One of Chris’s friends gifted Kaia a Shadow Puppets version of The Little Prince. The way the “book” works is with big sheets of beautifully cut out scenes from the famous book The Little Prince that you hold up facing the ceiling with a flashlight (or your phone flashlight) under it. As you go through the scenes, you also either read the story or have the narrator read it via the pre-recorded story on their website. The idea behind it is to add variety to bedtime stories and also to encourage sleep.

The funny thing about doing this at Kaia’s age is that while she loves getting exposed to new things as a toddler, she gets very easily frustrated when she doesn’t “get” it right away. She seems to have perfectionist tendencies in this way. She tries to hold the puppets up vertically (which you’re not supposed to do), and then gets mad when she doesn’t see their perfect image show up in the light from my phone flashlight. I have to keep correcting her. Then she gets excited when she sees the image render. Then she holds the puppet up incorrectly the vertical way, and then the cycle continues.

I really like these shadow puppets myself and love making shadow images. But I think it’s going to take some time for Pookster to really embrace this and “get” it. After about 70 percent of the way through the story, she gets mad and says she doesn’t want it anymore. So, we end up moving on to her regular books and have to turn the light back on.