While our three children were very young, at some point in the evening the echoes of my wife or me reading Goodnight Moon would be filling the house. I will never know whether reading the book was more for the kids or for calming us down after a hectic and harried day. I do know that if I brought my “read it and be done with it” attitude to reading the book, our children would slow me down by pointing to objects on the page or try to read the book from their memory of repetitions. It didn’t take long to take a deep breath and slow down.

The start of the book always has the calming effect of a great cup of tea:

I was reminded of this wonderful book when I was browsing at the UW University Bookstore and came across Goodnight iPAD. There was no question that I had to buy the book and add it to our collection at home. There was also no question that I would get the hardcopy book rather than the Kindle edition.

I quickly thumbed through the book amazed at the creativity of the author. So I flipped back to the front cover to find the author’s name and started chuckling – Ann Droyd. Now that is too cute for words.

There are lots of other parodies we’ve collected over the years so that if grand children ever show up in our lives we can provide more diversity for their early reading pleasure. A few of the previous parodies are:

Of course, no parody list would be complete without my adult favorite Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach.

Any parent who has ever spent the night holding a crying baby has uttered these words (at least mentally). It is a wonder that the “F-word” isn’t the first thing that a baby says rather than “ma ma” or “da da”. The book was a sell out even before it showed up on Amazon’s order list. This book may be one of the first best sellers that derived from desperate collaboration on Facebook.

Last night’s dreams were more peaceful than I remember in the last year as the joys of Goodnight iPad (video) reverberated through my sleepy brain.