My husband and I are avid readers.  I’ve been fortunate in my work career to be able to be around books. When I taught elementary school, I had books all over the place.  Then, I  couldn’t get enough of them, so I worked at a bookstore… now, I work at a public library.  Books are just such a huge part of our lives that we just wanted to transfer our love of books to our children.

The first thing that we put in the baby’s room was a book shelf, and we filled the shelves with our favorite children’s books.  As baby gifts, we also asked our relatives to send us their favorite books to add to our collection.  So by the time the little guy was born, he had a well stocked library.

How we are doing it…

• We stocked up on colorful board books
• We started reading to the baby right away – (first day home from the hospital).
• When he was able to sit up and grasp things with his cute little fingers, we started teaching him how to turn the pages
• Our bedtime routine always included a little story book (usually my husband does the night time reading)
• I read to him during his morning feeding
• We are still teaching him how to be gentle with books
• Books are everywhere in our home… we place books where he can easily reach them.  There are baskets of books lying around the house (even in the bathroom) for him to just pick up and “read”.
• We go the library almost everyday (I work there) and usually have him pick books in the kid’s room – most libraries have a toddler book section

Of course the baby went through the “eating” the books stage and some of his books are definitely showing “teeth wear”.  But now that he’s more mobile, he can be found pretty much just reading all over the place.