"In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon...

...and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon."  Who doesn't have the entire Goodnight Moon book memorized??!!  There was a time in my early mommy years when I thought I might never be able to go for a run again without inadvertantly having those hypnotizing words pop into my head and play over and over and over!  (Now it's the lyrics to Justin Bieber songs, but I digress...)
I read an interesting study this morning out of Loyola University Health Systems talking about the impact of reading on childhood development.  It's no big secret that reading to children is good for their cognitive development, but what was interesting was how they were able to break it down by age-group and derived benefit.  For example, they found that for infants, parents reading to them is a very valuable experience, but it turns out it's not so much what you read, as how you read it.  Have an important work report that you are saddled with, but suffering from the mommy-guilt that we all suffer from - you know, the guilt that you're not spending quality time with your infant when you're home in the evenings?  No worries - just read that work report out loud, in a sing-songy voice, and your baby will love it just as much!  As babies morph into toddlers, they love faces, so books with pictures of other babies, children, and even adults are always favorites.  A photo album will even do, as long as you narrate the pictures that you're looking at.  Narration and interactive reading, where you point to pictures, ask your child questions, and have dialogue mixed in the middle of reading, have been found to be extremely beneficial to children's language development.  So, if you're a Type A Personality, like me, you're just going to have to get over the fact that interruptions mid-sentence are part of the process!  Your kids may even (gasp) want to shut the book and get a new one after you've only read the first two pages!   It's not a sign of ADHD...it's a sign that they're enjoying books, and wanting a rich literary experience!   As children move through the toddler stage, they love repetition.  Hence, the Goodnight Moon reference.  If they want to read the same book over and over again, don't worry that they're not getting exposed to enough variety.  It's very normal for them to want to read the same book every night for two weeks in a row.  Go ahead and just surrender to the fact that you'll always be able to finish those words by heart:
"....goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere."

A group that's doing great things to promote literacy in children: http://www.readingfoundation.org/
A great idea for a birthday gift for the baby or toddler who has everything?  Donate a book in their name to a local library, to their preschool classroom, or childcare center!