15-minutes a day

There's a public campaign these days that parents are supposed to read 15-minutes a day to their kids. It doesn't sound like much, like, "I should be able to do that!". But I find company when I talk to Hoa (and probably other moms of more than one kid) that it's not as easy as it sounds.

It's as easy as it sound for Tobey. Because we were able to read to him a lot when he was younger, he loves to have us read to him. To the point that sometimes I need to cut reading time short. Or I just have to admit that I'm not up for reading the firefighter book AGAIN. We also read him Bible stories at bedtime and now with his church Lil'K lesson, it's even more reading. 15-minutes a day is no problem for Tobey.

Eli is a different story. Not only because he's a 2nd kid but because he's just more antsy. He really won't stay still for more than a page at a time if we read to him in the daytime. And I'll read to him as long as he'll sit during our nighttime Bible story reading (he squirms 1/2 way through the first story but I kind of clamp him in to last 2 stories, our standard for when we used to read to Tobey).

Now Eli seems to be a little more amenable to reading. Maybe because he sees Tobey ask to read so much, Eli will now grab a book and give it to us to read to him, for the 5 seconds that he can pay attention before he turns his sight to a different book to then destroy (Eli loves to bend covers backwards, thus breaking the binding, as well as tear pages; drives me nuts). And now at bedtime, he can sit through a good 2-3 stories, which has to log a good five minutes. Now that he's also a better milk drinker, I found that he is a captive audience and won't squirm away. Three milk drinkings should log 10 minutes altogether and I think we may just have the 15-minute minimum.

At the 15-month checkup, the honorable Dr. Moore asked us if we read 15 minutes a day to Eli. Since we consider his opinion highly, I've been watching out for our reading to Eli ever since the checkup. He said to read to him (unsure if it's required that Eli sit still with us), it doesn't matter what, it could be the Wall Street Journal at this stage. But as long as it's more than just the picture books with a word per page. I guess the idea is that we're addressing and talking to him. Yet another area that I'm sure we're weak with Eli but we're working on that too.