Reading Rainbow

This is the scene beside my bed. The mess is a little embarrassing, but the point is that I always have lots of books sitting in that spot because I love to read, especially before falling asleep. I've read at least part of each one pictured this week, plus others that are sitting other places (neatly stacked of course).

Today was the first of our weekly summer treks to the local library. One thing I can say for myself is that I have passed down a genetic love of books and reading to my children, an obsession that I received from my own dad. Since my kids were crawling, I've been taking them to the library, and they would beg to visit Barnes & Noble long before they ever knew that Toys R Us existed. Luckily we have a very family friendly library in town with its own kids room separated off from the adult area, stocked with toys for the babies, coloring supplies for the toddlers, besides the regular library goods.

Brainy Boy and I have always been habitual readers, taking 20-30 minutes each night before falling alseep to read something. If we don't have a good book at hand, we've been known to resort to a magazine or newspaper flier. I've been worried about Little Chic, though, as she loves being read to, but she doesn't appear to be a recreational reader on her own. She reads well and does what she needs for school, but she isn't one to curl up with a book--it's just not active enough for her.

This trip was exciting, though. I generally have to put a limit on Brainy Boy's books (like "only 10 for this week") and have to require a number from Little Chic (like "at least five"). This time, rather than ferreting out all the picture books of kitties, Little Chic went to the librarian on her own, asked for a mystery, a book on cats and a few other topics, and came home with five chapter books of her own choosing. By the time we'd left the library and gotten home, she was on chapter two of the first book she opened and she was reading sections aloud to me.

I also grabbed a couple for me to read aloud to her, one being the next requirement for our Mother/Daughter book club. Although Little Chic doesn't do a lot of reading, it had the word 'club' in it so she didn't have to think twice about joining. We'll be reading The Horse and His Boy for the book club, and then I chose Stories About Cats by James Herriot since Little Chic aspires to be a vet and she is obsessed with cats at this stage in her life.

We generally set aside Tuesday evenings for library day, as it's open until 9pm and Tuesdays are Hero Guy's Fire Department Training night. We'll probably stop for ice cream on the way home too, since we did it tonight and habits like that aren't easily broken at our house. Oh, yeah - if you bump into us at the grocery store on the way home, you'll need to watch out for us. We'll all have our heads buried in one of the new books we've checked out and we won't be watching where we're going. It's really not all that hard to steer a shopping cart while your nose is in the page. We tried it tonight and it worked just fine. We only ran up on a couple of Achille's tendons.