Looks like we got ourselves a reader...

In continuing with the reading theme from the following post (The Turnover Artist), I thought I'd post a couple pictures of Kiernan with books.

As I said in that post, one of the last activities of the day is reading. Lately, it has become one of the first as well, and not because of us. Because of him.

He gets up pretty early in the morning these days. Five o'clock or so. Sometimes a little later. Sometimes a little earlier. Wendy feeds him and then tries to convince him it would be in his best interest to sleep a little bit more. He always disagrees. 99.44% of the time he wins the argument, and one of us must drag ourselves out of bed to start entertaining him. The world is still dark--as are we--and here we are giving piggy back rides.

Of late he has finished his feeding and gone back into his room, heading straight for his bookshelves. He just starts pulling books off the shelf and handing them to us. Some of them he pushes away after a couple pages. Some of them he tells us (by use of his hand sign for "more") to read to him over and over again.

On the morning pictured above, he sat by himself for about fifteen minutes just, well, reading to himself. Sometimes he makes noise while he's doing this, like he's mimicking the way we read to him. Sometimes he just silently turns the pages. Sometimes his lips move. I guess he's been watching me read to myself.

The picture below is another shot from that same morning. I like this shot because it feels like he's about to say to his mom, who took the picture, "Do you mind? I'm trying to read here." (Yes, he looks a mite bleary. But keep in mind, the sun hasn't even come up yet. He's barely got one cup of coffee in him at this point.)

NOTE: The marks on his face were from a spill he took while walking a day or so before. He was chasing birds and got two good steps on me and went down. He's usually quite good at catching himself and bracing his fall when he goes down, but he was too close to nap time when he stumbled, and his arms were getting too heavy.