To my beautiful daughter, Charlotte. Fierce, smart and full of joy- you are a super reader and a super girl!

Preview audio:

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My name is Charlotte. I’m a kid who loves to read. And I am lucky, because I come from a reading kind of family.

And a reading kind of family means I get to read all the time. Everyone in my family loves books, maybe even as much as me. But I doubt it.

My Gaga Leah was a reading kid and now she’s a reading grandma. She has the biggest collection of books you have ever seen! She has so many books, she has to store them in little libraries all over her big wooden house. She has books in the bedrooms. Books in the living room. She even has hundreds of books stored in her attic! I’m not allowed up there yet, but someday I’m going to read every book she has up in that attic. That’s a promise.

When we go for visits at Gaga Leah’s house, there is always someone who will read to me. With so many people in my reading family, there are a lot of different reading laps to choose from. Sometimes, at a family party, I can go from one lap to another for an hour and not run out of laps! Gaga Margery, Uncle John, Pop Pop, Beth, Grandpa Jack - everyone will read to me if I ask them to. Soft laps, bony laps, laps with a giant belly or a soft bosom or hairy chest, all those laps are ready for me and my books!

Even if it’s not a lap day, I don’t have to worry. Behind the big yellow chair in the living room, there are two secret shelves bursting with books, colorful books of every size that I can reach all on my own. I read a book, pull it down, read another and pull it down, again and again, until all of those books fan around me, like the petals of a paper flower. And I don’t just look at the pictures either. I actually know how to really and truly read. All by myself.

Everyone was pretty surprised the day they figured out I could really read words in books. That’s because I taught myself when I was only three years old. But mostly they were surprised because I didn’t hear words when I was a baby and most kids who can’t hear have a hard time learning to read. I wear hearing aids now, but when I was a baby, I couldn’t hear much. Unless it was a noisy sound like a yell or a bell or a clap of thunder, I just couldn’t hear it. Especially words.

But I was lucky because I have reading parents. So I found the words anyway. My parents read to my twin brother, Henry, and me every day, all day long, even when we were the smallest of babies. I couldn’t hear the book words but I looked at the pictures and letter shapes and moving lips until my brain put it all together and it came out reading.