green eggs and ham

If you ask Ada to bring you a book so that you can read to her, she will march right over to her book shelves and pull out a book. Sometimes it will be a Miffy book, sometimes it will be 'Goodnight Gorilla', but most of the time it will be 'Green Eggs and Ham'.

She won't actually let you read the entire book, she likes the first few pages. She likes to point out the green eggs and the 'Hem' (Ham), but once you get past the "Would you like them in a box? Would you like them with a fox?" she gets bored and flips to the last series of denials. I honestly think that now that she knows the protagonist actually ends up liking green eggs and ham she doesn't want to hear any of his whining. The part she really likes is when he is saying how he will "eat them in a car, and in a tree they are so good, so good you see!" And the reason she likes this part is not because of all the positivity, it is because she is that much closer to the last page of the book - Ada's favorite page in the book.

In the early days of reading to Ada I tried to find ways to get her interested in the story. So one day when I was reading 'Green Eggs and Ham' to, well myself, as Ada had walked away after the first page, I called Ada over to me when I got to the last page and showed her that at the end, on the last page, the grumpy cat like character says "Thank You, Thank You" and showed her using her signs because at the time she wasn't really saying actual words. And it clicked. Words, signs, and OMG books. At that moment she started 'reading'.

So now, when we read 'Green Eggs and Ham' Ada sits, and not so patiently, waits for that last page to come. Because then SHE gets to read.