Look At Your Own Risk, It's Grimm

Michaela is a reading fool. 

I think she may have read 7000 pages just since the beginning of this year. 

I made that number up, but a lower number didn't sound high enough, and a higher number just sounded ludicrous. 

She can be found buried in a book if she is not otherwise engaged.  This here is a whopper of a book, too. 

It's the Grimms' fairy tales, at least one of the editions; I got it at the library, thinking it was cool because I really wanted her to read the "real" fairy tales, not the watered down versions.

Can we say "engrossed"?

She reads while she eats!  She can't get enough.  She's read through a lot of the American Girl books (I'm not sure what I think about that-it's fun reading for her), and she loves Magic Tree House, although she is way beyond those books as far as her ability.  Again, it's fun for her.  But the other day she tore through a book I checked out for our section on Japan in history, "The Boy and the Samurai".  I had the intention of reading it with her, but she's already done with it. 

I love it that she is such a reading fanatic.  I remember reading like a crazy maniac too, around the same age.  I loved books in a series (Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and the Black Stallion books) but I read poetry (Christina Rossetti-we have the same name, how cool!), and I loved the Rats of Nimh for example, as well as other works of fiction (like a book called Magic Elizabeth which you can't really find anymore except for mucho dinero on Amazon, used, but which I discovered in a box at my parents' that they had set aside for me to go through, and can I just tell you I screamed I was so excited?!). 

I love watching her read.  She curls up in one of our chairs ("the green chair") under a blanket, and enters into another world.  But in a good way.  She could stay that way for hours if I were to let her.  In fact, my mom told me about a conversation they had on the phone the other day about travels (we are far away from them)...Michaela was talking about how she could at least read on an airplane ride which helped (as opposed to Eliana who could not read and had a really hard time just being able to go back and forth between the two of us for three hours), and that she could read for three, four, five, or even six hours!  And based on what I've seen these last few weeks, I believe it.