Four years, seven books, and tens of thousands of pages later...

Today is a monumentous day! Keeper Boy finished the seventh and final Harry Potter novel. It has taken more than four years, but he has read the entire series. How awesome is that?

We started reading the first book when Keeper Boy was in first grade. I (or Hubby) would read a sentence, and Keeper Boy would read a sentence. We would alternate in that manner every night. It was VERY slow going at the beginning, and we had to stop and explain a lot of words (though with these books, our guesses were sometimes just as uninformed as Keeper Boy's).

Through the school years and over the summers, we progressed to alternating paragraphs, and then to pages. About halfway through the sixth book -- toward the end of third grade, I think -- he started reading on his own. This last book he read completely on his own.

It took him a year -- reading in increments as short as five minutes, or as long as 45 minutes... usually only a few times each week -- to finish the last book. Over the summer, an entire week would sometimes go by while the book gathered dust or he was distracted by reading some other book or he was off at some camp or another. But he never forgot about it and he always came back to it to see what Harry was up to.

Tonight he sat down after dinner and started reading. I left for my class and when I came back a little over an hour later, he was very excited to tell me that he'd finished the book after he did his math homework. So cool! I'm very proud of him, and I love that he loves to read. Like mother, like son. :-)