February 16, 2009: The Reader

Veronika is reading! Actually she has been for months now and I'm finally getting around to writing about it now. The first time I remember her reading anything on her own was on October 8th (plus or minus a day), on vacation in Maine. We were getting ready to watch A Bug's Life and when one of the usual Disney pre-movie screens came up, she said, "Home video?" Dinka and I were in the kitchen and were all, what now? The biggest smile spread across her face, a smile that said "Holy crap, can you believe that I just read that?" For the rest of the vacation, she kept telling us about "that one time that we were watching A Bug's Life and I read 'home video.'"

A week later we bought her a Finding Nemo learning to read book and she tore through it. Since then, she's been reading everything she can: road signs, cereal boxes, my browser windows while looking over my shoulder, and lots of books—about baseball, dolphins, ballerinas, you name it. She's pretty good about sounding out words when she's stumped and loves to learn new words, so the weekly vocabulary list at school is a hit. She's already reading level two books, something that she knows puts her ahead of the recommendations on the back of the book (because she can read them!) and occasionally brings up. She even surprised us the other day by reading a hand-written postcard from Grandma, the video of which you can see here.

Veronika has also been writing for quite a while, at first just her name while we fed letters to her, but she soon graduated to her own words and sentences (see here). She can sit for an hour at her table and write, diligently forming the letters, folding up the papers, maybe stamping an envelope. Her favorite thing is to write notes and letters to people, which are the sweetest sentiments that you can imagine (representative of her character, I think, objectively). It's like she sits down and thinks, "What could I write that will make the recipient of this letter happy?" Early on, she wrote a note to Ivan: "Dear Ivan, baseball, Mets." Just words that she knows would make him happy to hear and think about. One night she came to a German school dinner with me and spent the evening writing notes to everyone she knew. Here are a couple of them:

Dear Mama,

I love you very much.

Love, Veronika

Dear Papa,

Can we go camping again? I love you.

Love, Veronika

I read things like this and am astonished at the sweetness of this child. I'm not sure if she's taking years off my life or extending it by making my heart beat so but she does make it all worthwhile.