Goodnight, Gorilla

Jman is still on a zoo kick (which I find utterly fascinating, since he's never much cared for the zoo). After our Zoo Fun book, he dug out his copy of Goodnight, Gorilla and has been enjoying it. This is a fantastic wordless (almost) book about a gorilla who follows the night check zoo keeper around and secretly releases all the animals, who then follow the zoo keeper to his house to spend the night. I won't tell you how it ends--you'll have to read it yourself! haha!

Anyway, Jman has enjoyed this book before, but today he took it to a whole new level. Following a haircut (which is always a challenging event for him), he went to his bed to recuperate. I followed him in, and he gestured and asked for "Goodnight, Gorilla." So, we read it again. But this time, we worked a little more on language sentences: The gorilla has a key, The zookeeper has a flashlight, etc.

But here's where it got really interesting: A couple pages into the story, Jman pointed at the zookeeper and said, "Dad." Then he pointed at the mischeivous gorilla and said, "Jman." Wow!

And I got curious. As we read, I began asking him about other family members. He said the mouse (gorilla's sidekick) was Sly. When the giraffes were breaking out, I asked about me and SB3. He pointed to the big giraffe as me and the giraffe toy as SB3. Okay, that was interesting. He thought before he said we were the giraffes. The zookeeper's wife comes later in the book, and I thought he might flip ahead and point to her for me, but instead he tried to find me on the page he was looking at, and I was the big real giraffe and SB3 was the toy.

Well, fast forward to the part of the book with the wife, and presto--the wife is "mom," the zookeeper is "dad," the gorilla is still Jman, the mouse is still Sly, and the big giraffe is now SB3. I could have great fun psycho-analyzing why the itty bitty mouse is Sly and the great big giraffe is SB3. I've come up with several reasons already, but there's really no way to confirm, so, I'll just enjoy the fact and see if the names don't change with a later reading.

Anyway, it's the first time that Jman has applied himself or us to characters in a book or video (to my knowledge, anyway). And I just find that absolutely fascinating!