Emma had an instant love of books and I’m really not exaggerating when I say “instant,” as the picture to the left shows. I love this picture. Emma is only about a week old, but already she is staring intently at the brightly colored cardboard book that Peter is holding up to her. You can see by the intensity of her gaze that she is soaking in every little detail her newly developing brain will allow.
She loved to read with us and we would spend hours and hours snuggled together on the floor or couch working our way through a selection of favorite books. When she found a book she liked, and she pretty much liked them all, she would want it read again and again and again. So it was not surprising that by the time she was two, there were a fair number of books that she could pull from the bookshelf and recite word for word.
By the time she was three, the number of books she had managed to memorize was pretty impressive. If I was busy cooking dinner or got a phone call, she would entertain herself by “reading” a book out loud to herself. Her dad and I loved trying to listen in on these recitations but we had to be sneaky. If she caught us spying on her she would march right over, hand us the book and demand (very politely, of course) to be read to, “Read this, peese.”
One night when she was three we were capping off our dinner of Chinese take-out with the customary fortune cookies. We took turns breaking into our cookies and reading the fortune, Peter first, then me, then Emma. When it was Emma’s turn she broke open the cookie and pulled out the fortune. I expected her to hand it to me so that I could read it for her, but instead, she looked at it herself and recited a very authentic sounding fortune. Peter and I looked at each other, then back at her, a little bewildered by what had just happened. “ Wow, that’s a cool fortune, Emma. Can I see it?” She handed me the little piece of paper and there, word for word, was the fortune she had just recited – just read! When had that happened? When had she learned to read? And not just little first words like “cat” or “dog”; but Chinese fortune words, like “amazing” and “future.”
Fortunately, learning to read did not mark the end of reading together and we spent many more years snuggled together sharing a good book. More stories to come…
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