Noah Cooper
Image: Amazon.co.uk
I don’t know where we got this book from. I have a feeling my brother bought it on one of his forays into charity bookshops. Wherever it came from though, from the age of about 2-9 months, this was Thomas’ favourite book.
It is a Ladybird cloth book with something like cellophane inside so that when you touch the pages it makes a noise. This was an immediate attraction for Thomas. Each page has one big bright picture on it with the a short two-word description e.g. orange teddy or woolly sheep. Every two pages there is the image has a different material to provide a tactile experience. Thomas’ favourite page was the woolly sheep because the body of the sheep is made up of wool.
While I will eventual give away a lot of the books that Thomas had when he was a baby, this is one book that will be staying with us to remind us of the early days. He used to just sit with it for what seemed like hours, obsessed with the noise, the colours and feel of the pages. I am convinced that one of the reasons he is so comfortable around book nowadays is the positive experience he got from this book in his first few months. It also gave us one of my favourite photos of him.
