Indestructible – A book superhero?

Babies love paper. It crumples and it’s fun to turn pages, but paper is flimsy. When moistened paper turns into mushy yuck.  Even a nice cardboard board book can be turned to pulp by a dedicated baby with just a tooth or two.  This leads not only to book destruction, but possible choking hazard and ingestion of ink dyes and paper whitening chemicals.

So, books for babies are mostly board books and reading them is mostly an activity shared with an adult, rather than an opportunity for solo exploring.

But, Ezri is so happy when she gets ahold of a magazine or catalog.  She loves looking through books on her own.  Enter Indestructibles which seem expensive at $5 for a seemingly flimsy magazine like pamphlet book.  However, Ezri has flipped through hers multiple times, she has put them in her mouth and pulled a full mug of cold coffee down from a bookshelf onto one and they are still standing.  They are a little rumpled, but still together with nary a tear or soggy page.

Indestructibles look flimsy and feel like a high quality paper, but they are not.
They are made of Tyvek – a material developed by Dupont and used for maps that are to be taken into the wilderness(rain doesn’t phase it), medical packaging (it’s hard to tear), and housewrap (it’s just that tough).

We own two of these Indestructibles. There are only 3 currently available.  All three feature brightly colored paintings of animals by Kaaren Pixton with no text.  Wiggle! March! features barnyard creatures and offers the opportunity to make animal noises.  Ezri likes my chicken and cow noises especially. Creep! Crawl! features the same style of paintings of bugs and slugs.  While some might consider the lack of text to be a cope out(yes, Eric I am talking to you), it is nice opportunity to just talk to Ezri about what’s in the pictures and point at things together.  We may have to pick up Flutter! Fly! which presumably features birds and has a hummingbird on the cover soon.

Here’s Ezri with that pinnacle of children’s book characters, Walter the Farting Dog. Oh, she loves the noises he makes!