Something I thought I'd never say...

"Aubrey, Stop Reading!!!"

This child is downright obsessed with reading. Her appetite for books is nothing less than astounding to me. She can literally read a book a day, sometimes more. She reads anything and everything she can get her hands on: books, magazines, newspapers, road signs, food labels, you name it. There are certain of our books she has read several times already. She reads from sun up to sun down: sometimes, I go in her room in the morning to wake her up, and she's already up, reading. When I put her to bed at night, the last thing she does is turn out her reading light, because she's been reading. Some children go to bed snuggling their stuffed animals. Aubrey snuggles books. I just went in her room and there she was, sleeping peacefully, surrounded by her beloved books. Sometimes I call up to her, "Aubrey, where are you?" And she says, "I'm upstairs, reading!" We borrow books from the library, Grammie, friends, and piano teachers. She reads in the car, while she brushes her teeth, and at the table. At any given moment, she might be in the middle of two, three, or even four books. Yesterday, just to spice it up a little, she opened two books she'd already read, to read at the same time, alternating words from either book. The story that ensued was very interesting. She has also taken to trying to "read" license plates: taking the letters and numbers and creating a sentence, using each letter as the beginning of a word in the sentence. We used to read books together, out loud, but Aubrey found it went too slow that way: She'd rather read silently to herself, or out loud to me, because at least then, she controls how fast the story goes.

It would be a severe understatement to say Aubrey loves reading. We've reached the obsession threshold. Sometimes I find myself saying, "Aubs, you've got to stop reading! You have homework/a spelling test tomorrow/social studies project due/piano to practice/me to play with!" I think she enjoys these things too, to an extent, but what she would rather do, more than anything, is read, read, read.

And so she does.