You know how parents have Things They Say?  For instance:

• If you keep staring at the computer screen your eyes will turn to marbles
• Just wait until your father comes home
• Clean your plate, there are people starving in Africa
• Don’t run with scissors
• When you cut your legs off with a lawnmower, don’t come running to me
• I’ll give you something to cry about
• If you keep making that face it’ll stick that way
• Don’t use my tools unless you’re going to put them away when you’re done
• You aren’t bleeding, so you’ll be fine
• Leave that kitchen cleaner than when you found it
• I brought you into this world and I can take you out
• Turn the TV down
• Save your money

My mama really only had two things she said often.  Before we got spanked, she always told us that “this hurts me a lot more than it hurts you” (which I can totally believe is true now that I have a baby), and that “books are our friends” (every time I was about to destroy one).  Actually she used to have to tell me to be gentle a lot.  I know this because we used to have a cassette tape of me as a baby, which we wore out listening to so often when we were all growing up.  The tape got lost (or destroyed) somewhere, which is unfortunate.  It was hi-larious.

The two best parts on that tape were of Dad trying to get me to say my ABCs when I was eating peanut butter bread, but I was too interested in my peanut butter.  So about every three letters he’d pipe in with a “don’t eat your peanut butter, say your ABCs”.  I finally made it through to the end, but I did get Q mixed up, I thought it was for Umbrella.  And another time I was abusing a laundry basket somehow, and poor Pops could be heard from the background telling me to “be gentle with the laundry basket”.

Anyway, when I was a little girl, my mama loved to read books to me.  And I loved to have books read to me. One of my earliest memories is of me deliberately throwing a book on the floor just to see if Mom would say “Be gentle, books are our friends”.  Because I had started noticing that she said it when I was being mean to books, and I was testing to see if she would say that every time.

She definitely did.

Dude.  Now I feel like I was a really wild, difficult child.

No wonder my child screams at the top of her lungs when she’s happy instead of making the soft, gentle noises that other babies seem to make.

The other morning, we were all cozied up in bed reading books.  I read Analie Hop On Pop, and Joey was reading his latest sci-fi weirdness.  I glanced over to look at Joey’s book, and when I looked back at Hop On Pop, it had somehow gotten in Analie’s mouth in the 0.2 seconds I hadn’t been watching and she was gnawing on its pages.

And then, out of my mouth came, “Be gentle, books are our friends.”

Poor quality cell phone picture? Yes please.