There is no right way to read this book.
I wrote that line in the parent's note at the back and I meant it practically. The books are deliberately sparse with words, designed to leave room for the conversation that happens when a parent and child look at something together without an agenda. But I think I meant something bigger than that too.
I think I meant: you don't have to have this figured out.
Most of us have been conditioned to make reading productive. To get through the words correctly, to point at letters, to finish the page before bed. To teach something. And underneath that is a deeper conditioning. That time with our children should look a certain way, should be achieving something, should justify itself.
I know what it feels like to be sitting with my son and realise my mind is already at dinner. Already at the mess in the kitchen. Already somewhere else entirely. The caffeinated squirrel, running anxious circles while my son is right there in front of me, wanting nothing more than for me to crouch down and look at what he's looking at.
The book didn't fix that. Nothing fixes that. But frogs kept pulling me back.
I watched my dad read a book with my son one afternoon and he found things in it I hadn't found myself. He made the sound of a key turning in a lock, something on one of the pages I had read past a dozen times. My son learned it in that moment, from his grandfather. Not because anyone sat down to teach him. Because two people were paying attention to the same page and one of them noticed something small.
That's what I was trying to make. Not a teaching tool. Not a curriculum. Just an object that makes it easier to be there, because there is genuinely something to be there for. Something that meets the child where they already are and says: this thing you love is worth looking at. Slowly. Together. For as long as you want.
You don't need the frog in the umbrella or the bedtime story or the bucket with the lid. You just need to know what your child keeps returning to, and be willing to return there with them.
The slow looking happens on its own after that. It always does.
There is no right way. There is only the two of you, and whatever has caught their attention this time.