Elly likes being read to now, but lacks the necessary patience to fully appreciate a story. I’ve tried many of the suggestions people brought up to me and had some mixed results—and crushed fingers. I think she’s just too excited to see the pictures on the next page or believes reading is a race. It’s very hard to get a deep explanation from someone whose current linguistic capacity is limited at combining two words from a pool of 100 to get your point across.

Tradition has failed me; however, I’m not one to easily give up. It’s time to resort to the opposite of tradition: cutting-edge technology! I picked up a Barnes and Noble Nook Color at a good price for Elly’s mom’s birthday and decided to give the “Read-to-Me” eBooks a shot—okay, it’s not really “cutting-edge” technology, but it makes for a really cool toy.

I figured that Elly watches her Pingu DVDs zombie-style so it would be a good possibility that the eBook’s vibrant pictures and professional voice actor reading would have a similar effect on Elly as TV. My results were mixed. Elly is completely in love with the vibrant screen and thinks the reading is really cool; however, she quickly realized that she could change the page by swiping her finger across the screen—observation-learned behavior. One again, she’s blasting through book pages. Fortunately, the Nook Color’s small form-factor makes it very easy to hold above your head in the event that the page turning gets out of hand.