Ready, Set, Go!

I have only one son and he has only ever had one goal: to avoid being still for any length of time. His nickname was “Turbo.” He shinnied up a 20-foot ladder at Walmart in a split second at two. He chattered and thrashed incessantly in his sleep. He never stopped moving. Ever. So, the hours-on-end reading aloud that his older sister thrived on was not for him. I developed what I dubbed “sniper reading” for Connor. I would grab him under an arm and a book under the other, dive for the couch, flip through as fast as I could pointing out a single thing per page, and then release the whirlwind. He couldn’t handle reading any book longer than that, except one. Something about Jez Alborough’s It’s The Bear! caused a lull in Hurricane Boy. In the book, Eddie goes on a picnic with his mom, who assures the nervous child there are no bears around before she leaves him, alone in the woods, to get a forgotten pie. Naturally, a bear shows up in mom’s absence-- he is big, loud and hungry for food including, possibly, little boys. Eddie hides in a picnic basket trying to stay quiet and off the radar. It was at this point that Connor would curl up tiny, still as a statue, and pretend he was hiding from the bear. I think Scarlett was scared of the bear, but those were rare moments of peace and focus for my very busy boy.