King’s Island in Kentucky. It was three feet tall – a life size representation. The carny laughed all the way home, I’m sure. And it was my favorite toy.

I was concerned with every detail of that dog’s existence. I made him my confidant, my best friend. I wore the color off of his collar and pilled up his black spots. Without Scooby, I couldn’t survive. Or so it seemed.

Now, imagine grade school – Irving Elementary. Show and tell day. I brought Scooby Doo to school to show off. He was hard to carry around all day, but when the time came, he was a hit.

In the middle of show and tell, the principal came in and told us to evacuate the building. A gas leak had been suspected, and we were shuffled out onto the playground for an extended recess. It was a glorious day – sunny, warm and free; a day for playing and waiting, two things a grade school child knows best.

But Scooby was still inside.

I freaked out.

I was smart enough to know better. But I had a strange connection with that stuffed animal, and I was worried about what was happening to it. “Gas leak” sounded ominous – like some disfiguring fog that could eat flesh and cause radioactive-like mutations. I imagined my stuffed animal being taken away from me – burned like the Velveteen Rabbit, lost forever. I cried. I couldn’t stop. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t help the feeling of helplessness. Over a stuffed animal!

It was a long day at Kindergarten, for both me and my teacher.

That’s why Mo Willems is brilliant. Knuffle Bunny is the story of every child who lost a stuffed animal. And it’s the story of every parent who had to both console and search, simultaneously, as their child’s world came crashing down around them. He makes it all real, because he’s been in the same place. You know he has – he has the parts down pat. Probably on both sides of the coin.

What makes Knuffle Bunny so compelling – so re-readable – is the details. The looks. The images of real New York layered with a scruffy post-yuppie parenthood. A walk to the Laundromat seems so luxurious, a front stoop so spacious. It’s life in a big city with a children’s story filling in the holes, with the freedom of life strewn across every page.

It’s also a classic story of child/adult miscommunication. Trixie’s father assumes Trixie is babbling, not freaking out over a lost stuffed animal. And Trixie’s attempts at clarification fall on deaf ears – that is, until mother saves the day.

This will be me, I’m sure – a father saving the day from his own mistake; a daughter so preoccupied with life that she nearly forgets the one thing her life revolves around. I look forward to it, actually – those hero moments of sheer normalcy, the stories we can share later on.

When I was in the situation, though, it wasn’t a fun story. And I relate with Knuffle Bunny on that level. I was there. We all were. That’s what makes it real. That’s what makes it irresistible. Because each one of us wanted only one thing that day.

We wanted that security back. And it took a hero to get it back – even though we didn’t realize at the time how mundane that hero’s act was.

It was here that I ran face to face with a mouse. And a cookie. Specifically, a small stuffed mouse holding an even smaller stuffed cookie: The If You Give a Mouse a Cookie mouse.

It was the first time I’d ever seen the character, and before even reading a word I was in love with the idea. For some reason, it just seemed so natural, giving a mouse a cookie, and I’m sure that if I lived in a larger city I’d have been moved to begin feeding the sewer rats small pieces of biscotti or leaving opened bags of Oreos in the basement in lieu of a mouse trap.

It wasn’t just the mouse, though – it was an entire menagerie of animals. All of the If You Give A… books are centered on a long, winding series of causes and effects. If you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want a glass of milk, and if you give a mouse a glass of milk, he’ll want a straw. Or something like that. It goes on and on, and it’s rather fun.

If You Give a Pig a Party serves as a “greatest hits” book, bringing all of Numeroff’s friends together for a party. Naturally, it goes through the same cause and effect craziness; asking for balloons, decorating the house, calling her friends. They play hide and seek, they ask for cake, and at the end, naturally, you find out that she wants to decorate a fort with balloons and, just as naturally, she’ll want a party after the balloons are blown up.

It’s this cyclical nature that makes the books so fun. But I’ll admit – that’s not the reason I gravitate toward them when it comes to Sierra reading time. The fact is: the illustrations are cute.

You heard me. Cute. As in cute as a button. They’re adorable, and they make me smile every time.

Okay, so it’s out again. I love these children’s books because, yes, I think they’re cute. That vicious, horrible word – the bane of my existence. CUTE. I hate when people call my work cute – it makes my blood boil. Yet here I am, praising a book for its cuteness, a darling little pink pig drawn with hair and balloons and a mouse for a friend.

It’s cute. But it’s supposed to be cute. So there’s no danger in saying it. I can still be taken seriously.

Just don’t tell anyone, okay?

It might be a cleverly worded sentence – blunt enough to cause a burst of laughter, a rat-tat-tat that awakes a snoozing baby, rendering the story useless unless read during the waking hours.

Sandra Boynton has packed her short, board-designed books with these looks and sentences. And no one line amuses me more than the titular sentence from her book Hippos Go Berserk!

The book – as all children’s books are wont to do – features a lesson; counting from one to nine. The lesson is told through a boring day in the life of a hippo – a sad, lonely looking hippo who invites two friends. These two friends invite three more, etc. until nine hippos dressed as wait staff arrive at the lonely hippo’s door.

And, as promised, the hippos exhibit some darling looks. A wary glance over the shoulder. A stone bored stare at a fellow hippo. A shifty look of deceit. The 45 hippos that end up in the house may all look the same, but trust me; they all have a special place – a unique trait, a personality unlike any other hippo in the room.

So 45 hippos are packed into one house. What happens?

ALL THE HIPPOS GO BERSERK!

Just like that, I’m satiated. It’s a line that always fills me with joy – usually wondering how five words in a children’s book could make me laugh so hard. It’s improbable. Why is it funny? Really?

Maybe it’s the fact that none of the hippos are actually going berserk. Maybe it’s the fact that it was so unexpected the first time I read it. Maybe it’s because after they go berserk over the two pages in the middle of the book, they all start leaving.

Probably, it’s the idea of these sarcastic looking hippos all attempting to go berserk in one place, surrounded by waiter and waitress hippos, some in fancy clothes, some simply looking around wondering why they ever bothered to arrive, while the lonely hippo who started our tale dances on the table with a phone receiver on his head – the only hippo to actually bother going berserk.

Or, maybe it’s just the unknown power of the “sense of humor,” a collection of remembrances and triggers that are as different in humans as fingerprints or dental records. The simplest things can trigger laughter. No one knows why. It just does.

One by one, the hippos leave. Actually, more accurately, nine by eight by seven, etc. until one hippo, alone once more, finds he misses the other forty four.

I always seem to miss them too. So, to the chagrin of my daughter – resulting in the first of a series of perceived eye rolls, I’m sure – I read it again.

Reading fathers go berserk!