One of my and Wes’s favorite things to do on our free weekends is to spend the afternoon at Barnes & Noble with our skinny lattes and a stack of books and magazines to flip through. Sometimes I find a winner…that book or magazine that has sucked me in so far I just need to buy it and finish it at home.  Other times, I leave empty-handed, but with a brain full of new information and the feeling that I am just a  little closer to the world around me. Last weekend, instead of partaking in our bimonthly pilgrimage to B&N alone, we decided to introduce Anna to our ritual. She had been having a hard time finding anything of interest to read ever since she finished the latest Wimpy Kid book (more on that to come), and since she thinks only a very small few of my book suggestions are good ones (that’s a tween for ya!), I let her loose in the kids' department so she could find a book for herself.

One of the things I LOVE about Barnes & Noble's kids' department is that it's laid out by age. It was very easy for Anna to find the fiction books for her age range where there were more than three bookcases full of wonderful books for her to choose from. We left her alone for a while and when I came back to check on her she was holding one book in her hand. One!  With all those books to choose from, she chose just one. I must say, I was slightly perturbed at that, but once she sat down with her hot chocolate, she read. And read. And read. She stopped every chapter to tell us what was happening, explaining that she could actually see the story playing out as a movie in her head as she read it. I couldn’t believe that she actually liked it and continued to like it that much! Of course, we bought the book and she has been reading it ever since, a little each night. The book was Hoot, by the way.

What I learned that afternoon is that sometimes you just have to let them be. I mean, if you think about it, kids try and exert their independence from the time they're babies. Why not encourage that independence? Yes, you still provide boundaries and structure, but let them figure stuff out and make decisions for themselves. You might be surprised. I was. And I also learned a little more about Anna, like just how much she's influenced by book covers, how much animals mean to her, and the fact that if she's reading something she likes, she can comprehend the story.

I was excited that Anna did not know that Hoot was made into a movie. For the first time she will experience reading the book first and then watching the movie it inspired. She’ll be able to compare the movie she created in her head to the one she can watch on TV, and we'll enjoy talking about what she liked and didn’t like about it. And when she’s finished, I think she’ll enjoy going back to Barnes & Noble, to the Children’s department, where she'll choose another book that will create a movie in her head. Happy Reading.