April 5, 2013

I think there should be a refresher school course for parents. My little monkey loves books. She's still working on the reading part, but I know she'll get it in the next year. The better half and I field endless requests for "can you read me a story?" We try to oblige as often as possible. After all, it was our doing. We taught her from a very early age to love reading and books. When she was only a few days old the better half started reading her the sports section out of the Brandon Sun. Both writers ourselves, we knew fostering the love of reading started early. Besides, it gave us another way to interact with her when she was an infant and babies really respond to your voice and the attention. Not all of her books have been that interesting. She loves Disney Princess books or any book about princesses or fairies. We've really covered that subject. And I found the ABC the counting to 100 books a little dull.

But now I'm quite delighted that know we've discovered "Fancy Nancy," books written by Jane O'Connor. O'Connor seems to have great insight to the person my little girl is. Fancy Nancy is a little girl, about 7 or 8 years-old that loves everything fancy. But what's really great about O'Connor's books is that the author is teaching her readers something as they are enjoying reading about Fancy Nancy's adventures. Fancy Nancy also likes to use big words, and this has increased my five year-old's vocabulary substantially since we got into these books. It's the adventures my monkey reads about in books, that makes me wish there was a brush up course on these subjects for parents. The latest Fancy Nancy is about a school trip to the planetarium and discusses Fancy's Nancy's love of stars.

So quite rightly, my daughter assumes I know everything and asks me to name some other constellations (her big word this week). "Um, I say, the little dipper, the big dipper, Gemini, Pegasus..." I was short by about 84 constellations. So if summer ever comes, I've promised to keep the monkey up past her bedtime and drive out to a dark field somewhere with the better half's telescope where we can gaze at all the stars. The one good thing about spring being so late this year is that I have time to brush up on my space knowledge so I can continue my daughter's illusion that her mother knows everything!