It's not a good ministone unless I cry a little

I thought my babies' cries were the sweetest sound I'd ever heard. Ditto their early laughs and their first words. I thought wrong. The sweetest sound in the world, it turns out, is the sound of my child's voice as she reads a new book aloud from the back seat of my car.

Julia's read aloud to me plenty of times before. Hell, she even read the Four Questions at our Passover seder this year with remarkably little assistance. I know that she regularly reads to herself when I'm not around. But it's always been my idea when she reads aloud; my suggestion, never hers. It's always seemed like she was humoring me by deigning to show off her reading abilities a bit, and I've often worried that I might be pushing her to share skills that she just wasn't ready to share yet. Not today. Today, the siren song of a new book that was just sitting on the seat beside her was too compelling, and she simply had to pick it up and read it aloud without delay.

I was the kid who brought my book along when my mother made me go out to play. I think I probably checked every single book out of our local library's Young Adult section in a period of only a few months. All my life, I've read voraciously, fueled by a hunger to find out what happens next and an impatience to get to the good parts. Today, Julia showed herself to posess at least a little bit of that same love for the written word. Is it really lame if I confess that my eyes filled up with tears when I realized what she was doing?