Ah, how well I remember wanting to be Mary Lou Retton. So what if I had no gymnastics experience? So what if I didn’t know a round-off from a back handspring? My father had welded two bars for me, and I spent every day outside swinging on them and flipping over them on my stomach. I was SURE I was the next Mary Lou. Like thousands of other little girls, during the 1984 Olympics, I cried because my parents wouldn’t send me to Texas to train.
Watching Simone Biles be so brave about her own struggles with pressure has turned my young tears into gratitude, and my wishes into empathy. Though I have never been an Olympic gymnast, I have learned you don’t need to be an elite athlete to hit a wall.
And boy, have we hit it.
As summer marches on, and the new school year gets closer, the blow-up pool no longer holds any charm for my kids, using the weed-eater no longer makes them feel grown up, just tired of chores, summer math on the iPad isn’t a novelty anymore, just tedious—and reading, well, that has started to seem like a chore too.
To be fair, it’s reading new books that seem like a chore. The super-hot and humid days we’ve had this summer seem to have sapped every bit of energy from my kids, so it’s a constant battle to get them to read something new. When it’s reading time, it’s the well-worn pages of Diary of a Wimpy Kid or New Kid that make an appearance. Only my youngest, who is just entering a new level of reading, is tearing her way through her unread The Boxcar Children.
This fourth installment of Miller’s graphic novel series (Click, Act, Camp) finds Olive, still in the sixth grade, but with a new problem, a new problem whose name is “Natasha.”
Every night I read chapter books to my kids. I sit down in the rocking chair while they all pile on the bed, and I read one (or two, maybe sometimes three depending on whether teeth-brushing time went smoothly) chapter of a book that I have chosen. While most nights my kids are happy to hear the next installment of what happens to Anne Shirley or Cassie Logan, there are nights when I read the room and see that my kids need a break, they need something fun and dare I say it, something with a bit of “yick.”9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004))
