Toward the end of the last school year, Aliya finally started to love reading, and lately she’s been walking around with her nose stuck in various Judy Blume books. I let her read my copy of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret,” which I had saved from way back when I was a pre-teen (yes, Aliya, we had books back then). This photo is from last weekend, when we ran into our friends at Mad Willies and the girls got sick of waiting for the grown-ups to stop talking. Hannah had the foresight to bring a book, Aliya and Chloe were reading the free papers out of the boxes on the street corner.
There’s an unforeseen benefit to Aliya’s love of reading, which I discovered a couple of weeks ago. Now that she’s a little old for time-outs, I don’t always have a compelling punishment to threaten her with. She’s normally pretty good, but one day she was giving me trouble while we waited for Adlani to come out of Taekwan Do, and I spontaneously took away her book. You can tell by the video that I struck a nerve and she promptly transformed into psycho-kid. My favorite part is when she says that I took a stupid pill, but you’ve got to wait until almost the end of the video for that. Don’t worry…I confirmed with my psychologist-friend that taking away a book was an acceptable punishment and would not cause permanent damage. I didn’t ask her about videotaping the tirade, but Aliya seems to have recovered.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5yZQzJ5i2g&fs=1&hl=en_US]