linearity and book reading

At her evening story time, Sophie likes to be the one turning the pages.  She's gotten the linearity of it down fairly well now, attempting to turn pages from the right to the left.

The trouble is, her little fingers can't quite grasp a single page or separate it from its brethren.  The result is a frustrated reader.  

She knows that pink flower--dress comes after green pear--leaf, but when she grabs at the page, all of a sudden we've jumped to red shoes--apple.

WTF????!!!!!!!

It's like books have this mystifying ability to show one thing and then another and just as you're really getting the idea of object permanence and linear order, somebody comes around and just unilaterally decides we're gonna skip over purple grapes--tricycle, orange fish--towel, black kitten--coat, and oh just a lot of stuff to go right to gray parrot--rabbit or even to the back cover of the frickin' book.  And it really tries a girl's patience when you've been working hard and growing brain cells and developing this "right page turned over onto left page" cadence and things just refuse to stay in their accustomed order and "bah!" I say "bah!" and "bah! bah! bahbahbahbahbah-BAH!"  and fine, oh great, now Daddy's turning the pages for me, I am *so* over this. Not gonna even look at the pages anymore. Just look at the lamp over there. bah.

Rather than calming her, story time sometimes has the opposite effect.  Most nights we never get to brown bread--goat (my personal favorite) before we have to call it quits and turn to the bottle and a song.