Jonah’s reading continues to amaze us. In about six weeks, he’s gone from figuring out three and four letter words to being able to read many books to himself. We go to the library every week and usually come home with about a dozen new picture books to read, and the past few times, he’s been wanting to read them to me first. I’ve also been impressed that he also seems to be understanding the story while he reads it and can usually retell what happened. If he misreads a word, he will often notice that it didn’t make sense and go back to try to fix it. He always requests several books in bed with him, and we can hear him in the monitor totally reading them to himself before he falls asleep. He sits behind us on car rides, reading books as we travel.

Last week, I took a video of him reading three new library books for the very first time – Get to Work, Trucks; Hit the Ball, Duck; and Moose in the Garden. Now, even though I cut out a bunch of extra stuff, this is still not a short video – it is about 15 minutes, but I can think of at least a few relatives who won’t mind. ;) If you do watch the whole thing, you will also notice that Jonah is deep in the ‘Why???’ phase. I can’t even begin to count the number of times a day I (attempt to) answer an unending string of ‘Why? Why? Why?’ It’s also fun to see what he notices in the pictures when he’s seeing a story for the first time.

The other great thing that’s been happening in the past few days is that Jonah will decide completely on his own(!) to sit down near Nora to read her a book. What’s especially cute is that he’s not reading her his favorite truck stories, but says that he’s picking “a good kind of book that a baby would like,” so he often chooses lift-the-flap books or touch-and-feel books. Awesome!