My reluctant, struggling reader is now . . . a reader! When we moved to Oman he was barely reading Frog and Toad books and other “I Can Read” books and even those were a fight. He kept saying that he hated reading and would flop and sulk when I required him to read to me. But the first week here we were browsing in Borders, looking for Oman travel books, and he came up to me with the first Harry Potter book in hand. I really (secretly) didn’t think he could read it, but he wanted it, so we bought it (and yes, it cost twice as much as it would have cost to order it from Amazon, but if this kid was interested in a book, I was buying it right then and there, no matter what the price!)
So the first few chapters were slow and painful as he would read aloud to me and I would help him pronounce the hard words (there were a lot of them), taught him to decipher Hagrid’s crazy dialect, and valiantly fought to stay awake. At first he was ready to quit as soon as I was each day, but after a while I noticed that he would continue to read to himself after I had to go take care of the baby.
Then two days ago he started complaining that his neck and back hurt and I realized it was from READING! He has spent so much time with his head buried in that book the past few days that he was getting a kink in his neck. He asked Calvin if his neck ever hurt from reading and Calvin said, “Oh yeah. That’s totally normal.”
Today he was determined to finish — he was up reading until 1am last night so he slept until 10am and went right back to the book, even before eating breakfast (Thus the bedhead in the photos). After he finished all 300+ pages, he proudly handed me the book and then I did a happy dance around the living room. Then we hopped in the car and immediately went to the mall to buy Book 2 and stopped at ColdStone to celebrate.
The ColdStone employee must have transferred in from Benihana, because I’ve never seen ice cream tossed around like this: He threw the scoop up about 10 feet in the air and caught it in his paddles several times, then he mixed in all the cookies and chocolate sauce like he was holding Ginsu knives, reshaped it and flung it to the other employee who caught it in the cup, stuck a spoon in it and handed it over. They must have known it was a special day.