Supplies Required (a supply list for this activity is pretty much ridiculous):
books
a bed
After my son W was born, I wanted to make sure that I set aside some special time for my daughter E, especially in those early newborn days where W was so dependent on me. So one night shortly after W was born, I asked E if she would like it if I spent the next morning reading to her in her bed. She was super excited about the idea, especially when I said it would also involve having breakfast in bed. (My husband, who had to make the pancakes and serve them to us in bed, was probably less excited about the idea.) When E woke up that morning, I climbed into her bed with her and we read several books. My husband brought us a tray of pancakes while we were reading. E loved this, and ever since then, we have probably done this activity about once a month. She especially loves it when the reading has some sort of theme--for instance, when I read her ALL of the books she checked out from the library (usually that's about 15!) or ALL of her Clifford books. Shortly before Christmas, I suggested to her that we should gather all of the books she had about Christmas and winter and we should read all of those on our reading in bed morning. She had fun gathering all of the books the night before.
E loves Curious George, and for Christmas, she got a big Curious George book with all of the original Curious George stories. (If you are at all familiar with the original Curious George stories, they are LONG.) So after Christmas, when we had our reading in bed morning, she said she wanted me to read that entire book (350 pages or so!) along with two other Curious George compilations with 10 stories each. I told her we could only read 2 of those big books, so she picked out the original Curious George book and one of the newer ones with 10 stories. I read all 10 stories from one of hte newer books, but we only made it halfway through the original Curious George collection before E got tired. I couldn't believe she had finally reached her limit!
