We’ve been having a problem with Wesley lately: He will stay up to all hours reading when he’s supposed to be asleep. Yay for reading, of course, but the biggest problems are the aftereffects. He sleeps in the next morning and spends the rest of the day arguing and complaining.
We have tried everything to make him stop. I took away his TV privileges, which seemed pretty silly. “Keep reading and you’ll never watch TV again! That’ll teach you!” We gave him half an hour of reading every night before bed if he would just please stop when it was over. We took his lamp away and he turned on his room light. We started patrolling the hallway more regularly (German Shepherds, searchlights, concertina wire…we go all out), and he started reading by the streetlight. Tonight I came upstairs and heard some rustling. I stepped into his room and gave him my best mommy-guilt eyebrow. He sadly lifted up his pillow to reveal two books hidden underneath like it was his meth stash.
This is a case of the nut not falling far from the tree. I used to and still do stay up way too late reading books. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series was my biggest problem last year. I read each one in 2 days and I was not fun to live with. I imagine. I’m not really sure. It’s all kind of a blur. I know I have a problem because it doesn’t even take a particularly good book to keep me up, hence the recent spate of Jack Reacher novels.
Wednesday night, while I was up reading The Dog Listener, he clandestinely stayed up reading The Lightning Thief. Thursday morning we were both grouchy. After much grousing about his math lessons (the day before he was learning long division and all of a sudden subtraction is “too hard”), I gave up and called school off for the day. We cuddled up on the couch and went back to reading. Now I’m an enabler.
.
I was a little thrown by the title of this book until I saw the author’s name: Temple Grandin. Then I remembered an excellent BBC documentary I watched quite a while ago entitled The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow. It was a very intriguing story of a woman born with severe autism (available on YouTube 
by Jessie Wise This is another book I originally checked out at the library. Gracie wants to read so badly and I work with her quite a bit. However, I wanted something a bit more structured to get her on the right track. This book has short lessons that build up her reading skills and it has suggestions for fun activities to help her practice. The book is set up in such a way that it is easy to skip ahead to the section she needs without any trouble. I’m also using it as a review for Wesley. I like that it is so comprehensive. It starts with letter sounds, builds up to longer letter combinations, and ends with words like “enthusiastically” and “anticipation.”
: Our library has this book and I read about three chapters before I took it back. There were so many passages and quotes that I wanted to highlight or underline that I didn’t want to read through it unless it was mine. That was a year ago. My dear husband remembered and bought it for me. Now I’m ready to get back into it.
Home