Silence Is Golden

If silence is golden, then the silence that follows a trip to borrow library books must be the 24-karat variety. After our Saturday morning stop at the public library, the kids rushed into the house with their separately bagged three books apiece and sat soundlessly in the living room for 15 minutes poring over their finds.

This is one of the early rewards of literacy--a young child's ability to entertain, educate, and amuse herself with a book. And it is the encouragement I offer to parents who doubt that reading to a six-month-old who'd rather chew on a book than listen to it does any good. It most assuredly does.