Pre-reading

As Tuck fought sleep a few nights ago, he asked, groggily, if we could go to the library "to find books about crocodiles and iguanas and sea turtles."  Going to the library to pick books - instead of just to see the fish and to play with Legos and to get stamps on his hand - is something I'd like to encourage, so I agreed.  When he woke the next morning he remembered the request and was eager for the library to open. 

He asks that his door be left cracked at night, with the hall light on, so he can read in bed.  And we find him in the morning with books in his sheets, imprints on his face, pages dog-eared and covers bent.

He shares story time with his brother now, retelling the most familiar tales, and he recognizes the word S T O P, whether on a red octagonal sign or not.

Andy and I haven't been able to talk, for at least a year now, about when to go to the 'Zee oh oh' unless we're serious about going right.this.instant.

Tuck takes pride in adding "words" to the grocery list, and wants to label drawings with their initial sounds, like the rectangle he traced yesterday needed an "R" in the middle.

A few days ago while he sat on the toilet and I sat, as instructed, on the other side of the closed bathroom door, he asked me to bring him a newspaper or nag-da-zine.

Tucker likes to talk about whose name starts with which letter, and commercials for things like pizza leave him saying things like "pizza starts with P!"

We found the reptile section at the library the other day, and Tuck pulled books off the shelf with wild abandon.  He sat in the middle of a big pile, flipping pages and flipping out - in a not-quite-library voice - over the animals he'd discovered.  We  carefully chose three books and sort of carefully reshelved the rest. 

All this getting ready to read may be the neatest part of parenting so far.
JEB