Independent reading

So, Sayer woke up sick this morning. Not the kind of sick where she wakes up and is whiny and mopey. Nope, the sitting straight up in bed and puking all over the place sick. Yay for stomach bugs!

Since she and Duncan and I were all sharing a bed while staying at my Mom's house in Tucson, that means that he and I both got nailed, as did all the bedding. It was all of 4 AM. Yippee skippy.

Once the puking stopped I got the kids into a bath and stripped the bed and started laundry. Then Sayer laid down on one end of the couch and I laid on the other with Duncan already half-asleep on my chest at the other end. Which worked fine until Sayer woke to vomit again.

She continued to doze and then rouse to throw up for the next 5-6 hours. When the sun came up I took our air mattress outside and cleaned it off and left it out for the sun to dry and sterilize. When it was dry Sayer decided she wanted to go lay down in bed, so I brought the mattress back inside and got the bed made and sent her in. But she wanted company, so I went in with her and we read the rest of the third Magic Tree House book. After that, she fell asleep for a LONG nap.

And when she woke, she was 98% recovered. Hooray!

What does this have to do with independent reading? Nothing much. But because of her nap she was quite awake in the evening when Chanda's kiddos were going to bed. I was finishing up something and told her to go to the bedroom and I'd be in shortly so we could read together from the 4th MTH book.

Whatever it was I was trying to do (which involved chasing Duncan down to brush his teeth) took longer than I thought. But I heard no complaints from Sayer. No pestering me asking when I was going to come back to read. In fact, I heard nothing from her at all.

So I peeked in, wondering if she might have fallen asleep again. Yes, she did have a long nap, but she'd also been up early and was recovering from a stomach bug.

She was not asleep. She was reading. Silently. To herself. She was on about page 20 at that point. She looked up at me and said, 'What?' with half a smile. I said, 'Oh, nothing.' and smiled back and left her alone.

I checked again a half hour later and she was still reading, now a little more than halfway through the book. About 40 minutes later she came out to the living room.

She'd finished reading the book. All. By. Herself. It took her less than 2 hours, start to finish. And she was able to tell us about the story - who was the mysterious M, what the pirates of the story had been doing, etc.

It was awesome. My baby is an independent reader. Really really. :D