What we're reading now

It's notable only because it took all day to get Eric through The Big Honey Hunt. I let them dawdle too much this morning, and he was already a little tired when we started on it. When he's tired, he's truculent, and when he's truculent, he glances at a word, seizes on a few key letters, and then tries to guess what it is instead of actually reading it. Sloppy guesswork is one of the quickest ways to try my patience; by the time he'd read "are" for "ate," "log" for "lot," and "start" for "store," we were only on page 2, and he was crying.

When I was teaching Faith to read and she got upset and crying, I would send her to her room until she could calm down. She could never stand being off by herself and would quiet down and come out to try again pretty quickly. That doesn't work with Eric. When I would send him to his room, he would just start playing with toys and happily stay in there, so when he starts crying during a lesson, I make him stay on the couch until he calms down. Of course, crying plus couch plus already tired equalled him crying himself to sleep and napping most of the afternoon away. When he finally woke up, we still had The Big Honey Hunt to master. Usually, when we read a new book, he has to read it twice through, but both of our patience was shot long before the last page. He'll have to read it twice tomorrow and the next day, but hopefully it won't be as daunting as his first time through cold.

Faith is reading Little House in the Big Woods to tie in nicely with her American history on the pioneers and westward expansion. As for me, my pile of magazines is growing again. My problem is that my dad sends all his magazines up the street to me when he's done with them. He's retired and has nothing to do all day so is starved for reading material; me, I feel like I have to at least skim through anything that comes in the house, even though I don't have the time for it and barely make it through the newspaper. (Some days I don't; last weekend, I ended up reading 4 days' news at once.) I ought to just segregate the stuff he sends for a while and see if I could keep up reading only the magazines I subscribe to. Well, I might not keep up exactly, but I'll bet I wouldn't keep falling farther behind.