Reading Aloud is Contagious

It was a little before Simeon was born that I caved, trading in my old handy flip-phone (“sorry, I don’t text – it’s way too hard on this thing”) for an iPhone, and then I think it was shortly after Simeon was born that I learned about podcasts. At first, I would literally just smile & nod when people would talk about listening to podcasts, because I honestly had no real idea what they were talking about but didn’t want to seem as ignorant and old-school as I truly was. But after I got hooked on Sarah Mackenzie’s blog, The Read Aloud Revival and fell in love with her upon reading Teaching From Rest – a Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakable Peace, I decided that I needed to figure out this whole podcast thing and find a way to jump on that bandwagon. Because, ya’ll, Sarah Mackenzie had a podcast (was it like a sermon? someone reading a blog? webcamming? I was that clueless…) and I wanted in on that treasure.

That was over two years ago. I’m deep in treasure now.
Since then, I have listened to every podcast episode at least once, pored over her booklists and recommendations, and have seen her out & about in town (like at Nate Wilson’s movie release last week) – because, yep, we live in the same county and go to the same places and know a lot of the same people and use the same library. In fact, my kids and I have been known to compare the size of Sarah Mackenzie’s “hold” items stack at the library to ours! Because, umm, we’re awesome like that.

It was Sarah Mackenzie who somehow got me linked up with a lot of the authors and homeschooling resources that I have been in love with over the last couple of years. She is the one, thanks to her blogs and podcasts, who has trained me to recognize names of authors & illustrators, and how to choose great literature over twaddle or mediocre stuff. She helped us fall in love with The Rabbit Room, especially S.D. Smith and Andrew Peterson and Jonathan Auxier and Jonathan Rogers and Jennifer Trafton… She lead me to resources like IEW, Andrew Pudewa, CiRCE, Cindy Rollins, and Sally Clarkson. She is also the culprit behind the fact that even though my family has four library cards (with fifty checkouts each allowed at a time) we have actually maxed-out our limit before!

She speaks at homeschool conferences and women’s events, and I have wanted to participate in one of her events, but they honestly are usually a plane flight away. And y’all know how I feel about flying, right?
I might be a bit personally peeved that Sarah Mackenzie has not yet helped remedy the fact that we still don’t have a great homeschooling conference in our area… hehe… but maybe I need to help get that wagon started moving. I’m a communicator when I need to be – I can make phone calls and write letters and get details organized. So we’ll see. I so much wanted to attend the Great Homeschool Convention or even Wild+Free. Sigh. My city is growing, and we’ve got tons of homeschoolers who need a superb resource at our fingertips! And I think Sarah Mackenzie just might be our golden ticket.

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But anyway, her new book released yesterday and I got to attend her book release party tonight at a local bookshop called Auntie’s, along with a few friends. Sidenote: this was after I spent two hours reading aloud to my kids this afternoon, and they each read on their own for an hour, plus yesterday I read an entire novel (it was middle grade fiction, but still… the whole thing in one day doesn’t happen very often anymore in my life!) AND half of The Read-Aloud Family. My life is always bookish, but today was no exception whatsoever.
So anyway, she read us a chapter of her new book, answered questions, visited with us & signed books, and shared all over again how she fell in love with reading aloud with her kids to make connections with them & with literature. And since I caught the bug from her over two years ago, it was fun to spend some time with lots of other locals who caught the same bug. It was an energetic group of gals & a super sweet evening, and I am so thankful I got to spend time with these lovelies talking about one of my favorite things in the world!! (….books! but you knew that already, right?!)

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(L to R: Sarah G, my sis-in-law Ashley B, Sarah M, Tina G, and me)

Oh, and if I were cool and trendy enough to have instagram, this would be filled with all the hashtags.
#readaloudfamily #readaloudrevival #homeschoolmamasonthetown

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