I Learned To Read At The Age of 3

I am one of the lucky ones in this life. I learned to read at the age of 3. While some people have a hard time believing this to be true, I felt that I didn't have a choice. Ever night at bedtime, my mom would let me pick out books for her to read to me. I had bookcases full of books with literally every type you can imagine. I, however, was a stubborn, fiery child who had at approximately 12-15 books picked out each evening. Plus, we always ended with a story that my mother had made up about a blue bird and her nest. 

You can imagine that reading that many books each night tended to get tedious, especially when she had another 1 & 1/2 year old, and one cooking in the oven. She decided to start skipping sentences, sometimes pages, until sometimes the stories were so short they didn't feel like stories at all. She knew that I would refuse to go to bed unless every single book had been read, plus the blue bird story. My Dad was traveling with the 1982 World's Fair, so he wasn't there to help with the mayhem each evening.

One night she decided to cut the blue bird story short. She thought that I didn't notice because I didn't say anything, but when she left the room I remember laying there and thinking about the parts that she left out. I made it a goal right then and there that this could not happen again. What if she was leaving out parts of Cinderella?

I started paying attention the next night by having her use her finger to guide through each sentence she read. I don't think she really caught on at first, but I was memorizing what the words looked like. And with the help of Sesame Street, I was able to catch on pretty quickly. Then the gig was up. We laugh about it now, but I'm thankful that she did that, and that I was so stubborn, because it has instilled a lifetime of reading appreciation and literacy promotion for me, my brother, and my little sister. 

Peace and Love!