Boo Boo’s Book List: Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?

Yes, I can moo. The real question is, do I want to? 

Boo Boo loves this book. It has taken a pretty permanent residency in Boo Boo’s book basket, where we keep a usually rotating collection of books on the bedside table. We rotate out the books if we’ve read them more than three nights in a row. The contents of the basket is more like a thing salad than a designated book receptacle, but that’s how it started. Then we kept finding binkies, legos, balls, socks, our harmonica, even the occasional stick under the covers, where Boo Boo had squirreled them away. Once you’ve settled down to a book and your child is nestled against you about to go to sleep, the last thing you want to do after sitting on a lego is put it away, because that means leaving Boo Boo on our bed, alone, treading halfway across the apartment (only far when you’re tired and you are paranoid about your baby falling off the bed), and stashing it in the play pen. Once you’ve done that you’re probably going to sit on something else that you will have to put away, so it’s just easier to throw everything in the book basket, which is now the everything basket. 

Anyway, Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? has been sitting there for some time, because Boo Boo loves it. Am I surprised? It’s described on the front cover as “Dr. Suess’s Book of Wondeful Noises.” I loved Dr. Suess as a kid. His made up words resembled ones I actually used. He spoke my language. He speaks Boo Boo’s language, too. 

Distilled to its most basic essence, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? is a book about a grown man who makes sounds. And that’s it. That’s all it has to be about, and that’s why we love kids, because they’re absurd, but life is absurd, and that’s why kids love Dr. Suess. This is essentially what Boo Boo does all day, and he’s expanded his repertoire from barking like a dog to also meowing, making siren noises, beeping, making vacuum noises, and mimicking his mommy when she brushes her teeth and spits out her toothpaste in the morning. Mr. Brown is someone Boo Boo can aspire to. 

But I do not aspire to read Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? when I’m tired and all I want to do is turn off the light and cuddle with Boo Boo. You cannot half-ass this book. You have to moo, I mean really moo. You have to go for the Oscar here if you are worth your salt as a parent, because no kid wants to be embarrassed by a parent who cannot even commit to a proper moo. And you cannot stop at mooing. Dr. Suess will have you SLURP like a big cat drinking, or go GRUM GRUM GRUM like a hippopotamus chewing gum, or SPLATT SPLATT SPLATT like lightning. You cannot achieve a SLURP, GRUM or SPLATT by half-assing it. Halfway through the book you, after making ten different sounds, you might be wondering if Dr. Suess if Dr. Suess loved kids but hated grown-ups. It certainly makes me wonder if this type of stuff is what my dad meant when he used to tell us, “Just wait til you have kids.” 

He’d say this whenever we begged him to take us out for ice cream, throw us harder and higher into the pool so we could make the biggest splash, whenever we wanted to ride on his shoulders, whenever we wanted to sit on his lap and drive the car around the parking lot.  

“Wait til you have kids” is something he’s say if he was about to capitulate and do the thing that he really did not want to do. Reading Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? is not what you want to do after a long day. If you had your druthers, and we wouldn’t be here if you did, you’d be reading Go The Fuck to Sleep, or at least something short like Goodnight Moon. But your child, with the help of the sadistic but genius Dr. Suess, has you mooing, slurping, grumming and splatting. Which is fun!! It really is, especially after some coffee, or at least in the afternoon. 

But after so many nights in a row of ignoring Boo Boo’s requests for Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? (requests made by overtly reaching out and pointing to it, requests that I ignore by saying “You must be pointing to Goodnight Moon! Let’s read Goodnight Moon!) I finally read it. I made all the noises. And then I fell asleep with Boo Boo.