It mystified me when I realized a few years ago that Annalie was actively resisting learning to read.

I was an early reader—very early. I was barely three when I started reading easy-reader books. In kindergarten I was so shy and reserved that my teacher didn’t know I was reading at a third-grade level. The summer after second grade, I borrowed the Beverly Cleary book Fifteen from a teenager traveling on the same Trailways bus as me and my family and finished it before the trip was over.

Reading was my number-one, all-time favorite activity as a kid. I liked to color and draw, and I enjoyed swimming and playing kickball with my brother and our friends in our front yard (we ran the bases backwards—the corner sidewalk square was first base, the cracked sidewalk square was second, and the crab apple tree was third). But reading trumped everything.

I carried a book with me everywhere we went, from Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house to the movie theater when it was my brother’s turn to pick the movie, and read in every spare moment. The only thing I ever got in trouble for at school was being so lost in a story that I failed to hear the teacher asking us to get out our math workbooks. When neighborhood friends knocked on our door and asked if I could come out and play, I often politely told them, “Not right now, thanks. I’m reading.”

It’s not surprising, then, that I wasn’t sure what to do with a kid who didn’t want to read.

As Annalie turned three and four without any signs of wanting to read for herself, I just shrugged. She was clearly a smart kid, and she knew the alphabet and her numbers backwards and forwards. She’d learn when she was ready. I kept reading out loud to her and encouraged her fledgling attempts to sound out words.

As Annalie turned five, and then six, and still was mostly indifferent to reading, I worried a little. I talked to my friends whose kids were a bit older than Annalie, and some other homeschooling moms. My friends reminded me that kids learn at different rates, that in some European countries ANY formal math or reading lessons are verboten until kids are seven or even eight years old, by which time most kids are on an even playing field as far as cognitive reasoning goes.

So I just kept doing what I’d been doing all along—reading to Annalie, praising her efforts to read, and modeling lots of reading for her.

That changed a little when we started doing sit-down lessons with a first-grade curriculum. I thought, Well, someone who knew what they were doing designed this curriculum, and I know Annalie is smart enough to read, even though she doesn’t want to, so…I guess we’ll just follow the curriculum and see what happens.

Mostly what happened was: Annalie started to learn how to read more than the thirty or so words she could already recognize. It was laborious and slow and involved lots of whining, even though I made it as fun and painless as I possibly could. Getting her to sound out a word was like pulling teeth, even though she was always proud of herself when she realized she was improving. Frankly, it was exhausting, and her stubborn resistance to reading made many of our homeschool days more frustrating and challenging than they otherwise would have been. (Of course, it probably didn’t help that I was in my third trimester of pregnancy at the time. Just trying to figure out which mug to drink my coffee from in the morning could leave me in tears.)

Around the time I had Elliora (about halfway through the homeschool year) I sort of threw up my hands and retreated from the reading battlefield. I was taking some time off from formal lessons anyway, since I’d just had a baby. I decided if Annalie just wanted me to read to her, and she didn’t want to take turns reading sentences, that was okay. And anytime she asked me what a word was—even if it was “the” or “and”—I wouldn’t ask her to sound it out, I’d just tell her what the freaking word was. She’d learn words that way too, eventually.

It wasn’t a magical solution that instantly made her want to read more. She still resisted sounding out words on her own. But (here is where homeschooling really shines, in my opinion) because we had the luxury of time, because there was no class of eager readers for her to keep up with, I was able to let Annalie go at her own pace. Slowly, over the next few months as she realized the pressure was off, she started to read more and more on her own. She got a big boost in confidence at the end of the school year when she took the California Acheivement Test and scored well above her grade level in reading.

Then last year, during our very unschooly second-grade year, at some point the switch was flipped. It really did seem that fast, like Annalie went overnight from carefully sounding out things like:

“On…brigg…bright red days, ho…how good it fells…feels…”

to smoothly reading things like:

“Fire Lord Zuko’s off his gourd! You people don’t belong here! This is the kingdom’s—and the earth’s—first school of metalbending!”

As a beginning third-grader, Annalie still doesn’t love to read like I did at her age, but that’s okay. She is confident in her reading skills now, and doesn’t shy away from words or books. On our moving road trip this summer, she discovered Archie Comics Digests at some gas station or another, which is hilarious to me because I loved those at her age. She’s just starting to realize that reading can let her go places and discover wonders all within her own head. She already knows very well that, “Can I please stay up and read just a little longer?” will get her bedtime delayed a quarter-hour or so.

I know there are people who probably think I should have just pushed her a little bit harder a couple of years ago, and she would have learned to read much sooner; that school is challenging sometimes and you just have to learn to deal with it, the sooner the better.

I agree that school—and life!—are challenging, and that anyone who doesn’t teach their kids how to deal with challenges and disappointments is doing them a disservice. If Annalie had been in a regular school, she probably would have learned to read just fine a year or two earlier than she did. Or maybe she would have resisted, and would have been labeled a slow learner. I don’t know. But I do know that six-year-olds are just barely past babyhood, really. If you have a preschooler who loves to read, that’s fantastic! They will probably do great in a traditional classroom. But if you have a perfectly intelligent five- or six-year-old who balks at being asked to interpret the written word, it’s probably not the end of the world. Give her another year or two, and she’ll be older and more mature, and she just might teach herself to read overnight.

I’ve been so thankful over the past couple of years that we are homeschoolers, which enabled Annalie to learn to read at her own pace. I don’t know why she wasn’t ready to read sooner, I don’t know if it was for emotional reasons or what, but I’m thankful that I didn’t have to force her to learn before she was ready.

Most of all, I’m grateful that she’s reading now…that she’s cracked the code and a world of knowledge is out there waiting for her, in libraries and bookstores and magazine stands and on the internet, and I get to help her explore it.

It’s the middle of the night. I was awakened a few minutes ago by the sound of Elliora calling, “Mama, Maaaamaaaa…” on the monitor, so I walked down the hall to her room to check on her. (She doesn’t wake up every night anymore—probably more like every other night, maybe every third night.)

I changed her diaper, as we usually do when she wakes up at night, just because. As I changed her, she was whining and fussing, asking to “murssh” the whole time. I told her it wasn’t time for nursing, it was time to sleep, and finished changing her diaper. I gave her some medicine (she’s recovering from a virus and teething at the same time), cuddled her for a minute and sang to her, then set her down in bed where she rolled immediately onto her stomach and tucked her knees up under her.

I reached down to untangle her blanket, and she started to make a fuss. But before I could mentally weigh the options of staying in her room to coax her to sleep or leaving her to wind down to sleep on her own, I realized she was saying, “Cover up! Cover up!”

I quickly pulled the blanket up over her shoulders. I patted her on the back a few times, and then she dragged one arm out from under the blanket. I thought she was going to push the blanket off or protest my leaving, so what happened next was unexpected and hilarious.

Without turning over or even looking at me, she waved her hand in my direction and said, “Bye-bye.”

I blinked, said, “Okay then, good night! I love you!” and went back to bed, where I realized I needed to write this down so I didn’t forget it by morning.

When my brother and I were kids, my mom used the ASL sign for “I love you” (hand, palm facing out; thumb, pointer finger, and pinky all extended; middle finger and ring finger folded down to touch the palm—a combination of the signs for the letters I, L, and Y) all the time with us. When Annalie was old enough, I taught it to her. We use it with each other as a way of checking in, of saying, “Hey, I’m glad you’re alive!” or “Remember that no matter how much I’m annoying you right now, I’m doing the best I can and I care about you.”

On Day 6 of 7 Days, I asked Annalie to go outside on the deck and play with Elliora for a bit while I cleaned up the kitchen. She didn’t really want to, but she did it anyway, wrapping up in her blanket and grouching her way out there. Despite her reluctance, I thanked her politely. (I’d gotten my way, after all, which makes it easier to be polite!)

I saw her pick up a piece of sidewalk chalk and brightly suggested I could give her some sentences to write for handwriting practice. “How about, ‘My mom is awesome’? Or maybe ‘I love my mom! She’s the best ever!’”

Annalie gave me a dirty look and said, “How do you spell ‘stupid’? I laughed, said she could figure that one out on her own, and went back to cleaning the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Annalie called out, “Mom, can you please come and see what I drew?” I went out on the deck to see her sitting next to this drawing, fighting a grin.

She drew me scolding her, and herself imagining blowing a raspberry at me. See the little tongue in the thought bubble? I cracked up and told her that was very smart, because blowing raspberries in her head is much less likely to get her into trouble than doing it in someone’s face. She laughed, all hostility gone.

I love that Annalie can pour her anger or frustration into creating something–a drawing, a dance, a puppet show–and the negative feelings seem to evaporate in the process, leaving only the art.

Then, even though I had another idea planned for that day’s photo, I took a picture of the drawing and all our feet for my 7 Days self-portrait. How could I not?

These two. They’re such stinkers sometimes, but they make life so very fun.

We’ve had a string of good days lately. It’s probably due to a combination of factors—we’re recovered from all the travel we did in January and February, no one is sick, everyone is sleeping better—but I think the biggest factor is that we’ve gotten back into a routine.

I know that I function better when life is somewhat predictable, and I know that my kids do too. For some reason I have a really hard time sticking to a routine, even under ideal circumstances; throw a baby and frequent travel and a husband regularly working long hours into the mix and all is confusion and chaos and lost tempers and pouting and hands thrown up in defeat.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across some reading and math workbooks that looked like a good fit for Annalie. I had Annalie look them over, and she thought they looked good too. We talked, and agreed that we were going to start out by doing one lesson per day from each book. That’s not very much, considering that last year before Elliora was born we were consistently doing two to three hours of sit-down schoolwork per day, but I figured it would be a good way to ease back into things.

At first, Annalie resisted every suggestion that it was time to do some schoolwork, but I stayed calm and persisted. She thought it was pretty cool when I told her that she could take a pre-test before each math chapter, and if there were concepts she already had a grasp on, we could skip some of those lessons. Within a couple days, she had stopped arguing and was doing the work with no complaint. Now, she actually seems excited to sit down and do school. (Of course, this is in addition to all of the unschooly things we do every day, but it seemed like it was time to re-introduce some discipline back into our days, for both of us.)

Today, she suggested that instead of doing the one page of reading in the workbook, she could read the Magic School Bus book that my mom had just sent her. I told her that was a great idea. She read every single word in that book to me, without hesitation or angst. We paused several times to discuss additional information she’d gleaned about the subject (teeth) from Wild Kratts (you might want to turn your volume down before clicking that link). The reading moved from the dining-room table to Elliora’s bedroom briefly when there was a diaper change, and Annalie didn’t even blink, just moved, made herself comfortable in the nursing chair, and kept reading.

Something seems to have clicked for Annalie with both reading and math recently. She’s had the skills for a long time, but it was almost as if she wasn’t emotionally ready to read on her own. Now, she’s suddenly doing multiplication and adding two-column numbers in her head with ease. She’s reading pretty much everything she sees without much difficulty at all. She still isn’t what I’d call a reader, which makes me a little sad, but that’s okay. I imagine that there are a lot of people who would shake their heads at all the hours I spent indoors reading books as a kid when I could have been outside enjoying fresh air and sunshine.

I think when she’s ready, Annalie will discover chapter books and how reading them is like seeing a movie in your head. (Also, she’ll discover the house rule that kids have to turn off the light at bedtime…unless they’re reading. That’ll probably motivate her to read more!) Until then, there isn’t really a reason to rush. One of the best things about homeschooling is that kids have the freedom to move at their own pace. And I’ve been doing this long enough now that I know Annalie really will move ahead. She doesn’t really do slow and steady. Just when it seems like she’s been stalled in the same place forever, she’ll leap and bound far ahead of where I would have expected her to be. And that’s absolutely, totally okay.

In addition to the ease with which we’ve been getting schoolwork done every day, Annalie has gone from surly and uncooperative to pleasant and helpful when it comes to unloading the dishwasher, playing with Elliora while I make dinner, putting her toys away, running downstairs to fetch me a Coke Zero, whatever. I suppose her change in attitude is partly because she’s consistently getting more sleep, and partly because she’s not seven and a half anymore (she’ll be eight in two months). But mostly, I think it’s because we’ve gotten a good routine going.

Annalie knows that when she wakes up, she can play games on my laptop or watch one of her shows until Elliora and I come out for breakfast. She knows that after breakfast, she can play till 8:45, when I’ll ask her to unload the dishwasher if it needs doing. She knows that after that, we’ll sit down and do some schoolwork until it’s time for Elliora’s morning nap, and so on. And knowing what’s coming next seems to make her happy.

It makes perfect sense, really. I’m the same way. I can handle unpredictability better than she can, probably, but I am a lot happier when I know what’s coming up, even though I resist schedules. That’s why I am writing this post: to remind myself, when I start to slide away from the routine, that it really does make things easier. And if we have a routine, then we get to experience the best part about living a predictable life: doing something unpredictable! Being spontaneous is about a hundred times more fun when you have a routine to break away from.

This afternoon I was telling some friends in an email about the difficult morning we’d had with Annalie and how seven is going to kill me ded when I realized: she’s seven and a half.

We’ve been here before, with Annalie testing her boundaries at this time of year. The halves always seem to be a challenge. I know of no research or developmental theory to back this up, just anecdotal evidence. I’ve discussed with friends many times how it always seems like kids go through something developmental around their half-birthdays that turns them temporarily insane. Realizing this made me feel immediately better. Not only am I not imagining it, but there is an end in sight. Also, Madge and Bonnie both assured me that eight has been one of their favorite ages so far with their kids.

Thanks to all of you who commented on my last post about your own woes. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one who finds life overwhelming from time to time. I hope we all get a break soon!

Sleeping face-down on Mom’s crossed legs is SO two days ago. Face-UP is where it’s at.

This afternoon Elliora fell asleep in the car on the way home for a few minutes, which normally doesn’t affect her napping. But today when I brought her inside and nursed her, she didn’t fall asleep like she normally does. She was wide-awake and happy. I mentally shrugged, figuring she’d go to bed a bit early tonight, and we got up to play.

When her slightly-earlier-than-normal bedtime came around, she happily nursed and easily went to sleep, not even making a peep when I put her down in her bed. I went off to meet a friend at Starbucks for some companionable side-by-side laptopping, confident that she’d stay asleep…only to text my mom an hour and a half later and find out that she had awakened ten minutes after I left and had been awake ever since.

So I wasn’t surprised when she had a hard time going to sleep after that. I wasn’t even surprised at how hard she was fighting sleep; Elliora is very strong-willed and has been able to keep herself awake since she was born. What did surprise me was that when she flopped into a position face-up on my crossed legs, she relaxed and immediately went to sleep.

Nothing regarding this kid should surprise me anymore when it comes to sleep, though.

I’ve been gradually cutting down her night-nursing for a couple of months now, working my way up to eight hours without nursing. I did the same thing with Annalie, who was much more interested in nursing than Elliora ever has been, at about the same age. After a couple nights of her waking up and being denied a chance to nurse, Annalie just kinda went, “Oh, I won’t get fed if I wake up? All right then, I’ll just sleep,” and she stopped waking up at night almost entirely. The times she did wake up, it was easy to settle her back down by just patting her on the back and whispering to her.

Elliora, on the other hand, shows no sign of being even close to sleeping for eight hours without waking up, or of being willing to settle back down with just a touch and a reassurance. She does go back to sleep without nursing, so I don’t feel like she’s missing that. It’s more like she just isn’t a big sleeper. Annalie is like me: once we’re asleep, we’re out for the count and it’s hard to wake us up. I think Elliora just might be more like my brother: he has a hard time going to sleep and a hard time staying asleep, waking up more than once most nights. He’s been like that since the day he was born.

Elliora will sleep from bedtime (usually between 7-7:30) till around midnight without waking up about half the time. (The other half of the time, she might wake up once between bedtime and midnight, or she might wake up every hour on the hour. We never know which it will be.) She wakes up almost every night around midnight and usually takes about 10-15 minutes to settle back down with one of us picking her up and cuddling her. Just to keep things interesting, on some nights nothing on God’s green earth will calm her down for an hour or more.

Regardless of when or how often she wakes up, if we don’t pick her up, she will stand up in her crib and screeeeeeeeam and wake Annalie up. If we try to leave her in the bed and just pat her on the back, we have to physically hold her down to keep her from getting up, which makes her scream more, which wakes Annalie up. Annalie, very understandably, gets grouchy when a screaming baby wakes her up from a sound sleep.

The rest of the night is pretty unpredictable. Elliora usually only wakes up once between midnight and 4am, and can be settled back down with 10-15 minutes of cuddling. Or she might wake up every hour and need 10-15 minutes of holding each time, or she might just wake up and be awake for an hour or two.

Elliora has slept entirely through the night, from 8pm to 7am, exactly once in her life, on a night when we hadn’t done anything differently from any other night. So we know she can do it, but we have no idea how to make her do it again.

I would happily let her sleep with us and cuddle all night, but if she’s in bed with me and I won’t nurse her, she gets monumentally annoyed and will scream her annoyance for a long time. She’s also quite strong for her size, and trying to hold onto her when she’s struggling is difficult and exhausting. The times I have stuck it out and let her cry in my arms without giving in and nursing her, she’s screamed for two hours or more. Usually if I nurse her, she’s fine and will go to sleep eventually, but if I nurse her in bed I’ll probably fall asleep, and since she’s learned how to crawl we don’t feel safe leaving her in bed with us all night while we’re sleeping. She’s an explorer and she takes every chance she gets to wander off.

What it all comes down to is that Elliora is incredibly strong-willed. She isn’t a sound sleeper and she isn’t very flexible about her sleeping habits. She’s very good at letting us know how she’s feeling, and when she’s mad she screams about it.

It’s already gotten so much better than it used to be with her, sleep-wise. But there still isn’t much consistency, and that’s both baffling and frustrating at times. We know it won’t be this way forever, and we’ll deal with it like grown-ups and do our best to gently teach her, when she seems ready, how to sleep through the night without the all-night milk bar or on-demand snuggling. But we’ll still be really happy when she’s sleeping through the night consistently.

What about you? Does your kid have a sleeping habit that mystifies you, or drives you crazy? Or do you have one of those mythical kids who sleeps beautifully?

I’m SO close to 10,000 comments on this blog! Will this post be the one that gets the 10,000th comment!? I think it could be…and that 10,000th commenter will win a piece of custom-painted pottery, or something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely. It’s just my way of saying “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. So gimme your two cents, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Tonight, we didn’t get going on bedtime till an hour later than usual. Elliora was overtired and resisted sleep for an hour or more, with much whining and crying and squirming around. She nursed and then got mad when I tried to snuggle with her. I put her down in her bed, and she relaxed for a few seconds before getting mad, and sitting up and crying. I tried putting her down in the pack’n'play and rubbing her back while singing to her, and got the same reaction.

After about an hour of going around and around in this way, I was so exasperated that I did something completely ridiculous. I sat with my legs crossed and laid Elliora down on her tummy across my lap, her head on one knee, and patted her back. She calmed down almost immediately and was asleep in less than a minute. My reaction could be summed up thusly: What the–!?

BABIES.

Remember, I’m not far away from 10,000 comments (real ones, not counting spam) on this blog, and the 10,000th commenter is going to win a prize—maybe a piece of pottery of their choice, or perhaps something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely—just as a “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. Keep commenting, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Just for kicks and out of curiosity, today I kept a log of my day.

Today I spent 698 minutes between 7am and 1am caring for my kids. And today was pretty easy, aside from the fact that Troy didn’t get home till almost 8pm. Neither of the girls were overtired or sick, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling better. Everyone was in a pretty good mood all day. There were no tantrums or lost tempers.

Still, I spent nearly 12 hours nursing Elliora, preparing food, cleaning up after meals, changing diapers, attending Annalie’s gymnastics class, getting Elliora to sleep at various points during the day, encouraging Annalie as she did her chores, and just playing and talking and being a mom.

I’m taking two big things away from this exercise: (1) No wonder I’m so flipping tired all the time! That’s a lotta hours for an extraverted introvert like me to be on duty and around people, even two of the people I love most; and (2) I’m never feeling guilty about not blogging* or not getting laundry done again, not while my kids are little. Clearly I have more important things to be doing.

*That doesn’t mean I still won’t wish I had more time to blog, though. Just today I had great ideas for two blog posts—even took photos for one of them—but didn’t manage to download the photos to my laptop or write a single word of either one. Oh well.

Elliora was so smiley during a middle-of-the-night diaper change that I grabbed my camera to document it as a happy thing. Then I realized I was in the photo too (faintly, but I’m there) and it was after midnight. Boom, Day 6.

Yawn.

Happy baby is happy to see you! Even at 1am. To answer the question many of the Flickr commenters had: yes, Elliora went back to sleep pretty easily after this, even though it looks like she was wide awake. She usually goes back to sleep quickly as long as she can nurse.

Annalie said, “Ever since I was one year old and started walking, I’ve run to my Gramaw at the airport.”

Annalie took this alternate self-portrait in the mirrored side of the moving sidewalks at the airport.