Chloe has become a reader. This is new to us, and I am very excited about her burgeoning love for words and storycraft. She is reading, ‘Percy Jackson: the Lightning Thief‘. We bought the movie last night on our Hannukah shopping frenzy. We talked about our experiences reading books that have been made into movies, and naturally my agenda was to make a plug for books being vastly superior. That started the conversation.

Last night as we were snuggling, she explained how she feels her relationship to reading is. Think about a typical volcano shaped mountain as you keep reading. She takes her hand up one side of the volcano and says, “I feel like I get all into a book until I get into the middle of the plot (top of the mountain now), and then my interest just falls off,” her hand free-falling onto the bed.

“Your relationship to books is new,” I say. “It will be really interesting for you to see how or if that changes as you develop as a reader.”

“I would like to take a watermelon up to the Eiffel Tower,” she says. I’ve had a Tylenol PM and am not making any connection here and I certainly didn’t catch any segue way.

“What does that have to do with reading?”

“I would drop the watermelon from the top of the Eiffel Tower to show what I mean.”

“Not sure the people below you would appreciate your object lesson,” I’m stunned and fascinated by this connection, and beginning to wonder what kind of intellect this is going to look like when it’s full grown.

“Mimes? They have gratitude for everything,” she offers. We both giggle til our bellies hurt. I’m a little bit in awe.