Proud Mommy Moment

Current mood: the title says it all

Since Lexi was a baby, she has always loved to be read to. I tirelessly read book after book to her in an effort to fulfill her bottomless desire for the written word.

When Lexi was 3, she came to me and asked me to teach her to read. I decided that the alphabet was the place to start. I bought a workbook. Not liking the name "work"book because of the connotation that it was work and not fun, I called it a book of activity pages to give it a more positive spin. Lexi and I would work daily on her alphabet and once she recognized all the letters, we began to concentrate on the sounds the letters made. The next step was downloading the sight word lists from the local school's kindergarten's website and we began working on those. All this occurred over the span of about a year and a half.

It became obvious to me that she was a bit ahead of the curve when, at our first parent-teacher conference with her Pre-K teacher earlier this year, her teacher held up an early reader book and told me that I should begin working with Lexi on books like it. I chuckled because Lexi had been working with such books for quite some time at that point. Her reading has greatly improved since then and now she is reading not only by sight words, but by phonics too.

Today I was exhausted because it was the last day of the semester for me - signifying the end of yet another term and drawing me closer to graduation. While Abby napped upstairs and Lexi played in her playroom, I laid down on the couch in the living room and took a short, 15-20 minute snooze. When I awoke from my short siesta, I heard Lexi speaking in choppy sentences word-by-word. When I peeked in on her, she was reading a book that was considered a level 3 reader. I was shocked and amazed. This is a book that has sat on her bookshelf for when I thought she was ready and there she was...reading it.

She and Abby do things on a daily basis that make me proud, but up to this moment I must admit that this is the proudest moment I've experienced thus far. I'm sure it will be replaced in the not-too-distant future, but for now I am loving this feeling.