Building Family Culture: Reading Aloud
My husband and I both come from homes where our mothers read to us, where we were shaped permanently by the power of good stories read aloud. Reading aloud means living through stories together. And, I think that knits a family together in shared experience beyond mundane life. This also plants the seeds for corporate make-believe that goes past the imagination of the individual child. And, it’s life-giving for more than just children. I didn’t anticipate the joy of reading aloud to be so pivotal in our first year of marriage. We married a month after graduating college and moved to the Chicago area so that my husband could start seminary. Due to the random jobs I found as a seminary wife, I ended up having to wake up a majority of mornings around 3:30am. So, I would try to fall asleep around 8:30pm in order to get the sleep I needed, but I would find this difficult. Gradually, my husband started reading me to sleep. In that first year of marriage, we reread books like The Hobbit and …