Some of my fondest and earliest memories of childhood involve my dad reading to me his favorite fantasy novels - Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.  They must have had an effect on my developing mind as I have never been able to escape the fantasy of those worlds.

All kids are strange - wonderfully strange - when they're young, but perhaps I had a few extra idiosyncrasies (when we played house, I was always the unicorn).  I attribute a lot of my "strangeness" to those early evenings spent with my dad and the likes of Frodo Baggins and Taran Wanderer, imagining I was adventuring with them through worlds far more magical and unexpected than my own.

I was never unhappy being a daydreamer.

It's impossible not to see the reflection of yourself in your own kids and I recognize much of the same adventurous spirit and eagerness for fantasy in my boys that I felt as a child and still as an adult.  The world I grew up in fostered my creativity in ways that my sons will not likely understand or experience in the same way.  I would disappear for hours into the woods behind our house on an adventure all my own, back when a child disappearing for hours was not news-worthy or a reason to call the police.  I would climb trees, build forts behind the house, smash open rocks to see what crystals lay inside.  These activities now have an added layer of supervision and fear (you might get hurt!) that can inhibit that natural creativity and exploration.

Nearly the only experience I can give to my boys that will be the same for them as it was for me is reading.

Reading was my father's way of igniting my creative mind and it worked.  It turned me into an inquisitive artist (you should have been in my second grade art class when I didn't draw seashells on my mermaids, what a scandal), a determined learner, and an adventurous adult (female role models will have to be for another post).

I hope, in thirty-some-odd years, my own children can think of their childhood and remember such a time that marked them for happiness as the nights my father read to me, and - a little selfishly - I hope they recall the stories I read to them.