World Book Day in the mummascribbles house! – Mummascribbles

Today is World Book Day. Many of you parents have spent the last week cutting, pinning and sewing; creating wonderful costumes for your little ones to dress up in.

Some of you will have spent some money on shop bought costumes and have a little guilt that you just don’t have time to sit, cut, pin and sew all week.

Some of you will have simply looked to your little ones’ wardrobe to see what you could piece together to match the look of any old book character because you didn’t have time and didn’t see the point in spending money.

I fall into that third category!

I didn’t have time!

I knew World Book Day was approaching but until I walked into nursery on Tuesday, I had no idea they were doing dress up. Zach hadn’t been in the previous week and unusually, nothing had been mentioned in the newsletter/email/facebook to inform us! So suddenly I faced a dilemma of what I was going to dress him in this morning. It didn’t take long to figure it out when I started thinking about what he had in his wardrobe and I remembered that he has a Gruffalo dressing gown! So this morning, I dressed him in his normal clothes and popped his dressing gown on over the top!

At this point, I would normally pop the yearly World Book Day photo of my little munchkin in his Gruffalo ‘fancy dress’, but unfortunately I had a very miserable little Gruffalo this morning who denied me the opportunity to take his photo, refused to put his hood up (which has the important Gruffalo ears), and cried a bit when I tried! Not only that but he decided that he didn’t want mummy to leave him at nursery and I had to leave a sobbing Gruffalo behind! Not a great morning at all on what was supposed to be a fun day – I have no doubt he’s already having fun at nursery though!

So that you can have some form of image in your mind of him, here’s a photo from when we first got him the dressing gown. He’s just a little bit bigger now!

So, it’s World Book Day. We love reading. All three of us! The other half and I use our train journeys to read (although I’m currently writing this post on the train rather than reading Gone Girl, which was a rather difficult decision that I had to make!). We also read to Zach most evenings; only not bothering if he’s simply too tired. His favourite book at the moment is a noisy train book – he wants to read it every night and even if I hide it before he spots it, he still demands it noisily while I’m trying to read him something else until I give in!

We’ve been through various stages of him loving certain books so much that we’ve had to read them every night. The first time it happened was when we discovered Digger Dog by William Bee and Whoosh around the Mulberry Bush by Jan Ormerod. We had to read this every night for about two months! I had to regularly renew them from the library and when it didn’t stop, I ended up buying them. We’d read Digger Dog so much, he could almost recite the whole book!

Next up was Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson (we LOVE her!). He became obsessed with this and again we had to read it all the time with him learning the points where the NO NO NO happens, and telling us what animal was on the next page! We read this again a couple of nights ago and he still joins in

Following this, there was an obsession with the Mr Men series. My sister bought him the whole box set a while back and I think we’ve read every single one of them, some several times! We discovered at one point that they were the perfect length to read him to sleep – it would take three of them until he was in a deep sleep and we could creep out! He didn’t know their names so would always request Mr Red!

Finally, the other book he’s had to read nightly at one time is The Gruffalo’s Child, again by Julia Donaldson (she’s just fab isn’t she!). He actually got this before he got the main Gruffalo book as it was on offer and it’s a noisy one. He just loved pressing the buttons in the right places to make the spooky sounds of the story!

I have my own favourite childhood books that Zach now has and that I try to read to him whenever I can (which is whenever he allows and isn’t obsessed with some other book!). They are Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet & Alan Ahlberg, Peace at Last by Jill Murphy and The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson. I love these books and have done since I was a child. In fact the Each Peach Pear Plum and Peace at Last are my own copies. They are replacements of the ones my mum gave away. I was so upset that they’d gone, she bought them for me a few years back!!

And the adult me. My two favourite authors are Jodi Picoult and Jane Green. I just love anything they write. I do read anything though and I’ve always got my head in a book of some kind.

So that’s our own book story on World Book Day. What are yours and your childrens’ favourite stories? Do they go through stages of loving certain books that you get really bored with? And what did they dress up as today? I bet you were a bit more imaginative than me!