Readers digest

As an update to my last post, Baby B recovered nicely from Thursday’s illness. She could have gone back to daycare on Friday, I think, but we went ahead and kept her home with me since I was off that day anyway.

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I’ve got a journalism degree and read every day for a living and in my spare time, and The Husband has an English degree and gobbles up books faster than he can get them from the library.

To say that reading is an important activity in our house might be an understatement.

We understand first-hand how much reading can enhance your life in so many ways, and of course we want that for our daughter, too. It can exercise her mind. It can help her analyze information. It can help her learn to focus. It can help her focus on her goals and point her in the right direction in life. It can help her understand the world around her.

I think I can speak for both of us when I say that it makes us so happy when Baby B makes the choice — all on her own, without our insistence — to read books. She she’s deemed this a worthwhile activity that she enjoys doing. Sometimes she’ll ask us to read her a story, other times she’ll flip through the pages and narrate what’s happening in the pictures, throwing in snippets of plot she remembers from before and asking occasionally, “Can everybody see the book?”

But what I love best is when we leave her room at bedtime and she asks to read every night before going to sleep. This is not something we are going to discourage. She’ll ask us to keep her dimmer switch turned up a little so she can see, and sometimes she’ll spend half an hour devouring the books she has chosen. We can see her on the video monitor, and she looks determined to get every bit out of those books that she can. I love it.

Does it cause her to miss out on a little extra sleep?

Sure, it does.

But does it offer her so many benefits that will last her a lifetime?

Most certainly, yes.