Books give you wings

Wings figure prominently in the book which started our tradition of Family Reading Night:  Black and Blue Magic, by Zylpha Keatley Snyder.   Snyder says she wrote the book at the request of her son.  "You always write depressing books about girls, why don't you write a happy book about a boy?"  And so she did.

We went on to read many books together, including the Harry Potter series.  My daughter was the one we were reading to, so she didn't take a turn reading.  When we finished a book, we'd get out the dancing flower, which plays a few bars from "In The Mood", and she would dance the Finished The Book Dance.

When our grandchildren visited recently, my wife, daughter, and myself took turns reading chapters from the first three Harry Potter books.  The dancing flower has long been lost to us (I think it's packed up in the basement), so we instituted a bedtime ritual "Dance Party".   The bedtime ritual with our grandchildren was lengthy by design, because they fight bedtime much more than our kids did.  First came the vitamins & teeth, then dance party (about a dozen songs that the kids dance to), then singing (about half a dozen or so kids songs), then the chapters.  Sometimes the reading was a bit more extensive than it had to be, but it was summertime so nobody cared much.  The upside was, the kids had plenty of warning that bedtime was coming,

We're already dusting off our young readers list for the next visit!