Mommy Adventures: An Adventure Too Weird For Words

Despite all the awesomeness that he has shown in the first 8 years of his life (that i am so grateful to the heavens for), he’s not perfect. He throws tantrums, he gets into fights (but never starts, I have to add) and he sometimes forgets to say “sorry”. My major issue with him is that, for a boy so brilliant, he doesn’t seem to have interest in books. I bought him children’s versions of the classics – The Three Musketeers and Pinocchio – and I’ve enticed him to read e-books, but it seems like I’m only forcing the reading on him. I strongly believe that learning is most effective when the child is having fun, so I had to look for other methods to get him interested. In all fairness, the e-books kind of worked for a bit, but why the hell do these online resources for kids use so many words that young children cannot understand?! Captain Awesome has a very wide vocabulary for his age, but man, these e-books for kids still get him stunned.

Anyway, when I took him to Barnes and Noble, he showed a lot of interest in comic books. I kept insisting on the classics at first, but I later on gave in. I bought him one Marvel comic book and he got down on it in an instant. So, I said to myself, well, at least he’s reading. Comics is still literature. I went through that phase with my brother. He collected Marvel, I collected DC.

Following Neil Gaiman on Twitter, I remember him tweeting about his graphic novel version of Coraline. He’s done other graphic novels to entice children to read. So, I did some online shopping and decided to get three books for this sort of trial stage. I got, well, Coraline and The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman as well as one of my personal favorite reads, Artemis Fowl (the graphic novel version, though) by Eion (pronounced Owen!) Colfer.

They arrived a few days ago and I made him choose that night, before going to bed, on which he would want to start with. He chose The Dangerous Alphabet. He totally enjoyed it! When i told him it was time for bed, he asked for extra 10 minutes and started skimming through the pages of the other books!!! Yay, yay, yay!!! I hope that this is the start!!!!

Night 3 of reading Coraline. He even started drawing the characters of the story! I’m so, so, so happy! I feel so accomplished. I won’t be celebrating until he develops a real love for reading yet, though. I’ll just consider this the first step!