YES. HE. CAN.

Micah has been studying so hard in school for a few years now. I know he's currently in 6th grade, and has been in school longer than "a few years," but he's not actually applied himself to studies until recently. He squandered his time, he did.

So in his diligent studies, he's taken to math easier than he's taken to reading. Micah loves math. He's currently doing addition and subtraction, and I couldn't be more proud of that boy. Granted, he needs a number line to count on, but he's doing very well. He loves numbers. They're his happy place. Reading, however, isn't so much that.

He is reading, however. He's come home with some sight words that he's been working so hard on learning. He knows the signs for them, and is far more adept at signing the words than he is saying them. I suspect he may have some dyslexia or something? Words just don't come easy with him. He'll say the first letter instead of the word, or he'll forget what it is altogether even though he'd read it consistently for a week. It's like his apraxia carries over into words. Or perhaps that's the way apraxia works. At any rate, he struggles to read words.

Micah's aide told me that he read a book at school the other day. The excitement for me was.... unregistered. I believed her. I did. But I didn't hear it myself. I wanted to hear him read for myself.  I scoured our book shelf for a book that he could read. We'd kept a lot of beginning reader books, because they were the type that Micah liked to look at. But the words in them were still above his reading level. He could manage a few, but not even half of them.

He came home from school yesterday with a book in his bag. It was a book full of words that Micah could read. I flipped through it, my excitement growing with each page that I turned. And then I found Micah.

"Micah, can you read this for me?"

No.

"Yes, I want you to read me this book."

NO.

So I threatened to give him a chore if he didn't read for me, because I'm the meanest mom ever, so Micah read to me. Or rather, he screamed a book at me. You've not lived until you've had a book screamed at you.

HE. CAN. RUN.

SHE. CAN. JUMP.

HE. WILL. SIT.

And on it went, with Micah screaming words at me that described the pictures in the book. I even had the privilege of the words being accompanied by signs. It was quite an amazing book reading experience. And I loved every second of it.