Tonight at bedtime Lila declared:
“No mommy, you’re not reading to me tonight. Tonight I’m reading this book all by myself!”
I smiled at her, already proud of her brewing confidence (oh, and by the way, she can’t read a lick) and waited for her to begin.
“No mommy. You have to leave. I’m not reading to you. I’m reading to ME!”
I tried to hide over by her closet. But her room is square so there is really no place to hide and it was pretty clear she didn’t want to read to me. I sighed heavily as I left. I’m dramatic like that. Not 3 minutes later I heard her shout my name.
“Mommy!! Will you read this to me?”
I head back to her room and took my usual spot in her bed, propped my head up on her ladybug pillow pet and began reading. She interrupted me immediately.
“But mommy. You’re not doing it right.”
“No, I am. See, it says right there: ‘I found my other sock!'”
“No mummy, you’re forgetting about your accent”
The British accent is a must in Lila’s bedtime stories. Some nights (those late nights that bedtime seems to drag on forever and ever and each of the kids takes a thousand hours to settle down) we will not only try to skip the accent, but skip words and paragraphs altogether. You really can’t fool this kid though.
So I began again, this time with my best British accent.
“Thank you” she said, in her very best accent (and it’s ridiculously cute because she nods her head up and down and her voice gets all breathy and soft and she really does sound like a tiny little Brit).
I stop reading to tell her she’s cute, and I hope we’ll have a moment because I’m starting to feel like she’s getting too big too fast, but she is not thinking we should have a moment, she is thinking I should
“hurry up and read!”
She’s a feisty little bugger. And I’ll say it again, because it’s become somewhat of a family mantra, we would definitely be rather boring without her. (I hope you all read that last line with a British accent).