A bed full of cats

This morning I made breakfast for the family, unloaded the dishwasher, loaded it up again, sorted and put away three baskets of laundry, stripped and made my son's bed, and will put the wet bedclothes in the washer in a few moments. In the course of this, my son read to me, perfectly, from a book called "A bed full of cats." I see now that it's a level 2 book, scaled for grades one through two. That confirms my guess, which was that he reads better now than I did in the second grade. He's about to turn five, but technically he's still four years old. He reads stories to the other kids in his preschool. Here's a typical paragraph from the book:

Lee didn't hear anything about Flora. No one found Flora, and she didn't come home. Days and weeks went by.

He also reads Amelia Bedelia quite well, and that looks like 4th-grade level to me. You might think I'm bragging, and while it is true that I am impressed, and pleased, I realize that most bright kids will wind up being good readers whether or not they are advanced readers at four. The test of life is not who starts reading first (fleeting glory), but rather, how kind and how happy we are.