The Lone Ranger is Protecting Us

Supernova numbers 6 and 7. Our sixth child has an imagination that really took off. He’s only 5 years old, but he showed me a catalog the other night. In it he pointed out all of the cool things he’s love to have. Not video games, or electronic gadgets. He wanted the Space suit, with helmat and boots. He wanted the jet pilot suit with helmet . He likes excavators, trains, trucks, bulldozers, cowboys, and swords. The other day, he came up to me completely duded up like the Lone Ranger. “Whadda ya think, Dad?” he asked. “Well,” I replied. “I feel very safe with you around,” I said. “Dad, read me this book”, is something I hear from him all of the time. It’s great.

Our 7th child is only 2 years old. He practically walks around with a book in his hand. His vocabulary is really good, and he’s following in the footsteps of his siblings. We are having a blast with that little stinker. One benefit of reading that I haven’t mentioned, is that your children will begin to talk like adults sooner and will not fall into that annoying type of “baby talk” that I hear so many children use. I never thought much about it until people started telling me “your children talk so mature”. Then I started noticing how much I disliked the “baby talk” of many children. So read to your kids a lot. And don’t talk “down” to their level. You’ll be rewarded with mature speaking kids.

Catapults and Other Machinations

In the Supernova of reading benefits, one person shines extra bright: my second son. He has taken up reading as if it is more important than breathing. He will wake up in the morning, and walk around reading his current favorite book while getting ready for the day. When we go to the library, he is the type of person who will finish reading one of his chapter books on the way home. He will only have a stack of books to carry him through until the next visit. Not only does he read, he is making complicated drawings of catapults and other machinations of mankind. Then he loves to explain his diagrams in great detail. Perhaps he will be an engineer, or another Rube Goldberg.

Mother Goose Dinner Party

Back to the Supernova of benefits of
reading to your children: My second daughter, was read to from a very
young age, just like all of out kids. At age 14, she is writing her
own stories, and illustrating them. Westerns seem to be her
favorites. She is working on a screenplay. She is perhaps the most
like me of all the children, in her complete rapture in humor. For
our Mothers Day dinner, we all dressed up like something from Mother
Goose.(Get it? Mothers Day. Mother Goose?) My second daughter came
to the table dressed as the WALL that Humpty Dumpty fell off of. I
haven’t laughed so hard in a while. She still makes me smile.

O the Beauty of Blogging

National Children’s Book Week is ending on Sunday, the 16th, and I’ve been celebrating in my own way with Jerry Begly’s Blogathon 2010. I’m putting out one blog post every 2 hours until the end of the week. Whew! You readers are keeping me hopping. I’m looking out the window at an awsome crescent moon on the western horizon right now. What a beautiful way to work at night. Have you read even one book to your kid or grandkids this week? That’s a super way to celebrate this week, and your connection to the next generation. I still remember stories I heard from my grandfather, and the first time in my life that I ever read “The Little Engine That Could” was at Grandpa Begly’s house in Berlin.

The Best Kind of Book

What kind of children’s book do you like to read? Dr. Seuss. I Spy. Richard Scary. Sandra Boynton. Those are all favorites of mine. I like cartoons. Long drawn out verbiage bores me and my kids. Yes, chapter books are just fine as the kids grow a little older. I like color, and surprises. Books where the child goes to sleep at the end of the book are too predictable and trite. The only exception to that is Dr. Seuss’s “The Sleep Book”. Watching all of those crazy little creatures yawn make me yawn when I read it. Just writing about it makes me want to yawn right now.