Bookworms

One of the ways that having kids pays off in a major way is being able to share your favorite books with them. I've read the Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, The Great Brain, and the Harry Potter series aloud to the girls over the past few years. We finished book 7 of HP about a month ago, and it felt like such an accomplishment. It took us a little over a year to get through them all. What book do you even pick up to read aloud next after a year of Harry Potter? (We chose Millions. And then Fablehaven. We're on book 2 now.)

And they read on their own, too! Miriam is now old enough that she will read just about whatever I send her way. I love having a young mind to bend to my reading tastes (for now). Recently, I've been re-reading favorite books to refresh my memory and make sure they're age-appropriate for her (enough - ah, those awkward years where advanced reading ability launches kids into subject matter they're not quite ready for! One day she was home sick from school and I told her she could read The Hunger Games. I got home from work and was greeted with, "where is book 2?"). I re-read the Grisha trilogy with her in mind and set her up with Shadow and Bone the other day. It took some getting into, but she is now happily halfway through book 2.

She re-read My Lady Jane last week and we squealed together about all our favorite parts. We regularly reference jokes from What If?. We giggle about the kisses in the Cinder books and I tell her almost weekly that she simply must read The Book Thief. I know she'll pick it up one of these days. She keeps trying to get into The House of Dies Drear, but can't quite make sense of it yet. That was a hard one for me as a kid, and I can only imagine how much more foreign it is to her, being raised outside of the US. But I think she'll pick that one up one of these days, too.

When Magdalena is looking for a book to read, she asks Miriam for recommendations: "something not too scary, short chapters, and INTERESTING." Miriam is an expert at picking through shelves (ours or the library's) and offering her a selection to choose from. (That's how we ended up reading Fablehaven together.)

I love having my own two-person book club to enjoy all the time!