The Big, Red Book

Webster's dictionary.

A big(and I do mean BIG), red book. More suitable for use as a step stool or booster seat to a small child than as its intended purpose. Or so you would think.

Not to me. I could(and did) sit for hours with Webster's on my lap reading about all the strange and interesting words in the English language. I blame my mother.

Now what some people would term "encouraging educational exploration" or "providing the child with the tools to learn" my mother refers to as "what you do when you don't know the answer to the question your child asks". No pride or self-deception here. She plainly didn't know how to answer some of my questions, so instead of making up some vague answer or deflecting my questions, she sat down with me and the big, red book and we found the answer together. Never mind that along the way we found a lot of other answers to questions we didn't ask. Or that minutes (and occasionally a full hour) would fly by in which many more productive things should have gotten done.

The unintended consequences? Hours wasted, dinners gone cold, a ridiculous vocabulary, an excellent verbal score on the SAT, a BA in Linguistics, and the inability to quickly look something up in the dictionary.