books are a thing in this house and everyone knows it. i am a book snob. book collector. snubber of e-readers entirely. step on a book or bend its pages and you may as well pack your bags and go. i. love. books.
we have this nightly ritual here that’s been dubbed ‘book party’ and it started back when kid #1 was around a year and a half. i can’t quite recall the origin of the name though. maybe i had party hats lying around from someone’s birthday and was trying to be fun mom or something. or maybe i was trying to get my son’s attention. i don’t know. either way book party was born and it continues to be a non-optional requirement for children living in this home. basically we all squish into bed together and mom reads 3 books out loud. 3 really great quality books. as in, no kid #2, diego and dora cannot be invited to this party. neither can the wonderpets. do not even mention their names.
sometimes the books are ones i’ve purchased, and sometimes they’re borrowed from the library. my kids think field trips to the library are awesome fun times. one time we were out with some friends and had planned to go to the park. then it started to rain or got too dark to play or something so the friend sarcastically said that we should go to the library instead. kid #1 and #2 jumped up and down in excitement until i sadly had to explain to them that this was said as a joke. a sad sad inappropriate joke.
don’t mess with books.
but speaking of books, i am the owner of one of life’s most useless academic degrees: the english literature one. sure i love books but having a bachelor’s degree worth of experience reading stuff won’t get you paid. (neither will a graduate psychology one but that’s a whole other topic). what i did get out of the degree though was an introduction to the canon of great literature. you know, the classics and such. jane austen everything. war and peace. les miserables. charles dickens. that sort of stuff. the kind of books you don’t read to your kids. the kind of books they don’t read until they get their own useless english literature degree.
but have no fear! the classics can now be fun thanks to vancouver based cozy classics. featuring titles such as moby dick and pride and predjudice, ingenious twin brothers jack and holman wang have created 12-word primers with needle felted illustrations.
here’s one from moby dick:
and emma:
and pride and prejudice
wow, yes? yes. you can also buy prints from the books here
so looking at these really amazing needle felted illustrations i momentarily forgot my long history of craft fail-ness and wondered how hard needle felting could possibly be. while reading a very short excerpt about it i stumbled upon the words “stabbing”, “tangling”, and “painstaking”. so never mind. i’ll leave it up to the pros and get back to book party…
kidbrain 