books books and more books

We've been busy playing Harold and the Purple Crayon. He briefly drew pictures with a purple marker as you might expect but Ro's not much into drawing. He's very 3-D and he quickly ditched the marker in favor of recreating Harold's world with household objects such as using one of my belts with toys around the buckle to be a flower.

The thing that I've noticed about Ro watching books or videos of books like the Scholastic series is that it seems to prompt him into lots of pretending. This is really different than other videos. For example, Ro likes and watches Bob the builder but Ro has never once pretended to be Bob or any bob character. I think this is because the Bob stories are fundamentally lame and fairly stupid -- and while Bob stories may serve to entertain or distract your child, which is certainly useful -- they don't do anything for developing their imagination -- or at least not my kid. I think I'm going to pay more attention to see what things will trigger Ro's imagination or not and then avoid simple entertainment as much as possible.

We've also been playing Good Night Gorilla and Click Clack Moo. The story of Farmer Brown and his demanding cows has somehow gotten all mixed up with Old MacDonald had a farm and the nativity story - because I hear him mumbling about cows and baby jesus and farmer brown eieio.