Not only am I having a devil of a time keeping my happy zig-zagging head in one spot, but at lunchtime I was informed that both my children had extraordinary numbers in the February Reading Race at their school. Extraordinary. Ruth read a third of the total page count for her grade, and Henry's class won the school contest for most pages read altogether.
In a way, I shouldn't be surprised. Cole was a reader. Ben reads constantly. And I started with them from birth every single day, reading and re-reading Are you my Mother? and Love You Forever until I was so sick of P.D. Eastman and Robert Munsch I thought I might turn blue.
We raced through the lyrical The Lorax and Green Eggs and Ham and then in one winter we covered the entire Little House on the Prairie set. We did some CS Lewis and some Stevenson too and now we're currently on book four of the Harry Potter series and that's only counting the books that get read aloud. The children go to bed at night and continue to read for as long as they possibly can, and most nights I am halfway up the steps before I hear the lights clicked off and everyone pretends to be asleep far too late for the average under-ten set to be awake.
But I'm still surprised because I thought everyone read the way we do. I always wonder how everyone else seems so together and so busy and so accomplished. Then I look at my kids and they have all the answers because they read them somewhere wonderful, and then I don't really care about everyone else anymore. Maybe we're the together ones.
This is awesome. That's all. Give Bridget her proud mother moment. (God knows, most days I feel like I'm doing everything backasswards.)
Whatever else I planned to write about can wait, for today, at least. Ben and Lochlan have gone to the airfield, Christian is here working in some sunny corner of the house with his laptop and I'm making egg salad for tomorrow and plotting new curtains and dishes because I am bored.
Not a slow news day, just a good news day. They should all be like this.
