Sarita at the Sonlight blog reported a surprising finding from a survey that shows kids like their parents to read aloud to them long after they are able to read pretty well for themselves. The report says:
Kids wish their parents had continued to read to them after they reached school age. Across all age groups, 83 percent of kids say they loved or “liked a lot” those times when parents read to them aloud at home. Only 24 percent of 6-to-8-year-olds and 17 percent of kids ages 9 to 11 say that someone reads aloud to them at home, and many seem to miss it. Four in ten children in that 6-to-11 age range say they wished their parents had continued reading aloud to them. Kristen Harmeling, a researcher at YouGov, a consulting firm that helped Scholastic to conduct the study said one clear message for parents from this survey is to “start early and stay at it.”
We really never gave a ton of thought to the fact that we continued to read aloud to the kids all the way up to when they went to college at age 14. We all (not just the kids–me, too) derived a ton of benefit from our read alouds. We enjoyed it, but it also gave us time to talk about what we read. That was especially important when it came to things like apologetics, politics, history, ethics, philosophy, origins and just anything that had to do with the logical, scholarly, moral and practical reasons for holding to a Christian world view. I also helped with things like manners and how to act in social situations (How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc.) Enjoyment was reason enough to keep reading aloud to the kids, but there were other, more important reasons for doing it. We wish we could say we did it for all those other reasons, but we mostly just did it because we liked it.
Betty Blonde #281 – 08/14/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
These pictures are the room where we really spent most of our time. You could call it the kitchen, but it was really not just a kitchen. It was a living room/kitchen/breakfast nook with a fireplace and it was (for us) a very big room. There is a formal dining room and a separate, more formal living room where we did a few things, but this is the room where we lived. It belonged more to Lorena and Christian than Kelly and I because they were almost always there. Lorena worked in the kitchen and the laundry room next to it while Christian studied at the bar across from the stove, often with his cat Rubix laying on his arms.
We entertained mostly in this room, too. It was the place where we had the most seating, so people gravitated there. We did not entertain frequently, but when we did, it was usually with a pretty good sized crowd from church or school or both. The formal dining room was too small, so we set up tables that ran from the area in front of the fireplace all the way past the breakfast nook.
It might be at least partially because I am listening to Kelly’s really excellent Enya channel on Pandora, but there are lots of additional reasons to feel melancholy and nostalgia. We just received two very touching emails about some dear friends in their very last days on this earth. The are the same era as Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. They have been good and faithful people all their lives so there is joy in this, too, but we are hearing this kind of news way to often these days. It is hard to lose those who have been an example and an encouragement in all the right ways over the entire course of my life.
This is the first year our family has ever been split up for Thanksgiving. The kids, off at college on the west coast, will have Thanksgiving at their Aunt Julia’s house in Portland with Grandpa Milo, Grandma Sarah and a bunch of cousins. Lorena and I will have Thanksgiving here in North Carolina with Lorena’s aunt and uncle, Juan and Irma from San Antonio, her cousin Beto and his wife and three little girls from Dallas, and our friends from church, Emilio and Rocio and their son Pedrito and Rocio’s sister. The conversation here in North Carolina will almost certainly be 99% in Spanish. We hope to put up a few pictures later in the day.
Christian starts his last year as a teenager today. A couple of days ago he received the final piece of paper from his time at NCSU. There is no longer any official connection to NCSU. He is officially and completely graduated. I get to run down to Tempe today after work to bring him the computer he purchased with part of his ASU grant. The computer he bought for NCSU died a couple of months ago and he has been limping along with an ASUS tablet/laptop that is awesome, but not really powerful enough for his current work.
When Lorena and I first got married, we moved to Boynton Beach, Florida. We lived there for about three years. Another recently married couple moved there from Puerto Rico about the same time as us. The wife’s name was Vanesa. Her husband and I both worked as engineers Motorola, just down the street from the apartments where we lived. One day, Vanesa’s husband came over to our apartment and told me he noticed that I had gotten driving lessons for Lorena to help her get her drivers license here in the states. He wanted to do the same for Vanesa, so the two of them started taking driving lessons together. They have been fast friends ever since.
The picture to the left was taken from inside Kelly’s Ford Fiesta as we entered Arizona on our way to take Christian to Arizona State University and Kelly to University of Washington. We had a great time, but the trip was filled with melancholy. This trip really marks the end of the family’s educational journey and the beginning of Kelly’s and Christian’s individual education/vocational paths. They will be at different schools in different towns over 1400 miles from each other and over 2000 miles from our home in North Carolina for the first time ever.
