First love

I'm not a sitcom type of single mom beset with comedic adventures involving eccentric neighbors, screwball romances, and precocious kids. In fact, I don't even like to call myself a single mother, because it implies that I'm doing most of the work of rearing Sian and Colin myself. To me, that seems very unfair to their dad, who is so involved in their life. That being said, I do run my household a little differently now than when we were married. In general, I tend to be less lenient about such items as computer time than their father is. But I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, tell my children that they could stay up in bed as late as they wanted to if they were reading a book. No, I did not make sure all of the books had won literary awards, or appeared on some reading list of great books. Recalling what great pleasure fiction had given me as a child, I just wanted my children to grow up to love escaping into a book. Although Colin would rather play some arcane computer game than read a novel, he is a facile reader. His father observed that our son is not bothered by discovering words he has not learned-he just navigates around the word and moves on. On the other hand, Sian has long looked at reading as a duty rather than a pleasure. She was so opposed to it that we thought she had a reading problem. In hindsight, it appears that Sian had simply not met the "right" book. A libraria's recommendation led her to a novel about Doll-People...and my little girl fell in love with a novel for the first time. On school nights, the over head lamp was on so late that I had to go into her room and tell her that I was breaking my own rule-no reading past ten o'clock on school nights! I hope that this love affair is merely the first in a long line of literary engagements-we shall see. I wonder what other crazy rules I can come up with.