The Reader

While we have loved St. Catherine's, I have to confess that there have been times over the past year when we have wondered whether Jamie might not benefit from a more structured environment. Our biggest concern was his reading, or lack thereof. Fortunately, we kept the faith, and suddenly in the last 2-3 weeks the penny has dropped and he is reading like a maniac. It's funny, we are often saying that Jamie's behavior as a 5, almost 6, year-old is exactly consistent with his behavior as a 6 day, 6 week-old and sure enough he has followed his usual pattern here. He did not get teeth, for instance, for ages and then got them all at once. He did not walk until he was 18 months, but then he was running a day later (Thus proving the old adage wrong. To wit, you almost can run before you can walk!).

It used to be a little hard to tell when he was reading or not because he has such an incredible memory that he could recite books that we hadn't read in months word for word. But he proved his new skill the other day on a totally unfamiliar subject. We had been talking somehow or other about Tasmanian Devils and he was asking us what they looked. We had to admit that we didn't know either. Well, the next week he comes home with a book about them. We asked how he had found it, since he wouldn't have recognized a picture and he said, with a bit of a teenage exasperation, "I READ the title, of course!" In one sense, he is clearly enjoying this new skill, and is voraciously devouring text whereever he finds. In another sense, though, he is surprisingly casual about it.

He does like to lord this ability over Connor, as with his math skills. But for his part Connor is moving forward too. He was drawing the other day and then proclaimed, "Come look! I wrote my name!" Sarah and I proceeded over ready to see only scribbles and say "Oh that's so nice sweetie," but we were a little speechless to see, in jumbled form albeit, the rather well-formed letters C-O-N-N-O-R.