What to Read to Your Kids

It is possible to chart my daughter’s growing up against the backdrop of our games of hide and seek. Not but two years ago, whenever we played hide and seek, I would look up after slowly counting to ten and discover Emily standing but a stone’s throw away, beside a giant bush (beside, not behind, the bush). At which point, I’d do the thing that all parents do at one time or another: I’d turn my back to the bush and speak loudly into the air, I wonder where Emily is hiding. Where, oh where, could she be? To which she’d inevitably blurt out, I’m right HERE, Mommy!

Fast forward to last spring, when my daughter and I were playing hide and seek outside her school after dismissal one afternoon. You have to pick a really good hiding spot, she instructed me, before covering her eyes and commencing her counting. I ran across the lawn, turned down a little garden path, and squatted behind a bench. Moments later, I heard her exclaim, Ready or not here I come! And I waited. I waited some more. I waited so long that my quads started shaking and I thought I might die of boredom, and so I snuck a peek back in her direction. And there she was: climbing a tree at the other end of the lawn, singing gleefully with her friends, our game completely abandoned.

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