Photo a Day: Reading

I actually took today’s photo (and posted it on Facebook) yesterday, not realizing that today’s subject was “Reading.” But it is so perfectly appropriate that I am going to use it anyway. My husband had a lunch date with a longtime friend of his father’s, so I brought my son along with me to my daughter’s dance class, and I had encouraged him to bring along one of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books that he got for Christmas to keep himself entertained. He has just begun to read silently to himself, and although at times he’s simply not in the mood, at others he will happily curl up with a book for an hour at a time. This was one of those latter times. And the fact that he was snuggling against my lap while he read was the icing on the cake.

The combination of snuggling with his sincere enjoyment of a pastime that is so dear to me touches my heart in that special way that seeing your own personality (particularly the most positive aspects of it) in your child does. Like me, my son is something of an introvert, and although we both enjoy spending time with friends in limited doses, we also both enjoy our solitude, and cultivate a rich, imaginative, inner life because of it. A voracious reader from the age of 4, I lived in many worlds discovered in my favorite books. I traveled to Wonderland, Narnia, Mars, the Big Woods, Prince Edward Island, space, the past, the future. I was an explorer, an author, a frontiersman, a queen, an orphan, a magician, a time traveler. I learned to be curious, to ask questions, to imagine “what if?”. I learned to think. And all because of reading. It was both an adventure and an anchor. It was a refuge and a release. It was – and is – a passion.

And if my son follows that same path, I can’t wait to see all the adventures he’ll have.

Reading.