To Read to the Babes

Disclaimer: I do not yet have children. The hubby and I are thinking between 1 1/2 to 2 years to start thinking about it, but I love the little ones. My niece, I think, is the coolest thing in the world, and Eric and I have been discussing quite a bit lately how we want to "raise" our children. I know, I know, best laid plans... But we're definitely in agreement about reading to our children on a nightly basis, but neither him nor I have much patience for children's picture books beyond the classics like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Goodnight Moon, The Little Engine That Could, or any of the Little Golden Books or Dr. Seuss. You know what I mean: the good stuff with excellent illustrations and good writing (I'm not picky or anything). Seriously, I would really, really prefer to avoid reading my children anything with Dora or Blue's Clues or the Backyardigans (the only exception here: Thomas the Tank Engine...he's a personal favorite). I really don't know how my parents read so many of those kinds of books to my brother and I as we were growing up. I can't imagine how great it must have been for them when he and I learned to read and started only coming to them to help figure out the meaning of a word or something. And I know that I wouldn't have the patience for such things.

So here's what our plan is, and it's based largely off of what Eric's parents did with him and his brothers for bedtime stories: read good, in-depth fantasy "literature" to the kiddos before they head off to sleep...or since I'll probably be staying home with the bitties, any time they want me to. In my head I'm thinking, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, Little House on the Prairie, and those sorts of things. I just bought His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman to kind of preview before deciding whether or not to add it to the list above. We'll probably also add some Tolkein, The Wizard of Oz series, and anything else that gets suggested to us. Of course, we'll need to wait until all of our kiddos have a long enough attention span for a chapter a night or so. I just don't picture myself reading Nick, Jr. related books on a nightly basis. All of these books just have fantastic stories with "deeper" stuff for the adults reading. And I think it's a great "family-time" kind of thing that we can all be together with the bitties in pjs and read together. What better way to pass on a love of reading onto the little ones.

What do you think? Am I pushing my own reading habits onto my children? Could this keep them from being "readers" when they grow up because we didn't read the Dora and other tv-related books? Will they be the nerds because they don't know how Dora the Explorer is when they get to school?