"Mimi, do you want me to read you a book?" Maddie asked me after she had knocked, peering around our bedroom door this morning. I had read her a book last evening, which the five-year-old, paying rapt attention, thoroughly enjoyed. She "read" her memorized picture book to me with great gusto, and maybe even recognized some of the words. She had told me she is going to learn to read when she starts kindergarten this year.
Visiting at their house in Houston, we stopped at a Barnes and Noble bookstore on an outing with our grandchildren today. Maddie promptly picked out a book, "The First Day of Kindergarten," for me to read to her.
After I read a couple more books to her, during which she warmly confided, "I like it when you read to me," I suggested we walk around a bit. She was reluctant to leave the children's section, however, so I hovered nearby as I browsed. When I went to retrieve her so we could join the others, I found my friendly granddaughter listening intently and hanging on every word of a woman who was reading a story to her child!
I'm so glad she loves books. Yesterday when the subject of school's starting came up, her big sister, who will be in second grade, moaned that she was not looking forward to the dreaded subtraction. Maddie said, "I like school! I want to be ed-u-cated!" I had to laugh at her sophistication and big words. When I told her parents what she said, they burst out laughing, too.
"What does 'educated' mean, Maddie?" I asked, to which she promptly replied, "Learning!" Well, she is certainly doing that! And so is her big sister. Last night Anne-Marie asked me if I wanted her to put a picture on my iPhone "lock-screen." I selected one of the baby, and she had it on in nothing flat, then putting it on my "home screen" as well, with a few deft taps of her seven-year-old fingers.
Baby brother Isaac is busy learning constantly, too, from figuring out how to reach a toy as he practices his new-found crawling skills, to programming his computer mind with the varied tastes of things he puts in his mouth, which is everything. He is also intrigued with the sounds he can make by rapping a plastic cup on the table edge, or the satisfaction he gets out of crushing a paper cup and hearing it crackle. Awhile ago he was found, puppy-like, with his sister's small purse dangling from his clenched teeth, all four of them!
This morning I suffered a blow to my self-esteem when outspoken Maddie told me I was old. "No, I'm young! Pa Pa told me!" I said in mock-protest. She informed me she was young and I was not. At any rate, hopefully, I'm not too old to learn! Or even teach them something, however irrelevant it may seem to them in their digital, electronic world!
No comments:
Post a Comment