Reading Machine

When I was a little girl my dad nicknamed me his Reading Machine because most days he would come home from work to find me curled up on the couch reading a book. Mason must have caught the reading bug from me because he has turned into a Junior Reading Machine.

Mason has always preferred non-fiction over fiction because he loves to learn facts about real things. It's this thirst for knowledge that has made him the walking encyclopedia that he is. A while back my niece, Rachel Faye, was drilling her mom with questions about volcanoes. When Whitney said she didn't know the answer to several questions in a row, Rachel said, "I think we should call Mason, he'll know all about volcanoes." I love that story because it illustrates perfectly what a fountain of knowledge (albeit random knowledge) Mason is. He'll make a great contestant on Jeopardy one day.

Mason's latest reading obsession is the Magic Tree House series. It is a fictional series that incorporates facts about a certain topic throughout the story. Every book also has a companion "Fact Tracker" book that is a non-fiction book filled with facts and information about the topic of that book. An example is the book Tonight on the Titanic. After reading several books from the series Mason was reading through all the different titles deciding which he wanted to read next. He stopped on this one because he didn't know what the Titanic was. After a brief explanation that it was a big ship carrying thousands of people that had hit an iceberg and sunk on it's first voyage, Mason's mind started going a hundred miles an hour wanting to know everything there was to know about the Titanic. My limited knowledge could only explain as much as Leonardo Decaprio and Kate Winslet had taught me, most of which probably wasn't accurate at all. So the next day at school he found the book in his teacher's library and asked to borrow it. Then he came home and read the book start to finish without a single break except when I read it to him while he ate his dinner because he wouldn't put it down long enough to eat two bites. I loved watching him as he read the book aloud. It was a lot like observing someone watching an action packed, suspenseful movie. There were parts he couldn't read fast enough and would start stumbling over the words because he was so anxious to find out what happened. It didn't stop after the last page was read. When Mason called Grandma Nancy to tell her he had finished the book she was flipping through the channels and ironically the movie, Titanic was on TV. When Mason found out there was a movie he was going crazy because he wanted to see how the ship tilted out of the water and broke in half.  Not feeling comfortable showing my 6 year old Hollywood's version, the next day we looked up and watched several History Channel documentaries on the Titanic. Mason couldn't fall asleep that night because he was going over and over everything that happened in his mind. The following day he begged us to take him to Barnes and Noble so he could spend all of his hard earned money on the Titanic Fact Tracker. He finished reading it in a day. As soon as he finished it he sat up and announced he was going to make the Titanic out of Legos. At first he got a little frustrated because by this point he knew the exact layout of the ship by heart, and he wanted it to be an exact replica. Since he couldn't make it the exact same he decided his would be the shipwreck version that was at the bottom of the ocean because it had a lot of  broken and missing pieces and was green like his Lego piece he was using to build it. I thought he did a pretty good job.

Mason asked me to take a black and white picture because that is all they had in 1912 when the Titanic sank.

Artwork like this can currently be found all over our house.

I love seeing Mason enjoy reading  the way that I do. Hopefully it will rub off on my other kids, too. 

Found Miles like this one day.