When my eldest child was just a few months old, I went to the Library with her, for the excellent Tuesday morning room, and there they gave us a little packet of stuff they have for new parents, which included Rosemary Wells' book "Read to your Bunny." This lovely book (Rosemary Wells is a great writer and painter of children's books, I've never regretted reading or getting any of them) begins with the injunction "Read to your bunny" and ends with the prediction "and one day your bunny will read to you."
This prediction is being fulfilled in our life this summer. Sitting and listening to my daughter read is alternately dull, as the part of me that wants to do everything myself (the part that would grab your keyboard if I were watching you do something on a computer) is twitching, and amazing, as she turns the last page and has read another book. At that time, a burning flush runs through me and I smile with such pride. The journey from tiny pumpkin curled up in a swaddled ball that fit in the top left quarter of my chest as she slept her first days in the outer world to this lanky reader, showing shy pride at her increasingly useful skill and clever commentary at the somewhat straight-laced books they write for beginning readers, just seems too short a journey to have allowed such changes.
That lovely summer when walking around the city with my tiny pumpkin, on hearing the infinite stream of "it goes so quickly" from kindly parents, my back would stiffen with irritation at being told this obvious trite phrase, and now here I am wallowing in sentimentality. If someone walked in front of my window with a baby now, I'd be tempted to run out and tell them how quickly and amazingly it goes. (It's so much easier to wax poetical about kids when one is taking a no-longer inevitable long nap and the other is off at a play-date.)
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