Be Careful What You Wish For

Many blogs ago I expressed sadness that my boy Noah had no interest in the book Goodnight Moon, which is one of my favorites and of course a classic besides. Well, all that has changed. We read this book almost every night now, and have for the past few months. Several weeks ago, though, something happened when we were reading, that made me think twice about my earlier lament.

I am interested to hear if anyone else already knew what I'm about to tell you, so please, let me know...As avid readers of the book Goodnight Moon know, there is a red balloon in the room, and it hangs out in the upper right hand corner of the little bunny's bedroom. Well, one night when my husband and I were reading the book outloud, my 1-year-old Noah started pointing intensely at the wall in that area of the picture of the room. "Dat! Dat! Dat!" I was confused because there was nothing there to name, and kind of glossed over it and kept reading. At the next picture of the room he did the same thing. "Dat! Dat! Dat!" with a much more disturbed tone in his voice. We continued reading until he stopped us and made us turn the pages back to those earlier ones. He pointed again. Slowly it dawned on us that he was telling us that the balloon didn't appear in those pictures in the middle of the book. We flipped ahead to the last page, when the room is dark, and the balloon was there again, but it was GONE in the middle pages. Noah began perseverating on this, going back and forth between the early pages and the middle pages, then to the end page and back to the middle, getting more and more agitated, pointing and whimpering, and at one point sounding very sad and near tears. And it didn't just happen that night. It happened every night since. After a week of it, when he would sadly give his "Dat. Dat. Dat." when we got to those balloon-less pages, my husband suggested that we hide the book, but I said no, let's work through it. We half-heartedly made up some explanation that the balloon was on the floor, but it didn't convince him or us, so we dropped that and just talked about how it happily reappeared on the last page.

Why is the balloon gone, is there something subliminal to be known here? Is it altering the myth in a way I should know? After reading so many books where the illustrator is careful to include the little butterfly on each page, or the tiny mouse dragging a banana, so children can look and point to them every time, to leave a detail out of this magnitude seems like it could only be intentional. Especially when all the other elements of the room remain from picture to picture.

We just read the book again tonight, and thankfully Noah seems to feel better about it. After weeks and weeks of dogging that balloon through the pages, he has begun to focus on the glowing red fire and the wood beside it, instead of the balloon. But I am left with lingering thoughts - with the hundreds of times I've read that book in my life I am impressed that Noah noticed this striking omission when I never did, but more importantly, why, Ms. Wise Brown, why?