Turning Back the Pages

I am not speaking metaphorically. This is really what happens whenever I read to my little girl before bed. She turns the pages back so many times that we set the world record for the slowest finishers of a board book. She obviously doesn't appreciate the amount of effort that goes into reading to her! To fathers, nightly reading is not merely a way to sedate children before bed, it is a medium for developing a love for reading and learning, a habit of finishing what you start, and, in our case, a familiarity with a second language. The sad irony is that pushing the second and third goals to hard may seriously undermine the first. But, focusing on the first enables the second and third. As with everything else, this dawned on me only recently. So, as I read tonight, I let my little girl stop me, turn back the pages, and show me "moon," "house," "cat," and "food." We did that throughout the book, and with each word she would show me, I would repeat back the Spanish translation.