PUT MY DAUGHTER TO BED tonight. No news there, but it reminded me how fast she’s growing up. We used to read together — we went through the Harry Potter books and the Narnia books and so on many many times. But now she reads to herself. She just finished a book about Molly, a plucky little girl who made it through life on the home front during World War Two. Tonight, she read to me from a book about Emily, a plucky little girl who made her life in the Jamestown Colony.

Then she got out her old “Arthur’s Bedtime Stories” book and had me read the (Arthurized) Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, and The Princess and the Pea, complete with all the voices and sound effects I used to do every night. She knows she’s growing up, too, and she’s not quite ready to leave that behind. Yet.