3 Sisters 7 Days

My son Quentin’s first day of “real” high school was today. After five years as a home-schooler, he rejoined the Riverside, CA public school system as a junior in North High School's International Baccalaureate (IB) Program, an advanced placement program that includes community service in addition to the completion of honors and IB coursework and a series of written exams, essays, and projects over the course of two years. North High School is one of 717  IB World Schools in the United States currently offering the IB Diploma.

The availability of the IB program at one of our local high schools is the most important reason Quentin returned to so-called real school. The IB diploma, which differs from traditional advanced placement (AP) in both structure (essays and projects as opposed to multiple choice tests) and content (emphasis on critical thinking and community engagement), is simply not an option for home-schooled students. Yet I could have been persuaded to keep Quentin at home, where he’s been able to manage 40 units each term, in addition to a challenging schedule of physical conditioning and rock-climbing practice, if only the kid had been able to balance academics and rock-climbing more consistently…without increasing levels of parental oversight and harassment.

Okay, I was loosing it. Much as I might like to just “let him climb,’ smile as he “just” passes his classes, and believe that he’ll “make his way,” I cannot let go of the idea that Quentin needs to excel in high school to increase the odds of securing both entrance to and financial support to attend the university of his choice. Just call it my contribution to his psychological baggage.

So how did it go?

In typical teen fashion, Quentin said it was “boring,” except for theater, where they played “ninja.” He was sorely disappointed that he couldn’t take fifth period (Spanish) during lunch and get out early. And Quentin could not get over the skinny jeans (”Don’t they know it’s 100+ degrees out?” he asked) and Mohawks (And someone had the nerve to look at me funny!).

All I said was that one perk of living in Riverside is that there’s really no pressure to buy your kid a car…And she started justifying herself. Her daughter’s a good student; her daughter works and she thinks that’s great; she just doesn’t feel that there’s anything wrong with buying her daughter a car. She rolled her eyes, put her hand on her hip, turned and walked back to her seat.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was grading papers on my flight home last night from Hartford, CT, chatting with my “neighbor,” who was on her way back to LA after visiting the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS) with her daughter and grand daughter, the latter of whom will be a freshman there in the fall. The woman’s daughter had stopped to visit with her mom, who explained that I am a professor and had been grading papers since take-off. She asked if it’s true college kids can’t write. Following my somewhat flippant response of “Not this one,” we chatted about our children and the challenges of 21st century parenting. I probably should have stuck with commiserating, but I didn’t.

My fellow mom and Delta passenger, a self-confessed "helicopter parent," admitted to hiring a coach to help her daughter complete her college applications because the process is so confusing now. I disagreed, and explained that while there might be more competition at some schools and it’s certainly more expensive to apply, the application and financial air processes are actually easier and more efficient. The vast majority of my students successfully (obviously) filled out their own applications.

She said she was worried that even though her daughter had graduated from Westlake High School – a predominantly white, highly rated public school in the Los Angeles area – and been admitted to UMASS, she wouldn’t be able to write. I told her not to worry. I’m sure her daughter’s quality high school program had prepared her well for college. Anyway, in my experience, poor writers suffer more from some combination of laziness and hasty, last-minute efforts than lack of ability. I used my son, Quentin, as an example; he rushes every writing assignment, and has to edit, revise, and rewrite repeatedly.

She explained that she’s a single mom and had sacrificed to ensure her daughter had access to a quality high school program and ensure she got to go to college on the East coast. That’s when she mentioned the car. I told her that was too bad she felt that she had to purchase and maintain a car for her daughter that was worthy of Westlake’s student parking lot. I don’t feel at all pressured to buy my son a car. To be honest, I don’t think every driving-age child needs a car, and believe that those who do should contribute to the costs of car ownership and driving. I told her that my loving spouse and I don’t intend to get our son a car until: a) he genuinely needs to drive, and b) he can pay a significant share of the costs associated with doing so. That’s when she turned on me.

I really didn’t mean to offend, but rather to re-assure, which is odd. After all, I’m the one who deserves consolation. My purportedly under-socialized children are home-schooled. In Riverside. Yikes! The poor things can’t expect to “ride for free,” and will be responsible for their own college applications.

Perhaps aware again of the red ink on the papers I was grading, she suggested I “write something nice” on my students’ papers. “Always,” I said. For all the poor grammar and style errors I have to wade through, most of the students manage to provide plausible arguments; some even blow me away with their insights.

I’ve thought long and hard about what kind of mom I am and, more importantly, how to convey that characterization to others in a concise yet meaningful way. I think I’ve got it. I don’t regroup.

Like most American adults, I learned to “borrow” and “carry” when referring to subtraction and addition, respectively. Today, children are taught to “regroup,” a term that makes perfect sense while simultaneously pushing me over the edge.

I agree with Deb Russell that regrouping does make sense. Consider the subtraction problem 34 – 17 and line the numbers up vertically. You can’t take 7 away from 4, so borrow 1 and make it 14. We are actually taking a group of 10. The term borrowing also suggests that we pay it back. So, once again we regroup by taking 1 ten from the tens column and our 4 becomes 14. Next consider the addition problem: 34 + 17. Again, line the numbers up vertically; 7 + 4 is 11, so carry the 1 and put it over the 3. Of course, it isn’t really a 1; it is a group of ten. We have regrouped the 1’s into a group of 10 and we put a 1 in the 10’s column. However, unlike Russell, I am unwilling to collaborate in teaching my children to regroup.

It’s not that I’m one of those horrible moms who exalts in being the quintessential undependable and sometimes uncooperative parent. Nor am I categorically opposed to the introduction of new methods for teaching math. My current objection to regrouping is more principled than that. I refuse to jump on the regrouping bandwagon because the mechanical use of borrowing and carrying is plenty sufficient for immediate problem-solving in the lower grades; then once kids get the process down, I trust the vast majority of them will figure out the place value magic behind the process. I did, without being particularly great at math, and so did each of my children so far. It’s just a hunch, but I bet many parents’ eagerness to master regrouping represents some basic lack of faith in their children’s mathematical abilities, if not also their own acumen as parents-cum-academic coaches.

More generally, I simply believe that less it more. The less we assist our children in learning – here, explaining what goes on in the addition/subtraction black box – the more they are forced to figure it out on their own. This learning process will almost certainly be inefficient, time-consuming, and laborious at times. On any given day, our children may not outshine their peers academically, which may make us parents feel ineffective…even “bad.” So be it. I, for one, am happy to remain well outside the parental in-group to ensure that my children are allowed the freedom to make their own way through math, among the many other academic subject areas they’ll encounter between now and graduation.

All of my children read – regularly, if not voraciously, and practically never by force. My eldest, Quentin, who at 14-and-a-half would rather read than do just about anything else but climb, is probably an outlier. Although his younger siblings – 13, 9, and 5 – read measurably less, they remain enthusiastic readers, consuming an age-appropriate “chapter book” or novel each week, on average.

How did I do it?

Before I respond, note that I do understand well that they are the stars: the readers. I play only a supporting role in our home’s reading drama. Moreover, after reading dozens of articles and posts on the subject, I can report that relative to what other parents have done to encourage reading, or even “create” readers, my performance has been mediocre, at best.

Indeed, with the exception of the summer I gave my children $10 BOOKSTORE gift cards for every 10 books they read, I’ve never deliberately incentivized reading. Nor have I ever held some other pleasure – like video games or television – ransom until a particular book or selection of reading has been completed. In fact, I don’t actually require the kids to finish the books they start (honestly, after never finishing Moby Dick myself, how could I?), though they usually do. Aside from prioritizing free-reading on the kids’ schedule – they’re home-schooled, after all, so I can let them read during breakfast and then as long as they want thereafter – I don’t set aside time for reading. The kids write book reviews with some regularity, but are not quizzed about characters or plots or moral lessons. We all share what we’re reading, and our conversations can become involved, even heated, but I’ve never thought to engage them deliberately in discussions about what they’re reading. And I do not EVER make reading “fun” – no money or other non-bulky treats tucked into the pages, no contrived book-themed games, no untoward effort invested in extending a story (say Stellaluna) to research on bats, and maybe also a trip to see real live bat.  Those of you who know me best probably saw that one coming.

What I do is actually pretty straightforward. I read, and the rest simply follows.

Because I am a reader, our home is filled with books – not just my office and bedside table, but every room in the house contains books, if not also magazines and other periodical literature. I was well into building our library before I read Lucy Calkins’s Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide, which prioritizes the ready availability of books among other foundations for successful childhood learning. By the time my sister Jeanna helped box the kids’ bookshelves when we moved, our children easily owned more books than she and her husband did after more than eight years of college between them.

Because I am a reader, I leave books I’m reading in every one of my usual haunts – you know, upstairs book, campus office book, car book, bathroom book, etc. – and I’ve always carry something to read with me wherever I go. A time-worn family story about my running out of gas on a freeway off ramp features me sitting patiently on the curb, reading while I waited for the Auto Club to arrive.  Although my children haven’t entirely adopted this behavior, they keep books beside their beds for “free” reading at night, and others in their curriculum boxes or backpacks “for school,” though these are predominantly self-selected as well. In addition, they’ve been known to read entire series during extended trips to the bookstore, and pick up others’ books to read while visiting relatives, or waiting in offices.

Because I am a reader, I read to my children – more to Quentin, I admit, and less frequently as they’ve grown older and more able to read to themselves, and I’ve become busier. (Or have they become more busy, so that my work has been pushed progressively later into the evening?) And my older children have read to their younger siblings, sometimes transforming this “chore” into an opportunity to share their own childhood favorites.

Because I am a reader, on some level I expect the kids to want to read, to enjoy reading, to be able to articulate what kinds of books and other materials they want to read, to take the time to read, and to share what they’re reading with others. While it may be bad parenting form to thrust such high expectations on my progeny, I’m fairly certain that embracing any latent dislike for reading is not in their best interests. Not only is reading key to educational and, by extension, career success, but in a family that includes a fair number of avid readers, it’s also a golden ticket to fundamental social interactions.  You are what you read, after all.

Because I am a reader, my children are also readers.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
~ Mortimer J. Adler ~

I am reading the Junie B. Jones Series with Olivia. This is my second time through and I’m enjoying every minute, although, until now I haven’t publicized that bit of information.

Junie B. Jones is the title character in the book series, written by Barbara Park and illustrated by Denise Brunkus – all details I am reminded of every time we read a new episode, because Olivia routinely recites the citation information of the text. Critics of the series call Junie B. “obnoxious” and consider her to be, at best, a “bad example.” Her fans, including both of my daughters, find her “hilarious.” In their opinion, Junie B. is just like them (at her age, with respect to 12-year-old Reiley), but much more outspoken, even “mean.” (While Junie B. is not beyond screaming at her school mates and inflicting physical harm on them, my girls only “think about” doing so.) I am less sanguine. I simply find it difficult to believe that a child as precocious as Junie B. so persistently distinguishes herself from the adults around her by emphasizing she is very young – five going on six – and speaking more like a pre-schooler than a kindergartener.

So why do I like Junie B.? In addition to admiring her moxie, she got my girls to read. Junie B.’s exploits fill the first chapter books Reiley was willing to read on her own because she loved them so much. Now, Olivia, who resists the time and effort required to decode new words any other time, painstakingly sounds out countless “long, hard” words (for her, of course) in every story. And, in much the way children have historically recited nursery rhymes, Olivia repeats one of the lines that appears in the first pages of each book: “My name is Junie B. Jones. The B stands for Beatrice. Except I don’t like Beatrice. I just like B and that’s all.”

My appreciation for Junie B. places me squarely on the “let your kids read what they want” side of the fence. I’m in good company. Award-winning author Judy Bloom says that parents should “let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them.” She argues that parents’ impulse to censor what their children read is based on fear disguised as moral outrage:”Books that make kids laugh often come under suspicion; so do books that encourage kids to think, or question authority; books that don’t hit the reader over the head with moral lessons are considered dangerous.”

Unfortunately, parents’ efforts to restrict children’s reading choices arguably explains why children generally don’t like to read as much as they once did. According to book publishing expert Michael Norris, it’s parents – not access to online entertainment and handheld games – who prevent their children from developing a taste for books. Norris explains that reading is a personal experience. Parents must allow children to decide what to read, and trust that they will learn to enjoy reading much as they do gaming and talking and texting to friends.

The closest I’ve ever come to limiting my children’s reading material is attempting to pre-read the Harry Potter and Twilight series. In all honesty, I was quickly bored in both cases (though Harry Potter grew on me as the story developed), and wasn’t bothered when my eldest son Quentin raced ahead of me. He appears to be entirely unharmed by the exposure to the evil inherent in Potter’s world and the toxic interpersonal relationships that plague the young people of Forks, WA. More importantly, he reads. Quentin easily spends more time reading than he does virtually anything else besides rock climbing. He’s currently whizzing through the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes stories; before that, he read Stephen King’s memoir and epic The Stand, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1984, a couple of plays by William Shakespeare, and every issue of Climbing magazine cover to cover. Clearly, the kid’s no slouch.

I expect Olivia’s taste for literature will mature likewise. For the moment, we are both content to enjoy Junie B.’s adventures. Next up – Junie B. Jones Is a Beauty Shop Guy (Junie B. Jones, No. 11).I can’t wait.

Despite my relatively frequent conversations with friends and family about the virtues (and some vices) of home-schooling versus traditional public schooling, I rarely actually think about public school culture. Today was one of those times.

Our brother Brian was in town, visiting from Colorado, so we took off most of the day to hang out with him. The morning was devoted to running errands, including haircuts for the boys and a trip to the local mall to have my eyebrows threaded (he enjoyed reclining while he waited, and looked after Olivia for me), take care of some exchanges, and take advantage of the FREE gift with purchase promotion at Macy’s Clinique counter; I got two, but that’s another story).

On the way out, we passed a crowd of girls, who looked 12 but must have been closer to 16 because one of them drove. It was about lunch time, so it’s likely they had off-campus passes. Every one of them was wearing tight jeans, fitted tee with a brand logo, and flats. Every one of them had long, straight hair parted off-center and falling in her eyes. I noticed, but didn’t say a thing…but Reiley did:

“Those girls look exactly alike.”

“Yeah,” Olivia added. “Maybe they’re twins.”

“That’s how it is in high school,” Quentin said. “All the girls like to dress the same.”

“See what you’re missing?” I said. (No, I couldn’t help myself at this point.)

“Well, I wouldn’t,” Reiley said. “I’d dress normal.”

We’ll see.

After we left the mall, we stopped at Target to get candy to fill Easter eggs (Brian had agreed to take the candy and plastic eggs with him to dinner with our Mother, this year’s Easter egg hunt organizer), picked up a pizza to take home, and headed up the hill and back to the house. As we turned into our community, the kids noticed that the local public school was surrounded by cars – a sure sign that school was nearly out. Yet some children were still out in the field playing. Parker, who has never attended “regular” school, asked his older siblings, both short-term public school vets, what they were doing.

“Oh, it’s PE; some of the kids, usually the upper grades, have PE last,” Quentin said.

“Or it could still be recess, the last one” Reiley said.

“That looks like fun,” Parker said, “Does everyone get to [have recess]?”

“No,” Quentin said, “Sometimes you have to sit out.”

“Huh?” Parker said. He was clearly alarmed.

“Yeah, like when you don’t finish your work,” Reiley said. “One time, I couldn’t think of what I wanted to be when I grow up, so I had to sit on the benches during recess. It was for our time capsule.”

I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but that incident was among the ones that “pushed me over the edge” into homeschooling. Reiley was supposed to write a short essay about what she wanted to be when she grew up. After a full 45 minutes of consideration, the entire amount of time she had ever pondered this important question in all of her seven years of life to date, she hadn’t written a thing. Even though it’s perfectly natural not to know what you want to be – ever, let alone in second grade – and entirely understandable that a child will need more than 45 minutes to complete an essay, Reiley was punished by missing recess. She was devastated. I was outraged.

Now she has “study breaks” when she needs them, and her younger siblings don’t know what recess is…

In the brief amount of time it took me to reminisce, the kids were over it. By the time the children started filing out of their classrooms, we were at home, eating pizza.

I always wondered how often people fall out of chair lifts. In fact, this question entered my mind practically every time I rode past a “Sit Back, Hold On, Be Safe” sign on my way up to snowboard. Now I know that chair lift falls are statistically  "rare" events … that, unfortunately, include my own eight-year-old son Parker.

When the chair lift I was riding yesterday afternoon stopped, I assumed someone had fallen disembarking from the lift. Then I heard people on the ground below say that someone – maybe even two people – had fallen out of a chair near the top of the lift. The woman in front of me said that someone two chairs of ahead of her saw a child fall. Just about then, I watched two of my children ride across the crest of the mountain from the lift to a moderate run. Although I knew that Parker was riding behind them, and ahead of me, it still didn’t occur to me that my child was the one who had purportedly fallen out of his chair.

We started moving again and I, along with just about everyone else on the lift, looked down. Within seconds, I could see who had fallen – Parker! He’d fallen over 10 feet – maybe 12-15 feet – into an un-groomed patch of snow just as a doctor on his day off boarded by, and stopped to help him up. I watched the EMTs assist Parker onto a snowmobile for a ride to meet me at the top of the lift. Parker was understandably shaken up, but appeared okay otherwise. We opted against an ambulance ride to the hospital in favor of a visit to our own urgent care; in addition to a headache and a sore shoulder, he fractured his clavical.

That makes him really lucky. The last person to fall of that lift in the same location broke both arms and fractured his skull! More generally, despite a recent spate of chair lift falls involving children, it’s typically young men who sustain serious injuries – from major fractures to pulmonary embolisms – but do not die. According to experts, the best way to avoid adding your own experience to these statistics is to position your buttocks ALL THE WAY BACK in the chair.

In case you’re wondering, Parker’s sweet cheeks were nowhere near the back of the chair when he fell; he had positioned himself to disembark early in an effort to beat his friend off the lift, lost his balance, and the rest is now Snow Valley lore.

I understand completely how important it is that children learn to recognize patterns. In addition to providing a basis for mastering countless academic and life skills that require problem-solving, learning about patterns in the world around them prepares children to organize information, make generalizations, and predict future events. I similarly appreciate – deeply – the value of conceptual learning, which prioritizes knowledge of the underlying concepts and principles of a subject area over rote memorization. I just can’t stomach a five-year-old identifying a string of alternating blue and red beads as an “AB pattern.”

I’d mostly forgotten the way my stomach turned on the afternoon my eldest son, Quentin, then a bright kindergartner, smugly informed me that the tower of Mega Bloks he’d created represented an “AB pattern” until today. This afternoon, his little sister, Olivia, who is in kindergarten now, proudly noted that she could “make a pattern” by drinking one glass of apple juice, then a glass of water, and then another glass of apple juice…and so on.

“Yes!” I said, with perhaps more enthusiasm than the moment warranted.

I was elated because Olivia’s spontaneous recognition indicated to me that she’s internalized and processed some if not all of the patterns we’ve seen in her readers, worked with in her math assignments, talked about in the pictures she draws and the flags and constellations she brings home from class, and recognized out-of-doors, at basketball games, and in the rock-climbing gym. And I have NEVER once uttered the phrase “AB pattern” in her presence. (Nor is it part of the curriculum in her once-a-week math class.)

I believe this kind of organic learning is conceptual. Olivia transfered her understanding of the principles of how the world works in one context to how it similarly works in another context, and then accounted for what comes next in a given sequence of beverage selections. It’s significant and desirable both because she figured it out for herself, and because she demonstrated her ability to generate and make use of patterns.

Olivia’s big brother has always been a smart kid. I’m sure that he was just as clever as Olivia when he was five, despite his mere identification of an AB pattern in the alternating colors of interlocking plastic blocks. That said, and at the risk of stepping on potentially a lot of toes, the problem is that a child’s ability to distinguish an AB – or other testable – pattern on queue does not necessarily indicate his/her capacity for making sense of the world. It simply does not demonstrate that learning has occurred. The widespread belief that it does makes me queasy.

I usually spend Thursdays working at home – albeit in fits and starts between assigning the day’s lessons for my four home-schooled children, answering their questions, and watching Olivia work. I’m not kidding. Olivia likes her “teacher” – whether it’s me, her father, or one of her older siblings – to sit beside her while she completes her math and language arts “home work” and reads. I usually confine my earnest “watching” to the first 20-30 minutes after I finish reading the paper, and before I head into my office to begin my day.

Today, though, I was facing a 5 PM deadline for a grant application. Meeting it was likely to require frequent and repeated interactions with my Co-PIs (”Principle Investigators,” for the uninitiated), our administrative staff, and proposed project collaborators. Consequently, I was up early and had finished a 6-mile run and my first cup of coffee long before Olivia even woke up around 8:30 AM. I did manage to pull myself away from my work long enough to fix Olivia a no-cooking-required breakfast of milk, apple juice, and Cheerios and park her on the couch to watch one of her Scholastic books CDs. No, I don’t recall which, but it must not have been very interesting because Olivia was gone before it was over.

I hadn’t heard the door chime, so I assumed she was somewhere in the house, happily occupied, and – more importantly – quiet. I continued working.

Sometime between then and “early lunch” – you know, when the kids first start asking if they can have something to eat because they’re hungry, their stomachs are growling, and it’s SO CLOSE to lunchtime anyway – Olivia joined me in my office and asked me to tie her cleats. Yep, she was decked out in full soccer garb. Mind you, she’s never actually played soccer and it’s unlikely she remembers her siblings playing when she was much younger. But there she was with ponytails she fixed herself, wearing a pair of Reiley’s old soccer or basketball shorts, a t-shirt with a soccer ball screen print, soccer socks, shin guards, and cleats.

“Mommy, will you open the [sliding] glass door so I can play soccer?”

“Sure…” I said, as I opened the door, and out she went.

A few minutes later, Olivia was banging on the door. I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me if I tried talking to her through the glass, so I got up, walked across the family room and kitchen, to open the door. “Yes?” I asked.

“Mommy, Roxie is out of her kennel…Can I play with Roxie?”

“Hmm…” I thought. Roxie is an Australian Shepherd mix who is at least 15 years old. Once a menace to our neighborhood’s small animal population, she now has to be coaxed up and off of the pillow she sleeps on, and guided out of her kennel into the yard. I couldn’t imagine Roxie “playing” with Olivia. Still…

“Okay, I guess so,” I told Olivia.

“Yeah!”

I closed the door and returned to my office. It was a while before I heard from Olivia again…She came running into my office (nope, no idea who let her in or what prompted them to do so)…

“Mommy, I winned! I really did. I winned Roxie.”

“Great!” I said, and paused.

“Mommy, can I have one of your trophies?”

“Hon…” I said, “I’d love to give you one of my trophies, but the truth is, they were thrown away a long time ago.”

“Oh,” she said, and paused…”Then can I have one of Reiley’s?”

“Sweetheart,” I began, “You usually get a trophy because your team played better than all the other teams, and you won A LOT of games.” I refrained from adding that beating a geriatric dog is generally not considered worthy of a trophy.

“Did Reiley win a lot of games?”

“Well…yes…some of her teams did…”

“Oh…Mommy, can you help me take my cleats off?” And Olivia was on to something else.

But I was left thinking about the truth…As just about any parent would guess at this juncture, no, Reiley did n ot earn most of her trophies by playing well; rather, like the majority of children playing organized sports today, she was awarded them simply for participating. And much as I support rewarding children for having fun, learning new skills, cooperating with their teammates, good sportsmanship, etc. I hate the currently commonplace “participation trophy.

Rich Tierney has it right: “The participation trophy is one of the most misused and irrelevant pieces of hardware sitting on your child’s shelf. A trophy should represent an accomplishment of some sort, but there is no true accomplishment in participating, at least by the standards of most participation trophies.”

I can bet that’s not what Reiley thinks…there was no way she’d give Olivia one of her prized trophies – and certainly not for beating the dog at backyard soccer.

It’s all downhill after Wednesdays around here. Although none of my children have class, I teach, which means they’re at home “alone” for a good chunk of the day. I’m sure they’d enjoy this IF they didn’t have to babysit five-year-old Olivia.

While I’m on campus, my two “biggest” kids take turns home-schooling their little sister. As junior instructors, they find reading to be particularly challenging – no doubt due, in part, to Olivia’s tendency to read the pictures rather than the words. Today, Quentin became so frustrated with Olivia’s refusal to sound out the words in favor of telling her own, much more engaging, story based on the pictures that he apparently told her, “Fine! Then just read to  yourself, ” which she did.

When I got home, Olivia greeted me with a hug and a heartfelt “I missed you, Mommy.” Having so duly warmed me up, Olivia proceeded to spin  her own version of the day’s reading lesson. “Mommy! I read inside my my head quietly because the cats were sleeping.”

Uh huh…right…just like Dr. Seusscan read with his eyes shut.