I would not give you shelter

We have a giant bookcase in our family room and the bottom two shelves are pretty much dedicated to Baby J. One cubby houses his books, which he loves to pull out and then sit "reading," which really means moving them from one place to the other in a circle around him. He most loves to read books about animals, though his two favorite animal books are the largest and most unwieldy in his collection, so he struggles doggedly to maneuver them around and turn the pages. Every day, he pulls out all board books from the bookcase, and every night we put them back in so he can do it all over again.

In addition, the bottom level of the bookcase holds lots of boxes he can open. One contains a collection of rubber ducks, all of which were presents for the husband that are now entertaining his progeny. Most of the boxes, however, are empty, since there are very few things we can stand to see destroyed by his enthusiastic hands. One shelf does hold a wooden mortar and pestle that Baby J absolutely loves to play with. It makes a satisfyingly loud sound when he drops it onto the shelf or the hardwood floors, and noise is J's second love, after motion.

Yesterday he got to combine his love of noise with his third love, destruction. I let him rip apart a magazine I was going to get rid of and you would have thought I had hired a clown. J laughed big belly laughs every time he got a page free, and I gasped at his prowess with the ripping. He kept that up through the entire magazine, methodically and maniacally ripping out page after page and cracking himself (and me) up with each one. Perhaps it wasn't wise to encourage the ripping of magazines, but so far he's been good about telling real books, adult books, from magazines, the former he's not to touch, the latter his to do with as he pleases. And, of course, he's not allowed in the library unsupervised or at all, really, just in case he forgets!