Book

For months now, I’ve been having this problem where I do not want to be on my phone in front of Edith because I want to be present with her in the moment, and I also do not want her to be interested in screens yet. But I consistently fail on this, because when Edith and I are playing, she will inevitably wander off and become absorbed in something, at which point, I will want to look at my phone. But then I become absorbed in my phone, and soon she is back and then she wants the phone. And then we are locked in a battle over the phone.

I’d been struggling with this and making resolutions about it and failing to live up to them for so long, and then last weekend, I finally realized the perfect solution: an actual book. Before Edith, I only read hard copy books, and I have a million of them, but when she was born, I put them all away and switched entirely to ebooks because I could read them while feeding her, or rocking her back to sleep, and now that she’s older, I can read them in bed without turning a light on and waking her up.

So physical books just weren’t on my mind anymore, but a physical book is the perfect solution to my current problem. When Edith is ignoring me, I can read for a bit, and when she comes back, the book is perhaps somewhat tempting (she does try to rip the pages out of it), but not anywhere near as interesting as my phone, so she does not become monomaniacally focused on obtaining it from me (and if she does, she can just have it). I got through a nice chunk of the new Doerr over the weekend, and as a bonus, I felt much less stressed out because I hardly looked at Twitter!