It's been fun reading this thread- it came about before I landed on the Cat so I hadn't seen it before.

I read everything to my daughter starting while she was a babe in arms. Later I haunted used book stores to find the books I had grown up with (I have a strong feeling that Art Thieme's bookstore in Depoe Bay, Oregon was one of them. Wouldn't it be cool to discover that I had met Art L O N G before the Cat? This would have been about 1965-68)

I found many of the old books there and my daughter still has them. Books like 'Black Beauty', 'Call of the Wild', 'Robinson Crusoe', "Beautiful Joe', 'Treasure Island', dozens more. As I read them to her, I marveled at how well some of them had stood the test of time and how dated some others were. :)

As my daughter grew older we passed books back and forth; she learned a good many things about the birds and the bees that way- and I was able to keep tabs on what she knew and how she learned them. *G*

Whenever we were in the car we sang: school songs, gospel songs, Garter Family songs, old songs I had learned from my mom and dad, songs I had learned from my brother's records back in the 40s. One time when she was maybe 10, I let her sing a song alone and just listened. When she skidded to a stop, she burst out, Well! Aren't you going to listen?

One thing I didn't teach her was the language I had grown up with, a dialect of German. When she took her first foreign language in high school my preference was that she take Spanish because Oregon has a great many Spanish speakers. But she took German. (For years afterward every letter from her contained at least one paragraph in German.)

She did take Spanish later.