Zoey, Her Dad...and Forty-Eight Pages of Giant Peaches and Talking Centipedes

After Daddy and Zo snuck off for our usual Sunday breakfast...and Mom slaved over a filthy carpet...we did some book shopping and came home a few hours into the morning with a bag full of books and an eagerness to dive into them. We slipped through Peter Pan's Return to Neverland, and some space pirate treasure nonsense, an ABC mystery book and before you could say Fantastic Mr. Fox we were busting into James and the Giant Peach. I had only bought the book to stash away for a day when Zo was older, and perhaps, more interested and capable. She's never shown much of an interest in being read chapter books...until this morning!

We laid on the bed, as sunlight poured through the window, and read forty-eight pages of James and the Giant Peach this afternoon...no less than a dozen or more chapters, and Zo was enraptured. She laid beside me and swallowed page after page whole, she mimicked the dialogue, and pretended that peach juice dripped from the ceiling into her mouth...she giggled at streets full of rushing chocolate, and she smiled enormously at the notion of forty-one pairs of boots on that centipedes feet. Occasionally Mom poked her head in the door, and sometimes jumped onto the bed and helped dramatize Roald Dahl's awesome nonsense, and Zo was transfixed.

Forty -eight pages...we only stopped to watch Tom Brady and the Patriots, and even then, we thought twice about putting it down. Forty-eight pages, and she's not quite three years old. I think we've successfully built a reader.