Little gorilla learns to read - The Jewish Standard

If your kid is still sleeping at 6:30 a.m., the normal parental instinct is to leave them alone. Which is why I couldn’t believe my drowsy eyes that almost every day for three years, I resisted hitting the snooze button and dragged myself and my little girl out of bed to pursue a goal loftier than sleep.

Specifically, to read aloud all seven books of the Harry Potter series.

Looking back, it seems crazy that this plan should ever have been contemplated, much less implemented and persisted with through to completion. In theory, it should feel like a painful memory. To the contrary, this was an especially genius parenting hack, and my only regret is that I didn’t think of it until my fifth kid.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Apparently this is especially true when you are a mother who is far too tired after a long day to read to your child at bedtime without falling asleep long before you finish a board book, much less a chapter of a novel.

I remember my littlest girl gently stroking my hair or squeezing my hands to wake me enough to continue reading a few more sentences. Much better than the rather aggressive shoves my older daughters used. One of my baby’s favorite books was Hug, a very sweet little story of a baby gorilla who can’t find his mama. He wanders through the savannah past various species of loving mother-child pairs until at long last he finds his own maternal embrace. The story is told through illustrations, with only the word “hug” on every page. So the fact that I fell asleep before I could simply repeat the word hug 10 times while flipping through the pages was a pretty good indication that something had to give.

A situation specific to my daughter added urgency to find a better way. Like my oldest, my baby had strabismus, a common condition of eye muscles that makes it harder for the eyes to synchronize. My girls had no trouble learning their letters, but were slow to learn to read because their eyes went in and out of focus, making it hard to keep their place on the page. My oldest had mastered all the pre-reading skills for what seemed like eons before she could put it all together. But as the oldest, she had a younger mom with much more time on her hands and fewer inducements to doze off at bedtime. We probably read her 20 books a night.

Not so for the youngest in the family, who was lucky if we noticed it was bedtime, let alone found energy for an extended routine. Some nights we were happy if we remembered to brush teeth. Meanwhile, her eye condition led to her falling behind in learning to read, and she needed more practice, not less. While her classmates were moving through Bob books, on to Dr. Seuss and then Magic Treehouse, daughter #5 was getting taken out of class to trace letters in sand and review flash cards with sight words. At this rate, my little pigeon was never gonna drive the reading bus.

It was one thing to fall behind in her skills, an issue that grew in importance once her peers could read independently and classroom assignments grew more challenging. We had faith she would get there eventually. I was more worried she’d miss out on so much of the literature that her sisters had consumed all through their childhood, nurturing their imagination — not to mention granting me freedom from obligatory night-time wakefulness as they learned to read on their own.

In a lightbulb moment, it occurred to me that neither the 10 Commandments nor the Constitution specified that children must be read to only at night. And so, our morning reading routine was born. We would wake up before the rest of the house began to rise, murmuring Modeh Ani and Shema while she was mostly still in dreamland. We’d cuddle in her bed or in a big chair, enjoying some extra snuggles and a drawn out time to shed her slumber. Then we would read for about half an hour, at the time of day when I am most awake and needed the fewest pokes and prods to finish the paragraph, the chapter, the books. Bit by bit, her own reading skills improved as her little finger dragged across the line, pausing on whatever words she recognized.

By the time Voldemort and Harry poised for their last epic battle, my girl could enjoy reading aloud herself, although it was a few more years and several more books until we let go of our sweet mornings together.

In retrospect, this innovation not only allowed extra reading time, but also made mornings so much easier. With my older kids, we squeezed out every drop of sleep and then sprinted through our precious few morning minutes together in a familiar pattern of rushing, yelling, and stressing out while still half asleep — a high emotional cost for each extra moment under the covers. Getting up slowly, with hugs and stories that let us ease into full wakefulness before having to start getting dressed and out the door, made the morning a time to enjoy rather than dread. And to this day, we enjoy reading aloud together, a perfect excuse for this mama to give her little gorilla a hug. If I start to doze, she just reads a little louder.

Laura (Lori) Fein of Teaneck is a litigator at Eckert Seamans LLC. She is the daughter of the greatest mom ever, who she hopes is reading this, and the mom to five daughters who probably never will. Her podcast Mommash: The Oy and Joy of Family is available on all platforms, and she can be reached at mommash.podcast@gmail.com.

Opinion

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