Reading aloud

I’ve always read to my kids. Even our oldest (19yo) remembers sitting with me and reading book after book when she was a very little girl. We have quite an extensive library of lower grammar picture books and short stories, and a rather smallish library of older-kid type chapter books. One thing I’ve always loved, but have never really loved to read aloud, are the longer books. Years ago the bigger kids and I read the first three books in the Chronicles of Narnia. We read The Door in the Wall, and The Secret Garden, and The Indian in the Cupboard, and many others. I read them aloud, and we also took turns reading a page or two as they were old enough to do that, and we loved the stories. But I’ve been really bad about consistently doing this type of reading. As I said, we never finished the Narnia series. I did, on my own, but not while reading aloud to them.

For about seven years I’ve had The Little Pilgrim’s Progress sitting on my bookshelf. I bought it because I’d heard it was a wonderful story. I’ve never read the original one, so I couldn’t say from personal experience, but I do know it is a Christian allegory and is considered a classic. I’ve never gotten around to reading it, even to myself.

Last night, as I was tucking my boys (5 & almost 7yo) into bed, I decided it was time to spend some serious read-aloud time with them. They’ve listened to audio books, because we download them from the library sometimes. They love those! So I sat down next to the bunkbed and told them as long as they lay quietly I would read to them. We read the first two chapters of The Little Pilgrim’s Progress, and by the time I was done I thought they were both asleep.

No, not sleeping. Completely enthralled by the story! As I quietly got up to sneak out of the room, D2 says “Mommy, what’s in the gate?” And D1 said “The sun! I bet the sun is in the gate because there’s a light by it!” Mom grinned ear to ear and said, “We will have to wait and find out tomorrow night, won’t we?”
“YES!”, they said.