Long before my son was born, and even before I became pregnant, I knew reading would be an important part of my child’s early years. My mom read to me early and often, and I credit that as one of the reasons why I had such a love of books, that grew into a passion for writing (remember me, the book nerd?). I wanted to pass on that passion to my child, so there was no question that we’d read stories every night from the time he or she was tiny to the time when he or she started reading to me. And then my child would write a best seller by age 20 and make millions from the movie adaptation, and we’d be set for life.

Lately, there’s been a lot of news about scientific evidence showing how awesome it is to read to your children (YAY! Go mom for doing that for me even before the “experts” said it was good!). But for it to really work, you have to start reading to them when they are tiny little babies. One NPR story I recently heard about it actually used the words “from birth” to describe when you should start reading to them. I’ll come back to that later.

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