Jack the Ripper

I love to read. I am one of those people who keeps a stack of books by my bedside on the table and looks forward to starting a new one as soon as the current one is finished. I started a book club that is still going strong five years later and I can't imagine what it would be like to have to sit on an airplane without a good book.

So it should come as no surprise that I hope my kids are big readers too. Josh, well he's not so much into reading books. But he does read a lot online so that should count for something. But I am just suspicious of anyone who claims he would rather make shirts in his free time than read a book. I'm just sayin'.

Jack is very lucky in that he has a ridiculously large library of books. I would estimate he has about 50 books in two little bins downstairs and another 30 or so upstairs. The downstairs books are 99% board books and the ones upstairs are all nice paper-page books, hence the reason we don't leave them downstairs where he could wreck them willy nilly.

It's a good thing we decided to divvy them up that way early on, or he would have nothing left in the paper-page variety. You see my son, he is a book ripper.

This problem manifested itself early on. From the time he was about a year old, he would go to his little book corner and sit down in his little blue chair and take a paper-page book and start to look at it and then just tear a page. I would admonish him that we don't rip books, take it away and we would move on.

But this past summer he started to get a little stronger and a lot bolder. He ruined an entire set of the most adorable miniature farm animal board books by breaking the bindings and then ripping the pages apart. He moved on to other larger board books after that and now nothing is safe in this house.

I tell him every time that we don't rip books and then try to redirect him or show him a different more indestuctable book, but it's like he takes some perverse pleasure in breaking my heart by destroying books. I hear the telltale ripping sound from the kitchen and I know it's too late by that point to save it. He then looks at me and says, "Tape?" As if tape could fix this board-book debacle. He has also tried to ask me to "Tie?" it back together. No dice, defacer.

I thought this behavior was normal toddler stuff until we were at a playdate with our friends and she had paper-page books all over the place and I said, "Wait, how do you get her to not rip them?" and my friend looked at me like I was speaking in tongues.

He even ripped a board book from the library last month. You can't just hide that in the book drop. They notice these things. So I am sorry Lincoln Park Library and anyone who checks out "My First Book of Sushi" after us. I am not sure what happened to the page with "tekka maki" on it, but I think it might have met an untimely demise in my garbage can.