I love books, but I love them for their words and the worlds they create, not for their physical form. I try to take good care of my books, but I don’t treat my books like precious antiques that my 20 month old daughter can’t touch.
I love that she loves books so much already. She comes to me throughout the day with a book for me to read to her. She sees me reading, and she sees her father reading. She can sometimes even point out whose book it is if she’s seen us with it a few times. I have shelves of classical literature and I let her play with them. (I do have to remind myself that they can be alphabetized again very easily, but I am not concerned for the physical book itself.) If she wants to carry around John Stuart Mill or Charles Dickens for half a day, I couldn’t be happier.
There are a couple of books that I am more careful with. I let her look at and turn the pages of my illustrated Complete Chronicles of Narnia, but I sit with her. But even that book is replaceable—these early formative years are not. I want my daughter to continue to love books and to have positive experiences with them. She may not turn into a literature nerd like me, but I’m doing everything I can to help instill a love of books in her, just as my mother did with me and all my siblings.
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