A book and a mother’s lap make up for a potent pairing in transforming running rascals to reading tots.
At least that’s how Emilie Buchwald puts it when she said: “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
And so in Casa Ruffolo, we read – and read and read and read. While I started the culture of opening storybooks to the twins days after they were born, these days I have been quite inept in calling them for bedtime storytime or a midday storytelling. That’s because they’re the ones who bring books to me and forces me to read them.
The operative word is “force”; and I mean that with every letter of the word. Nicholas whines and moans if I don’t read Joanna Cole’s I’m a Big Brother, and Antoinette crumbles like a poorly-baked chocolate cake when I tell her I’ll read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar later..
It’s your fault, says my husband, who is also thrown into the mix of reading madness as the twins also hand him books to read even when he is in the middle of answering a phone call from some prestigious media outfit who bombard him with questions about Olympics and China and the economics behind it.
For a while, he mastered Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, a staple bedtime story when he puts the twins to sleep at 8:00 p.m. But that book got swallowed by piles of books in a recycled diaper box where the rest of the twins reading materials and coloring books are kept. My husband now contents himself with reading Stan and Jan Berenstain’s The Berenstain Bears and Baby Makes Five.
For some reasons – my hunch is that they like the singing part – my children are hooked to Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever. The illustrations by Sheila McGraw are just as touching and pulls the twins’ attention in the same manner that Munsch’s words tug my heartstrings.
I’m like a cloud streaming with endless raindrops every single time I read Love You Forever. It’s an emotional read that any Mother can relate to. I can read it every day and I will still be overwhelmed with emotions I can’t dare control. .
You don’t really know how your children will turn out in the future. I’m specifically horrified thinking about teenage years when most of the angst comes out. I was horrible to my Mom during my adolescent period and as early as now, I’m already thinking if karma will work its way on me and give me a taste of my own medicine. I hope not.
I once discussed this fear with my sister-in-law Sheryl, and she said that as a mother you do what you can do best and hope for the better. Yes you can prepare for the future but how they will turnout exactly is a subject of surprise.
Meanwhile, I’m home with a variety of books lying on the floor with Antoinette swimming around them looking for her pink copy of I’m A Big Sister by Joanna Cole. She’s been looking for it for almost two hours now after she saw Nicholas bring the I’m A Big Brother book to me at 8:00 a.m. while I was still in bed.
My children are getting better at their pretend reading habit. Buchwald hit the right note when she said that – and I’m paraphrasing – the perfect starting venue for a child to learn to read is his/her parent’s lap.
Writer’s Note: The first photo is called Durán Madonna or Madonna in Red of painter Rogier van der Weyden. The photo was obtained from Wikipedia.
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T30WC or The 30-minute Writing Challenge is a writing exercise born out of this blogger’s need to maintain a habit of writing. Subjects of each writing challenge is just about anything but should ONLY be written within 30 minutes.
