to the limits. It has encouraged and inspired me more than anything else on the earth. It bonds me more quickly to other readers than anything amount of time or experiences. As I faced a cancer scare earlier in the year, it caused me to reflect and journal a lot....leading me to write Bobby a list of things a father might not think to do and things I wanted Abby Kate to learn if I was not around to teach her. One of the most important things to me is fostering a love for reading in our children. My Mom was great at that. I would go to her countless times in a day, asking for ideas to break through my boredom and she always challenged me to go curl up with a book. Thanks Momma. So thus to the point....Abby Kate has loved reading, particularly a book called Miss Spider's Tea Party since she was terribly young....I think because the cadence of the language is so beautiful, the pictures colorful...but lately, she is loving ALL her books. She will sit for long periods of time (a feat in and of itself) thumbing through the pages. But my most favorite, the part that causes my spirit to scream with thankfulness is this... she comes toddling over, places a book in my hand, signs "more" and then climbs into my lap, leans back against my chest where I can smell her sweet hair and feel each sweet breath and I know... there is nothing the written word has never done more for me than this....
2 comments:
The book thing is SO special to me too! Isaac LOVES books -- he wants to be read to, but also will spend time throughout the whole day finding his various baskets of books and reading by himself. He might spend 10 to 20 minutes doing this several times each day. Add that to the reading sessions we try to fit in, and he probably spends two hours with books every day! A boy of my own heart! Honestly, when he was much younger, I did not know how to get him interested in books -- he seemed to not want to read. It was MY Mom who did it with him -- she is such a wonderful speech therapist, and makes reading for little ones so much fun -- she taught him to love books! One thing she really taught me is that many children don't want you to actually READ the story or the words. Isaac does not like the story books very much yet -- he wants to look at the pictures, listen to you talk about them, and DO stuff with the books -- so you go quickly through the pages and make up your own way to engage them in the book that you do every time. For example, we have book with pictures of puppies and one word to describe each one -- we read each word, but we also have a "thing" we do for a few of the pages. On one of the pages, the puppy is chewing on the shoe. EVERY time we read this book, when we get to that page, I say while pointing my finger at the book, "No, No Puppy! Don't chew on the shoe! No, No!" Then I try to get Isaac to do the same thing. He LOVES it. We try to do that kind of thing with every book. I know it sounds simple, and you probably already do it, but that has been the key to reading with Isaac -- engange him in the book on HIS level, go quickly thorugh the pages if he wants to, and try to do the same things each time!
Love YA and LOVE The pictures.
Oh STEPH, this made me cry! There is something so magically perfect about reading to your baby.
Nancy
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