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Jul 11, 2007 - 09:38 AM |
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I need to explain about Harry. |
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Back in early 1999, Christian (then age 11) came home with a book that she was so excited about she was actually jumping up and down, and that we just HAD to read together. She had already read the first few chapters, but she loved it so much that she was willing to start over so we could read it together. You see, reading books together is what Christian and I did. It was always our thing. Dane never liked to read, and I tried many times with many different genres to get him to fall in love with books, but some people are readers and some are skateboarders, and that's OK.
I had never seen Christian so excited over a book. I had heard about this one and knew it involved wizards and magic – neither of which I had any interest in whatsoever. Until that point, our reading repertoire had consisted of books such as Watership Down, Heidi and every Sharon Creech book ever written. However, her excitement drew me in and I didn’t have the heart not to at least give the book a chance.
So we started reading. By chapter two, I was completely hooked. I found the writing style to be absolutely beautiful. Rowling’s character development was astonishing, and by the time we finished the book I was a diehard fan. After that, we would wait with bated breath for every book and movie release. Book releases were particularly huge events since both of us prefer books to movies, but movie releases were also cause for much anticipation and celebration. We never missed a midnight book release or a movie premier.
The Harry Potter phenomenon, to my very happy surprise, turned out to be one of the most fulfilling bonding experiences of my parenting career.
Well, as everyone knows, Christian grew up and moved on to other things, people and experiences. Meanwhile, Wyatt, I thought, would soon be old enough to understand the books and (yay!) he was (and is) also a big reader. That day arrived much earlier than I expected, when he came home from third grade one afternoon with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in his backpack and a big smile on his face after having read the first chapter. Just like with Christian, he and I also had our little reading thing. We had read everything from the Shiloh books to Roald Dahl’s The BFG to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but once again, the Harry Potter series turned out to be the books that really brought us together.
For the past two years, several nights a week, Wyatt and I have had a Harry Potter routine that involves making a pot of tea and cuddling up in our big “reading chair.” Then I read aloud to him while he claps, cheers, cries and makes death threats toward Professor Snape. The movie premiers are always monumental events. This one is particularly exciting since we were able to time the completion of the fifth book with the movie release, having finished the book last night just in time for the movie premier tonight.
Wyatt likes to play hangman when he’s taking his bath at night. I figure this will last another 6 months at most before modesty kicks in and he doesn’t want me to see him naked. Sometimes the messages on the shower walls are so cute I can’t bear to wash them off right away, so I leave them up for a while. If you were to pull my shower curtain back right now you would see, scrawled in both his hand and mine in purple and red bath crayon, hangman games reading “No one is as excited about Harry Potter 5 as we are!” and “Dumbledore for President.”
I think – I hope – that these are the moments that define a childhood.
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