Monday, March 9, 2009

As a kid I couldn't read enough. I LOVED books (still do). It is a very satisfying thing to see my two boys become avid readers at their young ages. Taylor is an absolutely voracious reader. A year ago, I bought him a set of about 8 books by Roald Dahl (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame). He read all of them in two days! He's since reread most of them a couple of times. He's read Trumpet of the Swan probably four times. He just loves to read. Parker doesn't love books on the level Taylor does, but he is still way more into reading than most kids his age. One of my favorite things is when either of them delve into and enjoy a book that was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.

A couple days ago, I introduced Taylor to a series of books by an author named Gordon Korman. They are light, humorous books about a couple of boys attending a boarding school in Canada. As a kid, I thought they were the funniest books ever. Taylor apparently agrees. In two days he has read a couple hundred pages. Usually in the morning, he is the last kid up. He enjoys his beauty rest. But this morning, he got up early enough to get all ready for school and set the table by 7:30AM so he could read more of these books. I love it:)

Another set of books I enjoyed as a kid was a huge collection called "Best in Children's Stories." Each book has several stories in it, ranging from historical accounts of the pilgrims on the Mayflower to poetry to Puss in Boots. I had these in a box downstairs until this weekend. Parker has started reading them and is loving it. The shorter stories are more in line with what he likes as a reader. But it really is fun to see both boys following in dad's footsteps in a good way like this.

Saturday, we started putting up some shelves in the boys' room. The first thing we did was move the bunk bed so we could have access to the wall behind it. (The shelves were going to be up high to display trophies, etc. Well, to make a long story short, we didn't get any of the shelves up on Saturday, but we did buy and assemble a new bunk bed! (We knew we would need one that was "twin over full" when Chu Chu arrives, and we had already taken the old one somewhat apart to move it away from the wall, and why go to the trouble of re-assembling it when we would have to change it out within three months, etc.) So now the boys have a new, cool bunk bed that they love. Maybe we'll do the shelves this weekend...

Jeremy