In the Wake of Books

Maybe it's time to describe Finn's book fetish.

First, our bedtime routine, and this well incontrovertibly reveal what smashing good parents we are:

1. We brush teeth.
2. We potty. Everyone. Modeling is important.
3. We read books.

And that's where our good parenting ends. Because as any good parents knows, you want your child to become more than you are. So they can pay off your lavish Ikea debts in your old age.

Tonight's selections: The Little Giant (with Angelo de Gianti and Osvadlo di Curti) and No More Monsters for Pets. Or some such. We like to read two. And keep it to two. Ours is a child who will keep us reading until the wee hours, if he has his way, and that's just, well, bad. Too much book learning can hurt your eyes--and your brain. You just to need those nip book smarts in the bud. That's what we say. Often. And loudly. And even in public to, oddly, very few snickers.

But we do compensate our illiterate ways by letting Finn take books into bed. Not the best idea we've ever had as far as finding a happy, restful toddler in the morning, but we're thinking if he stays up late reading, then we can stay up late drinking and everybody is equally cranky when the household awakes to the blazing sun in our east-facing house at, now, 6 a.m.

So, it's all strategic. Yes, that's what it is. Strategic.

By books into bed, I'm not talking one or two. I'm talking sixteen. Yes, Finn pilfers through some sixteen books, maybe more. We find books stashed underneath the covers when we change his sheets. Comics, fairytales, picture books, Frazier's The Golden Bough, E.M. Forestor's Aspects of the Novel (one of his recent favorites). He doesn't discriminate.

For someone who doesn't "read"--and he's the first to admit he can't, but I seriously doubt his self-asessment--he likes him some serious literature. He'll spend a good hour or two or three flipping through books and talking his way through pictures or not. He'll even call us, hours after we've thought he's been dutifully asleep, to fetch a David Foster Wallace that's slipped behind his headboard or to ask us what "bawling" means.

We started this enterprise, this child rearing, wanting to develop our child's love of stories. In the parlance of pedagogy, we've developed a print-rich home, magazines piled on the coffee table (that's now buckling under the weight), magazines filling a bucket by the toilet, amply stocked bookcases and backseats, cookbooks that line every inch of counter space, comic books gingerly spread on any available flat surface.

We've got books, granted many that go unread between the hours spent blogging and watching Heroes and BG and calling KiKi and Alan to discuss the aforementioned. Oh, and work, too. Yes, we work. But we do have books, lots of them, to fill the time should cable and Sprint Nextel networks give out.

But now, despite our best efforts to promote books as decoration or hypocritical claims to culture, we can't get the kid to go to sleep because he wants to "read." I've taken to given him an extra 30 minutes to "read," and then I literally have to unscrew his light bulb. (Which is immediately followed by a click-click-click and a lamenting, "Poppi? Poppi?") I have become the Evil Witch of Lights Out, the one who has to tell my son that reading time is over.

Our child is now doomed to become an artist or a writer or a pursuer of multiple advanced degrees, despite our best efforts to get him to follow in someone else's footsteps.