Typical of the floor in Molly's room. I am forever tripping over books books books!

I always joke that Molly was born with a book in her hand. She LOVES books and always has. We read to her from day 1 (which I wish I could use to take credit for her success in reading, but the truth is we have done nothing different with Lilly and she could care less about books). As a baby and toddler, Molly never really attached to any sort of lovey. She just ALWAYS carried a book with her. Everywhere we went, every night in bed, etc.. she had at least one book with her. Sometimes she would sit on the couch buried in books and yell, “MORE BOOKS MOMMA! I NEED MORE BOOKS!”. And when absolutely nothing else worked when we went through the terrible twos, the big turning point in this house was the day we got so fed up with her behavior that we took every single one of her books away and made her earn them back one by one (and then eventually 5 at a time because I was just so sick of all these piles of books on top of every high surface in the house!).

Now, at the age of about 2.5, Molly came downstairs one morning and sat down in front of her bookcase (which she has EVERY morning from the time she could scoot up until now), opened up “That’s not my Puppy”, and said, “GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! i still can not READ THIS MOMMA! WHEN WILL I BE ABLE TO READ!?”, to which my response was, “oh my – maybe in like 4 years?”, at which point she burst into tears and begged me to teach her.

Teach? SURE! I love to teach things! And really – how hard can it be to teach a kid to read right? Especially a really motivated one? There have been many times over the years when I considered going into teaching. I come from a long line of teachers and was always a tutor and still enjoy tutoring all the neighborhood kids when/where I can help. The best part of having kids for me has been teaching them concepts and watching how they apply them to their world and discover things. Its just fascinating to me. So I assumed this would be a cake walk.

She even takes them into the bathroom while she's doin' her bizness, and we of course have many many plastic books for the bath tub as well.

So for 2.5 years I tried so hard to help her. I taught her her alphabet, checked out special books to help her with phonics, attended a class at the library for parents of emerging readers, wrote her stories and poems using only the words she knows to encourage her, got tons of writing sheets off the internet, etc… and we made LOTS of progress for sure. Molly has been memorizing words and figuring out sentences through the context of the photos they are near for quite awhile, but the actual process of READING – of sounding out words longer than 3 or 4 letters and understanding the flow of sentence structure, has eluded us. I just assumed it was an age thing. I kept reminding her, “for goodness sakes child you are only 3!” (and then 4 and then 5)!”, etc.. and she would just glare at me and ask if we could “hire a professional”. Gee, thanks kid.

But I am feeling today like maybe Molly is right and maybe teaching is something it turns out I suck at and I will tell you why. Last night I walked in to say goodnight to Molly only to find her with the book she had just checked out of the school library that day (called, “The Crying Princess”), open across her lap while she read each and every word. Whole sentences! Multiple sentences per page! Sounding out the big long words ALL BY HERSELF! She then read me the book from cover to cover. I cried I was so proud and she was so proud of herself she was literally GLOWING from the inside. She fell asleep hugging that book.

I tried for 2.5 years to teach that kid to read. That school has had her for what boils down to just 30 days in the classroom. And yet there she is – off and running all by herself. Looks like early childhood education is out as a career path for me LOL!

Can you believe it though? My big girl is READING! I just am so proud and just SO THRILLED for her. What a world opens up when you can sit and really enjoy a good book on your own – am I right?

No Lilly – I mean enjoy READING a book – not eating it. SIGH.

The big girl and her big girl book. Look how proud she is