Five years ago, when my son was only a few months old, I decided we needed to get out of the house. It had been a long winter with a newborn and spring was just starting to stretch it’s fingers into frozen Michigan. Armed with coats, blankets, a baby and a book under my arm, I marched out into our yard.
As I spread the blanket across the ground, the grass was just starting to turn from brown to green. The tree we were laying under was beginning to shoot forth tiny buds that would quickly turn into leaves of shade for me and my son. Birds that had been gone for months were beginning to return and their lovely song could be heard despite the still chilly temps. Life was beginning to bloom again… and little did I know it, life for us was starting to awake to something beautiful as well!
If people could have seen me, they probably would have thought I was crazy. Here I was laying on the ground with my tiny human who only a few weeks before would have been considered a newborn and I was opening The Book of Virtues. If you’ve never seen this book, I can only liken it’s size to that of the Bible or a dictionary or a commentary. It’s massive. Definitely not something you would think of reading to a young child.
But here I was reading a book with no pictures to my son. I knew he still couldn’t see much at this age, but I knew he could hear my voice. And so it was that over the next several months, I read him things like excepts from The Declaration of Independence, letters from Martin Luther King Jr., stories about Thomas Edison and countless poetries.
He would lay there and watch the branches of the tree dance above him and coo quietly. From the day he was born, everyone said he was an old soul, wise beyond his years. When he looked at you, it was as if he was looking into your soul, like he could see something inside of you that even YOU didn’t know existed.
At the time, I didn’t know that the 1985 Commisssion of Reading declared, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.” All I knew was that it seemed natural to me to read to my child. I felt it bonded us in a way that nothing else could.
Here we are 5 years later and I’m still reading… only now I’m reading to 3 kids. Sometimes they snuggle up with me. Sometimes they are playing quietly. Sometimes we TRY to read, but the wiggles don’t permit it. Sometimes we have great discussions about what we have read.
I recently learned that what I have found natural has a name:
– Reading our devotionals and memorizing scripture over breakfast is called a “Morning Basket.”
– Reading stories to my kids during lunch is called “Lunchtime Literature.”
– Reading books before bed is called a “Bedtime Story.”
I didn’t know these were “things.” I just simply did them because there was a bond for me and my children when we read! When conversations during dinner were taking a “less than pleasant” turn with body noises, laughter and not enough eating… I would pull out a book and begin to read. The kids would start eating and listen as I turned page after page. When the kids are overly tired and need to wind down for a rest time, I pull out a snack and a book and we unwind with our imaginations soaring to distant places.
Almost always when I put a book down, my kids beg for me to read another chapter or another book. I hope they always want to listen to mommy read. Even if they don’t, some of my fondest memories of motherhood so far involve a lap full of children and a book in my hands.
I recently picked up the book The Read Aloud Family, and while I haven’t finished it yet… I’m devouring it! Rather than showing me how important reading can be, its affirming what I already subconsciously knew… That reading to your children isn’t just about teaching them or making them smarter, it’s about creating a bond and making memories that last a lifetime.
“Reading aloud with our kids is indeed the best use of our time and energy as parents. It’s more important that just about anything else we can do.”
The Read Aloud Family