Thank You Budding Readers!

I absolutely love to read and I always have since I was a kid. I love losing myself in a book and following the twist and turns of the story. I have bookshelves full of my favorite books that I have read and will re-read. I held out a long time against e-readers, nooks, and kindles because I am an old school guy. I love the feel of a real book. I love how your favorite books’ pages are yellowing from age or dog-eared from the last time you read it, but because I lack both the funds and the space to build a personal library in my house I succumbed to technology and L Bird bought me a Kindle for Christmas a two years ago. In just two years I have close to 100 books on it.


I think my love of reading came from my Grandma Wicks. She died when I was very young, but I do have a few hazy memories of her and our short time together. I know that she spent a lot of time with me on my ABC’s, counting and reading and I think that really started the spark for reading. Then as I got older, I really have to give credit to my Aunt Georgia and Uncle Mark. I think on a few occasions I was their “test kid” before they had their own children. I went and stayed with them a few times and they took me to Shakespeare in the Park and other art events, but during these visits I think that they really realized who I was. They saw that I was this undersized, nerdy kid with glasses that sort of liked sci-fi, so Georgia introduced me to Piers Anthony a science fiction writer and kind of fanned the flame for my love to read. They got me books instead of toys for birthdays and Christmases and when we got together she would draw me into discussion about what I had read because she had read the same series. It was really great to be able to discuss what I was reading with someone who had also read the book.

Now that I have children of my own I am trying to pass down the old school art of reading books to my girls. A Bird has a book shelf that rivals mine, she has books from when she was a toddler to kindergarten age books. So there are chewed on board books to some of her first chapter books in the Mr. Putter series and the Poppleton The Pig series. The school has a large reading curriculum even for kindergarten, so we read to her 25 days of the month, and she routinely has reading homework books that she has to read to us every night. It’s amazing to see how much she can already read and read with comprehension. So I hope that she will find a genre of books that really excite her so she can really fall in love with books.

I want the same for Nat and this is the real reason for this post. I want to give a huge THANK YOU to the Budding Readers Program. This is a wonderful program that puts books into the hands of parents to start reading to their infants and children to instill a love of reading in them. Reading to your children gives them skills and a leg up on learning that will only help them as they grow older and make their way to adulthood. The other day a woman who works with Budding Readers came into the bank where L Bird works and was asking about Nat, then she gave L Bird a card to fill out for the program. This woman came back with a bag of books for Nat and even a large hard cover Disney Princess book for A Bird. All of the books were free to us, just so we can read to our girls. The program is just awesome. If you want to find out more about them please check them out, http://buddingreaders.org/

Well, that’s enough for now, we’re off to read some of these new books. Enjoy!