What we're reading

I love reading to the girls. Even when I pretend I don't. Even when minutes before I was yelling at them to clear their dinner plates, to brush their teeth, to stop fighting.

We embarked on the journey through chapter books about two years ago when I pulled out an old copy of Little House in the Big Woods. Bela loved it. Mae would come and go during the sessions and catch bits and pieces of the story of Ma, Pa, Mary and Laura, but her two-year-old attention span didn't really allow her to enter the obsession the way Bela did.

Laura and Mary: Halloween 2009

By the time we were On the Banks of Plum Creek, Mae was all in. As it turned out, that particular installment of the series was our "peak", and the girls' fondness for the story slowly declined as the heroines aged. I mean, what little girl wants to hear about the trials and tribulations of a young woman, wife, mother? Eeeew. The story might as well have been about a little boy.

So it took us awhile to finish up with The First Four Years. We needed to shake up the bedtime reading routine a bit, for sure, so I pulled out The Secret Garden. We consumed its pages in about 1 week, and we haven't looked back since.

Chris's mom caught wind of our reading frenzy and sent us a box full of favorites: Where the Red Fern Grows, Because of Winn Dixie, Old Yeller, The Wizard of Oz,  A Wrinkle in Time, The Indian in the Cupboard. This last one we started several weeks ago and made it half-way through when I decided suddenly that we needed an extra dose of magic around here.

Enter Narnia.

Each night the girls ask for "just one more page, please!", even though Mae complains of nightmares about the White Witch. Even though Bela almost cried when Mr. Tumnus was turned to stone.

We began Prince Caspian a few nights ago, and the sibling foursome just realized that the ancient abandoned castle they stumbled upon was, in fact, the remnants of their beloved Cair Paravel.

I hope these girls of mine let me read to them until they are grown.

What do you read to your kids? What can we add to our list?