Nice Mommy~Evil Editor

All great conversations start on Twitter. No really, these days they do. I thank Twitter for most of my blog topics these days.

A few months ago I was researching the Leapfrog Tag reader on Amazon, and reading the reviews. Brianna is a huge bookworm, I’m not sure WHERE she gets that from but she loves books. We read every night and, sadly, when we’re searching for a punishment “reading” is what we have to take away. I know, it seems wrong, but when that’s the thing your kid loves…

Anyway, she loves reading and though she’s at that point where she can both memorize whole books to read back to herself, and recognize/sound out some small words, she’s really not quite reading yet. I’d seen the Tag reader around and thought this might be something she’d love, because it would both read the books to her and also help her read them one word at a time. But I like to research things before I buy them, and though I don’t use Amazon’s book reviews because…well, that’s a topic for another post…I do like to browse their product reviews and read both the favorable and unfavorable.

But I was fairly taken aback by some of what I read while perusing the reviews. People attacking those who said they’d bought this for their children, chastising them for buying something to read to their children instead of reading to them themselves. Accusing them of all sorts of terrible things from bad to lazy parenting. Um. Excuse ME? Talk about making huge assumptions. Man, reading those comments pissed me off.

As it happens, Brianna did get this (for Valentine’s Day) and she loves it. She uses it almost every night at bedtime. AFTER we’ve read to her and she’s in bed reading by herself. Yeah, I can see how that’s evil and bad parenting. Come on, people. Did you ever consider that maybe the person buying it wants to supplement their reading time, not replace it? Bah.

So right now, Brianna has three books for the Tag reader, the one that came with it plus Scooby Doo (she chose that) and an Ariel Princess one that I got on sale last week. She was pretty upset because the Ariel one was NOT the book she’s been wanting. She wants Walter the Farting Dog. I mentioned to Josh today that I was thinking of ordering it from Amazon and shipping it to my parents, so we’d have it for her Easter basket next weekend. He looked at me like I’d grown three heads (not just two). Apparently, he’s never heard of the Walter the Farting Dog books. I was surprised because I thought they were just popular enough that most people know about them but…nope, guess not. He kept repeating “farting…dog? Farting dog?”

So now my husband thinks I’m insane because I want to get our daughter a book about a farting dog. Of course, he didn’t really appreciate the humor behind the jelly-bean pooping reindeer that I put her in Christmas stocking either. That our daughter refers to as the “pooping reindeer” (which is totally what it’s called), causing him to scowl at me every time. Heheheh. Guess who’s got the larger dose of juvenile humor in our family? Just wait until he finds out someone told me there are pooping bunnies AND pooping sheep in the Easter Candy aisle