With each passing day, I find myself trying to solve some new challenge with raising four toddlers, aka “quaddlers”. They are a cunning lot who inspires a little ingenuity on my part (and George’s) just to manage day-to-day life. While my ideas are born from being surrounded by four toddlers, I think many of them could be helpful to any parents of little ones so I’m sharing.

Because I want the quads to develop a love of reading, I leave book baskets within their reach within in every room where they congregate.  I even keep a basket of them in the kitchen so they can peruse them before and after meals.  Our “basket books” are primarily ones I picked up at garage sales and Half Price Books, or were handed down.  We have our special books located on high bookshelves and we take them down only when an adult can sit and read them, most often at bedtime.

When we finish a meal, I’ll often hear Rylin’s raspy voice whisper, “book” as she signs “please”.  They will sometimes sit for up to 30 minutes flipping through pages of books, examining the pictures, and sometimes even asking us to label things.  It warms my heart to see this.

Photographer, Christina Childress, captured this group shot during their one year photo session.  This is one of my favorite photos of the quads.

However, sometimes I’m convinced that our children are part Billy Goat.  They love gnawing the edges of books almost as much as they enjoy looking at them.  It doesn’t matter how closely we supervise them or how often we redirect this behavior, they are toddlers and they simply chew voraciously.  At first it wasn’t really a problem aside from making books a little less attractive.  After a while, their books were so tattered they’d chomp of bits of them, posing a choking hazard among other things.  The first few times this happened, I chucked the worst books into the garbage.   Then, our collection of board books began to dwindle forcing me to look for replacements.   I didn’t want to spend money on more books I knew they’d find delectable so instead began a repair process.

Here are a few of the books with chewed spines.

To fix them, I gathered our collection of Duct tape and a pair of scissors.

Voila! These books were put back into rotation. Since the repair, they have chewed the edges a little bit, but they cannot get through the Duct tape and don’t seem as interested in Duct tape as cardboard.

My desire to repair books began when they nearly finished off our copy of “Yummy Yucky”, which is a family favorite here.  What is your favorite children’s book?

Hugs!

Amber