Category: Stories

When did you first start reading?

I started reading when I was too small to reach the middle shelf. (I’m still far too small to reach the middle shelf, but still.) My mother read to me every night when I was little. We’d curl up together in my bed (I remember my Dora the Explorer-themed bedspread and stuffed purple unicorns), and my mother would stack the hardback picture books (gently retrieved from our black wooden shelf against the wall of the living room) between us.

While she narrated aloud, I’d follow her index finger as it brushed against a page’s structured sentences. Her soft and expressive voice transformed my small bedroom into the palace from Twelve Dancing Princesses, the garden from Little Miss Spider, or the house from Pinkalicious. (Plus, the musical versions of those books absolutely slap — especially Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses. Period!) I would imagine we were in Paris with Madeline and her boarding school sisters; sometimes, we’d be exploring the cut-out worlds of Eric Carle and the Foolish Magistrate’s home in Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.

Eventually I leveled up (as one does after gaining experience points); I no longer needed bedtime stories to lull me to sleep.  

Though I never grew out of stories.