Reading is Fundamental

But what is reading, really? I ask because the answer will determine whether Siena has beaten her peer group to another developmental milestone -- and it's never too early to compete vicariously through your children.

To any impartial observer, the first step would be to define "reading," then look at what Siena can and can't do, and see if she fits the definition. But I'm about as impartial as a Soviet figure-skating judge, so we're going to analyze -- and euphemize -- Our Little Angel's achievements, and then craft a definition of reading that allows Daddy to walk out of this with at least a partial victory. I do not, however, warrant this as a generally applicable foreign policy strategy -- and even if any of you even got that joke, you're almost certainly not laughing. But I digress.

Siena has the alphabet down cold; she can recognize any letter. At least, the uppercase letters; as I write this, I wouldn't want to put money on her recognizing a lowercase "q." See how we're already defining literacy down? She can also write just about any letter, though the more common letters -- the ones that turn up in "Siena," "Mommy," "Daddy," and "Love," she writes with more practiced familiarity. (BLOG UPDATE: just yesterday, Siena pointed out to me that she can no execute the "S" maneuver when she signs in at school. Thanks for all your prayers in this regard. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog post.) But she asked me how to spell "Mother" the other day, and needed a quick tutorial in "R." Of course, I attach no significance whatsoever to the fact that she won't write in lowercase letters; if I was thirty-nine inches tall, I'd want to make as big an impression as I could at all times.

And there's plenty of words that Siena can "read," in the sense of looking at them and knowing what they say and mean. For example, whenever a package comes for her (which, given MiMi's proclivities, is about every thirty-six hours) she can tell right away that it's for her because she can read "Siena Jensen DelliCarpini" without breaking a sweat. There's plenty of other words as well: the obvious "Daddy," "Mommy," "Doodlebops," and key words in the Angeleno vocabulary like "Ralph's," "Pink's," and "Trader Joe's." And she can spell the words when she's looking at them, too. In fact, there's whole books in her little library that Siena can "read" to you -- but then, she could read them to you just as easily without the book, because she's memorized them. But even I can't count this as reading. Once I had to play a Korean DVD (not at all what you think) and after a while I could recognize the hieroglyphics that meant "Menu," "Scene Selection," and "Bonus Features," but I wouldn't pretend for a second that I could therefore read Korean. I wouldn't even say that I could read those particular words; I didn't understand why they meant what they did, nor could I pronounce them -- or even draw them, for that matter.

No, I have to admit that none of the above constitutes real reading, any more than push-ups on your knees are real push-ups. The sine qua non of reading is to be able to look at a word you've never seen before and say it correctly. You don't have to know what it means, and given English's incoherent pronounciation rules you don't even have to get the correct pronounciation (that's the rule on Jeopardy, by the way). No, you just have to be able to come up with a plausible pronounciation based on the correct spelling. And if that's the test, then Siena, at the ripe, old age of forty-five months, cannot read.

But no one else at that fancy-shmancy WeHo nursery school can read, either. I guarantee that, if any of those kids could read, they'd be doing it all day for audiences like a Stupid Pet Trick; kids don't miss a chance to show up each other, especially in the presence of adults. And we do try to get Siena to sound out words, letter-by-letter. But when you do that with a word like "Mommy," and you have to tell her that "y" is, in this instance, pronounced like "ee," then you just lose all credibility. No wonder immigrants have trouble learning English; there's no rules to the darn language. So not only am I confident that we're not losing ground to the Russians, I've got plenty of excuses to sustain me until the kid can straight-up read.

It still bugs me, though, when friends tell us that their two-year-old can read. You knew that was what inspired this post, didn't you? Two years old, and the kid can pronounce words that aren't hanging from a mobile in his room? Words that Mommy and Daddy don't read to him every night? I'll believe that when I see it on YouTube.

And when I do, I'll come up with another reason why my child is, depsite the lack of quantifiable measures, a prodigy.