A lot has happened in our lives over the past 6 months...trips hither and yon, house guests, new sports, new friends, inches grown, and so much more, but I think I will always remember Charlie's 4 year old fall and winter as the time when we tackled reading, cried, ranted, celebrated breaks and almost fell apart.
Don't get me wrong, there have been a couple high points -- when he's made small strides, but overall the experience has been painful for both of us, and I'm not sure who was more relieved when we finally finished the daily reading lessons the day before we left for Christmas in Kansas City.
But after a blissful break, I realized that unless I tied him to a chair and forced him to keep practicing, Charlie would likely forget all he'd learned long before kindergarten. A good friend in KC advised me to just trade off reading pages of his favorite books. To me this was an epiphany -- but both my mom and Jason's mom responded with slowly nodding "yeahs" when I shared the wonderful advice -- clearly it is common sense to more "advanced" moms.
Anyway, right after New Year's I had Charlie pick a book for the first day. He picked Nate the Great. A children's book, yes -- a good story, yes -- a fun read, yes -- but the crazy thing is 80 pages. It might as well have chapters. Stubborn as always, we started it...and as of our impromptu trip to El Paso last week, were about 75% the way through.
In an act completely out of character for me, this morning I suggested that Charlie choose a new book for us to continue our reading. He picked...Are You My Mother? -- a 72 page book! I'm not sure he recognized the big issue with good old Nate.
Thankfully, these pages had much fewer words, and I even agreed to read the longer of each set of pages (again, I am sure this sounds like common sense to most moms, but in addition to cluelessness, I apparently have a bit of tyrant in me).
So we began to read...right before nap...worst time of the day...and Charlie started to smile. After his second page he said, "This is fun." After his fourth or fifth he said in a quiet voice, "I am a reader." Then close to the end he said, "I am a reader!!" And after I had him read the last (long) page, he tackled me and laughed.
Before today he has recognized letters, translated letters into sounds, put sounds into words and words into thoughts and ideas, but I think that just maybe today he took that giant leap. I think that just maybe today he loved it!
P.S. I just reread the entry from Dec 5. Apparently I have thought we'd cleared this hurdle before...oh well! I'm still going to enjoy his joy and hope for the best!
