Back when Jake had just turned three and Nate was semi-walking/crawling/eating anything he could get his fat little fists on, I remember a specific morning at Santana Row. We were sitting on a bench as the boys explored and climbed and fortunately, it was quite early, so they weren’t cutting-off every available pedestrian as is their typical weekend hobby.
All of a sudden little Jake turns to us and says, “That’s in my name! That’s in my name!” He was pointing to the signage on the window of the ted bAKEr store. And more specifically, the AKE.
“Yay!” our inexperienced parenting brains thought. “Maybe he’ll be an early reader?” That was when he was really excited about letters and signs and would exclaim excitedly, “Numbers!” everywhere we went.
We forgot to factor in his relentless negotiating skills and preference for pampering.
Years passed and he loved being read to. He dabbled in writing early on, but his interest waxed and waned. I felt slightly ill at the first kindergarten parent night when Maestra Patiño explained that our kids would be expected to write “opinion pieces”… in Spanish. James and I looked at each other and telepathically communicated, “Uh oh.”
At that point he had kind of mastered ‘Jacob.’ But he would frequently ask where the ‘p’ was— he’s always thought his name was ‘Jaycup.’
Kindergarten homework hit us like a ton of bricks. The thought of reading or writing an entire sentence was akin to asking Jake to transcribe the Bible by hand. He would flop and cry and lament, try one letter… and then flop and cry and lament some more.
So I let it go. If there is one thing to know about Jacob, it’s that he will do what you want him to do only when he is good and ready. No amount of pressure or bribes or threats or positive reinforcement or tricky psychological tactics will make him budge. Trust me.
And so we waited for the veritable reading “switch to flip” as many of his friends’ parents had described. Which is why I was gobsmacked when the week before Christmas I overheard him reading his Pokémon Handbook aloud on the couch.
Jacob can read?? Not just sounding out his Spanish schoolwork or reading stop signs, but entire sentences devoted to the intricacies of battles. Which is probably why I’ve decided to embrace the Pokélife— I am forever indebted to the one thing that finally flipped his “interest in reading” switch. We even got a stack of schoolwork where he had actually written entire paragraphs and the papers had no signs of dramatic tear stains or flopping around on top of them.
Nate is certainly ahead of the game as his preschool is leading the preliteracy motorcade. But then again, he’s always been the one who wanted to do Jake’s flash cards with me. That said, I’ve noted that he can confidently spell and write exactly two words unassisted:
N-A-T-E and …
B-U-T-T.
So proud.