Growth rates
(1)
Last spring Edith was barely a reader. She still sounded out words like it and and.
However, she was a voracious absorber of stories read aloud, as you all know, and on a whim we began Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Last night we discovered she'd stayed up for 90 minutes after Tom put her to bed, reading the climactic chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to herself. The only hard part, it seems, was the pressure of leaning on her elbows that long.
And after a few more chapters with Tom the next morning there it was, the whole saga completed in nine months, during which Edith grew from a non-reader to a reader of complex, extensive prose unaided.
For my money it's almost as miraculous as the nine months between conception and birth.
(2)
Most baby books give you a rule of thumb for infant growth: A baby should double her birth weight by six months and triple it by one year.
At 3 years 2 months, Alice finally has tripled her birth weight. Size 2T pants still fall off her, but she is on the way up.
She may not go to the prom in a carseat after all.
5 comments:
Good for Edith! Reading surely opens the world wide for you. Especially those of us who LOVE it. As for Alice. You know my feeling about how kids grow. this from a mother who had one who had to be measured every three months for two years only to have my mother take her in for me once and the doctor calling me to say - well, she will definitely be taller than your mother - who is about 4'10". I say - look at the child. Are they active? Healthy? Eat pretty good? Bright eyes? Yes? Thank leave them alone. :) Nothing you can do top force a child to grow. also now have a granddaguther who at a year and a half was still wearing 9 month clothing. We are a smaller family - and so are our kids. No biggy. One thing that always impresses me about your children is the bright eyes and shiny hair - signs of good health. Love to all,
Crystal
Go Edith! Elan is just now starting to read, if it called that yet, the painful sounding out of words that he often cannot recognize, even if he sounded them out almost correctly. I do hope he becomes a reader one day, though we are a long time away from anything resembling Harry Porter, I suspect. However, I am finding that kindergarten milestones are particularly cool (like discovering this weekend that he can add much better than I thought he could and taking training wheels off the bike)because they come with such a sense of accomplishment and pride for him.
As far as the size goes, I think that eventually we will end up winning the "I have the tiniest child" competition (at least in height), given the genetic pool here, not that I want to compete. Ari is almost 4 and 2T pants are mostly still too long on him, Elan is almost tall enough for 4T at age 6 and still not officially heavy enough for a booster by MA law, though we take liberty with that. The hard thing about all this is that both children have already come home complaining that they have been made fun of because of their height. I cannot make them taller, but how do I make them confident enough to deal with the cruelty of peers. Ahh,I should have my own blog for my angst, not hijack yours. :)
I love to hear about Edith's reading - it gives me a sign of what's to come. Matilda's about where Edith was a year ago, and it's crazy to think she could be staying up to polish off the last HP in another year.
A similar, though lesser, milestone: Matilda and I happily listened to NPR in companionable silence in the car recently! A minor miracle in my book!
I didn't realize you had gone ahead with the later books in the HP series with Edith -- I remember talking with you about how dark the story gets by the end of book 4. Still, how wonderful that she's reading such things on her own! We will definitely start on The Phantom Tollbooth while I'm in town. :)
All 7 books in 9 months?? I'm impressed... and jealous. Did you tell her that back in the "olden" days, we had to wait--sometimes years--for the next one to come out?
Soren's been loving them too, but it goes slowly only because I want to be part of the experience and insist on reading them out loud to him (even though I know he's dying to just snatch the books away from me and read them himself at a much faster pace). For a while, I was trying to parcel them out slowly, mostly to avoid reaching #4 until he was older, but I recently gave up, gave in. As a friend noted, they don't react the same way we do; they might not even quite grasp the darkness as much as we do. Hoping that's true!
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