ETC: Polar Bear Polar Bear

I've been posting about food on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I'm going to mix things up. It's not that I'm running out of recipes, in fact I have a backlog of food to write about, it's just that I want to try something different for a bit. I'll still be writing about food on Tuesdays, but on Thursday I'm starting a new piece that I call Entertain The Children.
Everyone who has children does stuff with them. Whether it's reading books or watching movies or going out to do things, we do stuff with our kids. Anybody who has had their two year old bring them a terrible book over and over knows that not all entertainment is created equal. Some books are fun for your kids but simply terrible for you. There are some kids books that I love that my kids want to hide from me so I won't read it to them again. The same applies to movies and outings and everything else. I'm going to try and write about things that have had appeal for both me and the kids. These are things that we have done together that have made us all happy. When everyone is happy, well, everyone is happy.
I'm going to start with the favorite book of our kids when they were very little. This is the first book that they sat through willingly and wanted read to them over and over. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've read it thousands of times. Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle is one of the greats. Some people like Brown Bear Brown What Do You See, and it's good, but with that you're just looking at stuff. When you read Polar Bear, you're listening. Not just to the words, but to the animal sounds. In order to read the book right, you, as a dad, need to make the sounds. You need to growl like a polar bear, roar like a lion, snort like a hippopotamus, flute like a flamingo, bray like a zebra, hiss like a boa constrictor, trumpet like an elephant, snarl like a leopard, yelp like a peacock bellow like a walrus and whistle like a zoo keeper. Make the noises, make them real. Ask your kids to make them back. We first learn speech by mimicking and all of my kids could mimic the animal noises that I made even before they could mimic my words. There's probably something fundamentally educational going on here.

By the time they're about 3 they move on to bigger and better things, but for a few years, I never got tired of growling and snarling and fluting and whistling. It's a good time, a great book to share.