Moving Story Time

For the last number of weeks, I have been reading the most amazing book to my kids. My friend Jaime recommended to me, saying that she had read it to her kids and it was so deep and both her and her children loved it.



It's called The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. It's a chapter book, with short, descriptive chapters, and every 7-10 pages is a picture. At first it was hard for the kids to listen without having pictures to look at, but I encouraged them to close their eyes and imagine the picture in their head (I taught 15 year olds that had no idea how to do this; how sad....). It worked, because Joel loved stopping and telling me what he thought someone or something would look like.

This past weekend, I was reading a part to the kids that was rather emotional. One of the characters in the book dies, and Edward is talking about how he feels hollow and broken inside. I stopped (so I wouldn't tear up so bad) and asked the kids what they thought that meant. Of course Edward is a china rabbit doll, so logically he is hollow inside and if you drop him, he'll be broken, but the kids didn't say anything like that. They saw him as a real person, just any other character in the book. Joel said Edward felt hollow because he had an ache in his body because he was sad, and Kezia said that he wasn't really broken, but that his heart was broken.

"Yeah, he was broken-hearted because _____ died", Joel explained.

"Do you know what it means to broken-hearted?", I asked them.

"Well, when we were going to Washington B.C (D.C.), and we were riding on the subway train, I was broken-hearted," Kezia shared.

"Why were you broken-hearted?", I asked her.

At this point, Joel has tears in his eyes.

"As we were on the train, my heart was broken, because I missed my friends," she told me.

And that's when I cried. I sat there with my kids, in someone else's house, processing the meaning of this book, and relating it so close to our lives. I knew it would be a stretching experience reading this book, but I had no idea the impact. I am floored at what is going on in my kids' heads, and am marveled that they could articulate it, and moved beyond words.