I was asked to try out Sparkup – The Magical Book Reader and review it. One was sent to me to set up and use.

I love reading to the kids. Each night I read approximately 6 books to Andrew to get him down to sleep. Eva is down to one or two or chapters from a book. Eva goes to bed listening to the Barefoot Books Podcast and so she listens to stories all night. Reading to them at bedtime is one of my very favorite activities.

The thing is, I can’t do it all week. Working weekend nights has been good for being there all week long day and night but it stinks for not being there on the weekend nights.

While I can’t be there physically with the kids, my voice can be there and read them their favorite stories. With Sparkup I can record any one of my kids’ favorite books and they can play it whenever they want.

I recorded the book Hush, Little Baby. I sing that to Andrew multiple times each night, that is the song that puts him to sleep. After I recorded it we played it together. Andrew was fascinated with how he was able to flip to any page and it would be read by my voice automatically. Of course I should have recorded the thing without him sitting on my lap because he just kept wanting to push the button and the recording has me telling him to stop doing that at the end of nearly every page. My son has been so thrilled with the recording. My wife told me that every night he asks for the book as read by me.

You can record up to 50 books on the Sparkup. You can also connect the Sparkup to your computer and backup any of those recordings. You can also download pre-recorded books from the Sparkup website. There is a little camera that scans each page as you read it and remembers which page goes with the words that you read. That way you can flip to any page and Sparkup will put the right sound to the correct page.

Recording a story on my own was very easy to do. Recording with Andrew was still fairly each but wrangling him was difficult. He’s a wiggle worm.

I plan to use the Sparkup even more to record books for the kids to listen to when I am off to work or traveling. It gives them a way to still involve me in the bedtime routine and for little kids, routine is important.