I’m in the middle of one of those periods where I look at my daughter, about to turn six, and am amazed. I guess I shouldn’t be. When I was five, I started reading Dr. Seuss books to my grandfather. When Trish was very young, she was reading and speaking two languages. Katie will turn six this month, and she is reading. Not just little words, either. She can sound out a very long word phonetically, and then her mind sort of CLICKS…she looks up and says the word.

We started out easy. Instead of me reading to her at bedtime as we’ve always done, she reads to me. She read “Go Dogs Go” and “Hop on Pop”. We were halfway through “I Wish I Had Duck Feet” when she decided on something harder. She is now reading me, a page or two at a time, “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.” This is a hard book. Just the word Christmas is rough for a six year old, but she’s toughing it out. Now she recognizes a lot of the harder words on sight, and even has mastered sounding out and being delighted by words that don’t exist, like ‘Grinchy’.

When she’s done, I’ve promised to read it all back to her with “the voices” and on Christmas Eve I’ll be reading “The Night Before Christmas,” hopefully to all the kids, young and old.

For now, though, my little girl is reading … and few things have made me more proud.

-DNW